I used to work for OLPC, whose mission is to distribute low cost laptops for education, without necessarily the connectivity with the outside world. Now at Praekelt we’re focusing on using connectivity as the power – harnessing the deployed base of mobile phones in Africa without requiring them to be smartphones or computing devices. As part of this Praekelt Foundation and Vodacom are hosting the Betavine Social Exchange Cape Town Developer Day 2010.

I’ve asked Steve Wolak to tell us more about Betavine and the event. Who is Steve Wolak?

Stephen Wolak, Founder and Head of Betavine, has worked in mobile technology and software since graduating from Imperial College, London. Stephen joined Vodafone Group R&D in 2000 and in 2006 put forward the idea of an open platform for engaging the wider technology community with R&D activities.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Deploying a new server at work – a dedicated server hosted at Hetzner. Fortunately Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) was released before we had anything hosted on the machine, so I took the decision to upgrade it before we do serious deployment.

One of the shiny new features of Ubuntu Server 9.04 is etckeeper, documented here by Thierry Carrez. In particular, on 9.04 etckeeper plays well with bzr and shows the real user who typed “sudo etckeeper commit” in the bzr log, not just “root”.

As we have a (small but distributed) team adminning the server, this will help a great deal to keep track of who did what when.

Some observations on the last n releases:

Throughout the Ubuntu development cycle, there are daily “snapshot” CD images produced. If you’re fortunate to live in a country where most of the “broadband” online population are not capped at 1GB per month (and a presidential hopeful who doesn’t keep singing “bring me my machine gun“) then you can download these during the development cycle to boot (daily-live) or install (perhaps in a virtual machine) to check on the progress or help with testing. These culminate in the actual “gold” release image.