Ubuntu Open Week | You are invited
Good news for all Ubuntu users! If you have been an Ubuntu user for a long time and wish to become a part of it, then it is now possible with the FOSS ecosystem. Well, Ubuntu Open Week has come up just for you! It is an online event hosted by the community to shed some light to newcomers about the whole development cycle along with some extreme sessions for beginners. As an online event, people from any part of the world can take part in this classroom sessions to learn about the topics specified on the schedule and shoot some questions to the Ubuntu guru who is taking the session!
Here is the timetable of the event:
| Time | T02/05/11 | 3 May | 4 May | 5 May | 6 May |
| 14 UTC | Introduction - Jorge Castro | Getting Started Translating Ubuntu - David Planella | Ask Mark - Mark Shuttleworth | Using Ask Ubuntu - Marco Ceppi | Getting involved via the Beginners Team - Jessica Ledbetter |
| 15 UTC | Promoting your project in press - Rikki Kite | Having fun with Ubuntu Testing - Paolo Sammicheli | Making a Poster to Spread Ubuntu - Martin Owens | Your Desktop Oughta be in Pictures - Duane Hinnen | Intro to Ubuntu Studio - Scott Lavender |
| 16 UTC | Involving in Ubuntu development/packaging and kick starting your box for Ubuntu development/packaging - Bhavani Shankar | Ubuntu and Amateur (Ham) Radio - Steve Conklin AI4QR, and Kamal Mostafa KA6MAL | Conquering the Command Line for Beginners - mhall119 | Bug triaging - concepts and process - hggdh | Getting Started with gnucash - Cheri Francis and Leigh Honeywell |
| 17 UTC | Introduction to Unity - Jorge Castro | To Be Filled | Introduction to AppArmor - John Johansen | To Be Filled | Introduction to Audacity - Carla Schroder |
How to attend the event
Now, if you are interested in the whole thing, but have not heard anything about IRC and other geek stuffs, then here are the details. In simple words, IRC is just like your chat client. However on a chat client, we are chatting real time to hundreds of other users who are online at the moment, more like a conventional group chat.
There are two ways to join in an IRC channel. One is via a desktop chat client and other through the web client of free node IRC server.
1. IRC Desktop Client
The most basic and easy one is Xchat. You will have to install it via Software Centre or by running 'sudo apt-get install xchat' at the Terminal. When you run the software for the first time, you will be prompted for details like nickname, username, real name and finally the IRC server to use. Select the server as 'FreeNode' and click on the 'Connect' button.
After that, when prompted for IRC channel, type in 'ubuntu-classroom' in the small box that appears. That’s it! You will now get the chat window with a text box at the bottom. Type your question in it and press enter. On the other hand, in Ubuntu Open Week sessions, you are supposed to keep an eye on what the session guru is talking about. You will get time after the session to ask your questions.
2. IRC Web Client
FreeNode has an online client to do the same job. Click here to go to the website and follow the same steps as above to join the session.
Celebrity Speaker!
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, is taking a session named 'Ask Mark'. It is meant for common users to ask questions about the future of Ubuntu and to get some hints of Mark's involvement in the major decisions taken. Here is the chat log of the past Open Week conducted on 2010.
Here is the official Ubuntu wiki page of Open Week.
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