BLUA stands for Bangladesh Linux Users Alliance, a LUG formed in 2002 primarily to promote the use of GNU/Linux in the country. We’ve come a long way, and today we officially represent Ubuntu and Fedora in Bangladesh as well as working as the local affiliate of Creative Commons.

We’ve started working on to give a complete face-lift to our website, and as a part of it we’ve come up with a new logo for our organisation. Since this blog post will get aggregated on Planet Ubuntu and Planet Fedora, I’d like to take this opportunity to get feedbacks about the logo from all of you. There are some brilliant graphic designers in our community and I’ll sure with all of your inputs we can improve the logo! Please let me know what you honestly think about it, we’ll take all your comments and suggestions in account.

The logo was created by Adnan Quaium using Inkscape, and the font used comes with a “free for commercial use” license.

Ubuntu Bangladesh was formed in 28th April 2006, more than 4 years ago with the vision to create a solid platform for Ubuntu users and contributors in Bangladesh. We’re the official local community team in Bangladesh, recognised by Ubuntu Community Council and Ubuntu’s sponsor Canonical Ltd. It’s been a long journey, and I’m really glad that with all of your help, support, and contributions we’ve been able to achieve most of our major goals.

I’ve been working as the team leader of Ubuntu Bangladesh throughout these years, and I’ve decided to step down and hand over the team leadership to two of our very active volunteers, Shahriar Tariq and Shabab Mustafa. They have made a tremendous contribution for our team, for Ubuntu, and for Linux as a whole, and I strongly believe that Ubuntu Bangladesh will prosper even more under their new leadership and vision.

I’ll still be around, will help to administer our Launchpad page, mailing list, IRC channel, and our site.

Thanks to each and everyone who’ve helped me throughout the years, thank you for your never-ending support! Long live Linux, long live Ubuntu!

Thanks to Chris Schlaeger for this awesome picture, taken during Japan Linux Symposium 2009. I’m nominating this as the picture of the year!

Larger version of this picture is available here under a CC license.

BLUA Documentation Team has published a beginners guide on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) in Bengali, which is available for download from http://linux.org.bd/go.php?link=ubuntuguide (PDF file, 2.7 MB).

If you’re new to Ubuntu Linux and want to learn more about it, then this guide should be helpful to you. The topics covered are installation, package management, network and Internet connection setup, customization, proprietary hardware driver and multimedia support, troubleshooting, and much more.

Please pass on this message to your friends and colleagues who might be interested in using Ubuntu.

Microsoft finally made it to Twitter. Big shots like Google and Yahoo are already on Twitter, but it took Microsoft quite some time to decide whether they really want to join or not! (Come on, we all know that they are slow!)

Anyway I found it really interesting, and thought like to welcome them via my account @Linux. I did, and it was awesome to see that people found it hilarious! They started retweeting right away, and as I’m writing right now after an hour, people are still making fun of it.

Here they are, @Microsoft on Twitter. Give them a follow if you like to!

Update:

• In a surprising event, they replied and said thanks!
• This story has been TechCrunched!

I’ve been using the Unicode based Bengali fonts of Ekushey for a long time, specially SolaimanLipi which I use almost everywhere. To make these fine fonts easily available on Ubuntu, I’ve made a package of all of them called ttf-ekushey. Users of Ubuntu derivatives such as Linux Mint can use this package too.

Font list:

1. SolaimanLipi
2. Rupali
3. Ekushey Lohit
4. Ekushey Sharifa
5. Ekushey Punarbhaba
6. Ekushey Sumit
7. Ekushey Durga
8. Ekushey Saraswati
9. Ekushey Puja
10. Ekushey Azad
11. Ekushey Godhuli
12. Ekushey Mohua

(Twelve for now, but whenever they releases a new font I’ll update my package too.)
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