I just created a linked in page for the Arizona Ubuntu LoCo team: (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3014215&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr) in an attempt to make us more visible on the internet and, perhaps, make us easier to find for people needing/wanting our help. If you can think of other places where we can make our presence known, please let us know so we can make use of that info or create an entry for the team and give us the info so we can keep track of it.

I'm going to start by saying that if you didn't make it to SCaLE this year you missed quite an event. Everything about this event was top notch. The Westin has the most comfortable beds in the world. I am qualified to make that statement if you need to know my qualifications, feel free to contact me by any means you have at your disposal. Oh, before I go any further, I want to thank Nate Hutchins (hutchnate) because if it hadn't been for his proactive nature I wouldn't have been able to go. Ya see, it was his idea in the first place and he drove. So we left Thursday afternoon and drove most of the way to LA and stopped for the night in some small town and slept on beds that were about as comfortable sleeping on hard wood floors without a mattress pad. Anyway, the Chevy Equinox is a great road trip vehicle in that it's comfortable and gets good gas mileage. navigation was brilliantly handled by my Motorola Droid using Google maps/navigation.

You have to read the whole entry to hear about the car.

OK, in last week's teem meeting I mentioned that toddc came up with a great idea about how to hold regular installfests in Tempe and get free advertising. Well, after some discussion with xHans and another PLUG member that is always at installfest, we decided to do a trial run of 3 months at a new location while keeping the UAT installfest going. Todd did a bunch of leg work and found us a location. He found a Community Center Manager that is the Manager of Computer Training for the Community and has a room for us.

ABLEconf (Arizona Business and Liberty Experience conference) was held on Saturday, October 24, 2009. Once again at the University of Advancing Technology in Phoenix, the conference held more presentations than in its inaugural. Among those displaying their services was the Ubuntu-Arizona LoCo team.

I was disappointed with the conference at first, this year. Not because my table was bracketed by Red Hat on one side and Fedora on the other. That was pure serendipity, and we had a lot of fun talking about our experiences and discussing mutual problems with various programs and new converts. No, it just seemed that there were very few people attending the conference. All morning long, we only had a handful of people approach the tables.

BOY! Was I wrong. Noon-time came, and the whole area around the vendors' tables seemed to sprout people by the handfuls and in bunches. Then it hit me. Everyone had been at the morning presentations. That's why we hadn't seen them. About 90 people filled the space as PLUG (Phoenix Linux Users Group) leader Hans started up the raffle for prizes. Sponsors had donated a number of prizes to be given out - everything from books to a USB pen (literally) drive, to a child's penguin costume, to various food items. Excitement ran high as Hans had tickets selected and numbers called off, and good natured teasing erupted from all over.

Reports I've heard lead me to believe that the presentations were well received. Certainly discussions at my table were enlightening both for the people who came to ask questions and for me. If the questions raised at my table are any indication then people are starting to think of more than just "what's in it for me." They are beginning to ask about how Linux behaves and what is available, as well as differences between distributions.

The talks with the Red Hat representatives was just as enlightening. We discussed problems we'd had with various elements of our distributions - everything from window managers and sound and graphics to problems raised by others and how we strove to solve them. It was interesting to find that we all shared similar problems and solutions. Unlike commercial software vendors, there was no competition between us, or at least only good natured competition. We were just as apt to suggest to someone that they also look into Red Hat or Fedora or Ubuntu, and see if it suited their needs. We even discussed SELinux, both between ourselves and with conference attendees. The spirit of Free Libre Open Source Software seems to have been the attitude of the whole conference. Though we each presented our own distributions and situations, we didn't restrict ourselves, and tried to make things as all-inclusive as possible.

For myself, the AZ LoCo distributed 12 Ubuntu server disks, 9 Kubuntu desktop disks, and 19 Ubuntu desktop disks. In all, I think this ABLEconf was a success, and was glad that I was able to represent Ubuntu and the Arizona LoCo. I look forward to future ones as being even better.