Guadalinex v6 is out!

I am pleased to announce that the final version of Guadalinex v6 is out 🙂
The official news are at the Guadalinex website. But it’s in Spanish, so I’ve decided to explain a bit (in my poor English) what is all about.
Before to start I like to thank to all those people who help to develop, test, fix, translate and document all those great projects which Guadalinex is based on. I really do. They make this possible and deserve most of the credits.
This is the 6th edition of Guadalinex which is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. The distribution is paid by the local government of a big region at the south of Spain, which is Andalusia.
There are a lot of people who think this is  waste of public money, but I think quite the opposite. And I think so because we don’t just make Ubuntu booting in Spanish and change the wallpaper, we try to listen to real end users from this region of the world and bring them the closer system to what they need and demand.
The distribution is oriented to the regular citizen, but it is being used at schools for few years. Thousands of children have been using Guadalinex (ergo Ubuntu/Debian/Gnome and much more free software stuff) everyday at the schools for about four years now.
But also people from very low populated areas of Andalusia have been using Guadalinex at centers with computers where they can learn computers skills and use internet for free. Now there are around 700 centers working from Monday to Friday for them.
Even the public libraries are using now Guadalinex.
Because of that, Guadalinex is more than a few technical or artistic changes. It’s a social project.

I think the changes we have made in this version are useful no just for Andalusian, but for all the people who feels more comfortable reading and writing in Spanish. And there also some interesting stuff for a normal Ubuntu user.

We like to push those improvements to Ubuntu, Debian, GNOME and all the wonderful projects we touch. And also new small tools we develop because our users need them. We think those are also useful for everybody.
I have to say that Guadalinex don’t try to compete with any distro. Guadalinex have its owns users with their needs and we just want to give them what they need. And in the process (if we can) to help the community and other people.

Our goals are really different from Ubuntu’s ones. Ubuntu need to be for everyone. Need to be universal and be useful and “compatible” with every person and culture.
We are the opposite. We need to target to specific people, with specific language, culture, needs and resources. That’s why Ubuntu is so useful for us, but Guadalinex is more useful for our users.
We have to deal with users who barely know how to write and know nothing about computers. Ok, we have also real good IT people or people who really know all this stuff, but our threshold is the user who less know.
We like fancy things on our desktops but sometimes we have to wait a bit to get them into Guadalinex because our users aren’t ready for them. And we know because we have professional helpdesk services, forums, feedback from teachers, from our technicians at the tele centers. So it’s not something we figure out by ourself and then take “conservatives” decisions, it’s something we do, because we know well to our users and we are here for them.
What I was trying to say is that Ubuntu (or any other generalist distribution) has a very important mission and there are a lot of smaller and more focused derivatives distributions that need to be there. This is an ecosystem and everyone grown and learn on this interaction.

Sorry for been so tedious, I’ll promise to tell shorter and funnier stories next time 😛

Well, actually my next post probably will be the list of things that are different between Ubuntu Jaunty and Guadalinex v6. The list is in Spanish now, so I want to explain it in English.
And If anyone like to try Guadalinex, we have a DVD version (the full edition) and a minor version on CD.
Thanks for reading 😉
Happy hacking!

Hello Planet Ubuntu

This is a short post just to say hello to everybody at the Ubuntu Planet 🙂
I’ve been around Ubuntu since its first version (back in the 2004) and now my work got me closer again to Ubuntu, so I’ve decided become a member of this community and start my process of developer in here.

I was always a very Debian guy, but for different reasons I found Ubuntu interesting and a project that I had to keep eye on. I still like Debian, but I use Ubuntu for my work and my home (well, actually I use Guadalinex).

I hope my work let me keep pushing bugs, translations, patches, branches and more no just to Ubuntu but Debian, GNOME and more interesting projects out there that we use.
That’s it for now. Soon, some news about the last Guadalinex version. Stay tuned 😉

Help with the Hal deprecation

Hi, I need somebody tell me what is going on with Hal.

Yesterday Carlos told me about Ubuntu’s plans for Karmic and the Hal deprecation. I don’t really know how could I miss this, but I didn’t know before…

Lately I was working a bit with Hal and I kinda like it. As far as I saw, there is a GNOME plan for that deprecation and hal will be split into different pieces which will be integrated into other software. Such a udev-extras, libudev, DeviceKit-*, the kernel itself and so.

I’ve been reading quite a lot about all those changes and I don’t really get the reasons for this move. And I don’t really know how the things will work when the migration be completed.

No more hal at all? No hal-info either? just udev rules (which, btw,  I find really confusing and ugly…)?

I hope someone could help me to see how the things will be at the near future around the hardware layer on GNU/Linux.

Thanks

Track your GNOME bugs from your desktop

Time ago I found an interesting tool for the desktop. It’s  Java client for Bugzilla called  Deskzilla.

I’m not fan of Java at all, but I have to say that the application is very powerful and it’s not so slow…

Basically it let you fill bugs, search bugs (and save the searches) in a way a lot easier than the bugzilla itself. But the coolest thing is it let you make searches offline. It has even a screenshot editor to add marks, texts and more to the screenshots before to attach them to the bugs.

I don’t know, it seems very interesting and useful for who work everyday with Bugzilla.

The only thing is this is not any kind of Free Software/Open Source code, but they have special license keys for free software project.

Actually I ask one for working with GNOME and the give me one and ask me to public it so any GNOME’s bugzilla user can use this software for free.

If anyone want the GNOME key, just take it here.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.