Come and join us to celebrate the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release – all the details for today’s and other upcoming parties in Quebec province are on the Ubuntu Quebec wiki page.
See you there!
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release parties in Quebec: today, MONTREAL!
Archives par mot-clé : ubuntu-qc
Ubuntu business cards
Thank you Jacob! It took me a few minutes today to install Inkscape, load your Ubuntu business card template and adapt it for my usage – with the new branding! it’s the first time I’ll use that benefit of being an Ubuntu Member. If you are an Ubuntu Member, make sure you check other benefits available to you.
We have quite a few events coming up in the Ubuntu Quebec LoCo team so I figured it would also be a good idea to put our web site address on it too.
Interestingly enough, the print shop clerk asked me what I had created my template with, of course he had never heard of Inkscape and… the rest is history 🙂 To make a long story short he still thought Linux was for server only! He also asked why Linux had gone away. His face when I explained what a LoCo is and why I was printing such cards was priceless. I am bringing a Live CD with me tomorrow so I can show him the magic.
Never underestimate how many people have no idea about Ubuntu, much less any free software!
How to upgrade to Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) ?
Introducing… The Ubuntu Upgrade Wizard 🙂
If you’ve wondered how to upgrade from from 8.04 LTS or from Ubuntu 9.10 to Lucid Lynx (soon-to-be 10.04 LTS), you may find the above link useful.
It’s a little experiment in documentation built in « Choose-your-own-Adventure » fashion. I don’t mean to replace any official docs but I’d like to have comments if anyone thinks it’s useful or how to improve it.
Please note this is NOT an applications – it is only a wiki guide meant to be followed by clicking on corresponding links!
I am using this as part of a set of internal tools for support (as Canonical staff are encouraged to upgrade to beta versions during development cycles) but also as a community tool to help follow best practices.I’ve also integrated links to IRC and the Answers section of Launchpad – I believe integrating live chat and the question/answer facility may help too.
The target here is beginners but also experienced Ubuntu users that seek an easy way to help someone upgrade.
Let me know what you think.
BTW I’ve focused on 8.04LTS and 9.10 but if anyone is willing to document upgrading from the other versions using the same conventions just let me know.
Reminder: Ubuntu Hour this Thursday Feb 11th in Montreal
I am gladly surprised the simple Ubuntu Hour concept I proposed a while ago is slowly picking up in a few places 🙂 14 cities already have someone proposing to meet & greet Ubuntu users on a regular basis.What are you waiting !?
Well, this is only a friendly reminder and invitation to come and join us at Café Suprême, (4190 Boulevard St-Laurent, Montreal – Plateau Mont-Royal) tomorrow Thursday at noon. We’ll have lunch and who knows, perhaps meet some new people. Or just have lunch.
Thank you Ubuntu Québec and Facebook
Télévision de Radio-Canada is a Canadian French language television network. It is owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, known in French as Société Radio-Canada, or just « Radio-Canada », for the rest of us. – from Wikipedia
A couple of weeks ago they launched a new web site, tou.tv, making « available » all their TV shows (or most of them)… in Flash 🙁
Never mind it’s 2010 and HTML5, Ogg Theora and in general open standards and formats are the talk of the day on most web development sites… Flash 10 is a bad enough choice as it is, but apparently tou.tv’s team just forgot that Linux existed.
Within hours of the launch Ubuntu Québec team members started complaining on the mailing list and on tou.tv’s Facebook group. We wrote to their admins, provided details, wrote to the ombudsman, got canned replies for all communications. We then put together a Facebook group, and started inviting people to join and we shared our findings (now all on a public wiki). 451 people joined the group which is an amazing number for Quebec province, given the context. I never ever thought I’d use Facebook for open formats and Linux support advocacy in such a way!
Only one programmer from the tou.tv’s team first acknowledged the problem, then asked for testers. That’s it, total silence from the tax-payers-funded TV network and website.
Within hours of the initial launch people on the mailing list had analyzed the streaming protocol, the Javascript code, etc. and ruled out problems there. To our amazement, a single commented line was preventing any shows to be displayed. Someone put together a GreaseMonkey script, someone else tested it… we went online on IRC to coordinate testing + blogging. Bottom line is we came up with a workaround. A week later tou.tv finally applied minimal fixes to unblock the Flash display on Linux systems.
The site is not perfect and now other minor issues subsist, and yes, I wish open formats were an option. For now I just wanted to thank Ubuntu for providing not only an incredible operating system but also an amazing community that made all this possible 🙂 I also wanted to thank the Free Software Foundation as we used several resources from them such as the Defective by Design web site to explain the problems associated to using DRM-like implementations of web TV sites, and the problems of not using open formats, such as Flash.
I also wanted to send a big FAIL to Radio-Canada and tou.tv’s team. To this day they don’t even mention Linux on their FAQ.
You can also find more details about this little victory of ours in my original blog post in French.
Your taxes at work!