Ubuntu Wiki

Member of the community

Related URLs

Hubuntu @ launchpad

Hubuntu @ ubuntu-es and my contributions there

My weblog

Enterate de lo que ha pasado en Ubuntu esta semana!

Visita el sitio de Ubuntu Ecuador LoCo Team

Visita el sitio de documentación en español de Ubuntu

Página en el wiki de documentación @ ubuntu-es

Besøk Ubuntu Norge LoCo team sin side

What's with the name?

H stands for huayra, which means wind in several aborigine languages in America (yes, the continent!). It stuck after choosing it (hubuntu) for the gmail account I use for Ubuntu and FLOSS related activities.

I am 26 and love GNU/Linux. I am also a student at the University of Oslo taking a BA in Philosophy and IT. I work as a Security ant IT/Telecom consultant for the SMB and enterprise markets (Cisco, Fujitsu-Siemens hardware)

I have used Ubuntu since March/April 2005. Tried the Gnoppix Warty LiveCD and I was sold... I decided to start with Hoary as my main OS and I downloaded it the day it was released and have used it ever since (yes, got a computer that has "suffered" through a lot of update-manager tweaking ;). Before that I was introduced to GNU/Linux in 1997 and have used exclusively as my main desktop since 2000 going through the following distros (more than 2 days at a time ;): SuSe, Caldera, Mandrake, RedHat, CorelLinux, Debian, Fedora, DSL, PuppyLinux and Ubuntu (in chronological order). I like Gnome best, but I do test the different Ubuntu flavors at least once a year.

Projects

• Contact member for Ubuntu Ecuador LoCo Team.

• I'm part of the Spanish Ubuntu ISO project which has the goal of creating an easy to use add-on CD over a normal Ubuntu install which delivers all related localization packages for the Iberian and Latinamerican communities (involving many local languages). The idea is to build it in the same way the Edubuntu add-on CD ISO is built so we won't fork Ubuntu or have to maintain our own distro. An ultimate goal for the project is to create a "framework" so other LoCo communities worldwide can easily make their own add-on CD based on their local needs. See the full proposed specification (Spanish Only).

• Another project I am involved with is the Spanish Documentation Team which is a joint effort by the Spanish speaking LoCo Teams to create, translate and maintain the best possible documentation for Ubuntu available in Spanish.

• As part of Ubuntu-es and the Marketing Team activities I have taken responsibility for the Spanish translation of the Ubuntu Weekly News which we call NSU - Noticias Semanales Ubunteras

• The Spanish community aims to make it easy for new users to get acquainted with Ubuntu in their own language. I participate in this effort by being part of the CUPIE Project (Ubuntu Classroom in Spanish).

• Powered by stickers (by System76) distribution in Scandinavia. Working on setting in up in Ecuador too.

Activities

Community and teams

• In the fall of 2005 I joined the marketing team and have since gotten involved in many teams and groups within the Ubuntu community.

• My current and biggest contribution this far is the up & running Ubuntu Ecuador LoCo Team for which I am the contact member. I just love to see the interest this has generated within the FLOSS community in Ecuador and how amazing it is to be able to participate in social and networking processes beyond the barrier of space (I live in Oslo, Norway),

• I have urged the community in Ecuador to advocate by distributing CDs and this activity has been a success for our LoCo having now 14 distribution points in the country (April 20th 2008). While visiting the country in the summer of 2007 I gave away 15 CDs to many different people. I even gave a CD to a guy in the Galapagos Islands! This would never have been possible without the sponsorship of the CDs by Canonical, thank you guys for that!

• I have distributed myself over 90 CDs from ShipIt! (got all in all over 100 since the summer of 2005) to different people, without counting the ones I have burned (PowerPC, PS3). I have given it to people at work, at uni, in the street and used them specially at InstallFests. I bought myself a Ubuntu bag from the Ubuntu Store and I always go around with at least 4 CDs (x86 and 64-bits). So if you ever happen to be in Oslo in the middle of the week and you want a Ubuntu CD just send me an email and we can hook up for a CD exchange.

• I took the iniciative to bring the lovely "Powered by ubuntu" stickers by System76 to Scandinavia. I have distributed most part of these (around 400 stickers) to people in Scandinavia (mostly Norway, but also Finland, Sweden and Denmark) and around 50 in Ecuador. All in all I distributed the stickers to over 100 people and 10 companies and institutions in at least 5 countries (including but not limited to): Trolltech, FAST, Active24, Eniro, Sesam and the Ecuadorian Presidential offices. Currently I am working with people in the US to get the sticker distribution going for Ecuador as well. 100 are on their way already; unfortunately no answer from System76 regarding a petition to get/buy stickers have been answered (sent the first one in august lat year...) so the distribution in Scandinavia has been halted for a while now. As of April 20th 2008 I am working on making some stickers locally so the distribution can continue, after a long "break"; bear with me!

• As part of the marketing team activities I am working in the Spanish Presentations projects so up-to-date information about Ubuntu (desktop, server and edubuntu) and Free Software are available for the community.

• Participation in the joint Spanish speaking LoCo project to better organize our activities and move forward a goal for approval of all LoCos within a time frame (not set yet).

• Have worked in the answer tracking system, translations, blueprints and sended a couple of bugs. Now I have become a beta-tester of launchpad.

• I have pushed for more integration between launchpad and the Ubuntu-es infrastructure. OpenID will hopefully simplify this issue and help wider contribution and cooperation across the whole community global easier. I do testing of this technology on Drupal, SMF and other web tools.

Support

• Have taken some time to work in the ubuntuforums, but not as much as I would like to have taken - I keep an eye though in the Ecuadorian forum there.

• I moderate the #ubuntu-ec IRC channel where we provide support and have our meetings.

• Participates in the forum @ Ubuntu Norge

• From time to time I go to #ubuntu and #ubuntu-es in IRC to just give a helping hand if someone needs it.

Events

• Besides InstallFests and my job I have installed or participated actively (more than just giving the CD) in the installation of over 20 machines (desktops mostly, but also 3 servers) with ubuntu since June 2005.

• 6. February 2007 - Installfest participation representing Ubuntu Norge - Set up 5 machines (including a PowerPC Mac with JAVA??!!) and distributed CDs and stickers (Lovely sent from Canonical and System76 respectively, thanks!)

• 04. September 2007 - Installfest participation representing Ubuntu Norge - Installed Ubuntu in 10 machines and distributed stickers and CDs to everyone who got Ubuntu installed (over 50 stickers and 13 CDs distributed). See pics here and here and the poster here. here the odt file too.

• Organizer of the LoCo activities within the FLISOL 2008 in Ecuador. See our wiki page here

My goals

• My first goal is to achieve approval for Ubuntu Ecuador ASAP.

• A goal far down 2009 is to lead the Ubuntu Ecuador LoCo to be a model for viability within the Spanish Speaking community in terms of how cooperation within the community of users, Ubuntu support providers and the enterprise in Ecuador can be done while keeping our transparency and credibility as a Free Software advocacy group. We take Ubuntu as our origo, but we are open to and cooperate with the wider FLOSS community in the country.

• A goal for my participation whithin Ubuntu globally is that we should always move towards the Gobuntu direction for the whole project, and I want to show that it is posible, but that it takes time, patience and a LOT of HARD work! I have used GNU/Linux for 10 years on my desktop... We have come a long way, but have a long way ahead of us.

• Personally I am all in for endorsing commercially backed support locally but make it explicit that the Community efforts come ahead of commercial interest in any case the LoCo members are involved. Building a good and lasting relationship with the enterprise in Ecuador is a very important goal for me and Ubuntu-EC, but the relationship with the wider community comes first. Even if these two aims rarely collide, and do rather strengthen the position of FLOSS, it is important to know what comes first if there are things that arise within the community and enforce its use when neccesary.

• Implementation of OpenID access in the whole Ubuntu-ec infrastructure (using Launchpad as provider), showing that it is possible and be a helping resource with the implementation of it in the Ubuntu-es infrastructure.

Trivia

• At a age of 2 my daughter was able to recognize what she calls: "el ubuntu" (on a monitor, bag, sticker, CD, coffee cup... you name it).

• I ended up in 3 meetings while vacationing in Ecuador the summer of 2007: One at an International School (wanted to try Edubuntu), one at one of the biggest newspapers in the country and at the Ecuadorian presidency. These meetings where undoubtedly the final motivation for me to start the Ecuador LoCo, so MauLuna and I did days after the meeting. This happened:

  • School: I have tried to find out what happened there, but with no luck

  • Newspaper: They had load trouble in their web server. Incoming connections peaks with their IIS setup put the server down to its knees and it eventually collapsed. So MauLuna (ubuntu-ec co-founder) and I proposed to them to put Ubuntu as the front webserver and run the IIS in the back serving the content. They said they would consider it, but wanted to use RedHat (as they had in their spamfilter ;). In the end we never heard from them, but they ended up implemented our idea. Which is a victory for Free Software and a step closer to fix bug #1. Pretty cool I think!

  • Presidency: I met two key persons in of the Ecuadorian Free Software movement in this meeting: Rafael Bonifaz former president of ASLE (Ecuadorian free Software Association) and now working as Free Software Director in the newly created Bureau for IT and Esteban Mendieta IT adviser in the presidency. They both organized the meeting between Richard M. Stallman and Ecuador's president [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zpruk8L0Us Rafael Correa] which lead to his endorsement of Free Software by law. Esteban is part of the team formally, Rafael is not, but as far as I know he uses some *buntu flavor (probably Gobuntu).

• I was introduced to Ubuntu by a guy who walked in the store where I worked and wanted to buy a laptop. So we started talking about what he need it for and stuff and eventually he named Linux so we went on and I mentioned that I used Fedora Core (or something) at the moment, but upgrading to a newer release was such a pain (it was!), and then he said: "I have discovered this new distro, it even beats debian! But I prefer BlackBox over the GNOME standard". What happened? I got too interested in the issue (he even begged me to just do the sales job, he really wanted to be spontaneous) and no Laptop was sold... In exchange I got the love of Ubuntu! So if you are that guy: Thank you man! If you are my former boss, sorry...

• After I started studying I have found out that I use weekly (at least) 15 hours on Ubuntu related stuff comprehending reading, translating, writing e-mail, wiki edition, forum help, websites mainteinance, blogging about Ubuntu, helping (or getting help) in Ubuntu related irc channels, testing and advocating among other activities. I was really shocked to find out that one week I used over 40 hours!!?? - I have stopped counting...
• I got a job interview offering at FAST, just by talking to a guy (a Senior Recruitment Consultant) at a bar. I do not think I'm qualified for the job, but that's not the point; the point is that it was the Ubuntu @ FAST conversation that got me his card. Now that Microsoft is in the process of buying the company I do not think I will make that call anyway.

• I went to the Galapagos Islands (yes, they are in Ecuador) last year adn went to the Isabela island to see penguins! I did take a movie with a penguin and me while wearing my Ubuntu t-shirt ( Thanks Karianne! I will post it as soon as I manage to convert the film to a free format.

• I once wrote a letter to RMS about the participation of Ubuntu Ecuador whitin a series of seminars he gave in Ecuador.

  • I asked: I want to ask you if it is posibble for us to give a talk in Quito, Cuenca and Loja? - he replied:

  • I cannot disregard the ethical shortcomings of Ubuntu... Therefore, you may not give speeches about Ubuntu in association with my speeches... To permit this would be to endorse the non-free software in Ubuntu.

  • and then I asked What will it take for us to get a positive answer from you? - and he replied:

  • When Ubuntu changes its conduct, I will treat it differently according to its conduct.

  • So yeah, I sort of agree with him, but I believe that making that happen can only be done working from within Ubuntu and its community, not by just waiting until is done or forking the base. This proves a point I think: We all are Ubuntu and the world see us not apart from the software but the software as part of Ubuntu as a community, even RMS! which I think is great and gives testimony of the great work Canonical AND the community, in all of its instances, have being doing the last few years.

  • RMS did suggest using gNewSense, so for those of you wanting his approval get it here and those of you wanting totally free up-to-date software get it here. Both are Ubuntu based

• Just for the record: I use the main Ubuntu flavour with full codecs support and universe, restricted, multiverse and the Canonical commercial, google and other repositories activated. I want to get my job done, simple as that! That doesn't mean that I do not work for a day in which only main and universe are activated, but we have to make it viable for ourselves till we get there. no excuse, just a mere fact!

Comments

• Hubuntu is a major contributor to the Spanish-speakers Ubuntu community. He has worked hard to strengthen relations between the Spanish-speaking LoCo Teams. He is actively involved in community projects such as the creation of http://doc.ubuntu-es.org (a great site of Spanish documentation for all the community), the Spanish translation of Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, and organizing LoCos Team members. He has been an important member in the project to create a large Spanish-speakers community integrated by all the LoCo teams, avoiding duplicate work in our communities, and strengthening the relationship and good communication between them. Also, he actually works on the integration of the different Spanish sites, finding to improve the experience of the user, that actually has a different login for launchpad, doc.ubuntu-es.org, ubuntu-es.org and their specific Local Team web site. kelp

• Ruben has contributed tremendously to the Spanish speaking Ubuntu community, and is long over due as an Ubuntu Member. He has my full support MartinAlbisetti

• Ruben has rapidly taken a leading role in re-organizing many crucial resources, most notably doc.ubuntu-es.org. He's also been very insistent on banding together several Hispanic LoCos into better collaboration. I fully support his membership. - FabianRodriguez

• Ruben does a superb job with Spanish translation of the UWN. He also keeps us up to date on great events, like FLISOL. - NickAli

• I am alex, this is cool!!! - Alex - member of Ubuntu-ec

• Ruben has been contributing to the Norwegian LoCo team by taking part in organizing install-parties, distributing cd's and stickers, and encouraging activities within the LoCo. He has definitely been a resource to help our small team grow in numbers. -KarianneFogHeen

• Ruben is an active contributor in the Spanish speaking Ubuntu community, and the closer relationship between the different LoCo teams, is actively involved in several projects, documentation, translations, talks, Ubuntu-ec .....etc, etc. -Meisok

CategoryHomepage