Gary’s Blog

Well, thought I better make a quick post to summarise 2007.

It’s been a busy year for me, lots of changes, many new things.

Work has been weird - in July I was moved from a local project to one 170 miles away from home, which is actually going okay, very busy but fun. I am setting up a couple of compounds for a motorway widening job, one office is 50 staff the other is about 160, pretty much the total network setup has been my decision, scary but great fun and super for my career. I am renting a house up there now and so live in two locations.

Home has also been fun, Ella my niece is a toddler not a baby now, she giggles all the time and really is a barrel of fun. The house is going well, looks good and is great to come back to on the weekends. Tom is being great, we are getting on really well and hopefully will be able to devote some time to planning this civil partnership one day (damn being too busy).

One of the things that really cheered me up at the end of 2007 was being deemed suitable to be made staff for freenode ( irc.freenode.net ) this is a project I really believe in. I am very happy that the other staff have felt me worthy to join their ranks and help make my contribution to the open source community a worthwhile one.

As you may know, my work is all based around MS technology and apart from my success in getting a open source VOIP phone system they are very very hesitant to ever look into the FOSS side of things. I however strongly believe in FOSS and the ideals and principals behind the open development of applications and code.

I needed a new laptop for work, so bought a HP 2710p laptop, it’s a 12″ machine which rotates the screen around to be a tablet.

A week or so in and I am finding it quite cool, great for making notes etc.

I installed Ubuntu dual boot, and most things work super - pretty much all except the touch screen.

I have done a new build of Ubuntu Gutsy, to test the installer and how it works for me.

everything works really well, I’m very impressed.

I also installed kubuntu-desktop, and as such got a good mix of gnome and kde applications

Theme and wallpaper now look like this -

Click for bigger

I’ve been playing with logos for my LUG, and so far like this one the best

Other possibles are:

The pink one is for the people in the LUG who are more in touch with their feminine side

Original one is like this:-

I’m doing an event in Colchester for Software Freedom Day 2007, it is in the library and should be quite a laugh.

Today I made some t-shirts, they are not that good, but they are cheap.

I am quite pleased with them.

Also I am being very busy on other preparations for Saturday 15th, as can be seen here - LUG Category and here - LUG SFD Page

Oh, and I made a cool logo

Full Sized gif

It was Tom’s birthday on Friday, and the family and I had clubbed together to collect enough money for the gift he wanted. 

He had a old Dell latitude laptop, a D400 or something, with the noisiest hard drive ever™. He wanted a macbook, so we drove off to Bluewater (our nearest apple store) to get one.

once there, we finally decided on a white macbook, same spec as the black one, but £80 cheaper. We saw the same sales bloke as the last two times, but sadly he let the impression I had of him down big time by pushing the sale of silly apple support things, ffs if we needed training on how to use OSX we would not be buying our third OSX machine this year… (all bought from the same sales guy btw)

I thought he would have realised the reason I liked buying from him was his no-nonsense selling manner, but maybe they have been told to try to mis-sell support services by management or something

Anyways, we parted with too much money, then went to Costa (lot) coffee, Tom was well happy and opened the box right away to have a play (since apple ship there machines with 50% odd battery life)

The opening of a apple product is like so cool, you cannot believe how cool apple products are packaged. So he opened it up and went through the setting up sequence and had a play with it, all the time with a massive smile on his face.

Since then, he did a rebuild, as we are both geeks and like doing that kind of thing, and has hardly left it alone

The dell laptop has not been switched on once, not even to copy data over, which I think is cool as I got a bit of peace from the clunky hard drive.

He even found some OSS book writing software and has been busy writing his mathematics book.

Lets end by saying tom is very impressed with the build, fit and finish etc of the apple macbook. we will probably be installing ubuntu on it at some point, as the ubuntu install is a lot easier on that than my macbookpro (which I am waiting for others to write ubuntu install guides for first)

As Daviey posted this link to the #ubuntu-uk channel, I thought it’d have a play… I don’t think it’s that good a likeness, but it’s a good waste of time, so meets with my approval anyways :) 

Link to Imbrandon’s blog here 

Right, as many of you know, I am a member of the Ubuntu-UK LOCO team, I have been for about a year now.  I was just thinking today, after joining the IRC channel, and being offered advice pertaining to my recent post about my MBP not working quite right under Ubuntu, how absolutely excellent both Mr Pope, and the community are, I did not ask directly for help, I did not whinge, I only posted a blog comment, and actually said I was just waiting to find some guides on how to fix the few remaining “bugs”.

For someone to go out of their way, even if it was just a little google search using different keywords to what I used, and to post them back, un-asked for really impresses me.

This is why I like Ubuntu, and this is why I keep going back to them, I hate the default human theme, but that is so easy to change it’s a non issue, the OS is fab, but what beats every other distro and both the other two mainstream OS’s is the community.

As you can read on previous posts I have just got back from LugRadioLive2007, and I have also gone to LinuxWorld back in 2006, and meeting people who you see make such wonderful contributions to the community on the Forums, mailing lists, IRC Channels and LaunchPad, for no financial gain whatsoever really gives me that nice warm feeling inside.

So folks, and I hope you know who I am referring to, let me say thanks, let me honour you, YOU are the reason so many people like ME are ubuntero’s

Well, a short while ago I bought a MacBookPro.

It’s a great piece of engineering and I really like it, OSX is easy to get used to etc, but I felt really guity, as it has a closed source OS on it.

Well today I thought i’d have a go at putting Ubuntu on it, as the last time I tried I had some problems, I followed the guide here Ubuntu Wiki Link and got most it installed, rEFIt is brilliant, it looks great and performs well.

The only things left are hoping someone figures out how to get audio, wifi and the Nvidia graphics card working, as at the moment it is rather quiet, non-roaming and using vesa graphics drivers, sadly.