Czajkowski

I forgot to update folks on how well the Ubuntu Hour is going here in Ireland. We held a poll to see what day best suited folks to meet up as we wanted to meet as many people as we could. The last Wednesday of the month was the winner, our venue . The Trinity Capital Hotel.  It has free wifi, food, beer and cosy couches and great service. They don’t seem to mind a bunch of geeks with their laptops out, dragging chairs over to a table we have occupied as more and more people arrive.

Tonight saw 10 people attend the Ubuntu hour, I was there from just before 6pm as I came straight from work, one by one folks started to arrive, take out their laptops and chat and talk about Christmas the weather and you guessed it, Yahoo and Ubuntu hand in hand.

It was great to catch up with folks and make plans. There are 6 of us going to FOSDEM, all on the same plane on the Friday morning 6:50am flight so that should be fun. We started to plan out Global jam day also this evening, as we’re hoping to add an Irish slant to the event and call it Free Jam, we want to invite other groups here to take part in the day and work on their projects side by side. That way throughout the day we can give talks and hopefully some of the groups will to and break up the day a bit for us.

I also announced the next OSSBarcamp taking place in Dublin, on Saturday 17th April so I got some feedback on what we can differently this time as the room layout is a bit different, perhaps some hands on tutorials, more LPI exams.  I’m still not sure, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

All in all it was a great evening and nice to catch up with folks and plan things out face to face and bounce ideas off one another. Thanks for coming folks and see you next month.

Recently I popped down to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition here in Dublin.  This is for secondary school students/ High school junior students in Ireland.  It’s pretty amazing to see the enthusiasm they show for science and technology at an early age.

The process starts months ago, students submit a one page proposal on a topic, if it’s accepted they research and come up with the results, prototype or something to show from it all. It also gives Industries who are based over here to come and show case their projects and encourage students into those areas. IBM, Google, Analog Devices to name a few all took part and all have offices here in Ireland.

Walking through the exhibition, I stumbled upon Zorin OS, which caught my eye.  So I stopped and asked Kyrill and Artyom Zorin  the developers behind it all a few questions and I thought I’d share them here. Firstly, Zorin OS is an OS they have developed based on Ubuntu, which is why it caught my eye.

Q: So where did you hear about Ubuntu ?

We first came across Ubuntu while watching videos on YouTube of Compiz and Kiba dock.
We were very impressed by Ubuntu and started using it since June 2008.  However, we learnt that many Windows users found the Ubuntu interface unfamiliar and difficult to operate.

We decided to develop Zorin OS to make Ubuntu more friendly for Windows users. We started our project in September 2008. We added a Windows like start menu and theme, many applications to improve user experience and usability including WINE, which lets users run Windows programs on Zorin OS, and Ubuntu Tweak.

A preview of Zorin OS 1.0 was displayed at the BT Young Scientist And Technology Exhibition 2009 and was highly commended. The public beta was released on 5 May 2009. Zorin OS Lite beta, which was a stripped down version of the original beta, was released on 30 May 2009. We had a few bugs including a start menu bug and a bug with 64bit but we fixed these bugs.

The first stable version of Zorin OS was released on 1 July 2009. In summer 2009 Zorin OS was tested in Kenya by Camara, an Irish charity that ships used computers to Africa to educate the community there. We received very positive feedback. Zorin OS 1.0 was downloaded by estimated 3,000 users.

Based on the comments and feedback from the community we decided to improve Zorin OS even more. We decided to make Zorin OS as friendly for Windows users as possible. We made a new Windows 7 style look including a new theme and Windows 7 like task bar.

We improved stability, fixed bugs, included many updates, added many new wallpapers created by ourselves. We also added many new applications including PlayOnLinux to make it easier for Windows users to install Windows programs on Zorin OS.

We created five different Zorin OS flavours:

1. Zorin OS Core which is a free down loadable release
2. Zorin OS Educational which is also available to download for free
3. Zorin OS Gaming which includes over 40 games
4. Zorin OS Multimedia which has a host of multimedia processing programs
5. Zorin OS Ultimate which includes the best programs from the Gaming and Multimedia editions

Zorin OS Gaming, Multimedia and Ultimate can be purchased on a DVD from our website to support our project. Currently we have to sell our products in order to support our project due to a very small level of donations.

Zorin OS 2.0 was released on 1 January 2010 and currently has over 8000 downloads. Zorin OS 2.0 was displayed at the BT Young Scientist 2010. We got 3rd Intermediate group in the Technology section and also got into the BT Business of Science program.

Zorin OS is growing at a fast pace and we are constantly improving it. Currently Zorin OS has about 75,000 relevant web pages on Google. There are also several very positive reviews on the internet.

Zorin OS 3.0 will be released this summer and will have many new features. It will also be tested in Africa again. We also plan to develop Zorin OS Educational Lite for law spec computers which are widely used in third world countries and Zorin OS Educational for high spec computers. We hope that these products would be used by individuals and schools.

We were very impressed by all of the features of Ubuntu. We really enjoyed its openness and functionality, and were amazed by the stability and the incredible desktop effects. We found Ubuntu to be very robust and extremely fast. We’re looking forward to the new 10.04 release.

Kyrill and Artyom Zorin

I think it’s pretty amazing that a 4th year and a 2 year student came up with this idea, and implemented it. I’d still prefer to work on the idea of getting more people using Ubuntu, then having it themed to look more windows like, but I can see the reasoning behind it.

I also think it’s pretty amazing these developments are happening in my back yard, here in Ireland, and makes me rather proud, that if students can do this, what else we can do.

I emailed the LoCo teams mailing list today but wanted to let more people know about this new process.

We the LoCo council are going to be interviewing and meeting with approved LoCos to see how they are doing, how they have progressed in the 2 years (some a bit more ) since they were first approved. If they have had any issues, how they have dealt with them. If they have any issues, or ideas and how we the LoCo council can help with them.

So many times, a LoCo is approved and you don’t hear much about them, this can be due to a language barrier in some cases, or perhaps they don’t have people who have a blog on the planet.  Many LoCos do great and wonderful things out there for the community, I for one want to hear about it.

How it’s going to work.  Very simple, we have selected a number of teams at random who have been approved over 2 years. Broken them down into groups, and assigned a  LoCo Council member to them. They will attempt to contact the loco team contact/leader 3 times in a one month period.  Once contact has been made, they will be asked to attend a meeting, where we will do a short interview like they first did to get approved.

This is one of the goals set out for the LoCo Council for the Lucid cycle, and I think it’s one we can achieve and well worth doing,. All of the teams that are going to be re approved are on the re approval process page. In case you’re not sure of the LoCo Council member are, you will be hearing from one of them over the course of this cycle.

• Laura Czajkowski (czajkowski)
• Alan Pope (popey)
• Jan Claeys (janc)
• Efrain Valles (effie-jayx)
• Christophe Sauthier (huats)
• Chris Crisafulli (itnet7)

Last year in Dublin I ran a Girl Geek Day event to celebrate Ada Lovelace day.  It was an afternoon of discussions where we got some feedback on issues we faced at college, in the workplace and how we thought we could help one another.

This year, the Ubuntu Women project has decided to celebrate International Women’s Day in a unique way.

International Women’s Day (IWD) is marked on March 8 every year. It is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women.

Started as a political event, the holiday blended in the culture of many countries (primarily Russia and the countries of former Soviet bloc). In some celebrations, the day lost its political flavour, and became simply an occasion for men to express their love to the women around them in a way somewhat similar to Mother’s Day and St Valentine’s Day mixed together. In others, however, the political and human rights theme as designated by the United Nations runs strong, and political and social awareness of the struggles of women worldwide are brought out and examined in a hopeful manner.

What we are doing is going to collect  stories from people who are involved in the project. Everyone gets involved in different ways, and we want to hear your story.  Were you involved in your LoCo before this, a member of a different team, heard about Ubuntu in college, or were you looking for help an answers with a project you were working on.  No story is going to be there same. Your story is important to us, as a community so we can share it with others, and encourage them to join and take part.

To hear how you got involved, shows us there are numerous ways to stumble into our world and take part.  This is what we want to hear about.

Now, how do you do it, how can you take part, here’s the information, read it and do circulate it. Share it amongst your friends.

There will be two (2) prizes up for grabs. One (1) prize pack will be given to the story that the community votes is their favourite. One (1) prize pack will be given to a randomly drawn entrant. Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager will be drawing this entrant in a videocast, and announcing both winners to the world on March 8th.

Please email your stories to ubuntuwomen.competition at gmail.com by UTC  23:59 22nd February 2010.

By submitting a story, you acknowledge that it will be posted on the Ubuntu Women website under the Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivatives [0] licence. If you prefer that your story be posted under a less restrictive licence such as Creative Commons Attribution [1] or Public Domain [2], then feel free to let us know when you submit. All stories are to be non-fiction and of a family-friendly nature. The  organisers also reserve the right to interview prospective winners over
the phone or other voice chat at their discretion.

We will celebrate International Women’s Day by announcing the winners, who will receive gift packs (which are still in negotiation — we will announce when it is confirmed!).

[0] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
[2] http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain

Looking forward to reading all the stories about how you got involved in Ubuntu! Remember it can be any length, it can be about anything you want, don’t feel your story has to be technical to enter! We just want to hear it from you!

The hackerspace in Dublin TOG are running a series of seminars and workshops showcasing Open Source as part of Engineers Week.  On Monday 8th of February they have a seminar showing how to create a  circuit board using open source tools. The cost of commercial software is usually the big barrier to entry in designing your own circuit boards.Did I say this was free? All the seminars they are running for this week are free but you need to prebook your place.

On the Wednesday 10 of February, they are also showing open source hardware with the Arduino Platform. The  Arduino is
a microcontroller that has become very popular with artists and electronics tinkerers alike. The seminar is an introduction to Arduino and a great chance for people to make a start with Arduino. Again this event is free.

On the weekend, Sunday 14th of February, they are having a hands on Arduino workshop. Where people will be doing all sorts of things with Arduino’s. In the afternoon you can get you chance to build your very own Arduino. There is a materials fee for the workshop.

These events are being organised by the folks over at TOG.  All of the information is here.  As they pointed out you do need to register for a place at these workshops.