Basque ads with Ubuntu on them
The Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa (local government of the province of Gipuzkoa in Spain) has a series of advertisings on TV for their i-gipuzkoa.net web site, within a campaign to promote the use of the Internet among the citizens.
The ads depict a family learning to use the net for different tasks, such as finding information or purchasing plane tickets. The remarkable thing is that the computer that the family is seen using boasts a GNOME desktop, apparently running under Ubuntu.
Below I show some screenshots of the videos, that are available for download in the “Videos” section of the i-gipuzkoa.net site. Underneath each picture there is a legend with the video it appears in, and the time (in minutes:seconds format) the image appears in the video.
Image 1 clearly shows that the desktop is GNOME, with its default top and bottom taskbars (only the top one can be seen in that pic), and the Ubuntu logo showing in the top-left corner. The windowing theme seems to be the default Ubuntu “Human” look. It is also apparent that the browser they use is Firefox.
1 – Video 2 (00:52)
Images 2 and 3 show that the browser window has been resized horizontally, so that the Ubuntu logo of the default background can be seen. It is hard to believe that the resizing of that window is casual. The resizing of the browser window (to show the Ubuntu logo) can even be seen in more than one video: e.g. video 8 (image 8).
2 – Video 1 (01:01)
3 – Video 1 (01:11)
The second video of the series shows the father and the son creating a web page for the father’s shop. To do so, they use Quanta+, as can be seen in image 4.
4 – Video 2 (00:42.36)
In some clips MS Windows is used (see image 5), but even there they use Firefox (see image 6).
5 – Video 3 (00:39.88)
6 – Video 3 (01:08.64)
Finally image 7 shows that in one clip OpenOffice.org is used to fill in some online document.
7 – Video 4 (00:50.64)
8 – Video 8 (01:05.44)
I find it highly significant that some official ads display such a prominent use of free software, to the extent of the window resizing for showing the Ubuntu logo, as I mention above. The simple fact that someone in the (ignorant) politic class has ever heard about Linux is a great step forward, I believe.
