3ca give-away – Trubuntu released into the wild

Last night our friends at Trinity Community Arts (aka 3ca) held their first computer give-away for people who’d successfully completed their music technology course. It also marked the release into the wild of the first public version of Trubuntu (codenamed 0.2), Trinity’s custom edition of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

While waiting for their machines, which all had to be set up individually for each user with user name and password by Ryan, Trinity’s tech guru, and not forgetting a final check that all the software fully up-to-date, there were some fine refreshments served up (thanks Emma). 🙂

I had a chance to try out the ten give-away boxes prepared and they certainly were impressive: fast, responsive and very easy on the eye. They all came complete with Trinity’s custom desktop wallpaper and the stunning 3D effects provided by Compiz (eat your heart out Vista Aero. Ed.). Looking at the software, these are perfect machines for creating all kinds of media, with music production tools such as Rosegarden (sequencing), Audacity (sound editing), Ardour (a full digital audio workstation), Mixxx (DJ mixing), video packages, e.g. Kino (video capture) and Cinelerra (film editing) and others such as the Gimp (image processing and production), Blender (3D animation and design) and Scribus (document layout and design), plus your usual web browsing, instant messaging, email and office suites that come as standard for Linux distros. The quality of the finished machines are a tribute to Ryan and all his hard work – the final result is very polished indeed.

The give-away is just part of the work of Trinity’s mediatech project that brings together techies and artists from a variety of fields and disciplines, to explore the potentials created by the new digital landscape. If you fancy getting involved, why not subscribe to the mediatech mailing list?