Photo: LUG Radio Live 2005 – a live LUGRadio show recording, with the usual gang, is in progress.
I went to LUGRadio’s Live 2005 event in Wolverhampton on Saturday afternoon. The event kicked off late morning and I arrived just after it had started, due to fun with trains as usual. I met up with a lot of people and partook of a few pints of coke between listening to some excellent talks. The organisers had asked me to give a talk on Embedded Linux and I was on in the afternoon with a number of props to help in making my varied points. Jonathan Riddell kindly made some notes on my talk on the LUGRadio Wiki. He was one of the many others who also gave talks – in his case on Kubuntu, the KDE based Ubuntu derivative for those who like KDE (keep taking the pills folks…I’ll just be sticking with GNOME for now 
)
Photo: Jonathan Riddell promotes Kubuntu when not scribbling down some notes on the talks.
Wolves LUG met up the evening before this year’s Live show event (which was also the first one there’s been, but there will now be another show again next year) for food and we all got together on the evening of the show itself at the regular curryhouse – The Standard – which was sponsored in part by profits from the 3GBP (approx 5USD, nearly 7CAD) on-the-door nominal charge that covered a bit more than costs of the day itself. RedHat chipped in a bit to help out too.
Photo: Kat and Dave manning a stall prompting Free and Open Source software. They actually do this at various computer shows too – I should try to help them out sometime with this laudable goal.
The cool thing about the friends I’ve got is that they’re all such nice people. Kat and Dave live next door to Hannah and Joe and kindly put me up again since their neighbours were off on their honeymoon around bits of the Cornish/Devonshire countryside. The next morning, I managed to just about be ready at 08:00 so that we could leave for the Paintballing at the Delta Force near Birmingham. I wasn’t going to be able to make it, but at the insistance of Jono and the LUGRadio gang (who apparently have been advertising that they plan to “shoot the roundhead”) and thanks to the kind offer of a lift to Nottingham from Matthew Walster, I was able to go paintballing in the morning and be miles away in time for Dave’s annual DDE/EP BBQ.
Photo: Paul Sladen asks a question of the team during a live recording of LUGRadio.
Matthew tells me that he flies a PA-28 Piper Cherokee and has kindly offered to take me flying in August if we can work out a mutually agreeable sunny day to fly over to see the museum at Duxford. Taking a few weeks out in Florida to learn to fly is something that had actually interested me. Certainly, I’ve gotten a few outstanding offers of being flown around various places that I really should take people up on – I wonder if Martin will reaffirm his offer to take me gliding if I see him when I’m up in Edinburgh at the weekend. In any case, I’m a little happier with the idea now. I have actually been in an army helicopter (I was one of those chosen at school to go flying with one of the teachers’ brother – or something like that – who is/was in the RAF and turned up one day with a SeaKing and another helicopter too) but have never been in a really small prop-driven areoplane (“airplane” to the USians amongst you).
Photo: Mark Shuttleworth talks about being an astronault, his motivation for getting involved with Free and Open Source software and where he sees the future heading.
Someone who didn’t have trouble with trains was Mark Shuttleworth. His jet being at London Stanstead, he elected to fly to the show in a private helicopter and was picked up from around the corner by one of the friends of the show. Mark amused us with tales of his trip to space and showed slides (as if it were a gigantic “holiday” – well, I guess it was really) while he talked. Mark is the angel investor behind Canonical and therefore by extension the primary financial backer of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. This was the second time I’ve met Mark and again I ended up really trying to stress a few points about things that suck with Linux distros right now that need fixing – mostly device detection and integrating stuff like Dell’s DKMS into mainline Linux distributions. I pointed out that the OS X shared text editor app he wanted to have an Ubuntu counterpart for relies upon proprietary Rendezvous technology and therefore that it may cause patent fun if a direct clone were produced.
Photo: Malcolm Parsons demonstrates his DSLinux port to the Nintendo DS.
Various other people turned up that I hadn’t seen in a while, including Kimble, Sledge, mjg59 and other Debian people, Brian, Josette, and probably many others. I enjoyed this year’s show and gave it what I considered a reasonable writeup for the mag. I’ll aim to be at the event next year and in the meantime suggest that readers head over to LUGRadio.org.
Jon.