The Ubuntu Education Summit has been quite good so far. Today people from various projects and distributions were giving presentations and talks, and tomorrow we’re going to have a workshop discussing the problems that were presented and discuss possible solutions. I talked about tuXlabs and about some of the lessons we learned in South Africa.

I also got a chance to play with the Intel Classmate PC. At the moment users have the choice of KDE 3.5.1 (not sure which distribution) or Windows XP, and apparently it supports the XO interface too. It’s probably not as innovative as the OLPC machine, but it certainly is a nice piece of hardware. I’ve love to have one.

Also got some Ubuntu and Edubuntu CD’s, they look really nice!

I’m having a nice pizza at OR Thambo International Airport. Just came from Cape Town International Airport about an hour ago, and the next stop is Madrid, and then Sevilla.

I had a strange experience in the bathrooms here just a short while ago… but I’ll talk about it later… it’s too soon to talk about it

• Thursday and Friday is the Ubuntu Education Summit, where the future direction of Edubuntu will be discussed with educators, developers and other users of Edubuntu. There will most likely be some form of on-line participation, but as far as I know, this hasn’t been finalised yet. Keep an eye on the Ubuntu wiki for more information.
• Saturday is Ubucon, I only learned about this yesterday, so I’ll have to read up a bit about it myself, but I’ll be attending that as well.
• Then, next week, is the Ubuntu Developers Summit

What really sux is that I just checked Planet Ubuntu, and saw that Jono Bacon posted an alarmingly similar post.

Now that I’ve read Jono’s post, I will also be taking photos and videos (just bought 3 extra tapes), will keep you updated! Also, if there’s anything specific someone wants to be recorded, please leave a comment and I’ll try to be there and get it on Youtube/Google Video/wherever.

This weekend I flew up to London, UK, to attend the first SkoleLinux developers, Guadalinux (spanish distro), and other great people like Mark Shuttleworth, Matt Zimmerman, Henrik Omma and Paul Flint (Paul isn’t just great, he’s larger than life!). The delegates seemed to really like the Skubuntu setup that we’re currently installing in the Shuttleworth tuXlabs project. I’ll be deploying the official Edubuntu website (currently a moin-moin wiki), which will also be based on the Drupal content management system. I’ll also be the community contact for the Edubuntu project. Oliver Grawert is assigned as my Ubuntu mentor, so he’s the one I’ll be pesting when I get stuck with doing nitty gritty things like package creation (and other Debian stuff). It’s all really very exciting!

London is a bit different than I expected. The fast food places are the most bizzarre. Nandos doesn’t sell any burgers, the McDonalds around the corner only sells health food, and the KFC’s only sells Pepsi, no Coke! I also find Afrikaans people everywhere. On the streets, in the pubs, in the tubes, you always hear of how many South Africans there are in London, I never realised just how many there were! The hotel is nice. The Internet connection is so fast that it seems that the bottleneck lies in my laptops wireless card! Collin Applegate, another delegate from the US, told me that he has a 6mbit line in his room that costs him US$40 a month (yes, uncapped)! I finally got to see MTV|2, a station we don’t get in South Africa. I can’t see what all the fuss is about, it’s really even more rubbish than the usual MTV. I was also surprised at the ammount of Spanish people there are here. I think I’ll do a crash-course in Spanish as soon as I get home! I haven’t had a chance to take lots of photo’s, but I do have some and will upload them when I get home.