Category: open source

New Ubuntu = awesome!

I just rebooted my work desktop into Karmic Koala, the new release of Ubuntu, my preferred distribution of GNU/Linux.  I don’t have much substantive to say, but the qualitative experience has so far been pretty amazing.

Not only did I get to work all day while the upgrade was downloading, only having to reboot at the very end, but everything worked as I expected when I rebooted – which is to say that the only thing which didn’t work was VMWare, which I expected to not work as with every kernel upgrade.  I might even take this as an opportunity to give Virtualbox a proper try (it was less than amazing last time I did).

Let me make that really clear – I only had about twenty minutes of downtime for the entire upgrade, and it would have been less if the installer had left upgrading Firefox until the end, as that was the only thing which broke (and even then, only partly – no new urls, but clicking through links was fine) while the upgrade was going on.  Try that with Windows 🙂

Things feel just a little snappier, just a little shinier.  I’m really impressed so far.  The new theme and icon set is lovely.

If you’ve been putting off trying out Ubuntu or Linux in general, now’s a great time to start!

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Papercuts

No-context-needed IRC log time!

-!- zfe [n=Gianluca@88.252.29.47] has joined #ubuntu-women
<zfe> is this the kitchen?
<zfe> who would make me a sammich?
<redacted> zfe: No this is not the kitchen
<zfe> aren’t you women?
<redacted> zfe: you are welcome to go into your own kitchen and make yourself a sandwich.
<redacted> zfe: please read the channel guidelines in the topic
-!- mode/#ubuntu-women [+o hypa7ia] by ChanServ
<zfe> ok i will while you make me a sammich
-!- mode/#ubuntu-women [+b *!*=Gianluca@88.252.29.*] by hypa7ia
-!- zfe was kicked from #ubuntu-women by hypa7ia [http://xkcd.com/322]

Nicknames redacted to protect the innocent.

Xelerance Google Summer of Code

I’m pleased to announce that I’m working with Xelerance this summer to mentor students participating in the Google Summer of Code program.  We have a bunch of interesting ideas up and have been talking with potential participants on IRC (#xelerance-gsoc on irc.freenode.net).  We are mentoring three sets of projects, related to openswan, DNSSEC tools, and Off-The-Record Messaging.   If you’re interested in participating as either a student or mentor in any of these, I’m reachable at leigh at hypatia dot ca, and of course on freenode under the username hypa7ia.

This is the first year Xelerance (and I) have participated in the program.  I’ve been reading lots of the collected wisdom from previous years on the mentor email list and around the web.  I’ve really enjoyed talking with students so far and can’t wait to read the applications as they come in.

-Leigh