If you happen to be around at this years LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin/Germany, you are invited to attend my short talk on MariaDB as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. The talk focusses on differences between MySQL Community Edition and MariaDB (e.g. XtraDB, Aria, userstats), shows some features live and explains how to switch. I’ll probably post the slides here afterwards.
The talk will be held in German and is scheduled for Friday, the 13th of May, 16:30. The official announcement can be found here.
Members of „Ubuntu Berlin“ met yesterday at c-base within the Ubuntu Global Jam. While it was nice seeing new and international faces showing up and introducing newcomers to advanced Launchpad usage, my main attraction of the day was Daniel Holbach’s notebook. He asserted it runs Maverick and starts up within five seconds, which made me laugh at first as my netbook’s startup time tripled from Lucid to Maverick to round about 45 seconds (which will at least change back until release I assume).
Ubuntu (Berlin) Global Jam at c-base
To make it short: Between bug triaging and patching Daniel showed the startup procedure two or three times on his X61s (with an solid state disk, one has to add) and as promised it started up in five seconds after Grub. Actually this isn’t more than a fast booting notebook, but it shows the results of focussed efforts from the last one and a half year. Remember the initial „10s“ posting and the bunch of changes it took.
So I am happy looking forward to improvements for Maverick on my netbook. And yes: I am happy with 10 seconds, too.
[update]
Daniel noted, that it’s a X61s, not a T61. Changed.
I am happy to announce that Berlin has been chosen as location for the Desktop Summit 2011. If you don’t know so far: Desktop Summit is a 1000+ developer conference co-hosting KDE’s „Akademy“ and GNOME’s „GUADEC“ at the same time:
Read the press release: Desktop Summit 2011 Announced
As Ubuntu member and head member of c-base e.V. I am part of the Berlin team, together with Claudia Rauch from KDE e.V. and Mirko Boehm of KDE. Let me quote Mirko:
„We are honored and proud that our proposal was selected. What we look forward to the most is the inspiration our communities will draw from having the Desktop Summit together again, but also from visiting our bustling, welcoming city. We would like to thank all the supporters of the proposal, and will work hard to make the conference a big success.“
I am sure this event will become a success. And it’s a great opportunity to meet and greet across the letters before the „U“ in „Ubuntu“.
Saturday evening this years LinuxTag, Europes largest open source fair, closed its doors. As LinuxTag is presented at Berlin, the „Ubuntu Berlin“ was happy to support it in different activities. Let me sum up some of them:
1) Ubuntu Community booth
The „ubuntu Deutschland e.V.“, Ubuntu and Kubuntu community presented their work at a community hosted booth. A bunch of Ubuntu Berlin members supported the booth, answered hundreds of questions and helped with the proceedings.
2) Talks
Saturday Featured a lot of Ubuntu focussed talks. For the first time „Ubuntu Berlin“ and its members hosted a remarkable amount of them, e.g.:
minutes before the „Ubuntu in 50 minutes“ talk
3) Interviews for Radio Tux
Several members of Ubuntu Berlin gave interviews to the well known German Podcast „Radio Tux„. Daniel’s talk on bugjamming has been released already. Be sure to check the archive for other releases within the next days.
4) LinuxTag BBQ
Last but not least: The „End of LinuxTag BBQ“ at c-base, sponsored by Canonical, has been a great success again. Three barbacues and about ten „Grillmeister“ (you cannot translate this) provided more than hundred visitors with tasty food. Members of various types of open source communities had interesting chats while relaxing at the banks of the Spree.
As Ubuntu Berlin’s support for the LinuxTag continuously increased within the last years, I am sure next year will even better. We’ll see.
For those of you currently staying in Berlin for the LinuxTag 2010: I know where you are going today evening after the fair closes. For the third time Ubuntu Berlin hosts a LinuxTag BBQ at c-base, the sunken starbase in the heart of Berlin. Be sure to grab free food there – friendly sponsored by Canonical (thank you!) and a refreshing botte of beer or the beloved Club Mate at the bar for reasonable prices.
The BBQ opens around 6pm. If you don’t know how to get to c-base from the LinuxTag area, a friendly team will guide you – just have a look at the official announcement. The last two your showed, the LinuxTag BBQ is a perfect ending as a large crowd of open source developers and community members of all free project types take the possibility to chat and relax directly at the riverside of the Spree. Don’t miss that 
See you there.
Ada Lovelace
The „Ada Lovelace Day“ celebrates the achievements of women in technology and science and pledges for blog posts about this topic. As the Ubuntu community tries to emphasize the involvement of women in the contribution to the project (e.g. see Ubuntu Women), there might interesting stories about an Ubuntu specific focus on this day’s topic.
I am looking forward the 24nd, there are over 1000 blog post pledges so far. In case you use twitter, have a look at the hash marks #AdaLovelace and #ald10.
(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:
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.