So Josh Chase, the leader and contact for the Ubuntu US Georgia Team, and I have been doing some video podcasts for the last couple of months.

Some things we covered this episode (no cigars this time!):

• Our opinions of the 8.10 wallpapers
• More Powered by Ubuntu stickers
• Cool AUV using Ubuntu Server 8.04
• Dell pushing Ubuntu out there
• etc, etc.

There are feeds for the video, Miro, ogg, mp3, iTunes audio, and iTunes video. Subscribe with twitter and identi.ca to be notified of new releases.

Feel free to leave comments and feedback on the site!

Update: Mackenzie pointed out that episode 10 wasn’t showing up in Miro. Its fixed now. Thanks Mackenzie!

People from the Obama campaign have said that they use Ubuntu 8.04. It seems to be used nationally.

Does anyone know any more about the use of Ubuntu by the Obama campaign and can provide us with more details?

Feel free to leave a comment here or drop me an email at nali -SPAMREMOVE - @ubuntu.com.

Update: There might be some questions of validity here, but it really wouldn’t make sense to doctor pictures, IMO.

I’m not a big fan of the color pink.

I have no problems with people wearing pink or having anything pink.

I don’t own anything pink. I don’t want anything pink.

So for retribution, my wife forced me to buy and keep this Toadette, from the Super Mario video games, in my office:

Apparently she didn’t think the Debian-related comic I posted on my blog was funny.

Now we know who wears the pants in my family.

Apparently this comic is from May 2004, but its still funny for us married folks:

(click on it to see the larger original version)

Its almost that time of the year, found through Digg:

Also, on the ubuntu-us mailing list, Elizabeth Bevilacqua pointed out there is now an US Ubuntu store: http://usshop.ubuntu.com.

Greg’s post about the Michigan release party reminded me that LoCos should be updating the IntrepidReleaseParties wiki page. The wiki page has suggestions for organizing a party and tagging the pictures so everyone can find them easily, just in case your LoCo is new to all the fun!

To see all the good times people had at past releases, check out Flickr and Picasa.

Ubuntu Podcast episode #9 is out! Check it out.

Josh and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, talking Ubuntu and enjoying cigars.

I’ve got a Blackberry 8320. Its used more for checking email, IM, and twitter/identi.ca than actual calling. If it crashed and burned, I wouldn’t really care that much. But…it would be  nice to back up just in case. Barry is the open source solution out there and now the folks who made the PocketMac sync app are coming out with a Linux version. Of course, why they are calling it “PocketMac for Blackberry (Linux Edition)” is beyond me. If you are interested in beta testing the Linux version, go register.

Somehow I missed that Linus Torvalds is now blogging. He says its supposed to be a family blog and there isn’t much on it yet, but I hope to see some of his legendary commentary, like what he thinks of the OpenBSD crowd and the Intel e1000e hardware designer. You can read more of his choice words at Wikiquote.

Ubuntu Podcast episode #8 is out! Check it out.

I’ve run into a couple problems repeatedly recently, and I thought I would write down the solutions I found. Beware that these might break your machine, so be careful.

While I absolutely love Gmail’s web interface, there are times when I would prefer to use Thunderbird. Having a browser open can be way too much of a distraction, so I want to shut it down now and then.

Running fresh installs of Ubuntu 8.04.1, I downloaded the latest stable version of Thunderbird from the Mozilla site. Extracted it and ran it. Set up my work email, worked great…

Set up Gmail using IMAP, but kept getting the error:

Failed to connect to server imap.gmail.com

I tried pinging imap.gmail.com, as well as doing a telnet into the IMAP port. Everything worked fine. But Thunderbird kept throwing that stupid error. I figured that maybe Thunderbird and the Gmail IMAP just didn’t get along. But googling, that didn’t seem to be the case. Hell, Google lists IMAP set up instructions for Thunderbird. Its gotta work!

Getting frustrated I started going through the various Thunderbird menus. Tried to do a Help >> Check For Updates…

Oh crud. That gave me

AUS: Update Server Not Found (Check your Internet connection or contact your administrator).

That settled it. Its highly unlikley the Mozilla update servers are down. It has to be a network problem.

Doing another google search, I came across this thread on the Ubuntu Forums (as usual). Basically, Thunderbird and IPv6 don’t always play well together. Turning it off should fix the issue.

Now, there are a thousand ways to mess with network configurations. I wanted the one which would require the least amount of changes, and something I could change back easily later if needed. So this unlikely to be the best solution, YMMV: blacklist ipv6 so the modules never load.

In Ubuntu, open up /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add “blacklist ipv6″ to the bottom. Reboot.

Once the machine came back up, Thunderbird could connect to imap.gmail.com and update servers perfectly.

Next, I decided to get Thunderbird and Gmail running on my laptop. When I tried to run it, I got the message

error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file”

I figured I was missing some libraries, but didn’t know the exact package I was missing. After googling, “sudo apt-get install libstdc++5″ solved the problem.