Ubuntu Wiki

You're invited to help us celebrate Ubuntu at a special Ubucon event on the first day of the Southern California Linux Expo 8x on Friday, February 19th, 2010! An Ubucon is an organized event for Ubuntu users that's halfway between an unconference and a convention. Our main focus is to get Ubuntu users together to meet others, share ideas, and improve their skills.

We'll have special prizes to giveaway throughout the day!

Details

• Date: Friday, February 19th 2010
• Time: 9:00 AM to 6:30 PM. Registration starts at 8:00 AM.
• Location: National room, Westin LAX Hotel, 5400 West Century Boulevard, Los Angeles CA
• Cost: absolutely free! (Hotel parking is $14 for self parking, nearby lots available)
• Lunch: Lots of dining options in-hotel and nearby

Speakers

We have several speakers on topics ranging from basic photo editing in Linux to the Ubuntu kernel and how it fits into the great Linux community. See below for the schedule and details

Lightning Talks

In addition, we'll have a round of lightning talks at the end of the day. Lightning talks are short presentations, lasting only a few minutes. If you have something to share with others--whether it's a favorite application, an exciting tip, or just a personal story about Ubuntu, you'll have an opportunity to tell us all about something awesome!

Schedule

Featured Presentations

Every NTEU *IS* Someone's GURU*  - How To Encourage The NTEU In Your Organization

This talk will be looking at ways you can harness the energy, enthusiasm, and expertise of those in your organization who self-identify with the non-technical end-user. *Based on a comment by Fabian Rodriguez during Jaunty Open Week - "Every User is someone's guru". In this talk we'll discuss all the ways non-technical users can become involved in a technical organization.

Amber Graner is an active Ubuntu community member and organizer who encourages everyone around her to participate, support, and learn about Ubuntu and Open Source. With a smile and a sense of humor, Amber reminds people that there is a place for everyone in the Ubuntu community – regardless of technical skill level (or lack thereof). She is constantly looking for people, places, and events within the Ubuntu community that help inspire Ubuntu users to participate actively within the Ubuntu community.

The Ubuntu Kernel Maintenance Strategy

Pete Graner is currently the Ubuntu Kernel Manger at Canonical where he looks after all things kernel for the Ubuntu distribution. Prior to that Pete worked at Red Hat in various capacities which include, on-site SELinux Engineer at the National Security Agency (NSA) working on SELinux, he managed the Level 3 Support team, and his last position at Red Hat was the Base Operating System Engineering Manger for RHEL and by extension Fedora.

Learn to Write Programs with the Quickly Tutorial

There are a lot of powerful tools to help you write Linux applications, but how do you know where to start? You can quickly have a program up and running with Quickly--a development tool that makes opinionated choices for you. Using Python, GTK, Bazaar, and Launchpad, you can start writing your own program in seconds. Nathan will use the tutorial that comes with Quickly to show how simple it can be to write your own program, share the code with others online, and even create Debian packages so others can download and install your new creation. Then he'll provide resources to help you learn more on your own.

Nathan Haines is an instructor and a computer technician who has been using Linux since 1994. In addition to occasional programming projects and magazine articles, he is a member of Ubuntu and is involved with the Ubuntu California Local Community Team, where he helps spread the word about Ubuntu and Free Software.

Working Within a Windows Environment

The talk will focus on the issues, pitfalls, advantages and solutions for a Linux user working within a Windows-centric corporate environment. It will review what problems are faced by someone using Linux as a primary desktop as well as the solutions afforded by the community. Tools for using Linux within Windows and the current state of adoption will be discussed. In addition, there are some advantages to having a Linux-based platform. These advantages will be reviewed as well.

Kai Ponte is the manager over Recorder Systems development at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. He is in charge of developing enterprise-scale applications handling property document recording, vital records copy issuance (birth, death and marriage records) as well as accounting and management applications. He has been developing applications professionally since 1993, having programmed in Visual Basic, COBOL, ASP, PHP and Java.

Kai's staff currently develops applications using primarily Microsoft-based technologies, including C#, ASP.NET and Visual Basic. Most run with a SQL Server back-end and multiple tiers of application servers. The primary application handing property document recordings contains 300,000 lines of C# code, runs with 30 services on 15 servers. It currently handles over 10,000 transactions a day. The back-end database has well over 300 million rows in some tables and serves anywhere from 200 – 1000 users simultaneously.

Kai is an avid Linux user. He first started using Linux as a choice back in 1999, running Mandrake on a P-133 laptop. After XP was released, Kai made a conscious effort to move into Linux. Having used SUSE/openSUSE for several years, he has now selected Ubuntu as his distribution. He currently runs Linux on his primary laptop, his child's laptop, and his home server. His mother also runs Ubuntu. (This was after way too many viruses were found on her Windows machine.) Kai writes about Linux and advocates its use in forums, conferences, community speeches and in articles.

Kai is married and has two children.

Photo Retouching Secrets

Linux offers great free tools for image retouching and enhancement. Cropping, color correction, cloning, and other retouching tricks can make ordinary pictures look amazing. We'll take a look at how to perform useful photo editing tasks and how to choose the right file format to deliver your images with the best quality and smallest file sizes.

We'll be demonstrating tips using CinePaint, an open source paint tool used by film studios and professional photographers. CinePaint manipulates high fidelity image formats such as EXR that other tools can't handle. CinePaint also works with more ordinary formats like TIFF, JPEG and PNG. Whatever Linux image editor you use, and there are many to choose from, the same image editing principles apply.

Robin Rowe is the CinePaint project leader, a project he found himself running after writing an article about it for Linux Journal. He's a contributing editor for Linux+ magazine. He's worked for DreamWorks Animation, the BBC, and NBC. He's a partner at MovieEditor.com.