The San Francisco Jaunty Jackalope release party was held on Thursday April 23 and was by all accounts a great success. It was quite well attended; I would roughly estimate several dozen people or 50-60. We held the party in conjunction with a group of technically inclined electronic musicians on the Mp3Death.US Creative Commons netlabel, and they were responsible for a good portion of the draw. The event was billed variously as "Ubuntu Linux Release Party featuring Linux Music & Robots", or "Jens and the Jaunty Jackalope" (Jens being one of the performers). "Robots" was a reference to the Orb SWARM project, which brought two of its machines to perform; they both ran embedded Debian on a TS-7800 board.
Our contact with Mp3Death.US was through its founder Jordan Gray, who presented the previous month at Bay Area Linux Users Group. Jordan makes all of his music on Linux; his main tools are the open source MIXXX and LittleGPTracker applications, and he performs using two Linux-based devices: an EeePC netbook (running Ubuntu) and Game Park GP2X handheld. Jordan graciously agreed to perform at the event, and in addition enlisted several of his friends to perform on the bill. They had been planning to throw a birthday party for a couple of their DJs, so we agreed to combine parties. We also recruited interim_descriptor, author of the open source "dvj" music visualization software. INTD ran projections on the wall for the his own set as well as the other artists'. The Orb SWARM team demonstrated one of their robots rolling around the floor inside its shell (2 1/2 ft diameter aluminum sphere cage). The orb interacted with partygoers, operated by a SWARM crewman with remote control. In addition to moving around the floor it flashed patterns on a matrix of multicolored LEDs and produced a variety of sounds. Besides the shelled orb, we set up a naked robot on a table where people could see its inner workings. It was connected by crossover cable to a laptop, and we ran a telnet session into the robot to demonstrate the Debian command line of the embedded ARM processor inside. About half the party space was taken up by a laptop area where people were doing various things on Linux. Grant Bowman performed a fresh Linux install on an HP Netbook, using the Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu Netbook Remix bootable USB stick he made earlier that day. We also gave away a Jaunty Jackalope CD on request. A number of other interesting Linux devices were present, including an OLPC XO laptop and a phone-sized Nokia device running Debian (brought by a member of Noisebridge, the local hacking space). A good time was had by all and we hope to repeat our success in October for Karmic Koala. -- Ubuntu-us-ca mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-ca
