Wednesday, May 23, 2007

preparing for InstallFest 2007

Talks about Linux InstallFest 2007 begun about two months ago, and preparation a month ago. We held several meetings on how to organize, promote and whatever related to our second Linux InstallFest. Linux InstallFest 2007 will be held on 27th May, and message will be "Linux is desktop ready, and we have another option".


During 17-21th May we participated ICT Expo 2007 that held at the biggest exhibition center of Mongolia to promote InstallFest 2007, Linux, FOSS. On the closing ceremony organizers were saying that there were about 20000 visitors, great though :). Still, we have a lot to do. Thank you guys from liMNux for doing great job when I was on vacation.

Here is little video from the exhibition:

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Closing Ubuntu mirror server

Sorry that I'm posting bad new. But unfortunately that's the reality. Few days ago we decided to close it due to some limitations, and constraints. First, server hard drive run out of space. Second, server wasn't collocated in ISP, so it's overloaded internet connection of a organization. That's why we decided to close Ubuntu mirror server for a while until we buy brand new server and collocate it at a ISP.

We were thinking about how we could support FOSS, and speed up its adoption. And found out that we could create and maintain mirror server for one of the most popular Linux distros, it was Ubuntu. That would reduce time required for system update, package installation, image download. It took more than a month to sync all the packages and images from the main server. At the same time we were participating and competing with others on SFD2006. We lost the competition because we hadn't complete mirror server. Nevertheless we were continuing syncing, soon we had complete and official mirror server. It did it's job. It was 10 times faster on low speed connection. Mongolian Linux and Ubuntu users grown that 2MB/s of line was overloaded. And organization who rented us server declined to support us anymore.

It was very bad news and very bad decision while we were preparing for Linux InstallFest 2007 on 27th May. I talked to ISPs, they are ready to collocate our server, but we don't have server to collocate. So I'm here to ask for help and support.