The agenda was a mix of techincal and divulgatives talks. We got two guests: Daniele Segato and Alessandro Palumbo that respectively spoke about “git for superheroes” and “Drupal: With a great CMS comes great possibility”. Good impression the first talks done by Leonardo about Openoffice and Raffaello about Gobby (a nice collaborative editor).

Despite the effort we put on it, we had low participation, probably we lack in communication: more spam and more conventional channels; Facebook (in Italy) remains a weak way to have more people participating to some events.

Anyway a big Thanks to anybody who came, who organized and set it up and all contributors we had. Thanks!

Photos (from Francesco Crippa) here.

Linux day 2008, this is the first time Fedora is sponsorized as much as possible to all around Italy, and maybe we got a new ambassador.

This year I lived Linux Day in a different way, I was present (not at the same time) in two city: my day started in Lodi with LOLUG and terminated in Mantova (a not-so-near-Lodi city) with LUGman.

In Lodi I spent most of the morning to finish the opened tasks: made LTSP working, deployed Fedora USB station and prepared myself for wireless (in)security talk I did with Stefano (to be honest, he did the presentation and I only help him with demo).

The fedora KIT worked well and I finally saw it after planning, organizing for months. We can tune and improve it, but we started and now is more simple to manage.

After midday I went in Mantova, and I realized how bad connected to Lodi is. ~150 Km. No Highways. The fastest path found suggested by GPS navigator was this: Lodi -> Piacenza -> Brescia -> Verona -> Mantova, completely pointless.
I decided to travel with my own route and I take more than 1,5 hours to go and about 2 hours to return (No way to reduce the travel time), fortunately my car is gas methane powered.

After arrived in Mantova I knew Pietro Calzoni and Fausto Picchi who were my fedora contacts in LUGMan. LUGMan’s Linux Day was organized in a quite different way, there wasn’t speech but only workshops. I had a table with a computer and the possibility to mix practice and theory.

My initial plan was to use the kick-ass-wonderful Lorenzo Villani’s Fedora presentation (we will provide the english version soon), but I preferred to spoke directly with interested people (a lot of people, 20-25 more or less), helped and showed them whatever they wanted.

I’d got a lot of questions: “What is the difference from Fedora and Ubuntu?”, “How is the Fedora community?”, “How I can have a polo like you?”, and so on.

I made 7/8 USB keys, I gave away all CDs. I spoke about many arguments: revisor, yum, packagekit, bodhi and koji, about the community (and the possibility to contribute without be a computer skilled person), the importance of being upstream (this was and always is the main point to explain why Fedora is better than Ubuntu).

I think our message “There is an awesome alternative to Ubuntu” was taken. We (fedora Italian Ambassador) are growing and we can reply to “$$ spent to burn CDs” with a lot of alternatives: Fedora USB kit is one of them.

Exactly one year ago, me and other six people, founded LOLUG association: Me, Francesco Crippa, Matteo Castellini, Samuele Farfarini, Davide Cerri, Andrea Tasso and Martina scarabelli.

What happens during this long year? We organize and partecipate to various events:

• Linux Day 2007
• Two meetings on “Networking for dummies”
• Fedora By night
• Participation to Liberamente event
• Fedora 9 Release Party

In one year we grew our members number from 7 to 14.

We also start a project: “Linux Information” (called PiLLO), each Thurdsay we are available to answer questions and issues about Linux and FOSS world.

Tonight we will do a party to celebrate LOLUG birthday!

I have some ideas about some future events..so…stay tuned!!

Maggiori informazioni sul sito dell’associazione.