Category: Uncategorized

L2ork on the Run!

In a decisive move to conquer an unsuspecting world, the L2Orkists have packed up their hemispherical speakers into their custom-made bags, loaded into three cramped minivans and begun a six-day sojourn through the mid-west.

With the first of three performances at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati happening at 7:30 PM our troop of droopy-eyed, wiimote wielding, laptop-virtuosos left a sleepy Blacksburg around 8 AM. Our caravan cut through a foreign countryside and, in 7 hours, arrived outside of an eager concert hall.

We unpacked and were left to our own devices to explore the surrounding city until sound check. A group of us found a hipster coffee shop and on suggestion by what could have been the owner, were led to an amazing Mediterranean restaurant and feasted on delicious Spicy Gyros. Later we returned to that hipster coffee shop and sipped on some of the best coffee that I’ve experienced in my lifetime.

As the opening act we were able to break down our set up and enjoy the rest of the concert, which kind of helped to put some perspective on the work we’ve been doing.

I had intended to finish this post before we left Cincinnati but the time to leave approached too quickly and since then we have traversed into 4 states and traveled 5+ hours and have arrived in Carbondale, IL where it is surprisingly flat and every store is separated into its own mini strip-mall.

We have a performance tomorrow at Southern Illinois University with Ron Coulter which should be exciting and then we pack up and journey to Indianapolis Friday for our last performance on Sunday.

This is Miles, signing off until next time!

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Kevin and Donovan from the Boys and Girls ClubHello all,

Over the last month L2Ork has been working with the Roanoke Boys and Girls club to adapt a laptop orchestra for use in elementary school education. I have been traveling to Roanoke 3 times a week to teach the students and help them make music. We currently have ten 5th grade students involved in the program, and they are all eager to learn and have been great to work with.

Both the students, and VT l2orkists are very excited by the opportunity to collaborate with one another through the use of the laptop orchestra. On April 17th, we very much look forward to performing with our fellow l2orkists from the Boys & Girls Club. Undoubtedly the upcoming concert will be a big step forward for all involved, and I urge everyone to attend.

More to come in the next couple weeks, Jonathan.

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L2Ork = L2ork * 2

It has begun. The excitement, patching, updating, coding, composing, fixing, soldering,… well, you get the point. L2Ork is back and is now bigger than ever. On the first day of classes we had students literally in the hallway as we could not fit everyone in the classroom, and DISIS is by no means a small space. So, now we are facing a problem: we have more students than stations. Our current infrastructure can support up to 16 l2orkists which leaves us with one dev notebook. In such a setup, however, we won’t have backup speakers left which is probably not a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good problem to have, yet on a flip side, given the nosedive our University’s budget has taken, it may be a while before we can support additional musicians, which is a shame as the very last thing I would want to do right now is to lose momentum because of such a problem.

Even though the ensemble has effectively doubled in size, we also lost in the process one of our last semester’s members. Jen is getting ready to graduate and that has made it difficult for her to stay with us, particularly as we look forward to hopefully touring later this year. On behalf of entire L2Ork I would like to hereby thank Jen for being a l2orkist when no one yet knew what being one even meant (needless to mention what it required), for believing in L2Ork and for being a part of the great success we’ve enjoyed in our debut performance last December.

One of the top priority tasks awaiting us this week is upgrading of our machines. After some testing we’ve decided to upgrade our setup to Ubuntu 9.10 (up from 9.04) which brings about a number of enhancements we like, including a prebuilt real-time kernel. So far the only regression we’ve identified is apparently buggy webcam driver. Given that currently we are not using camera for any of our L2Ork needs, it appears that benefits of upgrading to 9.10 far outweigh potential shortcomings. The word is also that a fix is in the works and that it has been already included in the upcoming 10.04 LTS (Long-Term-Support) release which is our ultimate near-term target upgrade currently scheduled for the summer of 2010.

There are a lot of other things and exciting news I wanted to share with you today but perhaps I should leave them for another time–in a sea of looming deadlines, time is truly a rare commodity we all are acutely low on, so I should probably get back to work and hope to get some decent sleep tonight…

Speaking of work, in the coming weeks, as we hopefully find time to catch our collective breaths, we will be posting additional content, including Linux resources, a new mailing list, detailed how-to documentation, and other goodies.

As always, please do not hesitate to contact us–we would love to hear your thoughts, comments, and ideas!

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Welcome to 2010

It’s been an amazingly restful break, so much so, the other day when I was filling out some VT paperwork I could not remember my office phone number. I am hoping this is a sign I indeed had a good vacation, rather than the fact that I am getting old…

Over the past weeks we’ve had enjoyed some great news coverage on L2Ork:

Since our December debut our site has received over 660,000 hits in December alone and our story has been featured in a number of international news outlets. Consequently, I would like to use this opportunity to extend my deepest gratitude to all who have showed such a tremendous interest in and support for L2Ork. Special thanks go to our PR Manager Jean Elliott as well as L2Ork Stakeholders and Sponsors and obviously all l2orkists without whom none of this would’ve been possible.

As I look forward to another semester full of new L2Ork adventures, I hope you will stay with us as we post additional content and information on this site, including Linux image and other software goodies. In the meantime, I invite you to check out the stories above as well as get a taste of L2Ork by visiting our Media pages.

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20/20

L2Ork Debut, Virginia Tech Studio Theatre, December 04, 2009As a number of l2orkists have already pointed out, L2Ork debut was a great success! We’ve had a packed house and a flattering amount of coverage, from regional news to Slashdot and other unsuspecting media sources.

As a thanks to all our L2Ork supporters and enthusiasts, we would like to share with you a piece from the program. So, head on to our jukebox for a quick listen.

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