Florida LoCo Team

The Florida Team held our second Natty Release Party at the Pizza Gallery in The Avenue at Viera shopping area on May 1, 2011. We have been here at the Pizza Gallery for a previous release party, and we have always enjoyed this venue. Lupine made the arrangements, and everything was ready to roll when we arrived (They had the tables all set up for us and the Staff was ready to go!). We had a couple of more new people join us in our celebration of Natty’s release.

I believe we had at least 6 installations that happened during this get together, and a lot of questions were asked and answered. Both of the release parties had really good turnouts. We discussed the pro’s and con’s of Unity, launcher customization, and functionality. Though not everyone liked the change at first, most attendees were willing to play around with it for a while, and even enjoyed some of the great features that Unity brings.

We gave a way a copy of The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and handed out more Natty bracelets. We still have a little surplus of the bracelets left. All in all both release parties were fun, it would be great if more people would hold them in their area. If you are in the Florida Team and are thinking of hosting a release party or similar event and are just looking for some ideas on getting started, join us in our teams IRC Channel, #ubuntu-florida (redirects to #ubuntu-us-fl) on freenode.

On Saturday, April 30, our team held an excellent release party at Panera Bread located off of Vineland Ave. in Orlando. We had 14 total attendees, and enjoyed good food and fellowship while we discussed the new features found in Natty. Munz (Chris) and Bluebomber brought a long a couple of friends and everyone seemed to have a lot of fun getting to know one another. Thanks to everyone that came out, and to Chaynie for hosting it!

This was the second release party we’ve held at this location, the wifi was great, and the staff was helpful. We were using their “community” room, and we were even able to stay a little longer than the reserved time so we could finish up conversations and configurations. We didn’t have whole lot of swag to give out, but we did give away one copy of the Official Ubuntu Book 5th Edition, and some of the Natty Bracelets from UDS.

10.10.10  was a great success for Ubuntu and for the Florida Team. We have had several release parties, stretching from Melbourne/Viera, down to Miami, and over into Tallahassee where they celebrated their Double Impact  Event (combining the birthday celebration for Ian, with the release of Ubuntu Maverick). Many people were doing in place upgrades, and were really enjoying the new features they began noticing once their machines pulled down the changes, cleaned up, then rebooted into Ubuntu 10.10. On Monday, Florida Team Members also met up in Tampa for lunch at Olive Garden in order to celebrate the release.

Here are some links from the Melbourne/Viera  and Miami Parties:

Pizza Gallery at the Avenues….

Miami Maverick Release Party

I will add more links as I get them, and I will try to update this post with some individual pictures from each event. I hope that everyone had a good time! Remember UDS is just around the corner. Looking forward to seeing you there!!

Maddog_2009 and I headed down to a couple of Software Freedom Day 2010 Events, with one thing in mind… Celebrating Software Freedom Day, and  attending Ubuntu Hour – Miami-Dade in honour!!  The first event we attended was locatee on the FAU Boca Raton Campus. The Palm Beach County Linux User Group had a very nice venue and there were approximately 26 attendees interested in Learning more about Open Source Software. I was really excited to see the PBCLUG in action and look forward to trying to visit them for a Lug Meeting or Two! Unfortunately we couldn’t stick around with the busy schedule ahead, so Chuck and I had to leave a little early, and we went down further south and kidnapped Andres from his apartment.

This was one of the few times that I have actually sat back and tried to plan each event to allow for the proper amount of time to spend equally at each place. I had anticipated we would arrive at the Florida Linux User Exchange‘s  SFD2010 event around 2:30, but that wasn’t possible. We did arrive around 3:10 and found that FLUX  they were slowly packing up. We sat and chat a while with them, it seemed to be a pretty slow traffic day, but regardless, they held and event for Software Freedom Day 2010 which was great.

On to the Ubuntu Hour , The location was pretty easy to find and we quickly met up with Jesús Aneiros, who recently officially became an addition to our LoCo Team. There were a total of 7 of us in attendance, and the venue was not a very good fit for  the amount of people we had considering they would not allow for us to utilise one of the 4-5 vacant classrooms they had available (one would think they existed for their patrons but despite registered library card carrying members, we were denied access upon asking). We discussed ways in which we could harness the momentum that has been appearing recently in South Florida. Andres (RoAkSoAx) made mention that on the FIU campus they have a library that might serve as a better location for future Ubuntu Hour’s as well as other events. Afterward, we headed over to Buca Di Beppo Miami Lakes and had a great meal with one another!  We ordered way too much food, and had a really great time.

Special Thanks to Jesús for starting the Ubuntu Hour down in Miami !!!