Yesturday afternoon I was at Ubuntu Live: London. This was a co-hosted event between Canonical and IBM.

The Canonical presentations were aimed mostly at businesses, and sysadmins in particular, delving into the Ubuntu Server distribution. IBM on the other hand went deep into Ubuntu Desktop model – this speaker was really entertaining. Mark Shuttleworth was there too of course – smart guy.

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The Ubuntu Eee team announced over Twitter that the new version of Ubuntu Eee (Intrepid Ibex) will be released on the 1st January 2009.

It seems this next version may come with a new name, to avoid Copyright conflicts. No biggie.
I think Ubuntu Eee will continue to be successful, no matter what name it goes under. The Netbook Remix style is just so user-oriented. But not in a newbie way, like the original Xandros OS that comes preinstalled on Asus Eee PCs.

I’m really looking forward to the new version – I’ve been enjoying Intrepix Ibex on my desktop for a few weeks now. There’s only one bug on my Eee, that I hope gets fixed.
I installed a new wifi card, as posted earlier. It works fine with BackTrack3, but to get it working in Ubuntu I had to disable ACPI. Which is obviously not ideal, because I then lose all power management, including the battery icon/status.

I wonder if we’ll be seeing a new theme ^_^

October is officially the month of Expos. Well if it isn’t, it should be!

Today I attended Linux Live Expo which was a part of the Creative Pro Expo / Mac Live Expo.

As it turns out the event was more Creative/Mac Expo, with a touch of Linux. The Linux area consisted mostly of IBM and The Open Source Consortium/Forum.

The .org village was larger than the ‘Linux Live Expo’, which is somewhat embarassing? The Mac Expo, by contrast, was huge. This Expo was much more aimed at the Designer/Adobe fanboy than Linux techies.

Don’t get me wrong, the stands were really good, it’s just that there were too few of them.

I bought a load of Linux magazines from Linux User/Developer and Linux Magazine. Both had some really good offers on. So that’s my reading material sorted for the next couple of weeks!
I picked up a few stickers for my eee PC too lol.

If I could re-design this Expo myself, I think I would probably invite a whole load more Linux and FOSS groups. I also think the *nix/FOSS stands should probably be a little more focused on the newbie.
My beleif is that we should be introducing FOSS/*nix to the masses. The way things stand at the moment, is these stands are more geared towards people who already know about this kind of thing. Techies like you and I.

I had a good day helping out on the GLLUG stand though. The guys were all friendly, in fact the whole .org village were really good people. I had a good chat with a few people – made some interesting contacts.

Right now I feel even more inspired than ever. I want to advocate Linux and Free & Open Source Software solutions to Local Education Authorities and small/mid businesses. I’d love it if I could get paid to do this, as a part-time job while I finish my last year at Uni. That’d be my perfect job right now ^_^. Something like Open Advantage – but in London.

Someone happened to be showing me a custom Linux Live USB distro the other day, which looked kinda cool. It was KDE (ew), but also had a Fluxbox setup, which is sexy in a simple way.

I took a copy, to play around with, as it seemed to have a lot of cool tools on there, some of which I had seen before, lots of which I hadn’t. This looked like a hacker’s distro.

The name is BackTrack. I didn’t look much into it, until I was watching Hak5 on Revision3 this morning, and saw a review on Maltego, which just so happens  to come with BackTrack.

So I started playing around with BT3 (after an easy upgrade), and I love it. It’s so useful.
This is a Network Security / Sysadmin must-have distro. Every tool you could possibly need, is already there, on the disc.

Maltego is pro. It’s basically an Identity lookup tool. You input a person’s details, whatever you happen to know about them, name/email/location/phone etc. and then it will look up all the information it can find on said person.

I found some very old email accounts of mine, linked to forum posts and profiles, just as old. I think I may have also discovered Kevin Rose’s personal e-mail account. No luck with Bill Gates though. ^^