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UDS-O in Budapest: Travel and Day 1

My weekend began with a quick ride down to the San Francisco airport for a noon flight to Los Angeles. I dashed across LAX only to arrive at my gate to a flight that was delayed by over an hour. At the gate I met Clint Byrum who was on the same fight. The long flight over the Atlantic was uneventful, but unfortunately the delay in LAX caused us to miss the connection in Frankfurt. Lufthansa rebooked us on a flight 5 hours later so we spent the afternoon paying too much for wifi in the airport, chatting and eating frankfurter sausages.

It was almost 8:30PM on Sunday evening by the time I was checked in to Corinthia Hotel Budapest. The hotel was stunning, but I was too tired to enjoy it and headed straight up to my room to meet my roommate and get some rest!

Monday morning the day started with a gathering of UDS crew for the week, we picked up our t-shirts and helped set up the registration table. It was then off for a great breakfast (all the food here has been very good) and then the opening and keynote by Mark Shuttleworth.

You can view Mark’s keynote on youtube here: Ubuntu UDS O Mark Shuttleworth Keynote

I left the opening early for crew duty, and then it was off to the first session, a short Community Roundtable.

– Remote Desktop Improvements –

I don’t do a lot of Remote Desktop work and do all of my own systems administration via ssh but I was interested in this session to get a view of the changes in the remote technology over the past several years and to see what the goals were in Ubuntu. The session discussed two very different needs for remote access, one being a way for systems administrators who prefer the GUI to remote in to a server, and the other being a demo instance of Ubuntu for people who want to try it. I had never heard of x2go or noVNC prior to this session, both of which I’ll have to give a try. They also discussed several other options including ones based on familiar VNC and NX technologies. Session notes available here.

– UDS-O LoCo Team Directory –

This was a great session where we discussed the future plans for the LoCo Directory. One of them was to include more documentation in the LoCo Directory itself rather than having it on a separate wiki page that people may not be able to find. There were also a number of ideas thrown out to make it more people-oriented, like adding rotating photos of people at LoCo events as a banner across the top, create a planet-like feed for just LoCo feeds from appropriate categories on personal and LoCo team blogs. Session notes available here.

After lunch I attended the planeries before running off for crew.

– Beginners Team Roadmap for Ubuntu-O Cycle –

This session was booked at the same time as the NGO Team Oneiric Plans which I somehow forgot to subscribe to so I went to this one and chose to catch up on the NGO session after. I ended up leading this session with komputes as we spoke with members of the community about their perception of the team and what we could do to improve the mentoring program. The resounding response was that at last UDS the team didn’t have enough quality control of mentors, and at this UDS there was too much structure in place so potential mentors were put off by the “hoops they had to jump through” to volunteer to be a mentor. It certainly is a delicate balance and I look forward to the Beginners team tackling this issue. This was probably the session with the most participation from IRC of all the sessions I’ve been to so far, a number of the representatives from the Beginners Team who couldn’t attend were active remotely. The session inspired remote attendee David Wonderly to write this blog post about the team. Session notes available here.

I then met up with Chris Crisafulli so we could finish our crew duty for the day and then catch up on the missed NGO session, notes are available here. Sessions were beginning to wrap up and so we went out with Paolo Sammicheli and Chris on my first geocache! And second!

Plus it was a nice walk around our area of the city.


We got back around 7:30 and headed to the UDS Meet & Greet where I met up with Scott Sweeny who I knew from the Pennsylvania LoCo but hadn’t seen since before I moved to California. We ended up going for drinks with a couple of others and had a very enjoyable, (and very late!) night.

Perfect first day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 at 3:48 pm and is filed under events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet, UDS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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