UbuCon Asia takes place somewhere in Asia towards the end of August each year. For its fifth birthday, the conference landed amid the eclectic late monsoon beauty of Kathmandu, Nepal, following memorable events in Jaipur, India (2024) and Surakarta, Indonesia (2023).
Community organization
All UbuCon events are community organized, and this year’s UbuCon Asia was the perfect demonstration of what our community can achieve when it combines skilled event leadership, excited and enthused volunteers and a local community hungry for anything Ubuntu.
The host venue was Saint Xavier’s College, a renowned centre for excellence that generously donated its space in the heart of the city. The 400 attendees were a mix of local Linux enthusiasts and technology students, all of them eager to share their ideas and initiatives. Across the two event days, and the following guided temple tour on Monday, there was no shortage of either.
The atmosphere was electric, from the opening plenary on Saturday morning to the cake-cutting ceremony late on Sunday afternoon. The time in between flowed far too fast as we jostled through corridors and down stairwells, moving between presentations, workshops, sponsored booths, and the delicious lunchtime curry and dahl.
Booth wars
Our own booth was quickly overwhelmed by sticker pirates, by students questioning the Ubuntu credentials of our touch-screen tablet, and by those who simply wanted to know more about Ubuntu, Canonical and open source.
While it took us a good 20 minutes to finalise the sticker arrangement on the first morning, it took seconds for our perfect symmetry to be decimated by the first wave of attendees.
Time and again, participants would gleefully hijack our Raspberry Pi 400 to replace our slideshow with their own code, the Matrix screensaver, or just to verify we were running Ubuntu (of course we were, with a fresh install each day).
Orange team are go!
In-between booth defence rotation, those of us from Canonical hosted our various presentations and workshops.
Alex Lutay talked about running PostgreSQL (Snap/Charm/Juju) on RISC-V, Andreia Velasco Gomes and Mauro Gaspari presented their Friendly guide to LXD, while there was some AI career advice from Andreea Munteanu (that’s advice on a career in AI, not advice generated by AI).
Dimple Kuriakose presented Confidential Computing Demystified, Graham Morrison helped attendees Make their first open source contribution, Pravesh Gaire shared his skills on Ubuntu systems in air-gapped environments and Tushar Gupta on Accelerating Launchpad Setup.
Last but not least, two local Canonical folks ran their own sessions, Shishir Subedi with AppArmor in Action and Bikalpa Dhakal on Running Spark on top of K8, after which Bikalpa transmogrified to become the Best Official Canonical Kathmandu Tour Guide and Food Orderer, Ever. Thanks again Bikalpa!
Closing time
After a wonderful closing ceremony, where we were each presented with thank you gifts by the organizing committee, we repaired to an ancient palace courtyard for a dinner hosted by another event sponsor, Programiz.
The balmy evening, good food, and even better company were the perfect closure to a weekend full of Ubuntu, enthusiasm, opportunity and friendship. Thank you to everyone involved, and we all hope to see you again next year.
