I recently stumbled across Gobby:
Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.
It looks really cool, and the realtime-editing would be very well suited to trying to draw up any form of document or source code at the same time when you will have too much activity for trying to use a code repository.
It is a shame Gobby does not have hooks builtin to allow loading code from a VCS or DVCS (that would be cool), but you can launch it headless on a server with an auto-save directory and then all connect in and start loading documents. There are times when I have wanted something like this, particularly when you are starting out a new piece of code and have several people wanting to get started right away. Once the pace dies down, it probably makes a lot of sense to move the file to your source code control system, but for that initial burst this looks like a fantastic tool
I recently noticed that 2nd-4th October is Ubuntu Global Jam. There is actually a meetup in Birmingham:
Ubuntu Global Jam – Birmingham (UK) – Source Guru
So, if you’re interested in helping make Ubuntu a better distro, and live in (or can travel to) the Birmingham Area in the UK, then you’re welcome to come along.
The Jam is on the 2nd-4th October, and we’ll be around on all three days…. Last year we had a great time, with refreshments (including beer) provided. Juggling penguins, and one person sleeping underneath the conference room table overnight. Hopefully we’ll also have the live Video Streams up and running again for anyone who can’t make it (or other Ubuntu Jams) to join in with!
However another question also occured – how much interest would there be in the south of England in order to try and organise one closer to home. We don’t really even need an official Ubuntu developer, as there is plenty of instructions and irc can provide access to developers real-time if we need them.
The only thing we need is a venue (I could possibly get use of the IBM site again) and enough people that want to contribute something to Ubuntu. The contribution could be packaging new programs, fixing bugs, raising bugs, improving documents, or translating documents (translation into British English anyone?)
On Saturday I hosted a group for 30 people at IBM Hursley for a Hampshire Linux User Group meeting.
We had a good set of talks, including Andy Stanford-Clark talking about his twittering house and mousetraps as well as the twittering Red Funnel Ferries [telegraph.co.uk] and his energy monitoring via Current Cost devices.
I did a brief (although rather technical) introduction to Debian packages (which will turn into a blogpost soon with any luck).
Laura Cowen did a nice talk on InfoSplicer which was originally designed for the Sugar platform of the OLPC hardware.
Tony Whitmore gave a rather interesting talk on podcasting, from his experience in doing the Ubuntu UK Podcast
Adam Trickett talked about book reviews, and gave out a pile of free books for people to have in return for writing a review.
Laura Cowen also did an excellent writeup for eightbar
On Saturday, we were mostly in the Auditorium (where Spitfires were built during WWII), then when we led everyone down to the Clubhouse for lunch, we took the usual site tour scenic route via the Sunken Garden and fish pond. Although Hursley is out in the country, seemingly the middle of nowhere, it’s actually on the bus-route from Winchester so we had an excellent turnout of about 30 people. IBM Hursley also has a lot of cool people who do cool things that we can tell people about (although one piece of feedback I heard from a LUG person was that they thought we didn’t talk enough about what IBM does!).
…
It was a really enjoyable and relaxed day; kudos to Anton, Stephen, and John for organising it from the IBM end. Thanks also to the IBMers who came along and to the many HantsLUG members who turned up. I’d say it was a success and we should definitely do it again.
Linux Users descend on the House | eightbar
The day was terrific (at least for me) and I hope to organise another one in the near future, as it turned out to be nowhere near as hard as I thought it was going to be (I thought it was going to be difficult persuading security etc to let me bring 30 people on site over a weekend when the site only has minimal staff).
Thanks to all those that helped, particularly John Wesley and Stephen Godwin, and also thanks to all those who turned up!
If you run a Debian or Ubuntu system and have more than one release in your apt-sources file (/etc/apt/sources.list) then you should probably learn the basics of apt-pinning. Apt-pinning allows you to have a specific package stay at a certain level or set a preference for it to be installed from a specific release. This way you can have the latest version of package X from a cutting-edge server without worrying about the rest of your packages moving up to cutting-edge levels by accident.
Two excellent resources are:
I recently installed KDE 4.2 on my Debian laptop, and found the whole process surpisingly easy and now working very nicely.
Following the instructions from The Debian KDE maintainers website, all that is required is enabling a sid repository and then installing the kde4 package which does the usual full-install of KDE. It is worth noting that it will warn you about installing in a running KDE session, so it is best to logout and use another windowmanager (like the failsafe one) or just a virtual console.
Once done, log back in with KDE and the migration wizard will move your data over (backing up the KDE3 settings in case you want to revert).
For me the process was painless and fairly quick. Configuring KDE to my liking took a little while, but I am quite liking it now and the widgets are quite cool. I have yet to turn on the special effects as I never got round to sorting out the ATI 3D drivers on my laptop since installing it, as they have been rather poor in the past (not sure if they are better now, but I use less power without the effects anyway)
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