The Ubuntu Nicaragua LoCo Team celebrated the release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala with two events in capital city Managua.

The fiesta kicked off on November 12, with a series of conferences in the Central American University (UCA).

I gave my usual talk about how to get involved and contribute with the community. Second on line was benevolent dictator Adolfo “K” Fitoria, who showed us the latest news on Kubuntu 9.10, followed by the Gnome fan-boy José Ernesto Dávila with all the goodies in Ubuntu 9.10, including a great presentation of gnome shell. The multimedia guru Rodrigo “RoRo” Rodríguez introduced us to video and audio editing in Ubuntu and last, but not least, daredevil Marcelo Gutierrez showed us the awesomeness of Xubuntu. 9.10.

It was a cool event, lots of new faces and many people interested in getting involved with the community. After the event, the party continued with some cold beers at a local bar.

The following week, on November 20, the Ubuntu Ninjas crashed the Pizza Bash 11 event at the Mansión Teodolinda hotel.

We had a lot of fun (well… not me, I got to work ). There was some BoF sessions, including one about GPG keys and the atendees got the opportunity to test drive Karmic.

And after the event… yes, you guessed it! More beers!!

Special thanks goes to Neville Cross from the local Fedora community for taking pictures of both events and for letting us raid the PB11 event.

This is a follow up on my last post about Nicaraguan schools using Ubuntu.

Today we had a second meeting with the authorities of the Ministry of Education (MINED) and the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) in order to clarify some aspects of the project and draft a preliminary plan of action.

Guardabarranco GNU/Linux is now the official name of the project who aims to develop a Nicaraguan educational distribution.

This distribution will be based on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, making an extensive use of the official Ubuntu repositories, adding only some new educational software and adapting other to fit the Nicaraguan curriculum for primary and secondary schools.

20,000 laptops for teachers with Guardabarranco GNU/Linux pre-installed will be deployed in the first phase of this project, followed by the installation of the system in computer labs in public schools using LTSP.

As some people erroneously pointed out in my previous post, this is not a fork, it may not even classify as a derivative distribution… it’s more like an ‘Ubuntu Remix’ with some extra packages designed to fulfill the needs of the Nicaraguan school system.

We want to work as close as possible with the upstream Ubuntu developers, pushing back our patches and changes to Ubuntu whenever it’s possible.

IMHO, this is a great project, both for the Nicaraguan educational system and for Ubuntu. We’ll be able to deliver a powerful and flexible operative system ‘out of the package’ with all the applications needed for our teachers and students, and at the same time, build a core team of developers that can contribute with its code and knowledge to the Ubuntu project and community.

If you can read Spanish and want to contribute, check out the announcement and join the Ubuntu-ni mailing list.

Guardabarranco, or Turquoise browed motmot, is the name of the official bird of Nicaragua. It’s also the name of the first public school that’s using GNU/Linux exclusively in their computer labs. Our community has been giving technical support to the Guardabarranco school since 2008, and started recently a project for recycling old hardware in order to deploy computer labs with LTSP in Guardabarranco and other public schools in Nicaragua.

El día miércoles en el Encuentro de Desarrolladores de Ubuntu (Ubuntu Developer Summit – UDS) en Dallas, se llevó a cabo la discusión sobre las aplicaciones que se incluirán en la instalación estándar de Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

Una de las decisiones técnicas que se tomó, y que me llamó mucho la atención, fue la de excluir a The GIMP en la instalación por defecto de Ubuntu.

Recordemos que Ubuntu es una de las distribuciones de GNU/Linux que aún mantiene la carácteristica de distribución en CD. Otras distribuciones grandes vienen por lo general en DVD. Esto mantiene cierta presión sobre los desarrolladores en cuanto a optimizar el espacio limitado disponible en el disco.

Entre las razones que se dieron para abandonar The GIMP están

• Es una aplicación para profesionales, “usuarios comunes” no lo utilizan.
• The GIMP se debe mercadear mejor entre usuarios no-Ubunteros. (???)
• Existen herramientas más sencillas para rotar y redimensionar fotos (eog y F-Spot).
• Es un reemplazo de Photoshop, y Photoshop no se incluye en una instalación estándar de Windows.

La idea es reemplazar entonces The GIMP con F-Spot, aplicación que a mi juicio le falta muchísimo en cuanto a funcionalidad. También se revisará la interfaz de usuario de F-Spot para resolver cualquier inconsistencia.

Entiendo la preocupación del equipo de desarrollo de Ubuntu, pero me parece que remover a The GIMP de la lista de aplicaciones instaladas por defecto en Lucid es un grave error.

Primero por la ausencia de una verdadera alternativa para la manipulación de imágenes, pero también por lo que representa The GIMP.

The GIMP es un ícono de excelencia en aplicaciones de software libre. Sí… la interfaz es algo compleja y puede resultar díficil la transición desde su similar privativo, pero seamos sinceros… hay pocas aplicaciones de software libre con el poder, el renombre y el prestigio de The GIMP (salvo tal vez por Mozilla Firefox y OpenOffice.org).

Si queremos demostrar lo maravilloso que es el software libre y Ubuntu, ¿no deberíamos priorizar el incluir en el CD aplicaciones de primera clase? ¿No es el trabajo de Ubuntu demostrar el poder del software libre, promoviendo lo mejor que GNU/Linux pueda ofrecer en cada área?

En fin, si ésta ha sido una movida inteligente solo lo sabremos en unos cuánto meses. Por fortuna, aún se podrá instalar The GIMP desde los repositorios. Incluso, una de las propuestas apuntaba hacía la creación de “suites” (o meta-paquetes) de diseño, con las cuales se podría instalar aplicaciones como The GIMP e Inkscape con un solo clic, lo que no parece tan mala idea.

Otras de las discusiones técnicas que salieron a la luz en la reunión:

• Revisar los juegos instalados en Lucid y hacer una selección con menos juegos y de mayor calidad.
• Añadir una herramienta sencilla para hacer respaldos.
• Reemplazar tsclient con vinagre.
• Incluir un editor de vídeo en la instalación estándar, lo cual me parece una excelente noticia. Lo malo es que se inclinan por PiTiVi, aplicación que es muy básica y tiene grandes problemas al trabajar con formatos cerrados. Lo que inclina la balanza a su favor es el hecho de tener la misma IU de su contraparte privativa (¿soy yo o hay un patrón de querer parecerse a Windows?). En mi opinión, sería más apropiado irse con OpenShot (¡Gracias Camilo!).

Una de cal y otra de arena para Lucid. Aunque recordemos que estas decisiones no son finales, y que todo puede cambiar en el curso de los próximos seis meses. ¡Stallman mediante!

The Linux journal magazine recently published an article about ALBAstryde: an agricultural information system build by SIMAS, a Nicaraguan NGO, on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture, and released under a GPL v.3 license.

ALBAstryde is a dynamic web-based information system that combines data from different sources. The numeric data can easily be combined with textual data (by placing comments on the graphs), the write ups from the wiki component, and PDF documents (added in a library section).

Some members from our community were involved from the beginning in the process of building ALBAstryde, and that’s for me, one of the most remarkable aspects of this system; that the knowledge of building, operating and extending ALBAstryde is available locally and not depending on foreign experts.

If you want to know more:

• Article in Linux Journal
• See ALBAstryde live
• Source code

The Ministry of Education have plans for developing an Ubuntu-based educational distribution aimed at public and private elementary and secondary schools in Nicaragua.

There’s a work group in front of this project, constituted by high-level officials from the Ministry of Education, representatives from the National Technological Institute (responsible for vocational training nationwide), delegates from the main private and public universities, and members from the Ubuntu Nicaragua LoCo Team.

This work group is going to meet next week in order to draft a plan for the first twelve months.

One of the first tasks is to identify and classify all the free educational software included in the Ubuntu repositories, and see which software packages needs to be adapted to fit the national curriculum for schools and how much new software has to be developed from scratch.

This is a great opportunity for our LoCo, both in terms of further advocating the use of FOSS in the country, as much as in gaining technical expertise in packaging, developing and maintaining Ubuntu packages.

Hopefully, in the long term, we’ll be able to contribute back to the Ubuntu project with patches for software that’s already available in Ubuntu and some new and exciting educational software in areas where it’s lacking.

The official Nicaraguan GNU/Linux distribution for schools is definitely a step forward in the right direction.

Just to give a big THANK YOU to our amazing Latin American community who contributed to make the dream of a Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish come true.

Thanks to: Pablo Rubianes, Igor Guerrero, Eduardo Rosales, Dante Díaz, René Mayorga, Rubén Romero, José Angel Bonilla, Andrés Rodríguez, Adolfo Fitoria, Marcelo Gutierrez, Marconi Poveda, Efrain Valles and Diego Turcios.

Special thanks to José Ernesto Dávila, the ubuntu-ninja behind this event.

See you again at the Lucid Lynx UOW!!

Yesterday was the first day of sessions of the Semana Ubuntera (or Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish). It’s our first UOW, so we didn’t expect many people to come.

Luckily, we had a great attendance; an average of +60-65 people in the IRC channel. It’s great for being a first-time-event and aimed at a community that hasn’t a big tradition of using IRC for communication.  You can find the logs of yesterday’s sessions here.

Today we’ll have some interesting sessions:

• Creating and signing GPG keys by José Ernesto Dávila from Ubuntu Nicaragua
• Collaborating with Debian by Eduardo Rosales from the Debian Nicaragua community
• Working with bugs by Dante Díaz from Ubuntu Perú
• Debian packaging by René Mayorga, Debian Developer from El Salvador

You’re most welcome to join us today in the #ubuntu-centroamerica channel, starting at 22:00 hours UTC.

In my last blog post, I talked about the organisation of the very first Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish. Well… we’re almost there!

From November 2-6, we’ll have a series of IRC workshops where you can learn about Ubuntu, talk to some of the developers and leaders of the community and find out how to contribute.

We have a pretty cool schedule with some interesting workshops about community, development, marketing, and the highlights of Karmic Koala.

We will also have the participation of our friends from the Debian community; Eduardo Rosales, leader of the Debian Nicaragua community, talking about how to contribute to the Debian project, and René Mayorga, Debian Developer from El Salvador, with a session on packaging.

There’s still a few slots available, so if you’re interested in giving a talk, please edit the wiki and add your name (yes! it’s as easy as that!).

The schedule of the Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish is here. You can also check out the schedule of the official Ubuntu Open Week (in English) here.

Yes! It’s Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish!

Ubuntu Open Week is a week of IRC tuition and Q+A sessions all about getting involved in the rock-and-roll world that is the Ubuntu community. We organize this week for the beginning of a new release cycle to help new contributors get involved.

The LoCo Teams from the non-English speaking countries has always had the language barrier that holds them back from contributing more efficiently to the Ubuntu project. A lot of members from our communities don’t know how to contribute and do not participate in the UOW tuitions and sessions because of their lack of understanding of the English language.

José Ernesto Dávila, one of the founders of the Nicaraguan LoCo Team and member of the local Community Council, stepped up and started the organization of the very first Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish.

The idea is to hold a week (or at least three days) of IRC sessions in Spanish in order to motivate community members from Spanish speaking countries to get involved in the Ubuntu community.

We’re teaming up with the Central American Ubuntu LoCo Teams from November 2-6 on IRC in the #ubuntu-centroamerica channel.

Right now we’re putting together the schedule of the Central American Ubuntu Open Week. If you are interested in holding a session, please add yourself in the wiki or drop us an e-mail at the Central American Ubuntu LoCo Teams mailing list.