I made a little mistake yesterday and forgot to add James Holden to the list of people volunteering for Infopoints. James has elected to manage the Leeds fair. This brings the volunteer rate up some more and I am pleased with how things are working out. We are going to begin arranging the wolverhampton Infopoint fairly soon too. 🙂

I had an email a few days back from a chap called Howard who is looking to help contribute to Linux in education. Howard used to be a teacher and I spoke to him last weekend on GnomeMeeting where we discussed Linux in education and his experience. His ideas are for a complete bootable live CD that can be used to demonstrate that Linux can be used in education at all levels. It strikes me as a great idea so long as people get out there and take it into schools. Does anyone know of any groups or individuals actually going out and approaching schools about this? This is another form of practical advocacy that we need. One thing is creating the live CD but another is actually going out and demonstrating it. Howard was talking of doing both. I would be interested to hear if others are doing this.

Right, I have a question for you all. Something I would love to do is to access my Linux hard disk in some sort of virtual machine in Windows. The idea is that I could get something along the lines of VMWare and basically tell it that there is an operating system on my second hard disk. It would then boot it in a virtualisation window. I asked about this on the Wolves LUG mailing list and had a few suggestions, but is there something that works exactly like this? I don’t really want to seperate chunks of the OS out; I just want to run the lot in a virtual PC on Windows (and vice versa on Linux).

Today I have been writing about CVS and branches/tags. I do quite like CVS but I need to mess around with the alternatives. I am now off to a BBQ.

The Infopoint Project seems to have kicked off to a flying start. It will be announced in Linux Format in the next issue hopefully. I have also had volunteers for Manchester, Bradford, Doncaster, Wolverhampton and possible Birmingham. I am hoping to begin arranging concrete dates next week. Matt Revell is also working on some materials for the project to help Infopoint organisers make a good impression. I am looking forward to seeing what he produces.

I have added some pics of the Linux Expo in London by the way. You can see them here and you may want to also see Schwuk and Aquarion’s pictures too.
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I went to the Linux User & Developer Expo 2004 at Olympia in London this week. The event spread out over two days, and in addition to this I put on the dickie bow and suit at the Linux User & Developer Awards ceremony on the evening of the first day. So, what was it like?

I went down the expo with Aq, Matt and Dan. We headed down to the Expo on Tuesday at 7.10am (well, a bit later because the train was late). I got a whopping two hours sleep the night before as Aq and I fixed up my laptop for the expo due to a wobbly that Debian decided to throw. Anyway, we headed down to the land of Chas and Dave and checked into a small two star hotel (OK, it is cheap) in Earls Court.

When we headed to the expo my first reaction was pretty positive. The expo spread over two floors with the mainly corporate stands at the top and the .org village down below. Most of the major players were there and there was a lot going on at the show. This was combined with a number of presentations that were given (of which I gave one) in the presentation theatre on the lower floor. We wandered round the expo and used our cunningly packaged equipment to record some things for LUGRadio. This included interviews with KDE, GNOME, AFFS, Linuxchix, Sun, Scribus and others. In the afternoon of the expo it was also great to meet some LUGRadio listeners and now friends; Schwuk, Ian, Mozrat and Digit0 (El Digito). We also met Aquarion. As per usual, it was great to see some good friends (in random order): David Pashley, Jonathan Riddell, Justin Davies, Roger Whittaker, Jasmin Ul-Haque, Brian Teeman, Alaisdair Kergon, Richard Bown, Paul Sladen, Trig and team from ITSLinux, Richard Hillersley, Paul Cooper, Scott Thompson, Julia Hickey, Chris Howells, Telsa Gwynne, Jon Masters and Graham Taylor. I was also fortunate to meet the inspiring Jeremy Allison from HP and Samba.

In the evening I headed off to the awards ceremony in my suit and it was a really nice evening. I arrived at the hotel and went down to the pre-dinner drinks reception. I got chatting to Brian Teeman for a while and some Mambo chaps and then Jeremy Allison came over and had a chat. It was good to have a chat with Jeremy and get to know him some more. I look forward to hopefully meeting up with him sometime soon. The evening was good; great dinner and some great company. I was earmarked to sit on the same table with the organisers of the expo. Barry Cryer of all people was going to be sat on the table too. It was announced that Barry Cryer had done his back in though, and we had a replacement comic in the form of Sean Lock. Very, very funny guy. He managed to take the piss out of pretty much everything and was very good. His humor was made even funnier by the endless amounts of wine that was available to me. I was sat next to a couple of cool guys who managed the sales and PR for the show (I didn’t manage to catch their full names) and it was good.

While at the awards I got to meet a few new faces that I have not met before. This included Rich Moore and Chris Schlager who are long standing KDE contributors, Matthew Bloch and Peter Taphouse from Bytemark. I was also chuffed to bits to meet Tonje Sund from Trolltech. I have been in touch with Tonje for the last few years with various projects for Trolltech, and I have always got on really well with her over email. It was fantastic to meet her and was completely unexpected. At some point I am going to get over to Norway and visit the Trolls. Great stuff.

After the awards had finished and I had the joy of another £14 taxi ride, I stumbled in to meet with Aq, Matt and Dan back at the hotel and proceeded to drink some Carling. Aq worked on the Vodka, Dan worked the Cider and Matt was already pretty well gone and had retorted back to some water. We stayed up until about 3.30am at which point we wobbled up the stairs and crashed out. I woke up on the second day with a distinct feeling that someone had shoved a spike into my head. I had a nasty, nasty hangover and the only solution was a trip to an establishment that would provide a fry up. A few cups of tea later I was on the mend.

We headed off to the expo and popped into the presentation theater to catch the panel discussion. This was very interesting. The panel consisted of people from Sun, IBM, HP/Samba, RedHat, Novell, Microsoft, OpenForum Europe and others. The questions were interesting and balanced, and I found the responses intriguing. There were no amazing bombshells dropped by anyone, but the discussion remained interesting; particularly in the little jibes made between the panel members. At the end of the second day we headed off to the pub and met up with LUGRadio listener and Aq mate; Tim. He was a really nice chap and bought us a pint. It was a shame we could not stick around longer as we had a train to catch, but I hope to meet him again in the future. We legged it over to Euston, missed our train by a few minutes, caught the next one and headed back to the Midlands.

It was great to meet some new faces at the expo, some of which I have spoken to before over email. Aside from the names already mentioned, this includes the very cool Richard Cobbett from PC Plus, Keir Thomas and Daniel James from Linux User & Developer, Jeff Snyder and Charles “Njaard” Samuals from KDE, Paul Salazar from RedHat and the many other people that I met who I have either accidentally overlooked or forgotten names of (this happens a lot – my memory is pathetic)

Out of this list of people that I had the pleasure of meeting, I have left out a few key people who deserve a special thanks. Maggie Meer publishes Linux User & Developer and has worked hard to make it all hang together. Maggie’s faithful sidekick Lorraine has also been instrumental in making things work smoothly. Finally, Amy from Sedulous made my presentation run very smoothly.

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OK, here are the details about my new announcement. It is something called the Infopoint project.

The aim of this project is to provide a free software information point at the many computer fairs dotted around the world. These computer fairs are visited by the key people who we want to target our advocacy at; computer users. I had the idea a while back and thought it would be great if LUGs and other interested people could have a table at these fairs where they could demonstrate Linux to people.

Anyway, I have struck a deal with Northern Computer Markets to provide a table free of charge once a month at every fair they organise. This could put in place an infopoint at each fair across the majority of the north of England and the midlands. This could have a great impact on awareness of Linux and free software. I really do hope it helps and people get involved. I really do.

I have created a new section on jonobacon.com dedicated the project available here. I have also created an Infopoint Forum.

If you are interested in getting involved, get in touch with me and we can begin to make arrangements. Linux Format are behind the idea and will be featuring Infopoint listings in the magazine and an announcement soon. I have also just posted to the LUGMaster mailing list to see if there is any interest and fingers crossed we can get most of the different areas supported with Infopoints.

The mighty Linux box is really starting take shape now. I had a right old dilemma a while back regarding the ADMTek wireless driver that was available for 2.4. I wanted to use the 2.6 kernel and there was only a slightly hacked version from wadey. Although this version insmod’ed fine, I could not get it going. Aq figured it out somehow but he has not had time to write it up yet.

Anyway, last night I was revisiting the problem and I saw that someone has coded a GPLed driver for 2.6. After accidentally blowing away my 2.6 source code I downloaded the 2.6.5 source and compiled. I then downloaded the new driver and it works great!! Many thanks to Michael Wu for this driver. I now have full-on wireless, ALSA and everything else. I even saw that the different Project Utopia bits (HAL, udev, DBUS, gnome-volume-manager) are packaged for Debian unstable. This is next on the list.

With my success last night I then tried to get working properly. After some time poking ALSA with a stick with a nail in the end I managed to get it to work fine. I got this working at about 6.30am and there was no one to talk to. Bugger. I went off to bed and got up today and everything works great. You can now call me. 🙂
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We had a gig last night at the Planet in Wolverhampton which was fun. Not much of a soundcheck but it was cool. It was good to play with our buddies in Fireswitch. We then came back, had a kebab in nan bread and watched Sex In The City DVD’s.

Today I went and bought a suit for the Linux Expo Awards evening that I will be attending on Tuesday evening. I will be suited and booted and I am sure some photos will be leaked onto the net. I am really looking forward to expo, and if it is anything like the last one, it will be a lot of fun.

I am pleased to say that I have a bit of an announcement coming up soon. Nothing drastic like getting hitched or kids, but this is related to the Linux community. I am hoping to make this announcement soon, and I hope it has a positive impact on our community. Stay tuned.

We went to the South Birmingham LUG (SBLUG) meet last night where ESR was due to speak, but he left them in the lurch and pulled out. I really felt for these guys as they had worked damn hard to host the evening and they had laid on a buffet.

Tim from SBLUG asked me if I would help out with a panel discussion that he planned on running instead. The panel consisted of Paul from Open Advantage, Tim from SBLUG, John from Clockwork Software and a chap from Speedie. There were lots of interesting questions and it was a good evening. I went down there with Sparkes and Peter Oliver, and we met up with Ade, James, Dave, Kat and some others. Cool stuff.

You know, the situation with the KDE Control Center is starting to concern me. It is getting truly silly how much junk there is in there. I think I might write something up about this soon. This situation really needs to be fixed. KDE is getting so incredibly cluttered and it is having a negative impact on performance. It also takes away the feeling of a lean interface. Hmmm, I will have to have a think about this one.

I have just had a jam with Munz and I am teaching Fizz later at 3pm. We also have a gig tonight at the Planet in Wolves. 🙂

Well, last night we recorded LUGRadio Episode 5 and it was fun. We had a guest along for the ride in the form of Adam Sweet. I was up late last night mixing it and then it was released today. It is good to see lots of activity and response on the LUGRadio Forums.

Tonight we (sparkes, Peter Oliver and I) are popping over to Birmingham to see ESR speak. I have not met him before so it should be an interesting evening. I did invite him over to Wolves LUG but he completely ignored my email. Nevermind.

My business cards arrived today and they are incredible. They look really nice and have that swanky smooth cardboard feel to them. If you see me wandering round the expo next week or watch my presentation you are welcome to one. 🙂
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Easter was fun this year. On saturday my pal Alan came up to visit until Tuesday. We watched movies, ate lots of food, and played some PS2 games. On tuesday we went over to ST Records in Dudley to buy some CDs where I managed to pick up a bunch of Morbid Angel albums and The Metallica Binge and Purge box set that I have long been jealous of Dom for having. On tuesday night we then headed down to London to see Cannibal Corpse supported by Kataklysm and Gorerotted. Awesome gig all round. I woke up today feeling the pains of the previous nights moshing.

Today I have have worked on my business card and got it sent off. I am now going to tie up some other bits and bobs before the LUGRadio recording tonight.

I read in Computer Weekly today that John Lewis has taken up Linux as one of the first blue chip companies to run Linux on a mainframe. This is a great day for Linux and it is really showing how huge organisations are taking up Linux to save money and increase performance. Kudos must go out to IBM for pushing this area too. Good work.

Oh, and before I go – may Caren Keating rest in peace. It is a great loss that she lost her fight against Cancer. Read the details here about it. I really did like Caron Keating – a nice person who I quite fancied as a kid sat in front of Blue Peter.
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The build of my mega-machine is going well. KDE is all compiled up and ready and I commited my first minor commit to the KDE CVS for a while. I plan on fixing some other bits and bobs if time permits – I would also like to contribute to some other projects. 🙂

GNOME is proving to be a pain to build due to a sheer lack of documentation on which modules to build in what order. I have hunted everywhere to find the details and I not found it at all. I don’t want to use Garnome to build it as I want to learn how to do it manually. If anyone can help me with this, drop me an email. When I have figured it out, I will write it up. 🙂

It seems like we are going to be looking for some new hosting as the mighty Savvy pointed out that we are sucking way too much of his bandwidth up. I spoke to Aq today about some potential homes for our sites and we have some interesting options lined up. It never ceases to surprise me how much traffic is getting generated by this site. Much of this is PDF’s from the Published Work section and there are more of these to come. 😉
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