Attendees need to register on eventyay.com and get a conference ticket for free before they can access the meeting rooms. There are two meeting rooms with presentations happening simultaneously like the usual conferences.

I attended this morning's keynote which was delivered by Ken VanDine, Engineering Manager at Canonical. Ken gave a brief about what's happening with the Ubuntu community. He highlighted the features of the upcoming release of Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri scheduled for 14 October, less than a month away.

He mentioned that in the recent Beta release of Impish Indri users will notice that the Firefox browser is a snap package rather than the usual deb packaged. He explained the choice as being a collaboration between Mozilla and Canonical developers.

He talked about Ubuntu's choice of Flutter to develop native apps. The current Ubuntu installer is a Flutter application. He showed a demo of how to install the Flutter SDK and Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu using the Software Center. He then installed the Flutter extension and brought up a quick demo app on Flutter.

It is good to note that there is a yaru-flutter package that provides the look & feel of the Ubuntu system theme to Flutter apps.

Canonical has been pushing Flutter as the choice of native app development on Ubuntu since quite some time now and with the demo by Ken VanDine it becomes apparent how effortless Flutter development is on the Ubuntu desktop.

Some nice sessions are planned today and tomorrow, giving Linux users tips and tricks that they can use daily. Many of the sessions are done in native languages like Bahasa Indonesia or Japanese with English transliteration.

Tomorrow at 08h45 MUT, Kukuh Syafaat, a friend from the openSUSE Indonesia community will present Snap in MicroOS.

Snap is a package manager for containerised software packages. It is used mainly by Ubuntu derivatives. Kukuh Syafaat will explain how to use Snap in openSUSE MicroOS, a Linux distribution designed mainly for container hosting. However, there has been efforts into having a MicroOS Desktop with an immutable OS concept. MicroOS Desktop comes with Flatpak pre-installed. It'll be nice to see support for Snap as well.

In this tutorial we are going to get you started with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). You'll learn how to launch, connect to, and use an Ubuntu instance.

First and foremost you will need to create an account: https://aws.amazon.com/resources/create-account/

Once you have created your account, we will need to find a region of lowest latency for us and the easiest way is to go to this website that runs the AWS latency test. https://ping.psa.fun/ . For Mauritius, it is the af-south-1 region (Cape Town, Africa) which has the lowest latency.

Launching your instance:

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
2. On the top right corner, choose your preferred region
3. From the console dashboard, choose Launch Instance.
4. The Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) page displays a list of basic configurations, called Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), that serve as templates for your instance. Select an Ubuntu Server 20.04 (Free tier eligible).
5. On the Choose an Instance Type page, you can select the hardware configuration of your instance. Select the t3.micro instance type, which is eligible for the free tier.  For more information, see AWS Free Tier.
6. Choose Review and Launch to let the wizard complete the other configuration settings for you.
7. On the Review Instance Launch page, under Security Groups, you'll see that the wizard created and selected a security group for you. You can use this security group, or alternatively you can select the security group that you created when getting set up using the following steps:
8. Choose Edit security groups.
9. On the Configure Security Group page, ensure that Select an existing security group is selected.
10. Select your security group from the list of existing security groups, and then choose Review and Launch.
11. On the Review Instance Launch page, choose Launch.
12. When prompted for a key pair, select Choose an existing key pair, then select the key pair that you created when getting set up.
    Warning
    Don't select Proceed without a key pair. If you launch your instance without a key pair, then you can't connect to it.
    When you are ready, select the acknowledgement check box, and then choose Launch Instances.
13. A confirmation page lets you know that your instance is launching. Choose View Instances to close the confirmation page and return to the console.
14. On the Instances screen, you can view the status of the launch. It takes a short time for an instance to launch. When you launch an instance, its initial state is pending. After the instance starts, its state changes to running and it receives a public DNS name. (If the Public DNS (IPv4) column is hidden, choose Show/Hide Columns (the gear-shaped icon) in the top right corner of the page and then select Public DNS (IPv4).)It can take a few minutes for the instance to be ready so that you can connect to it. Check that your instance has passed its status checks; you can view this information in the Status Checks column.

Connecting to your newly created Ubuntu Instance

Open an SSH client.

1. Locate your private key file. The key used to launch this instance is nu-server.pem
2. Run this command, if necessary, to ensure your key is not publicly viewable.
   chmod 400 *.pem
3. Connect to your instance using its Public DNS as provided in your dashboard

Example:

ssh -i "server.pem" ubuntu@ecX-XX-XXX-XX-XXX.af-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com

For a long time I had forgotten that Ubuntu has the tendency to keep things as "human" as possible; and therefore adhering to their motto, "Linux for human beings!"

Out of the discussion, we then decided we will put some energy into the dormant Ubuntu Mauritius LoCo Team. The latter was created in 2011 and we organised a few events around those years, such as the Ubuntu Global Jam and Installation Festivals. Later on, I continued to focus on my experiments with openSUSE and spent less time at the Ubuntu activities.

In 2021, we are going to sort out a few things and make the Ubuntu Mauritius group active again. Chittesh has agreed to take on the reign. He is already the team's go-to person. Expect to see more purple desktops next year!