Open Week Highlights
23rd - 28th April 2007
Filled with several hundred Ubuntu users, chatroom #ubuntu-classroom had Canonical employees - and community volunteers - explain what they do, how they do it and, most importantly, answer users questions. One Canonical employee taking questions was one Mark Shuttleworth (aka: SABDFL - Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life). What follows are a few snippets of his two Q&A sessions.
Mark, will there exist in the future a certification relased by Canonical, like RedHat Certified Professional?
yes! along with training programs, and training materials
ShipIt is currently not available for Xubuntu... will that become available in the future?
I don't think so. xubuntu, as i understand it, is a more specialist environment, so we probably would not fund cd shipments for it.
I've seen some of the estimated numbers for *buntu, but I'm curious... how many unique IP addresses did the canonical servers see on the 19th of April?
wow, not sure i have that number, but there were 53 mirrors before we announced, and 130 by the end of the day, that we know of. so hits on canonical.com are a small fraction of total. i think we were serving 12 gigabits / second from ourselves and top 5 mirrors :-). probably 20 gbits/s in total. 3 cd's per second for 12 hours. pretty amazing. if you were in #ubuntu-release-party, you know it was quite a rush
Any rough numbers on how many *buntu machines there are running in the world currently?
4-16 million, my best guess including derivatives is around 10 million
Several ubuntu pages and also bug #1 in launchpad note that ubuntu is entirely free (as in free speech), however in the default install this is not true (drivers etc.), are there plans on making this more transparent to the user?
we should always qualify that as "only free applications". at least, i fix it that way in the wiki when i run into it. we have had the driver exception in place since the beginning, so it's not as though this has changed. hopefully, the new flavour will also carry the "pure free" flag
full circle was even mentioned, twice!
is full circle magazine also a marketing team project?
Jenda replied - it's been communicating with the Marketing Team, and it's very much supported. But it has never explicitly declared itself as such to my knowledge. some members from the Marketing Team participate in it, but it was started (and is run by) from someone outside the team
What can you say about the Full Circle magazine, Ubuntu community magazine released issue #0. Perspectives for the future?
Jono replied - I had a look at it and I think its interesting - I have been looking to get in touch with the authors about a few things - so if they can get in touch with me that would be great. I think an ubuntu magazine is a pretty nifty idea, although a lot of these kinds of magazines due due to production time. I hope this continues
[Editors note: i've since emailed Jono]
