Aloha Lex,
This is a fantastic read and wonderful to hear! I'm always waiting for
success stories like this to come our way! This is the second time I've
heard of a radio station using Ubuntu Studio for their software platform
of choice as I was assisting someone in our IRC channel some months ago.
Maybe that was you? I'm not sure. :)
Either way, this is exactly why we make Ubuntu Studio among many,
because not only do we want to lower operational costs for use cases
everywhere, but we want people to understand what it is to be free from
vendor lock-in. From the home musician's studio to the broadcast studio,
such as yours, this software is for everyone.
I am very familiar with the Raspberry Pi 5. In addition to leading the
project that is Ubuntu Studio, I'm also the technical lead for Edubuntu,
a project led by my wife Amy. Amy is a teacher and Edubuntu is made for
educational communities, teachers, and learners. This past release
(24.04 LTS), we released our first ever image for the Raspberry Pi 5,
which I was able to test and sign-off on using a Raspberry Pi 5 that was
donated by a community member. One thing I can say is that Ubuntu (and
Edubuntu) runs beautifully on the Raspberry Pi 5, and I'm sure you've
noticed the same for Raspbian. I'm not sure how well Ubuntu Studio would
work on a Rapsberry Pi 5, but it might be worth experimenting with.
As far as "Broadcast Using This Tool (butt)" goes, it appears to be in
the Ubuntu repositories and may be a worthy addition to future Ubuntu
Studio versions, even as soon as 24.10 due out in October. I'll look
into this.
I've CC'd this email to the Community Team at Canonical consisting of
Aaron Prisk and Mauro Gaspari, along with Ubuntu Founder and Canonical
CEO Mark Shuttleworth, all people I consider friends. The Community Team
and Mark in particular love hearing success stories related to the
Official Ubuntu Flavors, of which Ubuntu Studio is one.
With that, I want to give my sincerest appreciation and thanks. Ubuntu
Studio is a labor of love for me, not only as an audio engineer of over
30 years, but because of the success stories like this one.
Mahalo,
Erich Eickmeyer
--
Erich Eickmeyer
Ubuntu MOTU
Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio
Technical Lead - Edubuntu
On 7/27/24 18:18, Lex White wrote:
Aloha, my name is Lex White and I'm your friendly neighborhood
Director of Development here at Kaua'i Community Radio (KKCR). I wear
a lot of hats at the station, including underwriting, community
outreach, hardware and software development, website design, graphic
design, and all kinds of ways of developing our station to be better
able to continue serving you, our community, and to serve the goals of
our mission such as preserving and perpetuating the Hawaiian culture,
and providing a platform of free speech for underrepresented voices.
In pursuit of these goals, I have made some sweeping changes in the
way that the station handles our technology and especially the kinds
of hardware and software we choose to use and deploy. I would like to
take a few moments to share with you some of my background and history
with computing, non-profits, and the Free Open Source Software (FOSS)
community.
In our modern age of complex digitization, where computers are more
and more an inseperable part of our lives, where we carry around in
our pockets computers so powerful that they can even outperform the
supercomputers of yesteryear. At this crucial place in human
development, it is vital that we take some time to consider the
repercussions and consequences of our unprecedented access to
information and ability to compute and process information at speeds
never before dreamed of by our species. We must choose between the
shackles of digital slavery, imposed on us by large corporate tech
interests whose profit motive has been admittedly the driving force
behind much of our modern technological revolution, and a future of
true digital freedom and transparency, with equality for all users and
administrators of technological systems.
A powerful part of that movement in computing freedom has come out
of the Free Software movement. Free Software is often said to mean
"free as in freedom, not as in beer." That is to say that the
software itself is not required to have no pricetag, but it is
required to have a certain transparency and accessibility so that we
as end-users can always know precisely what code we are running on our
machines, and what our electricity and data is truly being used for.
There have been some powerful personalities and players that have come
out of this field, and I won't list all of them right now, but for now
I would like to direct your attention to the Free Software Foundation
(FSF), the GNU is Not Unix (GNU) Foundation, and the Canonical group
that puts out the Ubuntu distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.
Here at KKCR we have a lot of legacy hardware and software that we
are trying to improve, and we can improve it best by adopting an
ethical and far-sighted view of the impact of technology. We want our
future generations to have a world worth inheriting from us and not be
sentenced to a lifetime of digital slavery to unscrupulous
corporations and out-of-control Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
To accomplish that goal, I have instituted a policy of gradually
migrating the station away from proprietary, walled garden software
and hardware that manufactured for profit by large corporations that
you are very familiar with, like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, to move
toward solutions that respect the freedoms of their users to have
digital privacy and freedom in their ability to use their hardware and
software how they choose.
To this end, we now run all of our office computers on the station
on a GNU/Linux distribution called Ubuntu Studio, which is
predominantly aimed at creating a FOSS computing platform for creative
individuals and organizations like ours to flourish with all the tools
that we need. Ubuntu Studio is not necessarily perfect in every
possible way, and it does allow for the use of proprietary software
that does not have to respect the freedoms of its users, but it is a
significant step in the right direction for us here at KKCR, and it is
a practical and pragmatic solution to our computing needs and the
challenges that face our station. I want to thank the Ubuntu Studio
community for all that they have done to make a platform for digital
creators to have the creative space to bring their artistic vision to
the world. I also have designed and set up some remote broadcasting
devices based on the Raspberry Pi 5, a single board computer, running
the Linux distribution Raspbian, and using the broadcasting software
called, hilariously, BUTT (Broadcast Using This Tool). So believe me
when I say that our radio sometimes has to be pulled straight out of
our BUTT. Haha. Anyway.
My point in bringing this all to your attention as our community of
loving and caring individuals is to enlighten you to the idea that our
hardware and software does not have to limit us to the walled gardens
of corporate masters who would limit our freedom and control our
access to information and data. We have already seen how large social
media companies can restrict our ability to exercise free speech, and
we have also seen recently in the news how large, proprietary software
developers like Microsoft develop unsafe computing platforms that put
all of their users at risk because they choose to use a design
philosophy of Security through Obscurity.
We here at KKCR do not support the ideology of Security through
Obscurity, whether it be used by the intelligence agencies in the name
of national security, or whether it be used by software developers to
protect their supposed "intellectual copyrights" at the cost of making
our software act as a kind of black box that could be running any
arbitrary, malicious code without our knowledge. Instead, we support
free speech, and the ideology of Security through Transparency, a
value that I know all of us here at the station hold near and dear to
our hearts, and which I hope you, our listeners, volunteers, and
community will take as an example of an organization that truly has
ethical values and that takes its freedom and integrity seriously.
I assure you that I will continue to do everything that I can to
support these values in our workplace, and to promote them across the
world through the means available to us as a free, non-profit media
platform. We support the FOSS community and we appreciate all the
work the many thousands of developers have done to create a better
digital world for all of us to enjoy and prosper from. Please join me
in appreciating these developers by checking out the foundations I
have mentioned above, and considering ways in which you can transition
in your own life from a pattern of digital slavery to a world of
digital freedom. I know to many of you this will be shocking news,
you may not even realize the ways in which your freedoms have been
insidiously eroded by a corrupt and exploitative class of corporate
executives and bankers, but I know that some of you out there will
hear this message and hear its truth. Let the voice of freedom ring
from every hill and every valley, from every mountaintop that we
broadcast our signal to the majestic and wonderful Hawaiian Islands
and the people of this magical and unique 'Aina. Let your voice be
heard as well by joining us in a chorus of voices that sing and cry
for freedom, not just for ourselves, but for all beings everywhere.
Aloha and hallelujah. Mahalo for your time and attention, and for your
continuing support of KKCR and our goals.
-Lex White
--
ubuntu-studio-devel mailing list
ubuntu-studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel