(no, I don't think this settles anything, just nice, ain't it?)

Setting aside the natural negative reaction to any advertisement, I actually kinda liked the fact that the ad stressed the "free download" bit, specially knowing that there is no catch, it's actually free.

Anyway, just wanted to share  

This did really amaze me on how fast the LoCo is growing everyday. We also seem to have a tremendous amount of mailing list traffic.

Argentina LoCo, keep on rocking!

Most users ever online was 11,277, 1 Day Ago at 05:01 PM.
Currently Active Users: 8482 (1295 members and 7187 guests)

That's a pretty big bump from the previous ~9500 max users

The forum staff have my deepest admiration for keeping it up and running so smoothly.

While that doesn't have to be a bad thing, it does make it a bit harder for regular users to get excited about it (and consequently, more involved in it).

So that led me to start a release cycle page, based on the email announcement back when Etch was  released: http://debian-community.org/LennyReleaseSchedule/

Now that the basics are layed down, I would like to add as much interesting information as possible to it, ranging from what versions of the different desktops are going to be added (gnome, kde, xfce, etc), what has been accomplished and what not, to major kernel improvements.

If can think of anything to add, please, feel encouraged to do so directly on the wiki, and if you can think of anything else that might make this release cycle more interesting, comments or direct email to me is the a great way to keep this moving forward.

It turns out I need some proprietary firmware to get it running in Lenny (aka Testing), so here's a quick step by step:

- Fire up a terminal
- Go into superuser mode: su -
- Then: gedit /etc/apt/sources.list (or "kate /etc/apt/sources.list" if you're under KDE)
- There you should add the following line at the end: deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny non-free contrib
- Save, then run: aptitude update
- Then we need to install the firmware and the module: aptitude install firmware-ipw3945 ipw3945d ipw3945-modules-`uname -r`
- You should have wireless now

You don't?
Take a look in: http://forums.debian.net/

Here is a pic of all the members we could gather:

It was a great event, so congratulations to the people from CaFeLug who made it possible

Seems like a good place to point people wanting to give Debian a try, so this one is going to my bookmarks.

It's been a very exciting and very active year for which I'm overly thankful for.

Most of the issues which worn me down seemed to finally appear "fixable" just about the time I decided I should take a break, most surely because it's when I finally spoke up about them to the right people. In any case, I'm going to go ahead and slow down for a while nonetheless.

I will make sure anything that depended on me is left in good hands (many good hands laying around, by the way), and be as careful as possible not to disrupt anything.

The only project I still feel motivated to be active in is "The Fridge", mainly because of all the cool people involved and the hard work they've put in lately, I just wouldn't feel right stepping down now.

This doesn't mean I'll disappear, just that I will be getting less involved in some areas. Please still feel free to ping me if there is anything you need my help for.

Of course, none of this will stop me from promoting Ubuntu wherever I can, I'm going to be giving a talk in the biggest Open Source conference in Argentina (CaFeConf) about Ubuntu together with a Debian Developer, where each of us will try and represent what works best in each project, and squash some myths.

Thanks a lot to those who dealt with me these days, it really helped me put some things into perspective!