A week in Orlando (Ubuntu Developer Summit – Natty Narwhal)

Currently flying from Orlando, FL where I had an awesome Ubuntu Developer Summit I wanted to quickly share what happened this week.

I had the chance of being able to participate in plenty of very different and interesting sessions over the week.

Here’s a quick overview of my interests for the Natty development cycle.

Edubuntu
I received a LOT of feedback regarding Edubuntu. There was a lot interest for Edubuntu WebLive.
I gave a plenary on Tuesday about what’s Edubuntu, why we are doing it and what are our plans for Natty as well as announce the availability of daily Edubuntu builds on WebLive.
For Natty we mostly plan on growing our user community and getting more feedback from. Our installation process should be a lot faster and let the user choose what kind of education software he wants.
We also reviewed around 20 new applications, most of them are already available in Edubuntu in Natty, two will need to be packaged.

Containers
For this UDS, we were lucky to have Daniel Lezcano from LXC attending.
So we had a few very interesting sessions on what needs to be done to get LXC to the point where it can be used as a replacement of OpenVZ.
We also discussed how we could use containers and similar technologies on ARM and on a regular desktop as a way to sandbox applications.

Desktop in the cloud
Following my demo of Edubuntu WebLive during Tuesday’s plenary, we had two cloud track related to it.
One on how to let users test Ubuntu (awstrial) and another on the Desktop in the Cloud image. We discussed the various technologies available for remote desktop and will try to get an official desktop in the cloud image for Natty.

Community
Being an Application Review Board member, I attended the 3 sessions on the topic. We discussed the application review process as well as the technical implementation and the current limitations the ARB noticed. We should soon have a clear process for reviewing new applications and will be able to start getting new applications in Ubuntu 10.10’s extra repository.

It was really great seeing everyone, discussing and working together this week. I’m now flying to Bangor, ME for the yearly LTSP by the sea meeting, then driving back to Sherbrooke, QC to start implementing everything we discussed!

See you all in Budapest next year!