If you are reading this Gutsy has been released. So please get your copy and enjoy the new features that the Ubuntu Community has worked so hard on.

When: Friday, 6pm (10/19/2007)
Where: Mitch’s House (Check the mailing list for location)

Food: Subway Party Sub(Club/Vegi), Snacks, Plus what ever else everyone brings.
Parking: This is a house party so please park in the areas highlighted by Mitch in the recent post.

If you are attending you need to RSVP with Mitch asap. Other wise you may be left out on the food count.

Gutsy Release Party Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GutsyReleaseParties

Thanks to Jim “Musashi” Hutchinson’s efforts our group has managed to score a great writeup in Full Circle Magazine. The write-up is over his efforts with the T.I.E. conference a couple months ago. It talks about many of the things that they covered at the conference and the teachers reactions to the thoughts of using Open Source and the Edubuntu/Ubuntu Operating System. They also cover the great Thin-Client network that Jim and David setup for the event to show of to the teachers and the network administrators what Edubuntu/Ubuntu could do.

The write up is on Page 11 of the PDF which you can download here.

P.S. Thanks Alex for notifying the group about this great write-up.

Meeting Scheduled for Next Thursday, October 4th @ 11:00am Irc.freenode.net #ubuntu-colorado

See you there!
- Mitch

There will be an upcoming meeting this Thursday the 27th at the Panera Bread in Longmont.

The agenda is:

1. discuss and attempt to finalize plans for the gutsy release party.
2. discuss how to best facilitate monthly meeting with a widely distributed group of members.
3. discuss the idea of regional coordinators.
4. brainstorm some ideas for a bigger, badder hardy party in April.
5. others as suggested and allowed for by time.

Thanks to the untiring work of Jim Hutchinson, help from lots of others and a lot of discussion on the CoLoCo mailing list, we’ll soon have classy embroidered polo shirts with our logo and “Colorado Ubuntu Linux Team” on the left breast, and “CoLoCo Rocks” on the sleeve. Today is the target date for final orders and payments - you may still be able to get in on the order. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ColoradoTeam/Tshirts for the details. Thanks, team!

Good Morning,

I would like to throw a little get-together tomorrow night at Woodys
Wood fired Pizza in broom field tomorrow night after the BBQ. In my
previous LUG in Tokyo, people would post if they are going to a social
place and invite the LUG to attend. This would be a great idea to get
the group together more. If you will attend, please respond to this
thread. Woodys is a laptop friendly place.

The directions are located here:
http://www.woodyswoodfiredpizza.com/locations_broomfield.html

Phillip Tribble - Rusher
That Guy INC.
http://phillip.tribble.googlepages.com/index.html

When: August 11 2007 @ 7:00pm MT
Where: Woody’s Pizza - HWY 287/Wadsworth & 10th Ave. - Broomfield, CO

CoLoCo Ubuntu BBQ
Where: Boulder, CO (Working on a location)
When August 11 or 12, 2007
Planner: Jim (Ubuntu Jim)

Where are currently planning the event out in the mailing list. Please join the mailing list for faster updates.

The Ubuntu Linux Colorado Local Community Team (affectionately self-ascribed as CoLoCo) was recently given the opportunity to travel out to Copper Mountain in Colorado to assist one of our team members in presenting a 3 hour session at the Technology in Education Conference. Jim Hutchinson approached our team several months ago explaining that he had recently found himself converted to Ubuntu Linux and that he ran a thin-client lab at the high school where he works. From all of his experience, he quickly jumped at the opportunity to present at this conference concerning open source technology in the education realm. Jim even got so lucky as to land a personal meeting with Mark Shuttleworth and several other representatives from both HP and Canonical which led to our having enough equipment at our disposal to be able to setup a thin-client lab at the conference itself.

The presentation was originally going to have just a small portion of Linux introduction in it, but after our team and a good friend at HP (Thanks Bryan!) worked closer with Jim, it quickly became a huge demonstration of the power of Ubuntu (specifically Edubuntu) to the teachers, administrators, and IT personnel that were at the conference. Jim opened up with an introduction into the world of free and open source software (FOSS). After explaining all of the benefits of open source software, we gave each of the session attendants a copy of “The Open CD” ( http://www.theopencd.org ) which has a large collection of FOSS software available for windows. The teachers quickly fell in love with several of the applications (especially Stellarium!) while the members of CoLoCo walked around helping people discover the wealth of software available to them absolutely free of charge and licensing restrictions. One of the session attendees even mentioned that he couldn’t wait to install GIMP on all of the computers in his labs because he didn’t have to worry about licensing restrictions and no longer had to purchase copies of Adobe Photoshop! At this point the session took a short recess to give us a chance to prepare for a little surprise we had in store for all of the attendees.

When everyone returned, we instructed them to reboot their computers and to open the boot menu so that they could select a specific boot device. Approximately 10 people asked if they could participate with their own laptops and we quickly crimped down some extra patch cables and got them plugged into the network. What the session audience didn’t know was that while they were away we booted up a quad-processor thin-client server and had re-routed the network in the room to go through the server (which was now acting as a router). Before long, there was a pleasant orange glow coming from the room as approximately 40 laptop screens were sitting at Edubuntu Thin-Client login screens! We had transformed this windows lab into a fully functioning Linux lab in under 5 minutes! The excitement of the room buzzed as all of the attendees couldn’t wait to try out this mysterious “Linux” that they had heard so much about. After Jim explained what we had done to the computers, and that none of their existing windows installations would be damaged, we gave each attendant a login and sat back and watched each person quickly start to churn through all of the edutainment and productivity software applications that we had installed on the thin-client server. After the attendees were impressed at how easy it was to use Linux, Bryan (Our HP Rep.) gave a quick demo of the administrator capabilities of the thin-client server. He quickly impressed his audience of system administrators with the multitude of features available for controlling program and login access on each individual machine or the entire group.

After all was said and done, we handed out well over 50 Ubuntu CDs and also at least 50 copies of “The Open CD” ( http://www.theopencd.org ) to the session attendants. Throughout the session, we had a demonstration table setup outside the room with several laptops running Ubuntu and a large stack of fliers and CDs. At least 50 Ubuntu CDs were grabbed from this table as well! 100 Ubuntu CDs in 3 hours? Not bad at all! The general consensus was that the Ubuntu session turned out to be “the cool session” amongst all of the conference attendees for that day. We were the only session to have over 30 people that afternoon, and actually completely maxed out our room at around 50 occupants! The demand for open source software and Linux in the realm of education is clear and we’re glad we could meet that demand with information and CDs. Our goal is to bring several more in-depth presentations to this conference next summer and continue to grow the interest and knowledge of Ubuntu for teachers and their co-workers.

Click here to view the presentation slides

There is a collection of annotated photos of the session on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9147709@N04/sets/72157600416477484/

Recently, several members of the Colorado Local Community Team manned a Canonical/Ubuntu booth at the Technology in Education Conference in Copper Mountain, Colorado. The conference was attended by nearly one thousand classroom teacher, administrators and technology enthusiasts from around Colorado and a surrounding states. The booth was open in the conference exhibition hall on June 20 and 21. Using our own hardware, we demonstrated Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu, passed out CDs and pamphlets, and answered questions ranging from setting up thin-clients in schools to finding good educational applications.Edubuntu was the main focus and was run on an HP server in a thin-client configuration. Many attendees were particularly interested in using current hardware installations in a “dual-boot” environment. This involves using an Edubuntu server and desktop computers capable of PXE booting. This allows typical Windows based computers to be rebooted into a thin-client mode. In this way, computer labs that are primarily used to produce documents can now be used to access a wealth of open source educational applications. This capability was demonstrated with great success during a three-hour session on using open source software in schools which was presented by Jim Hutchinson and Bryan Gartner on June 19th with the help of several other CoLoCo members (see details in separate post). During our time in the booth, we also demonstrated various applications like Stellarium (a big hit), ran video clips, and showed how thin-client labs are set up. In true do-it-yourself Linux fashion, our “screen” was constructed from an un-ironed table cloth and power strips were daisy-chained together to accomodate all our equipment.

The booth was visited by a wide variety of individuals who expressed interest in both Ubuntu as an operating system and Edubuntu as an educational resource. Visitors to the booth came from all corners of education - teachers, administrators, district technology personnel - and from rural and urban districts. We even entertained someone from the Colorado Department of Education. Most everyone we spoke to expressed great interest in using Edubuntu in their school or district but also concern over how to actually implement such a change when they themselves were not in charge of technology or lacked experience with Linux. Emboldened by the enthusiasm of the Colorado Local Team members, we began to collect contact information, pointed visitors to our team’s website, and assured everyone that if they only asked they would find members willing to come out and help. This has led to a current team project focused on developing a way to offer local support to schools, or anyone, interested in using any flavor of Ubuntu. The team expects to “go live” with local support options within just a couple weeks.

Overall, the booth was a great success and many people went away with new ideas and tips on how to actually make something happen in their school or district. Too often, many great ideas are shared at such conferences, but the reality of education in the United States often prevents positive change. We not only shared great ideas, but backed it up with commitments to actually help make it happen.

CoLoCo members Jim Hutchinson, Bryan Gartner, Leon Jaimes and Neal McBurnett worked the booth. HP provided the big server for the LTSP demo. Canonical provided funding for the booth as well as materials to hand out. Richard Weideman of Canonical was instrumental in getting everything setup. Visit http://coloco.ubuntu-rocks.org or https://launchpad.net/~coloradoteam for more information.