Ubuntu Pennsylvania Local Community Team

The Pittsburgh team will be celebrating the Jaunty release with a party at Fox and Hound in Pittsburgh! Thanks to Tim Bosse (who as it turns out, may not be able to attend, but is handling organizing) and Scott Sweeny for pulling things together.

Date: Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at the Fox & Hound

Time: 7:00 PM

Location: Fox & Hound

The Fox and Hound knows about the party. Ask where the Ubuntu party is if you can’t find it. Check out the wiki for more details: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PittsburghJauntyRelease

The Philadelphia team will be celebrating the launch of Jaunty with a Release Party at the Manayunk Diner in Philadelphia. Huge thanks to Jim Fisher for coming through on securing this location for us, complete with our own private room!

Date : Saturday May 2, 2009

Time : 3:00 pm

Location : Manayunk Diner

Check out our wiki for more details, directions and a map: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillyJauntyRelease

The Philadelphia team is working with others to plan our very own Geeknic! What’s a Geeknic? A picnic for geeks!

This event is not Ubuntu specific, so bring your friends of all geeky colors for an afternoon of BBQ, snacks, geek talk and hopefully fantastic weather.

Date : Sunday April 19, 2009

Time : 1:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location : Betzwood Park, West Norriton

More details and sign-up on our wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillyGeeknic2009

The Philadelphia Team is pleased to announce that we will be hosting an event for the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam!

What is a “Global Bug Jam”?

It’s an opportunity for Local Teams to get together all around the world and concentrate on fixing bugs, meet new people, and just have a good time.

Date: Saturday, February 21, 2009

Time: Noon - 6PM

Location: Resources for Human Development (RHD)

Map

Preparation:

• Helping with Bugs
• How to Triage
• Triage Flowchart

Experienced Triagers will be on-site to assist ALL who are interested in learning more about this vital part of the Open Source Community. There is no pressure; the only requirement is to want to learn and have fun.

• Bug Jam Handout

EDIT: See the wiki page for more details and more details as we have them:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhiladelphiaFeb2009BugJam

The next phase the  NTR Dual Boot Image project is an imaging party, all are welcome!

What:    NTR Imaging party!!!
Project: NTR Dual Boot Re-Image Project
When:    Dec. 6, 2008, 10am - 2pm
Where:   Nonprofit Technology Resources (NTR)
         1524 Brandywine Street
         Philadelphia PA 19130
         215-564-6686

More details have been posted to mailing list and forums:

The Xubuntu drives have been created and tested … well, almost tested. They have only been installed and booted on a few desktop PCs. We need to confirm that our Xubuntu image is generic enough to work on most of NTR’s desktop PCs. The best way to do this is to install the xubu drives into a wide variety of PCs and run them.

We have the drives.
We have the PCs.
We need YOU!

Some refreshments will be provided to attendees courtesy of Pechter’s Bread (maybe even some delicious oreo cake?).

Kevin Valentine has been leading up an effort in Philadelphia, here’s an update on the project from him, thanks Kevin!

The “NTR Dual Boot Re-Image Project” has made considerable progress over the past few weeks.  The NTR people liked the demo for the proposed dual-boot system.  After that it was just a simple matter of transferring that drive image to other drives of various sizes.

NTR has a drive duplicator made by Kanguru.  Several attempts were made to make  it work for our purposes.  Most were successful but there were random failures on known-good drives.  Turned out the Kanguru duplicator was bad and had to be sent back to the vendor.  As a backup solution, a PC was set aside just for writing Xubuntu images to hard drives.

After rigorous testing on Nov 14th, the PC-based solution has successfully imaged 23 hard drives of mixed makes and sizes.  The imaging solution is a bit clumsy but it works.  We can connect up to 5 hard drives with usb-ide adapters and image them in parallel.  It takes about 10-15 minutes to image 5 drives.  If the Kanguru gets fixed, things will be much faster.

The next step is to test out the imaged drives by placing them in 20+ different models of desktop PCs.  This is where we need the support of the LoCo team.  The target date for this will be either December 6th or the 13th.  It still needs to be discussed more with NTR and the LoCo team.  If the drives work well on the desktop PCs, NTR should be able to move forward with full scale drive duplications and installations.  If things continue work out, our next step is to provide a dual-boot solution on their single drive laptops.  This could be a bit more difficult.  We’re thinking a network imaging solution like Clonezilla could make it happen.

For those of you that are new or have missed the discussions, the basic idea of this project is this: NTR needs to provide their customers with a simple solution for restoring their Windows drive.  A simple solution was provided by installing Xubuntu on a separate drive and creating/modifying a few scripts.  The end result is a dual-boot, dual-drive desktop system that allows the user to boot into Windows or Xubuntu, or just restore Windows.  More details on the project can be found here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/CommunityOutreachTeam/NTRDualBootImage

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are planning get-togethers for the Intrepid release, details:

PHILADELPHIA

SATURDAY November 1, 2008 at Drake Tavern Jenkintown, PA, 3:00 pm for Food (Dutch Treat) / 5:00 pm for Party.

Sign up here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PhillyIntrepidRelease

Update!! Photos have been posted in our Gallery:  http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/main.php?g2_itemId=502

PITTSBURGH

Details upcoming, for latest see forum thread here:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=936955

Update!! Details for the Pittsburgh release party have been posted here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/EventsTeam/PittsburghIntrepidRelease

SATURDAY November 8, 2008 at Dave and Buster’s, 180 E Waterfront Drive Homestead , PA @ 7PM

Just a couple of quick updates of things we’ve been up to these past couple months…

On August 23rd several of the US-PA folks headed over the river to the NJ LAN party, photos have been posted in our gallery:

• http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/main.php?g2_itemId=468

Next we have an NTR project in the works, details posted both on the forum and mailing list that Jim and Kevin have been heading up:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=912276
• https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-us-pa/2008-September/thread.html#624

Finally, IdleOne took up a request to contact Canonical about the possibility of approaching Land’s End with an Ubuntu logo for goods. Canonical declined our request (discussion w/ emails located in this forum thread) , but told us that a US based store was in the works. Indeed, the official Canonical US store was launched last week!

•  http://usshop.ubuntu.com/

First off, we’ve finally gotten around to getting the Gallery back up, you can check it out here:

http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/

With the Gallery back up, we were finally able to post phots from the June MythTV Seminar with Matt Mossholder:

http://gallery.ubuntupennsylvania.org/main.php?g2_itemId=438

Finally, we’ve started running PennBot, the #ubuntu-us-pa IRC bot, from our new Linode server!

-!- PennBot [n=supybot@ubuntupennsylvania.org] has joined #ubuntu-us-pa

With this change, we’ve also able to put up chat statistics (updated daily) and real time IRC logs. Check both out here:

 http://ubuntupennsylvania.org/PennBot/

Kevin Valentine posted the following project information on our mailing list this week:

 I’ve decided to limit my presence at NTR.  Instead of going there up to
3 times a months I’m dropping it down to once a month – only during the
Bring a Computer Workshop.  There’s not much to do with the NTR Linux
Laptop project anymore.  We’ve finished all the laptops that are capable
of accepting DSL.  Now they just need to be sold.  Last I checked there
are 2 in the store and 10 in the warehouse.  So before or during the
Workshop, we can attempt to do the following:
1) enter products into database
2) check inventories
3) make sure ‘for sale’ laptops are setup and demonstrating correctly

The Bring a Computer Workshop is a great way to interface directly with
the people that we think need our help the most.  So far, almost every
time I’ve gone to one I’ve installed Ubuntu onto a PC.  Either as a dual
boot (Win + Ubuntu) or just straight Ubuntu.  I don’t force it either
(:  I give an honest effort to help with their Windows problem but there
are many times when a fast 1/2 hour Ubuntu install just gives them what
they want: a functional PC.  The only way it works is if they truly
understand what you’re giving them AND you understand what they need.
If they can only use AOL or Netzero dialup or NEED MS Word for
work/school, then you know the responsible thing to do.

Look forward to seeing some of you there next month.  Here’s the
calendar for more info on the time and place:
http://www.meetlinux.com/calendar/