Introductions and Meetups...

[scastle]

Howdy Everyone.

I'm not sure how many of you look at the forums, but I'd reckon that not all of you have access to IRC.

I'm making this post to put a spark under the group to get things going again. I started the talks in the fall (well, August 07) but people faded away. Hopefully we can get people back and active, get a site up, get approved as an Official State LoCo team and have some meetings, Teaching Sessions, Library Appearances, etc.

I think we should get to know each other, and I think here is a pretty good place to do it.

I like the following to start:

Our initial goal is to get a core group of interested people together so we can start building the resources the community will need. As of now, we are simply emailing each other and using the IRC channels. Please feel free to contact us and, again, add your information to the members page!

So I'll introduce myself first.

Name: You already my name
Age: 21 (You can add it if you like)
Why Ubuntu: I've tried many different Distro, and I liked the GNOME setup. Ubuntu was just starting to catch on, and I figured if Linux was going to get big, I'd love to be a part of it and go along for the ride.

I'm a fan of open and free software. I believe that there is a place and a time for proprietary software (I understand that it is something some people will not agree with me on), but the operating system is not it.

Since I'm a student at the University of New Hampshire (yeah in-state tuition... ), I have a desktop here running Ubuntu 7.04 full time, a desktop at home Dual-Booting Ubuntu 7.10 and Windows XP Media Center and A Backup machine that I call a server running Xubuntu 7.10.

Well, I know that sometimes I go on too much, and I think that this is one of them. I posed a "Get to know one another" in IRC the other day, I am 'xsc' in there, and only got a response from Nikkiana (?).

Look forward to hearing from you other Ubuntytes soon.

-Steve

[drdabbles]

Well, let me be the first to reply...

I'm Tom Cameron, from Manchester. I started using Ubuntu as my desktop and server linux of choice since around Dapper Drake was released. My history with Linux began around 1995 with Redhat Linux, which I quickly outgrew. Since then, I have tried several distributions from SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS, and so on. I try to know a little about each of them, so I can be as effective as possible when helping others.

My full experience with Linux on a technical side comes from a project I worked on for myself. I called it flashpoint firewall, and sold units to companies needing a multi-interface firewall device capable of VPN links between sites. For that project, I collected a host of kernel and application patches, wrote my own init scripts from the ground up, utilized Busybox heavily, and compiled everything against uClibc to minimize the device's footprint. I'd like to restart that project some day, but for now I find myself too busy.

Currently, I run Ubuntu on two laptops at home, two PCs at home (one acts as a server, the other as a media center), my desktop at work, as well as three other servers at work. I run the default Gnome window manager on them all (except the servers, obviously), but I have been a hard-core KDE advocate in the past. I find Gnome to have a very simple UI design, which keeps it from distracting me or getting in my way.

My aspiration for now is to help out with the MOTU group doing some packaging. I feel I need to contribute as much as possible to the Ubuntu community, simply because of what Ubuntu has meant to me. I have not owned a Windows license for any PC I own or use on a daily basis in over three years, and Ubuntu has been the best part of that.

[scastle]

Tom,
That's awesome. Great way to kick off this thread. Lots of knowledge we can all learn from. I'm interested in packaging (possibly not at the level you are ), but at least learning how to make a .deb, etc.

Looking forward to the other responses.

-Steve

[Matt 6:27]

Chris here, in Rye (a stone's throw from Steve). I've a different history from you guys. Started computing by watching my dad build an Altair 8800 back in about '75; it ran CPM and used a teletype for data input and a 300baud audio coupled modem to dial into Berkley. My dad taught me Basic and HEX so I could use the programming panel on the Altair.

Over the years, I pursued a different career path, but have always stayed on the periphery of computers. I started looking at linux several years ago; first Red Hat 5.0, then 5.2... then Corel Linux (a copy of which I still have on my shelf), but was always too chicken to load it on my one and only machine.

When MS announced it would discontinue support for 98SE, I threw caution to the wind and dual-booted Dapper and have never really looked back. I continued to dual-boot for about a year, but this past summer I re-lived my experience in 1975 and built a new system with my young daughter & son. I'm now 100% linux on my new desktop (Gutsy)... though I have to admit my wife is using XP on her laptop.

I don't write code, but do give out a fair number of Ubuntu CDs to co-workers, friends and family.

[scastle]

Chris, thanks for the response. Nice to know someone else on the Seacoast is using Ubuntu. Do you know anyone else within the Seacoast area using Ubuntu? It'd be interesting to know the ratio of CD's given out vs. converted users.

Please consider adding yourself to the New Hampshire Team Members Page here. I'm trying to get people together so we can maybe have a meet-up or even host an event. I'd like to get something going on the Seacoast, but right now it seems that the two of us are the only two Seacoast members of the group.

Looking forward to hearing more from everyone else. Again, if anyone else knows other New Hampshire Ubuntu users, point them to this thread and have them post their information on the NH LoCo Page.

All the best.

-Steve

[nikkiana]

Hi there, I'm Nikkiana (or Nikki). I live in Manchester. My first introduction to Linux and Ubuntu was in in May 2005 when my husband (then boyfriend) decided that he'd had enough of WIndows.... and his roommate using his computer. He installed to Kubuntu 5.04. The downfall was this transition came at a time when Firefox had some security issues and you couldn't download extentions unless your version number was correct, and while Firefox in the package manager had been patched, the version number hadn't been changed thus the validation on Firefox's page wasn't working.... and my husband had a meltdown over it because the package manager was such a foriegn concept to us at that point.

From there, he did some distro hopping.... I wasn't terribly involved with it, but I know he eventually settled on Gentoo for awhile. Gentoo successfully taught him what the value of a package manager was... He used Gentoo until Ubuntu 6.06 came out and the switched back to Ubuntu, and he's been with it ever since.

I went to school at NHTI and studied Computer Engineering Technology, so until school ended in 2006, I was bound to Windows for school reasons. (They've got a good program and teach foundations you can bring to any language.... but the program *is* horribly Windows centric). When I finished school in May 2006, I switched to Kubuntu 6.06.

Currently, I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 on my desktop, and I have a Mac laptop (seemed like the lesser evil).

Work wise, I'm a web developer specializing in theming for Drupal based websites.

[Matt 6:27]

Well, I know a guy in Newmarket who dual-boots Fedora and Ubuntu. He's an old school computer guy (I think he worked on the designs for the old VAX-11) and is much more technically savvy than I. He's the one who finally convinced me to go for it after all my hmmmin' & hawwwin'. Other than you, he's the only person I know in the Seacoast area who definitely uses Ubuntu (or any linux distro for that matter).

As noted before, I've given out lots of CDs, mostly to family & friends. My dad (in Essex MA) has been the most receptive family member, though I think I've got a sister about to make the switch. In turn, my dad has handed out disks to his techy friends in the Cape Ann area. I've also converted a couple co-workers who have complained about their windows systems at home... once they opened the door, I walked right in and had instant converts. Most of the other folks I've reached out to seem to have played around with the Live CD, but have be reticent to go farther than that.

Beyond friends, family & co-workers, every once in awhile I strike up conversations with people at places like Best Buy. One thing leads to another and they start to complain about this or that re Windows. These conversations have led to my giving them a disk. I've never heard back from those folks, so I can't tell you how many have taken the plunge.

So of the 20-30 disks I've burned and handed out, I can really only confirm three users at this time. A 10% +/- success rate isn't so bad given that people generally don't like change in their lives.

[scastle]

10%.... not too bad. That actually seems more than reasonable to me. Think about Firefox and the time that it took for its adoption, and its past and current market share. I'd personally like to see Ubuntu be as successful as Firefox, but (not to be pessimistic, but a realist) we won't see Linux in the mainstream for a long time.

Ubuntu is doing a great job to introduce people to Linux in a user-friendly way, but the adoption of Firefox didn't involve people having to change a major part of theie computer -- their operating system. Although we know that we can dual-boot, the common computer user only needs their machine to do the basic things... that of which Windows does well (all Ubuntu does just as well). Since there is no need for them to switch, they won't.

It is a personal goal of mine to get Ubuntu (or Edubuntu) into the local school system. This will introduce students to a whole new (and very powerful) computing world. Not all of the users who use the new Linux systems int the school will like it or ever use it again in the future, but I believe that it about getting them to know about it and realize that it is a viable alternative.

Maybe that was a little bit of a rant.

Anyways, I am on a Windows-based machine at work... Oh the irony....

What goals do you guys want to accomplish as a group.

I know personally I really want to be able to teach web programming (PHP/Javascript, etc) through Ubuntu by offering local courses for free at the local library. Any other ideas would be great and we can pool our knowledge and resources to teach others computing through Ubuntu.



-Steve

[magicrobotmonkey]

Hey, everyone,
I'm Aaron, just moved back to Laconia in Nov. I grew up here then spent a few years away at school and then living in Cambridge, MA, but the lakes called me back.

I've been all Linux all the time for about 3 years, and used it for servers and just playing for 3 or 4 years before that. I work for a small web-software company in Boston (I commute down there 6 times a month). My job is great because we run all linux servers, and have control over our lappies, so I run 7.10 on my dell inspiron for work, also on a mac mini with a big 24" monitor in the living room at home for all my entertainment needs and i have a old box running 6.10 with mythtv waiting for baseball season to start.

At work, I'm mostly a developer, but I do some sysadmin/dba tasks as well (its a small company, so we all wear lots of hat). We currently run rhel on intel but are working on moving to ubuntu on sparc. (For a good time, go to ##java and ask about running java on linux on sparc.) My work is mostly PHP, but I do some stuff on the side. My open source claim to fame is the original version of the Now Playing screenlet (which the community took over and vastly improved).

I've got a (much too infrequently updated) blog at http://magicrobotmonkey.blogspot.com/ .

I'm excited to see if we can get something going. Also, I talked to someone here in August or so who has a farm and I want to buy some chicken and eggs.

[scastle]

Sounds awesome. When and where do people want to get together?

I suppose that if people have access to IRC, we can have a live meeting in there at the time that most of the members of this group can make it to, and we can discuss relevant (or even some topics that aren't relevant ).

I guess we can just post here when people want the first IRC meeting to be and we can go from there.

Look forward to it...

-Steve