20130705
Ubuntu Hour
Event Link: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-qa/2457-ubuntu-hour/
We scheduled an Ubuntu Hour for Friday 5th July 2013 from 5pm to 6pm at the Museum of Islamic Art.
Present (in order of appearance)
Minutes
We had a good meeting. Nino (first time visitor) was asking questions about how he could change himself and perhaps his company's desktop/laptop environment to Ubuntu. A general discussion about the benefits and options of Ubuntu went on until about 6pm. We discussed things like:
Office Suites available in Ubuntu like LibreOffice
Internet browsers for Ubuntu like Firefox and Google Chrome and also how Microsoft Internet Explorer can be run if needed using Wine or Virtualbox
Email clients for Ubuntu like Thunderbird
Multiplatform file backup and sharing utilities like Dropbox
Ubuntu Software Center where various other software packages can be downloaded, mostly free, and sometimes at a cost.
The limitations of Ubuntu were also briefly discussed. Although software exists for web design like the great graphics package GIMP and various web editors, using them would involve a learning curve away from platforms like Adobe Flasheditor and Dreamweaver. In the same light though, we also discussed a bit how web development has now moved to a scenario where a team of developers will work on mirrored copies of a website "offline" running Apache webserver locally (which is setup in minutes on an Ubuntu machine) and publishing changes with versioncontrol systems like GIT, etc.
Great free website development editors like jEdit and the commercial Sublime Text 2
Ubuntu based website hosting solutions, like the virtual servers running Ubuntu in the cloud at Linode
How Ubuntu supports all major VPN standards like L2TP, PPTP and IPSec as used by commercial VPN providers such as Witopia
It also was great hearing from hyder-hr about his recent move to Ubuntu and how he's been enjoying the change, having purchased a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled at Sofitel Plaza here in Doha.
After (From about 6:05pm to 6:10pm) that we chatted a bit about opportunities for growing the community but nothing certain as yet.
We ended around 6:15pm and look forward to having another UbuntuHour in two weeks time or so.