Report From GULEV

I am writing this from the plane returning from Veracruz, Mexico where I gave a keynote talk on Ubuntu at GULEV’s Congreso de Software Libre. The keynotes at the conference were given by Randall Schwartz, Maddog Hall, Richard Stallman and myself talking about Ubuntu. Another Ubuntu developer asked me, "you were in parentheses, right?" Well, apparently not! There was massive turnout for the talk which went extremely well and generated a lot of energy that culminated in what nearly turned into a physical tussle over who got the last Ubuntu CDs. It was an honor to share the stage with both the other keynote speakers and the local Mexican hackers and just to be able to address the extremely interested and active Mexican Free Software community. I had a great time and hope I can make it next year.

In any case, direct from the parentheses, I’ve got notes and slides for folks that want to derive and present Ubuntu at their own LUG or who just couldn’t make it and would like to know what happened:

  • Talk notes for the narrative part of the talk: HTML, ReST

For the last bit of the talk, I should have paid attention to the two cardinals rules of technical talk-giving:

  1. Doing a live demonstration of software is an invitation to Murphy’s law.
  2. Doing an untested demonstration — for example, an install onto untested hardware — basically eliminates any ambiguity about Murphy’s appearance in rule 1.

I didn’t. I did an Ubuntu install, on the projector, onto a brave soul’s laptop. Through a stroke of luck (and the hard work of everyone in Debian and Ubuntu who ironed out all the bugs), it worked perfectly and gave me the opportunity to highlight many things I didn’t make it to in the formal talk.

5 Replies to “Report From GULEV”

  1. I was quite happy to have you over here, hope you had a good time!
    In the end, many people got sick – AFAIK, at least Tacvbo, P4ola, Toxicore, Liss, Diego and Tania (Stallman’s colombian girlfriend, I doubt you knew her) had serious digestive problems. Was everything allright with you?

  2. Yikes! I had no idea so many different people were ill. :(

    I knew Paola was sick and i tried to find you guys when I came back from dinner with Richard but I wasn’t able to find anyone. That’s really horrible. I hope everyone is feeling better.

    Did everyone eat Marisco?

  3. Hi people, how are you????

    Mako, gunnar, toxickore, every body :P

    i don’t eat Marisco, i eat meat :P i hate Marisco :P.

    greetings
    Taur
    Mako.- how many time i’ll need wait for some CDs???

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