Due to a confusion from our side we have to postponed the Drupal talk to June. Your President read the email too fast and didn't notice that there was also a Drupal Camp in Shanghai the following weekend (May 17th-18th) which our speaker has to prepare. Definitely sorry about this, but instead we're going to have a talk on a very hot topic that everyone of us should feel concerned about: Pollution in Beijing! So we're not really losing anything, are we?

Initially informed by our friend Dennis Kibbe from the Phoenix Linux User Group, and then confirmed by Leonard GU (a Shangainese living in London) who scanned and email us the article, Linux Format, UK's best-selling Linux magazine, has chosen us as the International LUG of the month! Not only that but they wrote a very nice article which I believe will make all of us, BLUG members, very proud. I also want to thank their editorial team for authorizing us to post the article for all our readers to see!

You can either read the text version below or click on the thumbnail to get to see the real scan!

Following up on that magic "Oyster Chuan'r Night" in January, Turingbook has decided to give us all the Linux/OSS books they had in their catalog in one shot! So we now have an extra 22 Chinese books (25 in total) which you can borrow from the openLibrary. Not only that, but they are looking at extending the cooperation with us and start a book review group to make sure that the content quality is up to our standards! That means that people subscribing to that group will get books before they are published and be able to make comments which will influence the quality of the final work. Least but not last, Turingbook would like to encourage Chinese BLUG members with some expertise to start writing their own books and offer to publish them! I don't think we could have dreamed of a better kind of partnership! Finally Yang FuChuan from Turingbook has a blog post explaining a bit more (in Chinese) here.

We've just received an extra batch of 8 books from O'reilly this week (Tuesday), making a total of 37 O'Reilly books now (+4 donations). As you all know by now we're enrolled in the O'Reilly User Group Program which gives us access to the full O'Reilly library and individual discounts of 35% from their online store. The list of titles received and which will be ordered this year is available on our wiki. Just to keep you guys updated, note that among those 8 books we have a few titles standing out for being related to our Quadcopter group. Click on the "read more" button to see what we are talking about.

With almost a week late, we're happy to inform you that Mandriva has released it's latest distribution. Why Mandriva you might ask us? Well, because Patrick Sinz from Mandriva is a regular here, and we're always happy to spread the word when it comes to members' projects. Besides we have a few other members (Funda and Freeflying) contributing daily to make this distribution working better in Chinese and it's worth mentioning it. The full press release is in the "read more" section of the article and Patrick should be back in town in about a month.