UbuntuBelowZero
Yesterday I attended one day of the UbuntuBelowZero conference in Montreal: "Ubuntu Love Day."

Canonical employees work from home, and they meet up for one or (in this case) two weeks in a different location around the world twice per year. The first day was the most community-oriented, and the attendance was well over 100 people. It was packed.

Interesting Highlights:

Installer: In the next version they will supercede the Debian installer. The liveCD will boot as it normally boots into the desktop, and there will be an "Install" icon on the desktop, with a graphical wizard. It will allow for a much simpler interface than the current Debian Installer, including something that works like gParted.

kubuntu: The KDE-based Ubuntu is headed up by Jonathan Riddell. He makes it a point to backport latest patches to keep their KDE fresh. Their main difference to other KDE distros is that they build the GStreamer backend into the multimedia applications as the default.

edubuntu: A really neat implementation of the Linux Terminal Server Project. I witnessed very, very fast booting on the thin clients.

Translations and LaunchPad: With their big "LaunchPad" project, the Ubuntu guys are trying to revolutionize how translations are done. Basically, when all of their default packages are built, all of the .po files are moved to a few big "core translations" packages. The LaunchPad already lets people translate strings online, and the translations package can be updated frequently without bumping binary packages. Another big goal of Launchpad is that it will aggregate all of the various Bugzillas out there so that bugs can be found quickly, duplicates thrown out, and patches not left unnoticed.

Obligatory Funny Quote: Jeff Waugh: "Ubuntu: ancient african word that means 'I'm sick of compiling Gentoo.'"