So this is a little late of an announcement for those that are on the mailing list but its official. We will be hosting a Ubucon this September at the New Google Office in Boulder. This event will be in the lines with our last Ubucon. Meaning that it will be an Unconference with a central topic on Ubuntu.

Now granted that the main topic will be Ubuntu. I would like to extend this conference to all things Open Source and the like. Meaning all you Open Source Evangelists, Linux Enthusiasts, Open Source Developers, and all others that wish to attend. Hopefully we can make this an annual thing.

Location:
1433 Pearl Street #100,
Boulder, CO 80302
Map

Date/Time:
Saturday September 27, 2008
S: 9:00am MT (Ruff Start Time)
E: 6:00pm MT (Possible Later if everyone is still interested)

Special Thanks goes out to:
Leslie Hawthorn for helping get everything setup on the Google side of things
Dale Hawkins for being our host at Google and all things that go with being the Host
Neal & Joey for the 1 on 1 with Leslie at Oscon

So after last years Boulder Ubucon was a success thanks to Neal. I have taken it upon myself to work at getting us another possible one this year. We are shooting for a September date sometime on the weekend if we can. Once I can confirm a date I will let you all know. Just wanted to give all the world a heads up that we are working towards this possibly happening again. So that you may have a little more time in advance to join us.

Keep watching for details.

Its that time of the year again the release of a new a better improved Operating System. This time we are celebrating the official release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron(8.04). A lot of discussion has been going though the mailing lists and IRC talking about where we should host the event and at what times. Well it has now been made official as to the date, time, and location, and here are the details.

Location:
Gordon Biersch
1 West Flatiron Circle
Broomfield, CO 80021
Map It

Time:
Sat April 26, 2008
6:00pm to 7:00pm - Event Starts
7:00pm to 8:00pm - Meeting and Discussion about Hardy Heron and its features/upgrades
8:00pm to when ever - General Hangout and interact

Please RSVP before the date by visiting HardyReleaseParty
We need to make reservations and need to know a head count of all who will be attending.

Hope to see you all there.
Thanks,
Mitch Mahan (Team Leader)
Nick Verbeck (Deputy Team Lead)
and the Whole Ubuntu Colorado Local Team

We have decided to have a LoCo “Bug Day”. In which all members of the Loco are welcome to join us at Caffe Sole in Boulder (Table Mesa and Broadway) on January 3rd, 2008. We will also be meeting along side with the Hacking Society.

We have also had suggestions of small groups of Loco members meeting up around Colorado to join us on IRC to help each other out with questions. So if you would like to help set up a small group. Please email the list with your suggested location.

To find out more on what a “Bug Day” is please visit https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay for more info.

“If you would like to meet up for Dinner, as well, there will be CoLoCo members mixed in with the Hacking Society at the Southern Sun at 6pm.”

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.

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.

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.

Well as a lot of you may have been noticing around the site I have started making a lot of upgrades to the website and its layout. I am hoping that you all are enjoying all the new features that have been implemented and the new looks. I just wanted to give everyone a break down of what has been done and what I have planed for the future.

Completed/Working:

• Round Corners
• Side Bar Titles Updated
  • Set correct titles
  • Removed Special Font
  • Titles are now text no longer images
• Flickr Avatar integration
  • Reduced Load time thanks to Session storage.
  • Sessions should be refreshed every 12 hours
• CoLoCo Members Roster
• Blinding Effect Added to Home Page Posts

Comming Soon:

• Blinding Effect will store to session. So when you come back to the article it will be in the last state you had it
• Avatars added to the Roster page
• Flickr Mash-Up to provide a Photo Gallery
• Updated SVN with the current website build. So that other LoCos maybe able to download it and improve upon it.
• Setup Flickr Mash-Ups to be configurable from the admin instead of editing scripts.

Also to all you other LoCos out there that want to have a website but do have the man power to setup or the scripting knowledge to do so. I will be uploading this all to SVN on code.google.com as well as setting up some documentation on how to deploy it. If you would like to use the current structure I can provide you with a copy and some information on how to set it up. Just email me on nerdynick [at] gmail (dot) com.