On Saturday 8th May 2010, Ubuntu Pakistanis from three major cities of Pakistan gathered to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. This was for the first time that we arranged a release party and we were very excited about that. However, our Loco Team administrator did not share our enthusiasm but that didn’t stop us.
In Karachi, Me and Haroon Idrees organized the event at arranged it McDonald’s Stadium Road, Karachi. The community’s response was great, the event was attended by students, IT professionals, bloggers, journalists and local IT companies that provided open source solutions to government and private organizations. Discussions revolved around creating awareness about free and open source software in general and promoting Ubuntu in particular.
We were really excited to meet Dr. Athar Mahboob. He is the president of IbnKhaldun Systems, and he is a legend in Pakistan for the work he has been doing since last three decades. Specially the work he has done on Linux, for example his company recently developed a network for EOBI – Pakistan, which has branches all over the country and all of them are connected using workstations and servers running a slightly modified version of Ubuntu Linux.
In Lahore, Mustufa took the responsibility of organizing the event. Mustufa is a young IT student and he is very energetic and talented. He single handedly organized the event, gave a small presentation and entertained the guests. Again there were students from universities and IT professionals and the event was also covered by a TV news channel.
In Islamabad Waqas and Babar Zahoor of Pakistan Open Source Foundation hosted the event. In Islamabad they discussed Ubuntu’s WUBI installer and open source alternatives to Microsoft applications.
Pictures:
For more images and details please visit and join our facebook group Ubuntu Pakistan User’s Group.
My only regret is, why did i discover Ubuntu this late.
Ill try to attend the next meet up.
Great, hopefully it would expand to other major cities of Pakistan. May be Faisalabad also 🙂