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Episode: 839
Title: HPR0839: Full Circle Podcast: The Lubuntu Team
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0839/hpr0839.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:20:42
---
Full Circle Podcast on Hacker Public Radio
This episode, the Lubuntu Project.
Hello World, and welcome to our show on Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode, it's the interview we ran last summer with Mario Bailing and Hongfuk Dong of the Lubuntu Project.
Lubuntu is a lightweight Linux distribution aimed at older and lower powered machines.
It's based on Ubuntu but using the LMDE desktop environment.
I spoke to Mario and Hongfuk over a sometimes shaky Skype connection to Vietnam.
The Full Circle Podcast is the companion to Full Circle Magazine, the independent magazine for the Ubuntu community.
Find us at fullcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
Full Circle Interview
I have with me two of the key members of the Lubuntu team.
Hello Vietnam.
Hello.
Hello.
Would you like to introduce yourself, please?
Yes, sure.
Hello, my name is Mario.
I'm the founder of the Light of Ubuntu Project Lubuntu, but actually I'm not a developer.
I wouldn't even say I'm a techie.
Other people say I am a techie.
I don't know.
I'm engaging with the Alexi community for two years.
It started when I met my friends.
PC Man and Andrew Lee in Taiwan.
Alexi is really prominent nowadays in many distributions and we thought it's not so prominent in Ubuntu yet.
Yeah, that was the initial idea for starting the Lubuntu project in March 2009.
And next to me is my friend, Hongfuk.
Hello.
My name is Hongfuk.
I'm from Vietnam.
Actually, I am a member of three and open-source community of Vietnam.
And I got involved with the Lubuntu project through Mario.
And I just tried to promote the Lubuntu project to some kind of marketing for Lubuntu in Vietnam.
Because this is a good project.
Very nice.
Very energy service.
Very fast.
So we want people in Vietnam have a fast system.
Therefore, I tried to promote it in Vietnam.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
The question that people over here are asking is, why do we need another Ubuntu based distribution?
I don't know.
We can never have enough Linux distributions to my mind.
So, right?
And I don't follow this opinion that we should have only one distribution.
And like, then people always say it's easier to use.
People can explain to each other how things go and so on.
The strength of Linux and free and open-source software is diversity.
And it's competition in the sense that we're all trying to do the best and get the best out of it.
Different systems are different for different reasons.
For example, I love Ubuntu.
I love the GNOME project.
I love KDE, of course.
Yeah.
They all have different targets and sometimes it's overlapping.
So, Ubuntu is something else that has its advantages.
The goal of Ubuntu is, as we say, from LXD, lightweight X11 desktop environment.
It's to be lightweight to use less RAM to use less CPU and to run on computers that are less powerful.
So, mobile computers, these networks that we have here, it runs even on some mobile phones.
And of course, on older computers.
What do you think are the specific strengths of Ubuntu aside from its lightness?
The specific strengths are that it is energy saving.
Well, of course, it depends on the user and what does the user install additionally.
But the recent test has shown that KDE and GNOME, as well as XFCE, use more energy.
This is pretty cool that we can actually install another desktop environment and use less energy on the same computer.
And I'm wondering about the current state of the project working actively on the distribution at the moment.
People always ask me how many developers, how many designers and so on are actually in the team.
And it's really difficult to say because from the beginning on, we decided to keep the team open on the launchpad page.
So, this was based on our experience in the LXT community.
There was a discussion, should we close the team or should we like have some kind of entry gate.
And yeah, especially the people from Asia said, like, I don't understand, why do we need to close the team?
Everything is running fine.
There are no, like in other teams, we have these fights on the mailing list and so on.
Things are in fine, so we can just keep things open and we shouldn't block anyone who wants to get more involved step by step.
So, for example, on the mailing list, we have more than 300 people.
Many never wrote anything, but they are listening.
And later on, I find out they wrote something on their block.
They are testing actively, so it's pretty hard to say.
We need more developers.
And the main developer of Lubuntu is Julian Laban from France.
And yeah, he is doing a great job.
He joined about, I think it was about eight or nine months ago.
And he's become the core developer now and constantly saying something on the LXT list.
We have, of course, a PC man engaging here.
A lot of PC man is the founder of the LXT project from Taiwan.
And this is another cool thing.
Like, here we have a relatively small community, but it's already an international community.
People from Asia started LXT, people from Taiwan, Chinese people.
Their English is not always perfect, but they're engaging here actively.
And that's fantastic thing for me.
And of course, as I am here now in Vietnam, it's fantastic to see how people locally take up the idea
and start working with Lubuntu, use it, translate it for some of the translation team also has over 70 people here.
Difficult to say, where is a developer?
Where is not, I think we see growing number of people participating and that's important.
From a project management point of view, which is where I come from,
I looked at the setup you've got where you're pulling LXT on top of Lubuntu as a base distribution.
And just wondering how that is fitting together, whether that gives you any particular problems.
Ubuntu, the Ubuntu team and canonical, they've really set up a viable model
to come up with a new version of Ubuntu every six months, twice a year.
We are taking, basing our work on that.
And is that the intention to keep in step with the core Ubuntu releases?
At the moment, we are not using all packages from the Ubuntu repository.
So LXT is not completely 100% based on Ubuntu, but some packages and some changes.
The goal is to include them in the main Ubuntu repository and to interact more with the Ubuntu core community
because we are small, we are small community.
And if we can have more people who join up with us and who we are joining up with,
that will make the outcome more efficient.
Moving towards that and soon it's going to be the Linux talk in Berlin.
And Mark Schottel was there. I hope we can meet up with him.
It was 2009 in February that I met Mark also in Berlin.
He said, okay, why don't you do Lubuntu? It's a great idea. It's a great project.
So actually after meeting with Mark, that was one of the first steps as well.
Lubuntu being a lightweight distribution.
I'm across one or two comments that have said, why do we need another lightweight distribution?
We've already got Zubuntu with XFCA. What's your response to that one?
Zubuntu is a very cool project, but they are focusing also on other things.
They are focusing more on usability on having a settings for the whole system.
And so on. And we are also focusing on usability.
But in the end, our goal is more, we are taking more of the speed into account.
Like many people complain that Zubuntu has become much slower in recent versions.
And I think that seems to be true. I mean, they also have a different focus.
You know, I don't want to create this Zubuntu against Lubuntu or XFCA against LXDE.
I mean, in the end, we are all in the same community.
And many members of the LXT community are in this XFCE community.
And members of the XFCE community are in our community.
There is not really this big gap.
And some people try to create this kind of controversy between our teams.
We're working together and for example, the LX task manager is based on the task manager of XFCE.
On the other hand, other projects take a call from LXDE.
And that's fine. As long as it brings our goals forward to create faster computing to create a faster desktop experience.
I'm guessing there's not too much resistance to pulling in any particular pieces of software from many, any source,
as long as they fit into the distribution somewhere.
Yeah, we're pretty open.
Recently, there has been a discussion, for example, about the music player and LXT has a music player,
which is Alex Music, developed by PC Man.
But PC Man said, hey, I just found that beef and I tried it out.
And it looks like it's better than Alex Music.
So why don't we take that?
So the community is pretty practical, focused on the outcome and really open.
And what we see is really like with the engagement of people from Asia, from Eastern Europe, Latin America,
it becomes a little bit more relaxed.
I don't know, we heard that we have on mailing list of Linux communities or free and all sorts of community, some fights and so on.
It seems to me like the LXT community and the Lubuntu community is generally pretty relaxed.
And that's why I like this project so much as well.
So how does that decision process occur?
Because if anything, we're spot for choice software that we could include.
I'm not personally mediating it.
And actually, there's no, like, I don't know, I'm thinking about it.
I think there's no, like, personally really mediating something.
It just seems to work out.
Through a consensus decision-making process, usually sometimes newcomers ask me, yes.
So how is the democratic process in your community and so on?
I don't know, I don't remember who said it to me, but somebody said in the free software community, there's no democracy.
The people who contribute the most, they have the biggest say.
That's pretty much true in our project as well.
For example, we have the big discussion about which browser to include.
Yeah, in the end, it was really difficult because there were arguments for any browser.
Like Julian made the decision for Chrome and people are quite happy with it.
And it doesn't mean we have Chrome.
So it doesn't mean that we cannot use Firefox.
I mean, everyone can still install it through the repository.
So it doesn't exclude anyone.
And right now they're also thin offs or other distributions like peppermint.
Which are based on Lubuntu.
And yeah, of course, they have their own choice of applications.
And you mentioned peppermint.
That was when I realized that it was itself a derivative of Lubuntu.
Do you not think the chain of forks and spin-off distributions is starting to get a bit long?
Because peppermint based on Lubuntu, based on Ubuntu, based on Debian.
In my mind, this seems to be stretching the chain a little far.
I'm happy the guys are engaging and they're working with Linux.
And it seems like even they're doing some kind of small business with this.
And isn't that what we need in the free software community?
People actually taking up software, like taking up projects and offering their own little distributions,
maybe to the people around them, to some small businesses around them and doing their business.
I haven't talked with it. I haven't talked about it with Julian.
I don't know what his opinion, but personally, I don't mind.
I mean, the greatest thing, the best thing would be if they also contribute back.
And at least they should say that they're based on Ubuntu.
They're based on Lubuntu and acknowledge the work of the community.
And anything else is fine for me.
Full circle interview.
So what is the state of free software out in Vietnam?
I'm guessing that the economic argument is driving the adoption of free software.
But do you have any feeling or how well it's being taken out?
I'm not sure if we could really say that the economic argument is as an argument or a country's like Vietnam.
Because if you talk about the cost of software, basically windows, you can get it for nearly free here as well,
which means like you don't have to pay a lot.
You can get any corner as a pirated copy, but there are other advantages.
Maybe I just passed the microphone on to Hon Fuk so she can tell you something about who's using it.
Okay, so at the moment in Vietnam, we have quite a few user community of free and open software in Hanoi.
They go elsewhere in the May Kong area.
However, for the developers, we still have a limited number of developers.
And even though at the moment the government has some project from multiple free and open software in government office like in school,
but the speed of the project goes quite slowly.
And on the other hand, to push the open-source community, we have some event like Norm Asia on free software freedom day.
This is the way to push the community in Vietnam and educate people about free and open-source ideas.
What do you think is the balance of people from Asia versus people from the US and Europe working on Ubuntu?
Okay, maybe I can answer that question.
I think that the number is pretty distributed.
We have people from Asia, maybe 30%, 30% from Europe and 30% from the Americas.
It seems pretty distributed.
And what we see of course in countries like Vietnam, people are adapting it for their own usage.
So we have translators in the project, translating applications and translating the desktop environment to Vietnamese, for example,
or to local languages here in the regions like Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, very close.
Recently there has been a DBA conference, mini-depth conference in Thailand with core involvement of the Ubuntu and LXD community.
So we're going step by step.
I always say 1,000 users, one more developer.
So the more users we get, the more developers we get, the more translators we get, the more developers we get.
It has been shown that the project really gains the more people contribute to design, to translation as well.
Because they start to get interested into development as well.
They see a bug and they want the bug to be solved.
So step by step.
You released the 1004 final version a few weeks ago.
Has that had a good reception?
Yeah, the reception was overwhelming.
Actually we were criticized by some new members of the Ubuntu team on the mailing list that we don't make enough promotion.
We don't tell enough press about it and so on.
But Julian also said correctly, we are still a new project.
We are still a small team and we have to go step by step.
We don't want to make the expectations too big.
And that's also why we call it stable beta.
We know still their box.
We know it can still be faster and it can still be more user friendly.
So we need people to join up with us and make the stable beta version.
A real stable version.
Like, you know, somebody is downloading it and it doesn't work.
People aren't happy.
Maybe many users won't join up one try again.
So we have to make this as stable as possible.
And yeah, the stable beta version is pretty good outcome.
We're working on the next one now.
You're planning to do another release in line with 1010?
Yeah, we'll see if we can be endorsed by Canonical and join up more closely with us.
Can release the same day as the official Ubuntu release.
At the moment, this release was about four to five days after the initial release.
Nothing wrong with being a few days behind them, particularly given their slight problem with the installer.
Yeah, and with previous releases, there was also, I think it wasn't the eight or four that also had some problems at that time,
where the release candidate was actually more stable than the final release.
Well, just to give you another piece of feedback, I'm running the latest version on my second machine,
which is a very, very old compact EVO laptop with a, I think it's a Pentium 4 mobile processors.
I have to say that I swapped Ubuntu calmyk for Lubuntu, and it really made the machine fly.
So I can testify that you're achieving at least some of the objectives on that.
Okay, cool. Thanks.
Another thing that we hear about Vietnam, because before we were talking about Vietnam.
So last year, there was actually a big event happening here, caught organized by Homebook and Me,
which was the GNOME Asia.
You know, as you hear, we're really open to engage with the whole Green Open Source community.
And so we're following up this year and organizing a new conference here with the university and the software park of Put You Me in City together.
Yeah, we organized 48 in 2010.
In November, cooperates with the University of Technology in Ho Chi Minh.
So this is a free and open-source event for users and developers.
So we wouldn't like to invite developers or anyone who's interested in Open Source software to come over to Vietnam in Toronto.
Like Mario said, at the moment, in my country, Vietnam, we don't have many developers.
But like you said, 100, if 1000 users, we have undeveloped us.
So we need to build the user community.
And you know, actually, I would say in Europe, it's quite easy to become a developer.
And we have many events going on where people just go and you can ask so many people like face-to-face interaction.
It's really important.
And then you can follow up, of course, by email.
But here in Asia, often, it's very difficult to find somebody who can help you.
And also, there's a big time difference to the US or to Europe.
People can even, it's difficult sometimes to meet up online on IRC.
So real-time face-to-face interaction is important.
And yeah, we had 50 people here.
50 foreigners from abroad here last year.
And it really gave a push to many communities here.
We hope to receive more visitors this year.
We have a lot of girls, a lot of women participating in it.
It was a huge event with 140 volunteers.
So people are interested.
People want to learn.
And I hope many people hear it.
And they will join up with us here in November 12 to 14.
The website is forstagia.org.
Okay. We'll put those links in the show notes as well.
And since we're on the topic of links, do you just want to mention where we can find the projects online?
The project is on lubuntu.net.
There are all the download links.
There's information on how to get involved.
We are using the Ubuntu Wiki for organization of the team.
There are several sub teams using the mailing list on launch pad.
We also have a block.
A few weeks.
We'll also go online with a separate forum on the lubuntu website.
And at the moment, of course, people can use the lubuntu forum.
There are many forums out there, forums in local languages.
I think there are many good points to enter.
Of course, you can also type into a search engine.
Our website lubuntu.net.
I've just got those two pages up on my screen.
lubuntu.net slash blog, which has got the blog post on it.
And wiki.ubuntu.com slash lubuntu has got wiki entries on it.
Thank you very much.
Good to talk to another up and coming project team.
Thanks a lot.
We hope to hear more from you.
Also, other projects in the future.
Thank you.
Thank you, Robbie.
Thank you very much.
See you later.
Bye.
Lubuntu continues to gather strength and users.
It's currently up to version 10.10.
Why not give it a spin?
This is the full circle podcast on Hacker Public Radio.
We'll be back soon.
I'm Robin Catling.
Goodbye for now.
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