Archive for the ‘Berlin’ Category

« Older Entries

Ubuntu Karmic Koala and Ubuntu Berlin enter metro system again

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Once again, “Berliner Fenster“, the company behind the Berlin inside metro tv advertising system was so kind to provide the Ubuntu Berlin Karmic Koala release party at c-base and the release of Ubuntu with it’s own spot. It  will be shown for three days from 29th to 31th this month every 15 minutes on hundreds of screens viewable by more than a million passengers:

If you cannot see the embedded spot, click on this link.

It’s really nice to have this great audience-appealing support once again, as it presents Ubuntu in a totally non-techie medium, reaching an audience that is hard to reach and that has time to consume  input – as the screens inside the metro trains are quite appealing.

I’ll see if I can post some real life pictures of the spot soon.

Posted in Berlin, Debian, KarmicKoala, Release, Ubuntu | 8 Comments »

Global Jam Participation – Ubuntu Berlin is prepared – are you?

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

(Wow, I needed to type “Global Jam” more than once as I’s used to write “Global Bug Jam”.)

I am happy looking forward to the third “Ubuntu Global Jam” taking place from 2nd to 4th of October 2009. “We”, meaning “Ubuntu Berlin“, Daniel Holbach, Benjamin Drung and me, already managed to prepare the local Jam session as far as possible:

  1. We found a place with power supply and network uplink: the c-base, where Ubuntu Berlin became some kind of resident.
  2. We decided to schedule our Global Jam for Saturday, the 3rd of October, from 11 am to 7 pm, which should allow people with different personal schedules to join us at least for some hours.
  3. We added our Global Jam to the official team list.
  4. We set up a core team with responsibilities for different aspects of the Jam. Daniel Holbach and Benjamin Drung will care for bug triaging, bug squatting and packaging while I’ll work on and present translation and documentation.
  5. We announced our Global Jam participation and invited more people to join us on several mailing lists (from Ubuntu Berlin lists over local Berlin Linux lists to c-base lists).
  6. We started to announce our invitation on different twitter feeds, our facebook group, identi.ca and some blogs. One of them you are currently reading :)
  7. Last but not least I dropped some lines on the Ikhaya-suggest-an-article box, one of the most read German Ubuntu ressources.
  8. We will continue inviting people on personal basis as there are a bunch of people able to support us and just need a small friendly push… :)

I admit I am curious about this years participation and impact. And you? What are your hints for setting up a Global Jam session? Or do you need any more advices? Let me know. I am curious. Really.

Posted in Berlin, BugJam, Event, GlobalJam, Packaging, Ubuntu | No Comments »

What do director Tom Tykwer and Ubuntu have in common?

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

What do director Tom Tykwer (”The International“) and Ubuntu have in common? Well, they seem to share the same passion for commitment in developing countries by focusing on media. This similarity came up when I read the schedule for the one day conference “Jour Fixe – media and development“.

While the first talk, held by Andrea Goetzke und Geraldine de Bastion from newthinking communications, titled “Ubuntu and the free toaster“, deals with free software and digital culture in Africa, the second talk, held by director Tom Tykwer and titled “The Making of Soulboy. A movie production in the slums of Nairobi“, deals with a movie project in Nairobi (and Tom Tykwers engagement in artistic education for youngsters in Africa with the ngo “one fine day”).

The “Jour Fixe” is scheduled for this Friday, the 24th of April, and takes place at “Hamburger Bahnhof” in Berlin/Germany. As I’m going to attend the conference, I’ll try to report back a short resume. Please note that there are more interesting talks besides Ubuntu/Tykwer – I just wanted to point out the interesting coincidence.

Posted in Berlin, Event, Ubuntu | No Comments »

possibly scrambled qt4 apps in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope while using VRGB and LCD

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

In less than 48 hours Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope will be released officially! While using Jaunty for more than a month I am pleased to see this great new release getting it’s way to a huge usership. While preparing my small “new features in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope” talk for the “Ubuntu Berlin” release party at c-base, I’d like to point out one open bug, that will make it into the release and might get some users into strange trouble:

When you have – for whatever reason (either by chance, clicking around or due to having a rotated display) – changed the display mode of Ubuntu to VRGB or VBGR (you can easily do this in the “System>Preferences>Appearance>Fonts” menu) and additionaly turned on the lcd/subpixel mode, probably all of your qt4 applications – even qtconfig – will be totatlly scrambled and unreadable. The bug might hit you under Ubuntu (without a blue “K” in the beginning) as you probably run something like VirtualBox, Skype or even Amarok in your Gnome environment. It will probably look like this:

Screenshot showing the scrambled qt application
Screenshot showing the scrambled qt application

But: Don’t panic! This bug only occurs when you changed some defaults in the Appearance/Fonts settings to rather uncommon or often maybe useless settings and switching back is fairly easy. But as I ran into this and put some effort into the corresponding bug on launchpad Subpixel/Lcd mode with VRGB/VBGR makes qt4 applications on Jaunty unreadable, I noticed, that a remarkable bunch of users posted duplicate bug reports or commented the report.

So if you are running into this error, all you have to do, is:

  1. exit all qt applications,
  2. go into “System>Preferences>Appearance>Fonts”,
  3. change VRGB/BGR to RGB/BGR.

That’s all. If you want to examine the bug, do the following (don’t do this at home):

  1. exit all qt applications,
  2. go into “System>Preferences>Appearance>Fonts”,
  3. change RGB/BGR to VRGB/BGR,
  4. switch to lcd/subpixel mode.

Afterwards your qt applications will look scrambled. If you don’t know, which one to run for a test, you probably have “qtconfig” installed.

(I had a little chat with some developers about the severity of this bug. Though I think it’d would be definitely better not having it in a release, I understand the point, that the environment must be set up in a rather special way to run into this and it popped up quite late. Therefore it did not make it into the release critical bugs, but I am quite sure, it will be fixed soon.)

That’s all about this. I wish you a smooth upgrade to Jaunty – see you there :)

[update 2009-04-03]

As you can read on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qt4-x11/+bug/334657, a patch has been committed to the Ubuntu repositories, that has been found here:

http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/qt/devel/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.5.0-disable_ft_lcdfilter.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup

So the fix as an update is coming closer…

Posted in Berlin, BugJam, JauntyJackalope, ReleaseParty, Ubuntu, c-base | 1 Comment »

And your favorite new feature in Jaunty Jackalope is … ?

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Again I’ll present a short new features from the next Ubuntu release (this time “Jaunty Jackalope”) to an audience of about 150 to 200 visitors at the upcoming traditional “Ubuntu release party” at c-base organized by “Ubuntu Berlin”. While it’s worth noting that this event will happen on Saturday, the 25th of April, so when the release is still a hot topic, and the very friendly guys from “Berliner Fenster“, the local metro television system, are going to support release and release party by sponsoring spots, I am curious about the new features in Jaunty Jackalope that you like emphazise – be it a litte eye candy or, a command line tool or a major innovation.

After using Jaunty for about a month now I think the graphical changes really please my eyes. I like the new notification scheme (though it feels still young and there is a lot to do like implementing it to common applications like Thunderbird), introduced by Mark Shuttleworth some months ago. Moreover while not currently using Evolution myself I am impressed about reading about “evolution-mapi“, enabling Evolution to access Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007 servers by talking the native Exchange mapi protocol and and not using the neat but slow owa (web) wrapper. Yes, that seems to be a techie feature but it might improve acceptance of Ubuntu/Gnome/Evolution in enterprise setups dramatically.

Your turn now. What is your new killer feature or just tiny improvement you like most? Let me know, and I promise, I’ll try to include it into my presentation.

Posted in Berlin, JauntyJackalope, ReleaseParty, Ubuntu | 8 Comments »

Ubuntu developers visiting Ubuntu Berlin and c-base – plus interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Friday, February 6th, 2009

A couple of months ago I started annoying people by telling them, I’d like to show the Ubuntu Berlin community and c-base to Mark Shuttleworth as he is interested in community personally on one side and Ubuntu Berlin is a great example on the other. So this’s rather inviting an important member of the community than celebrating a “meet and greet”. Of course telling people plans like this makes them smile, but when you raise your finger and say “It will happen” with certainty, they’ll get uncertain. So the plan was actually to invite Mark to one of our great traditional release parties which you shouldn’t miss when you are around Berlin at release time.

By chance the Ubuntu Developer Sprint happened to be in Berlin for the next Jaunty release this week. If I got it right, the Canonical Ubuntu developers meet five days around two weeks before a release feature freeze and work in groups and issues that need to be decided/designed or just fixed immediatly. The incredible Daniel Holbach had the idea of inviting the bunch of developers right into the c-base after their work. So he did and we scheduled it for an evening when the Ubuntu Berlin crew also meets at c-base for their monthly jour fix.

We did not announce this meeting externally as we tried to make the whole evening as comfortable as possible for everyone. And we did, I think. Right in time at 19:30 this Wednesday evening about thirty Ubuntu developers entered the c-base. Just among them Mark who seemed to like the whole c-base hackerspace, Ubuntu Berlin, community, space and future thing a lot. The Canonical crowd got several guided tours through the whole base by __t, while housetier provided the others with “German beer” and Club Mate. We had a lot of chats in smaller groups, things, you always wanted to ask the developer of your choice and just relaxed smalltalks about space, canooeing the c-base project “OpenMoon” (trying to send a rocket to the moon), and more. Mark seemed to be amazed about asking people why they joined to Ubuntu Berlin team, what they were currently doing and so on – so, what the community thing is about right here and right now.

We had no schedule for the evening. Therefore we spent about two and a half hour at c-base without any official part and a cosy diner in smaller groups afterwards. We only asked some people for an interview for the c-base statement studio channel where already people like Nokias Peter Schneider and Mozillas CEO John Lilly showed up. Mark took the time for an interview by jocognito. The results of this short talks are already online on Youtube:

Interview #1: (when the inbound video doesn’t show up, click here)

Interview #2: (when the inbound video doesn’t show up, click here)

Another interview with Jorge Castro and James Westby has also been taped and will be published soon. Funny guys talking about Ubuntu on the moon. I’ll post the Youtube links, when the edited version is online.
So what’s next? I hope everybody liked (Ubuntu) Berlin and c-base and we got a good start for possible events in the future.
Thanks again to Daniel who initiated the visit!

Posted in Allgemein, Berlin, Community, Debian, Event, Ubuntu | 5 Comments »

From workshops over Jour Fix to free network games – one week in Berlin

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

This week seems to be a new hilight in the “Ubuntu Berlin” history. I already mentioned that we are really busy with event organisation, but we continue to outperform ourself: In the last weeks we noticed that we reached a point where it is impossible to plan events so that a majority of is can participate, as we are just running so many of them which has positive and negative side effects.

So how is this weeks schedule?

  • Monday: workshop with the incredible Sven Guckes about screen and irssi part one,
  • Tuesday: workshop with Sven Guckes part two,
  • Wednesday: Monthly Jour Fix at c-base with some very special guests – I’ll report back with interesting material,
  • Saturday: free game afternoon/evening/night – our first try for a free lan party with free games like “Battle for Wesnoth”, “Sauerbraten”, “Tetrinet” – at least one game for every taste.

This feels really great on one side as you can participate at Ubuntu events on four of seven evenings within this week. And it seems we wont run out of content for the next months as we still have a lot of ideas and volunteers for workshops, release parties, events, jams and technical projects.

On the other side most members of our user group face the new situation of not being able to participate in all events. While a year ago the core team showed up at nearly every event, nearly nobody is able to participate in an Ubuntu event every second day a week.

We discussed a lot about this issue: Is it possible to offer too many events? The main argument for this is the possibility of shooting one’s wad within a short time. I, personally, don’t agree with this right now. When your possible audience is large enough – Berlin has round about 3.5 million residents – you actually can not run out of visitors. Of course millions of them aren’t interested in Ubuntu at all right now (are they?), but you have to decide whether you want to build a community for the sake of a community – which is okay, meaning meetings, chats and similar in and for a closer core group. Or you decide that you use the community as a kind of incubator trying to reach out for all the different people out there. Not to include them all into the community but to spread knowledge, free software and yes, fun.

So I guess, we’ll continue to fire off events as they come in. Actually we came to the comfortable problem of having “too many” events by doing so for the last months, even years and we’ll see what this means for 2009. Think a lot of fun and a growing amount of happy Ubuntu users. Promised.

Posted in Berlin, Community, Event, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »

Ubuntu Berlin raising money for a video projector – want to support?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

Hey,

I already mentioned that one goal of Ubuntu Berlin for this year is raising enough money for a new video projector. The “Ubuntu Berlin” team is quite active with its release parties, bug jams, lectures and workshops and most of these events require us to present software to an audience (surprise!). We are really happy about having the possibility to use the infrastructure of the well known c-base, but the video projector there is really close to its end of life-cycle and more or less unusable (too dark, unsharp, etc.).

Therefore we decided to buy a new video projector funded by the community. The “ubuntu Deutschland e.V.“, the main German LoCo team, if you can say so, and legal association behind major parts of the German community, is able to collect the money and can even issue an official contribution receipt as this is tax deductable in Germany.

So if you have some money left and want to support one of the most active teams in the Ubuntu community, feel free to donate some money to:

account holder: ubuntu Deutschland e.V.
bank: HVB Nürnberg
account number: 382916859
bank code: 76020070
IBAN: DE44760200700382916859

Swift (BIC): HYVEDEMM460
purpose of transfer: “Ubuntu Berlin” (important!)

Of course you can also donate money from another country than Germany, just use the IBAN/Swift :)

For your information:

We intend to buy a projector for about EUR 500 to 700, depending on the amount of money we collect. The beamer will be a permanent loan to the c-base, located in their workshop room – therefore used for hundreds of lectures and workshops around free software. If we collect more than we actually need for the projector, we’ll spend the remaining money for other expenses connected to Ubuntu Berlin (e.g. further reconstruction of the workshop room at c-base, funding of our bigger events like LinuxTag BBQ, release parties, etc.).

Thanks for reading, and: Donating makes you really sexy :)

[update]

You can also donate money over the wire: Just send the amount of money you like to spend via PayPal to: vorstand-de@ubuntu-de.org

Posted in Berlin, BugJam, Community, Debian, Ubuntu, c-base | 3 Comments »

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party on 1st of November at c-base (Berlin)

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

So, half a year has passed and it’s time again to celebrate a new Ubuntu release. This is an invitation for you, your friends and any other human being around to join our “Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Release Party” on Saturday, the 1st of November, at the sunken starship c-base (Rungestraße 20), starting at 4pm.

Again, a couple of lectures will be held – ranging from new features in Intrepid (that’s my part, I’ll give the lecture at the same day also at the BLIT), over Gnome eyecandy stuff to presentations of Freifunk project and the DeepaMehta semantic desktop (don’t miss!) directly from it’s lead developer. So either if you are new to Ubuntu and want to make first steps and contact other Ubuntu users or you are a Linux guru – you’ll find somebody to have a chat with, I promise. There’ll even be a “tux tinker corner” where you or your girl friend have the possibility to try out some Tux Origami.

The event’ll mainly be in German, but a lot of people are speaking English, so don’t hesitate asking for help/translations.

Entrance is free, there is a free wifi, so feel free to bring your notebook in. You can also “buy” a freshly burned Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu cd for a service charge of 1 Euro or check the Ubuntu merchandising table.

See you there?

Links:
Official Party Announcement Page
how to get to c-base?
Freifunk
DeepaMehta
Ubuntu Berlin

Posted in Allgemein, Berlin, Debian, Event, IntrepidIbex, ReleaseParty, Ubuntu | No Comments »

First BBJ – Berlin Bug Jam – with MOTU Daniel Holbach on Monday, 16th of June at c-base Berlin

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Ubuntu Berlin ist proud to present you the first BBJ: A “Berlin Bug Jam” with Ubuntu MOTU Daniel Holbach, who will rock the place, for sure. Don’t know what a “Bug Jam” is? Well, imagine it as a gettogether for working on bugs in a team. That does not mean, you have to be a developer: Everybody is welcome, who can do things from testing bug reports, triaging, patching or just wants to see how it all works. So this will rather be an “event” than a lecture/workshop and provide you with a lot of fun and knowledge. If you want to see a detailed description of a bug jam, check the wiki page.On the BBJ, we will try to persuade to join the 5-A-Day project, motivating people to continuously enhance the Ubuntu Distribution and helping you to spread the word (and yes, to compete if you like) by trying to work on five bugs every day. Let’s see, if we succeed…

Feel free to bring your notebook along. We have power and free wifi, of course.

Event: 1. Berlin Bug Jam (BBJ) with Daniel Holbach
Location: c-base Berlin, Rungestr. 20
Date: 16th of June
Time: 18:00

Please note: If you want to support the Global Ubuntu Bug Jam, which is taking place from 8th to 10th of August,
this is a perfect possibility for you to gather some hands on
experiences. Of course, Ubuntu Berlin, will bring up a great lineup and
event for the Global Bug Jam. We are already working on it.

Posted in Allgemein, Berlin, Debian, Event, HardyHeron, IntrepidIbex, Linux, Ubuntu | No Comments »

« Older Entries