Month: October 2006

Gentoo Australia

While reading Australian Personal Computer magazine I came across an interview with one of the members of the Ubuntu Australian Team.

This together with events such as the Gentoo UK 2006 Conference have pursuaded me that I would like to create a similar community in Australia.

So, 4 weeks 5 days (16h 56m 15s) ago I decided to revive the #gentoo-au channel on Freenode. Currently there are a few less than a dozen different people in it, but the community seems to slowly be growing thanks to word of mouth, and the forum thread I made some ago.

Plans still need to be written up for a website, that will contain all the information necessary to organise conferences down under. My goal is to aim for a mini-conf at linux.conf.au 2008. Hopefully before then we can even organise a meetup of some kind to try to spread the word about Gentoo on a grass-roots level.

Any readers of this from Australia, please join #gentoo-au, and we will see what community we can build.

gentoo.org.au

A few days ago I purchased gentoo.org.au (no, don’t bother looking, it doesn’t point anywhere yet :p).

I have been investigating various programs to help manage the webspace. Started off looking at various CMS programs:

  • Joomla – can’t say it grabbed me at all. The default setup is way too messy, and even after fidling with the seconds for 5 minutes couldn’t improve it.
  • Drupal – much cleaner interface, and default, this actually creates reasonably sexy pages without much effort.
  • Geeklog – looked, moved on quickly.

However people in #gentoo-au have recommended that a CMS may be overkill and to try out a wiki. So it looks like I will be experimenting with phpwiki and mediawiki over the next few days.

#gentoo-au’s Expansion

Seems that a little bit of advertising goes a long way online. We have expanded from a channel of less than dozen to a channel of less than thirty, almost overnight.

This couldn’t have happened without the help of people getting the word out on IRC and on their blogs. So I would like to thank them for helping to start establish our community down-under.

I have also been interviewed for Open Source On The Air and mention a few things about Gentoo in general, and Gentoo-Au. I will blog about this more later, after the interview is broadcast (at 9:30pm AEST for those who are interested.)

I’m on an Australian Radio…

Last week I was interviewed for Open Source On The Air, an online radio show made by James Purser.

You can download the whole show in either mp3 or ogg formats. Additionally, my good friend Jorge has made an edited version available: Ogg Vorbis, mp3: high quality and low quality.

Read below if you want a transcript of the show.
Continue reading I’m on an Australian Radio…