I was a Windows user for several years when I decided to switch to Linux, late 2005 or early 2006, I can't recall exactly. I remember that on Windows I was always looking for freeware alternatives to all the paid applications. At the time, I was not aware of the terms 'open-source' or 'free software', and I definitely had no idea about the concepts behind them.

The Community Council has recently implemented some changes to community governance processes which it believes reflect a significant improvement in one area of community governance: applications for Ubuntu membership.

What's the next best thing for Linux users who can't attend an open source community conference in person? Online workshops like last week's Ubuntu Open Week, where upwards of 300 participants per session showed up to learn more about the popular Linux distribution, the community, and its teams.

You may have already read about it, heck you may have already heard it yourself! The Minnesota (USA) LoCo team went about contacting local media outlets and agencies to inform them about the recent Ubuntu 8.04 release, the Loco Team’s release party, and the exciting possibilities of using an open source operating system.

24/4/2008. 24th April 2008. April the twenty fourth two thousand and eight. Get that date in your head - it is when the next version of Ubuntu is released - Ubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron.

Four amazing days have passed since the launch of brainstorm.ubuntu.com, and all we can say is Whoah! A couple of numbers:

• 10,000 registered users
• 2700 ideas (in comparison, Dell Ideastorm has 9000 ideas)

And the numbers keep growing! We had not expected such a success.

But this huge success has its consequences. As many users have pointed out, there are many duplicates, some spam, and the current ordering of ideas (most votes first) in the main page is not optimized for new ideas. Some quirks and bugs have also been found, thanks to your input on Brainstorm!

Ubuntu looks as though they have taken a page from Dell’s book. The Ubuntu team just launched a new feedback site called Brainstorm which closely resembles the Dell IdeaStorm site that was launched over a year ago. It provides a Digg-like voting interface to figure out what the community would really like to see come out of Ubuntu in the future.

Ubuntu has launched a new community feedback site, dubbed Brainstorm, where users can post ideas and suggest improvements they'd like to see in the popular Linux distribution. You can also comment and vote on other people's suggestions and ideas for improving Ubuntu.

Really, Five is the amount of bugs YOU, yes YOU, will work on today. This is a new promotion by Daniel Holbach, called 5-A-Day. What it breaks down to is this…You will pick 5 bugs per day to work on. Whether you are a developer or not, there is much fun to be had for everybody!

Ever since I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit last October I’ve had an idea on my mind for a new Team within the Ubuntu Community.  I think there is a real need for this project and I’ve been cooking up some basic specs for it for the past few months.  The reason I’ve been sitting on it is that I want to make sure I do it right, and I want to make sure that it is properly organized.

We are pleased to announce the first ever Ubuntu Developer Week . What does this mean? We’ll have one week full of action-packed IRC sessions where you can:

Ubuntu has rapidly established itself as the leading GNU/Linux distribution on the desktop, not least through its work with Dell. Less well-known is the fact that Canonical, the company sponsoring Ubuntu – and trying to create a viable business around it – is based in London. One of the key members of staff working there is Jono Bacon, Canonical's Ubuntu Community Manager.

With the new year in full swing, I’d like to take a few minutes to promote the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, and call on the community to help us with translations. We currently produce the newsletter in English, and due to some great loco team help, have translations into French and Italian.

Ladies and Gentleman, the November 2007 Community Report is now available! Go and read it to find out what many of the Ubuntu teams have worked on this month. Rock and roll.

Welcome to another edition of Compiz Fusion Community News. In this edition, I will be covering numerous bug fixes that have been made to Compiz and Fusion as well as covering some new features that just came in and some interesting user plugins found on our forum. Among those being atlantis2, fireflies, smackpad, Autumn, cubedbus and filedebug.

I asked this question over at the Ubuntu Forums, but I wanted to elaborate more on the subject here. In case you don’t know what Ubuntu is, it is one of the many distributions of Linux. Ubuntu, just like Linux, also has many flavors. There is Linux Mint (a distro aimed at noobs), Ubuntu Studio (a distro aimed at the arts), Mythbuntu, and more.

The UbuntuWire project, created to get developer services to the community by community members, is the culmination of lots of hard work from Ubuntu Developers within the community outside Canonical. The aim is to provide hosting and support for the many community-developed tools that help to make Ubuntu run smoothly, particularly for those working on Ubuntu’s Universe and Multiverse.

Tomorrow is the launch of Ubuntu 7.10. We have taken a look at all the cool features that make 7.10 so cool, we come to the best feature of all: the community.

So why is the community the best feature?

Someone on the United Kingdom Ubuntu mailing list pointed out this excellent interview with Mark Shuttleworth on the show “Open Season”. I hadn’t listened to the show before but it was very well done. One thing that didn’t get quite answered was a point about how Ubuntu manages to ensure that every package is reliable despite the high proportion of volunteers who have commit access. The show’s hosts seemed totally blown away by the fact that around 50% of people working directly on Ubuntu’s core packages are volunteers not employed by Canonical.