So I went up to LUGRadio Live on Saturday, which was at the Terrace Bar in the Molineux Stadium, Wolverhampton. This unfortunately meant getting up at 5.30 and sitting on a train for half the day… as a result I was living on caffeine alone for most of the day, which at £2.60 a pint became rather expensive. But I soon discovered that a pint of Guinness was only 10p more, so it wasn’t all bad 
I only just managed to get to the venue on time, having got the first train of the day from Plymouth and a taxi from the station, but thankfully I didn’t miss anything. Here the guys welcome everyone. From left to right it’s Jono, Aq and Matt (note the angry-ness in his eyes). Ade seems to have been getting a bit of a rough time – not only does he seemingly not have a mic, I’ve also cut him out of the photo (you can see a bit of him on the far right).
Millionaire founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth talked about his visit to the Space Station. This was obviously very interesting, but I would have liked to hear a bit about Ubuntu as well…
Later on was the Mass Debate, where the audience got the chance to ask questions of (from left to right) Kevin Carmony (CEO of Linspire), Rufus Pollock (FFII UK), Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical and Ubuntu) and Bill Thompson (writer for the BBC).
It was interesting to hear what the panel thought about the various issues discussed. One notable thing was how many times Mark Shuttleworth mentioned Ubuntu (not many) compared to how many times Kevin Carmony mentioned Linspire (practically every sentence)…
The team also interviewed Ian Bell, co-creator of Elite. I must admit to never having played Elite, but as someone who is into 1980s computing I must get a copy and give it a go sometime. It was interesting to hear how it all started, the technologies involved and what he’s currently doing at the moment, about 20 years on.
The amount of interest in Elite also gave me the idea of running a retro gaming area at next years event, featuring Acorn Electrons, BBC Masters and so on. There was a LAN gaming area this year featuring Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, but who wants 3D graphics when you can have Crazee Rider and Countdown to Doom?
Bill Thompson who often writes for the BBC talked about how Free Software helped get the public involved in the high-level discussions which followed the Madrid train bombing. He managed to put together a Mambo driven site in a matter of days, which provided the public with a discussion forum to get their views across to the decision makers.
This was one of the most interesting talks of the day for me. Jonathan Riddell talked about Kubuntu which is my distro of choice at the moment and also about the upcoming KDE 4. Talks about KDE 4 always get me excited and this one was no exception. Some new features were revealed, including better hotplug support (something KDE really lacks and Gnome is miles ahead with) and a replacement for the much-criticised KDE Control Centre. We got a brief glimpse of the new app (brief enough so that I didn’t have chance to get a picture of it – hopefully someone else did) which from what little I saw of it seemed to resemble the Windows Control Panel in appearance. I must start running KDE CVS.
Of course the show included a live recording of LUGRadio, which was just great. Almost certainly the best episode of the series (if not ever). Not sure when it will be available, probably over the next few days.
Well that’s the best of the pictures I got. There was also one of the lightening talks which got me interested: James Wallbank talked about Lowtech. Basically it’s a computer recycling project which does a hell of a lot more than recycle computers. They also run an Access Space in Sheffield – the idea is that anyone can come in and use a Linux system running on a recycled computer and get help with using the Internet and the desktop environment. The cool thing about it is that once the new users have had help, they’re expected to help others. I think this is a great way of helping people learn and giving them confidence. I often go over to Sheffield as I go to ShefLUG, so I will try and get involved in this when I’m back at uni.
In the evening there was the meal at The Standard. Anyone have Gordon Ramsay’s phone number? They were very slow (although they did have a full restaurant, they knew they would be getting a full restaurant and should have made sure they were equipped to handle it). That said, the food wasn’t bad and the free bar (the LUGRadio guys put some of the profit made from the event behind the bar – around £200) helped pass the time
Roll on LUGRadio live 2006!
