The Ubuntu Chronicles: Amber’s Adventures in the Community :)

Part 37

Jaunty Jackalope, Ubuntu 9.04 has arrived…

I spent time last night in the #ubuntu-release-party channel on Freenode waiting and watching for the official message that 9.04 had arrived. I wanted to know what the hype is all about on a release day. It was funny and fun. People in all the #ubuntu channels were talking about what they heard, expected, wanted, all that good stuff. There were moments that the giddiness hit some harder than others. People seemed to think midnight UTC was the release time, others thought midnight in their time zones and still others had all kinds of differing ideas on the the subject of release times. There were so many opinions on the release time, the date wasn’t a question, but, oh boy, did the time invoke some interesting discussions and one liners. It was great seeing the excitement build.

I could tell as each time zone crossed over into release day. The excitement, the buzz, and people’s sense of humor grew for the most part. I could see messages appear with someone asking “is it out yet” almost every second at times. There was this bot called partybot in the #ubuntu-release-party channel that people were having fun abusing. It was lighthearted and enjoyable for the most part.

Speaking of humor, there are some funny people out there and the fact that I understood some of the tech humor was great. People’s wit and quick thinking was evident throughout the night. Also evident was the lack of humor as well but thankfully it didn’t last too long. I also think there were some pranksters playing joyfully in the channels as well. 🙂

It’s was really fun to watch the last 18 hours or so…Seeing people’s excitement building and seeing the responses to Jaunty. I had no idea that 1000’s of people would be in the channels waiting and chatting it up for that long while they waited for a new release of their chosen OS..WOW!!

Now I am getting ready for our Release Party in Raleigh. Looking forward to meeting some new people, putting faces and names together, and continue building the excitement over Jaunty.

I am glad I took time to use BitTorrent back in February. I used BitTorrent and made some CD’s for some folks too. It took less than an hour to get 3 different iso’s at the same time. I used Brasero to burn the CD images after I got them in. Now I have a few to bring with me to the party. Oh I am enjoying all this…

I’ll have to write all about later…

I also installed Gwibber: an open source micro blogging client for GNOME. I just used add/remove then set up all the accounts for it. It was easy. If you are like me and use Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, pidgin, etc..Gwibber is should be pretty easy for you too. Check it out.

Hope you all are enjoying Jaunty, I am…:)