Tony Yarusso's Blog

Today we set a time for our very first formal Minnesota LoCo meeting. It will be held this Thursday, 20 September 2007, at 16:00-18:00 CDT (4-6 PM locally, in the UCT-5 timezone). The meeting will be held online, in the #ubuntu-minnesota IRC channel on the Freenode network. The agenda for topics of discussion is at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MinnesotaTeam/MeetingAgenda, and should be considered a work in progress which Minnesotans are free to edit up until the meeting if they have any points they would like to add. Note that this is a public meeting, so anybody is welcome to attend and participate (ie, you don't need to be an official member on Launchpad, etc.). Logs will be made available afterwards as well.

For those who are not yet familiar with IRC, take a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat for a start, or ask for help on the mailing list.

Hope to see all Ubuntu-using and curious Minnesotans there!

My laptop came with a built-in winmodem, and since at the time that I first installed Ubuntu I only had access to a dial-up internet connection, I of course needed that. However, it didn't work out of the box (this was Hoary). After quite a bit of very confused e-mailing, Google, and such (I didn't even know what a winmodem was/meant), I found a solution that worked from Linuxant. (I'd like to thank the Linmodems mailing list for this.) Anyways, getting to the point, I just noticed a small snippet in Issue 51 of the UWN indicating that there was a driver package available from Dell now as well. For more information on that, check out this post on the Direct2Dell blog. I'm not 100% sure, but it appears that this is the same driver, except now available for free. Note that it is still not free, in terms that it is not open-source, but at least now perhaps there is an option that doesn't cost $20. I have not yet tested this package on my system, but plan to.

I was dismayed to see on Digg today an article entitled US Transportation Secretary Doesn't Consider Bikes a Form of Transportation. Surely this isn't quite true, I thought. Well, upon further investigation, it seems I was almost hopefully right. Turns out she merely doesn't think the surfaces used by bikes are remotely related to transportation...somehow I'm not feeling much better. In the context of the article, and for anyone who's been living in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) area recently, with portions of highways 36, 694, 35E, 94, and 35W out of commission this year, you'd think that the government would be doing everything they can to recognize and encourage the use of bicycles as an alternative to cars. It would seem that at least Mary Peters has yet to figure this out - sad for any official, a truly mind-boggling incompetency for a Secretary of Transportation. I guess all that can be said here is, "that explains a lot".

The guilty interview (PBS)

The Digg article again

My comment on such

Following the Dugg Fridge article about US LoCo Teams, a number of places have started to receive attention. Among those getting started is Minnesota, which is now established:
On Launchpad
On the Wiki
On IRC at #ubuntu-minnesota on Freenode
and has applied for a mailing list, to be available shortly at https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-mn.

So, if you use Ubuntu in Minnesota, apply to the Launchpad team and add yourself to the wiki page so we know who else is around!

In addition, other teams who got started and added some yellow to the map include:
North Carolina
Rhode Island
Michigan
Oregon
Texas
Wisconsin
New Hampshire
Mississippi
Louisiana

States rumored to be about to join that list are:
Vermont
West Virginia
Idaho
with others soon to follow hopefully!

I had a chance to chat with Kaze again today for the first time in a few months, and got some updates on how the KompoZer project is coming along (unofficial continuation of the Nvu codebase). There was a code update a few days ago on the SourceForge project page, which he considers a “developer snapshot†(ie, not really stable, but getting close to it). The current plan is to release an official, stable 0.7.10 in the near future (next week or two hopefully), which will be the end of the line that’s just minor fixes to Nvu.