1-Man IT Department

Crunchbang - My First Contribution

A Happy New Year to everyone who comes across this! I hope that your holidays were a wonderful time with family and friends. To start this new year, I posted my first real contribution to a Linux community this evening. I have previously stated that I am using the awesome Crunchbang Linux on my desktop machine [an older Dell Dimension 4600]. Well over the Christmas holiday, I migrated my work Lenovo ThinkPad T43 to Crunchbang as well. It ran Crunchbang 8.04 early last year, but there were some game changing problems that sent me back to vanilla Ubuntu. I was excited to see that most of the problems that I was having in 8.04 are no longer present in 08.10.01.

Well I am a huge fan of VirtualBox for my virtual machine (VM) needs. I run it on my MacBoook Pro and I use it to host my Windows XP install for my job. I wrote up an Installation and Configuration Guide for VirtualBox on a Crunchbang system, and posted it to the Crunchbang Wiki.

Intrepid Ibex is Coming in for a Landing

This week the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Beta will be released. The Final release will occur on October 30. Jorge Castro has put out a call for ISO testers, and I am taking up the mantle.

Since I am not a programmer of any kind, it is hard for me to find opportunities to contribute to the Ubuntu community. So when there are opportunities, like QA Testing, that are well within my means, I jump at the chance.

I have also gotten together with two other members of the Alabama Ubuntu LoCo to try to once again to kickstart the group to action. We have resumed our weekly IRC Meetings on Thursday nights at 9:30pm in the #ubuntu-us-al room on the Freenode network. Please come by, especially if you are an Alabama resident, and join the group so that we can spread the goodness that is Ubuntu to the whole state.

Interviewed by the Fresh Ubuntu podcast

Yesterday, I was interviewed by Harlem Quijano and Peter Nikolaidis from the Fresh Ubuntu podcast. I have been a fan of Fresh Ubuntu for quite some time, and it was an honor for them to ask me to be on. We had a good time, and I got to give a brief overview of GTD and how it may evolve technologically speaking.

Peter has began to practice GTD, and Harlem was interested in what it was all about. Hopefully, I will be able to make a return appearance so that we can delve into some more GTD topics a little more in-depth.

For now, you can go the Fresh Ubuntu site to listen: http://urltea.com/31av

Thanks to Harlem and Peter for a great time. And I hope to join them again soon.

Michael

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Ubuntu Twitterers join @pulseofubuntu

Ubuntu member, Jorge Castro, put up a great writeup about a new movement to consolidate the growing number of Ubuntu twitterers. I know that Christer Edwards and Dan Trevino were some of the first folks to talk about setting this up.

From Jorge’s blog:

One random day Christer Edwards said something along the lines of “we should organize all Ubuntu people on twitter and put that to good use.” Poor Christer made the mistake of having a great open ended idea, so I convinced him to implement it. :)


Pulse of Ubuntu is a twitter account that follows people around from the Ubuntu community. As you can see, there’s already a good list of people being followed.

You can check out the Pulse of Ubuntu site to see the conglomeration of Ubuntu folks. Not everything said directly relates to ubuntu. Maybe there is a way to parse it out by using hashtags (#ubuntu). I am an idea man, and not a programmer, so I will leave that up to smarter people than me. **hint hint Christer **

Ubuntu Linux and Compiz Fusion: A Match Made in Heaven

I have recently decided to drop Windows from my life (at least at home). I have chosen Ubuntu linux to be my desktop OS of choice. I found a lot of YouTube vids detailing the use of Ubuntu and Compiz Fusion that have peaked my interest in trying it out.

This is one of the better ones (minus the obvious Hillary Duff fascination the guy has).

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