Yesterday I started the first sessions of Linux Training in Lisbon.

I’ll be teaching this course together with my friend Paulo Cabido for the R&D Center of University of Évora. We’ll be teaching this course to high-school teachers and this constitutes one of the first Linux Academies organized by the Portuguese Ministery of Education.

Hopefully this will represent a more widespread usage of Linux in the Portuguese high-schools as the intentions are to make a viral spread of knowledge — the teachers that are attending these training sessions will themselves give teach other professors and recursivity keeps on…

Today I finally installed the latest Ubuntu. I’m saying finally because since last February I didn’t install or upgrade anything… back then I was working in Seville and the internet connection at my place was crappy.

The new Ubuntu seems nice (as always) to me, a little slowlier than the 7.10 I used but not a real problem.

I still remember my Debian days, kernel compiling, always funny. Wireless fighting (not really good drivers and managers back then), interesting stuff and of course, telling my girlfriend: Uh, well, we cannot realy watch that movie right now cause I kinda screwed up the graphical environment…

To all the people behind Ubuntu and Debian, keep on, you’re doing a really good job as always!

Ubuntu 8.10 was released today!

Check out the new features and download this new version.

Ubuntu, the marvelous GNU/Linux distro is announcing its Developer Week and you are free to participate on it at #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.

As it says on the web site, in the Developer Week you can:

• learn about different packaging techniques
• find out more about different development teams
• check out the efforts of the world-wide Development Community
• participate in open Q&A sessions with Ubuntu developers
• much more…

Recently I needed to come up with some sort of widget in PyGTK to be able to draw selection boxes, drag them around, etc. over a background image. After spending two days with pycairo and having only what would be the basis for what I need done, I found Goocanvas, particularly its Python bindings!!

I already knew the name due to my subscription on PyGTK Mailing List but never had a change to dig in further. It is amazing!! You create items on a canvas, and you can deal with them one by one setting their properties, dealing with input events, etc., really nice.

Now I pretty much have what I needed (the drag selection boxes on top of an image) and I might extract it from the main program and make it available for anyone with such needs like I had.

Checkout this amazing work that allows one to do some neat stuff with cairo without sweating too much!