The third EPFSUG meeting on 30 June gathered a handful of EP staff and assistants and a small crowd of Ubuntu evangelists and free software supporters from around Belgium. It all started off nicely with socialising, coffee and carrot cake while waiting for everybody to pass through the EP's accreditation administration.
The first presentation "What is Unity" by Wouter Vandenneucker was a blast! Someone expecting a free software presentation to be like a command line or terminal experience would probably think he or she was sitting in on a "New iPad2 Features"-session. But no, this was about Ubuntu :-) and Ubuntu's Unity is simply looking very very good. Wouter's enthusiasm and outstanding presentation was successfully underlining that impression.
If you have a web browser supporting the SVG format, you can look at the presentation here. It takes a while to load, but when it has you should be able to "click through" it. It is made with the free software vector graphics tool Sozi.
Joris' presentation on how you can secure that your private mails remain private with PGP/GPG was also very interesting and ended with a hands on exercise. Joris helped Ward to install Enigmail and to create, sign, upload and share keys. The session was successfully wrapped up with sending (and receiving) encrypted email from Ward's machine!
The last presentation by Erik Josefsson was cut short into a conclusion that the ongoing procurement procedure is not a completely done deal and that there is hopefully room for dialogue with the institutions in the EP.
More on plans for the autumn will follow on the calendar pages :-)
Here are blurry but happy pictures from just before and after we left the room A8F388.
