Every third Friday of the month, the Linux User Group – Uganda (LUG) gathers for its monthly meeting at a venue around town. This time around, the Faculty of Computing and Informatics Technology played host to the assembly and by 4:00pm, the Level 3 lecture theatre was filled with chatter from a sizeable number of students and ICT professionals.

Every third Friday of the month, the Linux User Group – Uganda (LUG) gathers for its monthly meeting at a venue around town. This time around, the Faculty of Computing and Informatics Technology played host to the assembly and by 4:00pm, the Level 3 lecture theatre was filled with chatter from a sizeable number of students and ICT professionals.

As promised by the online postings on the LUG mailing list , this was not going to be any ordinary monthly gathering as Friday 19th February 2010 had been chosen as the date to launch the Makerere chapter of the LUG. A quick scan of the babbling audience revealed mixed looks of expectation and curiosity for the first-time attendees and calmer poised-to-share looks from the more seasoned professionals and their waiting soon paid off.

Jubal Harpster, Technology Officer, AGCommons (Agricultural Geospatial Commons) program took the attendees through a presentation detailing the extensive work done by AGCommons in identifying and developing data, tools and services that deliver relevant, timely and affordable geospatial information to smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Citing a Kenyan project in his presentation, he displayed how AGCommons made use of Open Source Software to create A map of existing seed (and other inputs) dealers and carry out Spatial analysis of the information leading to decision on location of new outlets. These maps are then updated at monthly/seasonal intervals on varieties available, with all this done using applications like QGIS .

Simon Vass, Technical Manager, E-Tech Uganda Ltd then presented his customized Ubuntu operating system, which he admitted to have put together during his free time so demonstrate the ease of customization and challenge them to come up with their own. He proposed that if willing students were identified to maintain the project, he could push for his prototype to become a release in its own right. He however, availed a copy of his release for students to explore get motivated to develop their own.

Sam a developer from Digital Solutions, who admitted to have completed his Bachelors degree less than two years back, took attendees through his daily use of Open Source Software to develop cutting edge applications like the latest cross-platform Butterfly all the while extolling Linux’ versatility and suitability for development.

At the end of the presentations, Battenberg, Director, Mountbatten Ltd encouraged the students to explore Open Source Software, especially the Ubuntu distributions, which have a locally hosted cache to ease the regular update of their installations. The team also talked about a proposed project to build an Ubuntu mirror at Makerere University or Uganda Christian University Mukono . They then took time off to answer the numerous questions from the students and at the end, thanked them all for coming to the launch, encouraging them delve even further into the daily use of Open Source Software.