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.

A couple of months ago I posted some CD/DVD labels for Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope and I had a great response from the community. The labels have been downloaded over 2,000 times since then, so I decided it was time to continue with the tradition and make some CD/DVD lables for the Karmic release.

This time the pack includes 25 labels for the 9.10 edition of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu and Ubuntu Studio. Thanks to the feedback from Alexandre, I’ve also included a set of LightScribe labels.

On the other hand, and in the spirit of the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam, I’m also releasing some artwork I made earlier this year that can be used by the LoCo Teams when promoting Ubuntu at events and conferences:

• Ubuntu Buttons (8 different designs)
• Ubuntu Stickers (52 different designs for your laptop or desktop)
• Impress templates for Ubuntu Vol.1 (30 unique designs)
• 2 different t-shirt designs I made for the Ubuntu Nicaragua LoCo Team

All the artwork is released as CC-BY-SA and the .svg sources are included and ready for you to hack!!

You can download all the artwork here (including the Karmic labels) and if you want to leave a comment or just say ‘hello’, please visit my personal blog and we’ll chat over a couple of cold beers. Enjoy!

The Software Freedom Day 2009 event is almost here!

We’re going to have a pretty cool event here in Nicaragua, so stay tuned and follow us via twitter and identi.ca for the latest news…

Con este título, La Brújula, el primer semanario libre que circula en Nicaragua, dedica su edición de esta semana al software libre en conmemoración del Día de la Libertad del Software, a celebrarse este sábado 19 de septiembre.

Descarga la edición electrónica aquí.

Ilustración: Edwin Moreira/La Brújula Semanal/CC

Agenda completa en LinuxTour.org

Original post by Gunnar Wolf here.

I met Carlos Bueso two weeks ago, at the Central American Free Software Encounter. I am translating this mail writen by Erika Valverde (Costa Rica) explaining his situation.

Excuse me for a broken, possibly wrong English – I find more important to make this message available than to get proper wording for it. If you cannot understand something and can read Spanish, or if you wish to further distribute this text, please refer to the original mail.

Hello everybody,

I wrote this some hours ago, and am circulating it because I don’t know what else to do… I imagine all of us are in similar terms with our frustration and our willingness to do something.

Somebody answered to me with an update, and I reelaborated the note, and am reproducing it here so everybody shares it with our communities, via our blogs and whatever ways we find. We must do something, right? At least this! And I don’t know what more… Can somebody think of anything? Meanwhile, please redistribute this.

I am writing to other organizations to see what we can do.

Our friend Carlos Bueso has been detained in El Progreso. He is a communicator, acused of sedition.

This morning, our friend Carlos Bueso was detained. Carlos is a member of the Comunicación Comunitaria (COMUN) organization, as well as of the Central American Free Software community. COMUN promoves and defends laboral and human rights by advancing alternative communication means. Their offices are located in El Progreso, 250 Km north of Tegucigalpa, the national capital, in the Atlantic coast of Honduras, and 26 Km from San Pedro Sula, the country’s second city in importance.

Carlos Bueso is an 18 year old informatics technician. In COMUN, he works performing computer-related teaching and Free Software promotion. He also is an editor for the Vida Laboral magazine, and maintains the http://wwww.honduraslaboral.org website.

In the June 30 morning, Carlos took part of a demonstration in El Progreso, Yoro, against the coup perpetrated on June 28. This demonstration was repressed at 10 AM, the army shot at the air and used several tear gas bombs. Carlos was detained, as well as Marcelino Martinez, Jorge Cordon, Junior Antunez, Joel Martinez, Martha Ileana Hernandez and Jose Erazo. The complete news note is available (in Spanish) in http://honduraslaboral.org/leer.php/1878 and a video of this repression can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC4LQU_UeTs

Carlos and other people are detained in the El Progreso police cells, and will be presented to the tribunals next July 1st, accused of sedition.

The detainees have been interviewed, and they are OK, waiting to be put at the Public Prosecutor’s (Ministerio Público) authority. The Prosecutor can decide to set them free, or refer them to the Tribunals. If they are sent to the Tribunals, they will be probably sent to the local presidium for six days to be interrogated.

Send your demands to https://twitter.com/R_Micheleti

Like millions of Latin Americans, I spent the first eight years of my life living under a totalitarian and dictatorial government.

There are other actors, but the methods are the same. What we’ve seen in Honduras in the last 36 hours; the military in the streets, the curfew, the kidnappings, the censorship on free and independent press, seems to be a replay of an old soap opera, starring Pinochet, Somoza and the dictators in turn in any Latin American country in the 70’s.

There’s no justification for violence against a peaceful country. Really. We cannot justify a military coup. No matter where we stand politically or what we think about Zelaya’s government.

Raise your voice and take action against this criminal act. Demand the return of democracy to Honduras.