I don’t like unconditionally clearing /tmp on boot, since I’m invariably working on something in there when my system locks up. But I do like /tmp getting cleaned up from time to time. As a compromise, I’ve set TMPTIME=7 in /etc/default/rcS so that only stuff older than 7 days is deleted when I reboot.

Debug packages and PPAs

Follwing up on my previous post about how Kubuntu 10.04’s Dr. Konqi will be able to install debug packages if the users asks it to.

I was asked by a friend whether this is also going to work with the Kubuntu PPAs. Since he usually uses the KDE pre-releases and updates from the Kubuntu PPAs that is a very good question indeed. And the simple answer is yes.

All core KDE packages ship have an associated debug package, that includes those that are available via PPAs. For non-core packages it looks a bit different. It mostly depends on whether the package is regularly worked on by Kubuntu Ninjas or not. Those that are mostly also have these debug packages, but those that are not might indeed not have debug packages in a PPA. The reason for this is a bit of a technical one so we better don’t dive into that ^^ (in case you care, I’ll explain it in a bit more detail at the end of this post).

PPAs figured out

On this note I would like to announce that we have a sensible PPA setup now and clearly documented what kind of software needs to go where. We have 4 PPAs that are somewhat suited for use. This somewhat means that they are naturally not guaranteed to be issue free, unfortunately it is an almost impossible task to guarantee this all the time, simply because there are too many possible upgrade/update scenarios we would have to run QA tests against. Anyhow, there are some PPAs for adventurous users and some for a more general audience that rather risk some issues than wait weeks until we can land updates in an official Ubuntu repsitories.
Clay Webber published a blog post on which PPA you would want to use as a user in order to get a specific type of update. For all those that care of a more detailed guideline document there is also a page in the Kubuntu wiki (thanks to Clay for that too).

In consequence this means that, unless you have some very specific needs, you should need no more than 4 (in fact you really would only want 3 anyway) PPAs to get an up-to-date KDE system.

Why there is no -dbg

Before reading this I recommend to read my post about Dr. Konqi’s debug package installer since I assume basic knowledge about the debug symbol stuff procedure here .

Above I mentioned that there are no debug package for some non-core packages. Now that was not entirely true. There are no debug packages for some non-core packages in regular repositories (that includes PPAs). The thing is that all those debug symbols that were stripped from the regular package do not get thrown away, they simply get put into seperate packages and those can be found in the so called ddebs archive. This archive contains packages with a -dbgsym suffix (short for debug symbols ) and those contain the debug symbols to their associated packages in the official Ubuntu archives (including the updates, security and backports repositories).

This has 2 major implications on how things work:
For one it takes probably >10,000 packages off the cache lists for the regular archives, and for another it means that packages outside the official repositories do not have those -dbgsym packages. So, in general this is a good thing, since not having the -dbgsym packages in the regular archives reduces the download time for the package lists and of course speeds up queries to the local copies of those lists (such as done by apt-cache). At the same time it also means that PPA packages would end up without debug packages, which of course is a bad thing.

And yet I told you that all core KDE packages have debug symbols. How is that possible, you might wonder (or not ). Again I only told you a part of the truth, if the package maintainer decides to have a -dbg package in the regular archives they can work around the stripping and move all debug symbols to another package (say kdelibs5-dbg) and those packages will then end up in any archive the source package gets built for. This is the case for most of the more important packages (those that are on the Kubuntu CD and worked on by Kubuntu Ninjas). Now since it’s mostly important packages that get published to our PPAs this means that you just need to request the appropriate debug packages and we can easily add them either temporary (only for the PPA) or globally (for all further package publications).

I hope this shed enough light on both the PPA and the debug package business

I saw the Translations of package descriptions video from FOSDEM 2010. Every distribution has two translatable string for each package: a synopsis (summary, short description) and a long description. These descriptions differ from distribution to distribution. The descriptions should be shared between the distributions. This will enable us to share the translations of the descriptions.

My idea: Why not letting upstream provide the package description and the translation for it? They should have the knowledge to provide a good description and to update it if required. To encourage upstream to provide the description, we should create a freedesktop specification for it. Quick draft: The tarball should contain a file named package.info. The package.info file should contain three RFC-2822-like fields for each package: Package, Synopsis, and Description. Translation can be stored in package.info.<language> (for example package.info.de).

Example package.info:

Package: audacity
Synopsis: A fast, cross-platform audio editor
Description: Audacity is a multi-track audio editor for Linux/Unix,
 MacOS and Windows. It is designed for easy recording, playing
 and editing of digital audio. Audacity features digital effects and
 spectrum analysis tools. Editing is very fast and provides unlimited
 undo/redo.
 .
 Supported file formats include Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and AU.

What do you think about this idea?

Edit: Alexandre Franke found an existing markup language designed for our use case: Description of a Project (DOAP). Package is name there, synopsis is shortdesc, and description is description. Here is my example in DOAP:

<Project xmlns="http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
  <name>Audacity</name>
  <shortdesc xml:lang="en">
    A fast, cross-platform audio editor
  </shortdesc>
  <description xml:lang="en">
    Audacity is a multi-track audio editor for Linux/Unix,
    MacOS and Windows. It is designed for easy recording, playing
    and editing of digital audio. Audacity features digital effects and
    spectrum analysis tools. Editing is very fast and provides unlimited
    undo/redo.
    Supported file formats include Ogg Vorbis, MP2, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and AU.
  </description>
</Project>

Please don’t forget to add your team to the Event List if you’re planning on running a jam as part of the Global Jam! People can’t show up to your wonderfully planned event if they don’t know about it!

Tagged: jam, loco, ubuntu

For the first time in several years, I had the opportunity to attend a software conference in the city where I lived at the time. I’ve benefited from many InfoQ articles in the past couple of years, and watched recordings of some excellent talks from previous QCon events, so I jumped at the opportunity to attend QCon London 2010. It is being held in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center, conveniently located a short walk away from Canonical’s London office.

Whenever I attend conferences, I can’t help taking note of which operating systems are in use, and this tells me something about the audience. I was surprised to notice that in addition to the expected Mac and Windows presence, there was a substantial Ubuntu contingent and some Fedora as well.

Today’s tracks included two of particular interest to me at the moment: Dev and Ops: A single team and the unfortunately gendered Software Craftsmanship.

Jason Gorman: Beyond Masters and Apprentices

A Scalable, Peer-led Model For Building Good Habits In Large & Diverse Development Teams

Jason explained the method he uses to coach software developers.
I got a bad seat on the left side of the auditorium, where it was hard to see the slides because they were blocked by the lectern, so I may have missed a few points.

He began by outlining some of the primary factors which make software more difficult to change over time:

• Readability: developers spend a lot of their time trying to understand code that they (or someone else) have written
• Complexity: as well as making code more difficult to understand, complexity increases the chance of errors. More complex code can fail in more ways.
• Duplication: when code is duplicated, it’s more difficult to change because we need to keep track of the copies and often change them all
• Dependencies and the “ripple effect”: highly interdependent code is more difficult to change, because a change in one place requires corresponding changes elsewhere
• Regression Test Assurance: I didn’t quite follow how this fit into the list, to be honest. Regression tests are supposed to make it easier to change the code, because errors can be caught more easily.

He then outlined the fundamental principles of his method:

• Focus on Learning over Teaching – a motivated learner will find their own way, so focus on enabling them to pull the lesson rather than pushing it to them (“there is a big difference between knowing how to do something and being able to do it”)
• Focus on Ability over Knowledge – learn by doing, and evaluate progress through practice as well (“how do you know when a juggler can juggle?”)

…and went on to outline the process from start to finish:

1. Orientation, where peers agree on good habits related to the subject being learned. The goal seemed to be to draw out knowledge from the group, allowing them to define their own school of thought with regard to how the work should be done. In other words, learn to do what they know, rather than trying to inject knowledge.
2. Practice programming, trying to exercise these habits and learn “the right way to do it”
3. Evaluation through peer review, where team members pair up and observe each other. Over the course of 40-60 hours, they watch each other program and check off where they are observed practicing the habits.
4. Assessment, where learners practice a time-boxed programming exercise, which is recorded. The focus is on methodical correctness, not speed of progress. Observers watch the recording (which only displays the code), and note instances where the habit was not practiced. The assessment is passed only if less than three errors are noticed.
5. Recognition, which comes through a certificate issued by the coach, but also through admission to a networking group on LinkedIn, promoting peer recognition

Jason noted that this method of assessing was good practice in itself, helping learners to practice pairing and observation in a rigorous way.

After the principal coach coaches a pilot group, the pilot group then goes on to coach others while they study the next stage of material.

To conclude, Jason gave us a live demo of the assessment technique, by launching Eclipse and writing a simple class using TDD live on the projector. The audience were provided with worksheets containing a list of the habits to observe, and instructed to note instances where he did not practice them.

Julian Simpson: Siloes are for farmers

Production deployments using all your team

After a brief introduction to the problems targeted by the devops approach, Julian offered some advice on how to do it right.

He began with the people issues, reminding us of Weinberg’s second law, which is “no matter what they tell you, it’s always a people problem”.

His people tips:

• In keeping with a recent trend, he criticized email as a severely flawed communication medium, best avoided.
• respect everyone
• have lunch with people on the other side of the wall
• discuss your problems with other groups (don’t just ask for a specific solution)
• invite everyone to stand-ups and retrospectives
• co-locate the sysadmins and developers (thomas allen)

Next, a few process suggestions:

• Avoid code ownership generally (or rather, promote joint/collective ownership)
• Pair developers with sysadmins
• It’s done when the code is in production (I would rephrase as: it’s not done until the code is in production)

and then tools:

• Teach your sysadmins to use version control
• Help your developers write performant code
• Help developers with managing their dev environment
• Run your deploy scripts via continuous integration (leading toward continuous deployment)
• Use Puppet or Chef (useful as a form of documentation as well as deployment tools, and on developer workstations as well as servers)
• Integrate monitoring and continuous integration (test monitoring in the development environment)
• Deliver code as OS packages (e.g. RPM, DEB)
• Separate binaries and configuration
• Harden systems immediately and enable logging for tuning security configuration (i.e. configure developer workstations with real security, making the development environment closer to production)
• Give developers access to production logs and data
• Re-create the developer environment often (to clear out accumulated cruft)

I agreed with a lot of what was said, objected to some, and lacked clarity on a few points. I think this kind of material is well suited to a multi-way BOF style discussion rather than a presentation format, and would have liked more opportunity for discussion.

Lars George and Fabrizio Schmidt: Social networks and the Richness of Data

Getting distributed webservices done with Nosql

Lars and Fabrizio described the general “social network problem”, and how they went about solving it. This problem space involves the processing, aggregation and dissemination of notifications for a very high volume of events, as commonly manifest in social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter which connect people to each other to share updates. Apparently simple functionality, such as displaying the most recent updates from one’s “friends”, quickly become complex at scale.

As an example of the magnitude of the problem, he explained that they process 18 million events per day, and how in the course of storing and sharing these across the social graph, some operations peak as high as 150,000 per second. Such large and rapidly changing data sets represent a serious scaling challenge.

They originally built a monolithic, synchronous system called Phoenix, built on:

• LAMP frontends: Apache+PHP+APC (500 of them)
• Sharded MySQL multi-master databases (150 of them)
• memcache nodes with 1TB+ (60 of them)

They then added on asynchronous services alongside this, to handle things like Twitter and mobile devices, using Java (Tomcat) and RabbitMQ. The web frontend would send out AMQP messages, which would then be picked up by the asynchronous services, which would (where applicable) communicate back to Phoenix through an HTTP API call.

When the time came to re-architect their activity , they identified the following requirements:

• endless scalability
• storage- and cloud-independent
• fast
• flexible and extensible data model

This led them to an architecture based on:

• Nginx + Janitor
• Embedded Jetty + RESTeasy
• NoSQL storage backends (no fewer than three: Redis, Voldemort and Hazelcast)

They described this architecture in depth. The things which stood out for me were:

• They used different update strategies (push vs. pull) depending on the level of fan-out for the node (i.e. number of “friends”)
• They implemented a time-based activity filter which recorded a global timeline, from minutes out to days. Rather than traversing all of the user’s “friends” looking for events, they just scan the most recent events to see if their friends appear there.
• They created a distributed, scalable concurrent ID generator based on Hazelcast, which uses distributed locking to assign ranges to nodes, so that nodes can then quickly (locally) assign individual IDs
• It’s interesting how many of the off-the-shelf components had native scaling, replication, and sharding features. This sort of thing is effectively standard equipment now.

Their list of lessons learned:

• Start benchmarking and profiling your app early
• A fast and easy deployment keeps motivation high
• Configure Voldemort carefully (especially on large heap machines)
• Read the mailing lists of the NoSQL system you use
• No solution in docs? – read the sources
• At some point stop discussing and just do it

Andres Kitt: Building Skype

Learnings from almost five years as a Skype Architect

Andres began with an overview of Skype, which serves 800,000 registered users per employee (650 vs. 521 million). Their core team is based in Estonia. Their main functionality is peer-to-peer, but they do need substantial server infrastructure (PHP, C, C++, PostgreSQL) for things like peer-to-peer supporting glue, e-commerce and SIP integration. Skype uses PostgreSQL heavily in some interesting ways, in a complex multi-tiered architecture of databases and proxies.

His first lesson was that technical rules of thumb can lead us astray. It is always tempting to use patterns that have worked for us previously, in a different project, team or company, but they may not be right for another context. They can and should be used as a starting point for discussion, but not presumed to be the solution.

Second, he emphasized the importance of paying attention to functional architecture, not only technical architecture. As an example, he showed how the Skype web store, which sells only 4 products (skype in, skype out, voicemail, and subscription bundles of the previous three) became incredibly complex, because no one was responsible for this. Complex functional architecture leads to complex technical architecture, which is undesirable as he noted in his next point.

Keep it simple: minimize functionality, and minimize complexity. He gave an example of how their queuing system’s performance and scalability were greatly enhanced by removing functionality (the guarantee to deliver messages exactly once), which enabled the simplification of the system.

He also shared some organizational learnings, which I appreciated. Maybe my filters are playing tricks on me, but it seems as if more and more discussion of software engineering is focusing on organizing people. I interpret this as a sign of growing maturity in the industry, which (as Andres noted) has its roots in a somewhat asocial culture.

He noted that architecture needs to fit your organization. Design needs to be measured primarily by how well they solve business problems, rather than beauty or elegance.

He stressed the importance of communication, a term which I think is becoming so overused and diluted in organizations that it is not very useful. It’s used to refer to everything from roles and responsibilities, to personal relationships, to cultural norming, and more. In the case of Skype, what Andres learned was the importance of organizing and empowering people to facilitate alignment, information flow and understanding between different parts of the business. Skype evolved an architecture team which interfaces between (multiple) business units and (multiple) engineering teams, helping each to understand the other and taking responsibility for the overall system design.

Conclusion

Overall, I thought the day’s talks gave me new insight into how Internet applications are being developed and deployed in the real world today. They affirmed some of what I’ve been wondering about, and gave me some new things to think about as well. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

THIS is an interesting thing done by Google today. They have finally added cycling routes to their maps. This is a really nice feature if you are just a casual rider. I know there are a few of us in the Ubuntu community who are not casual riders and we live for speed, we live for flying past pack fodder, and we aren’t afraid of hills. Well, Google maps new cycling route feature is afraid of hills, and when you use it, Google maps will route you around any hills. BOO!

I am sorry, but if Google was serious about the cycling stuff, they could have learned a lesson or two from Map My Ride. Map My Ride is amazing, as it will map, allow you to design a ride, and track your rides with a great level of detail.

Note to readers from the Ubuntu Planet - this is written for people whom don't have a clue what Ubuntu is. Hence why I describe it.

With the global economy in a depression, most people cannot currently afford to buy a new computer. But, you don't have to.

If your computer can run Windows XP (or possibly ME) or above slightly fast, it can run Linux, specifically the Ubuntu distribution (distro) (if you know the specifications of your machine, compare them to mine, which runs Ubuntu perfectly fine, with just a little lag during CPU intensive applications: Pentium 4 1.8GHz with 1GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce 6200 graphics card).

Ubuntu is a free and open source operating system based off the Linux kernel. It is a complete and fully functional operating system that you can use to browse the web, read email, compose documents and spreadsheets, and so much more. Almost any day-to-day activity that you can do with Windows you can do with Ubuntu.

And it's completely free, or, for a better term, software libre. You will always be able to freely download, edit, use, and redistribute Ubuntu.

If you are getting tired of being bothered by viruses, spyware, and the crashes that are well known to Windows users, you should try Ubuntu. Ubuntu rarely crashes and is almost completely immune to viruses and spyware. Ubuntu is far more secure than Windows at the most basic level, providing you piece of mind that your data is safe.

Ubuntu takes a minimal amount of technological knowledge and time to install, and you will be up and running in a few minutes.

If something goes wrong or if you have a question, Ubuntu has a massive, extremely friendly, and knowledgeable community of people whom are always willing to help with any question or problem you may encounter.

For more information on Ubuntu, see the project web site at http://ubuntu.com/.

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The Danish Ubuntu LoCo team had a community booth at the 2010 Open Source Days in Copenhagen last weekend.

The picture shows us (and the Exherbo guys next to us) setting up early Friday morning. Later in the day a Zebrapig banner joined the Ubuntu banner. All the community booths were located on the first floor, upstairs from the firms and organisations who had a paid booth. I didn’t take that many pictures, and the ones I did take didn’t turn out that great, but Flickr seems to have a nice collection if you are curious.

The new theme for Ubuntu Lucid had just been released the day before, so Friday, when we weren’t talking to people about Ubuntu, we spend a bit of time arguing for and against the new colour scheme.
We managed to hand out all our remaining Ubuntu 9.10 CD’s and Jesper gave a talk about ubuntu-dk.

As always, it was nice to meet up with the other people from the LoCo team. Although we do a lot of work together, it is often via e-mail or irc chat. Putting names to faces is always a pleasure. The beers both Friday and Saturday night were also a pleasure – beer and good company seldom lets you down.

We even managed to do some planning for the coming Ubuntu Global Jam.

Anders is set on doing an entire day of translating Sunday 28 at his place. And the plan is to do some more general bugwork on Friday and Saturday. Location is still to be decided, but properly Jesper or I will open our homes to the masses of Ubuntu volunteers. Stay tuned for more info about the Global Jam in Copenhagen / Denmark.

Related posts:

• Open Source Days – I got my ticket!
• Pictures from Open Source Days 2008
• Open Source Software conference
• Late Global Jam in Copenhagen

There’s a lot of people planning their participation right now. If you’re not on the list yet, have a look what others are planning to get some inspiration:

• Manchester (England, England), UK
• Montréal, Canada
• Waterloo region, Canada
• Budapest, Hungary
• Århus, Denmark
• Prague, Czech Republic
• and there’s lots and lots of others planning and discussing it.

Just hop on #ubuntu-locoteams on irc.freenode.net and discuss it there. At 21:00 UTC today (10th March) Jorge Castro will give a session about to run YOUR jam. Awesome!

More good docs here and here.

We finally have an units policy in Ubuntu. I started to work on this issue over a year ago. The first step was to talk to other people (Ubuntu developers and upstream), but the opinions diverged. Neither a consensus was found, nor any result came out of it (except heated discussions). Upstream was not willing to change anything. It was time to contact the Technical Board to get a decision for Ubuntu.

Now we have the policy and we can start filing bug reports and fixing them without discussions about the reasonability of the patches. Let’s get Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) in shape!

On Monday our partner Groundwork Open Source, whom are selling a monitoring solutions that they recently certified for Ubuntu, published their statistics of the OS on which they see GWOS running on.

read more

March 8, 2010 - 1st Annual Ubuntu Women Project "How I discovered Ubuntu." International Women’s Day Competition

The Competition which was announced back in January, asked women and girls who use Ubuntu to submit their "How I discovered Ubuntu" stories. We as a Project acknowledge that there is no one definite answer to "How do you get women to use Ubuntu?", but wanted a way to highlight some of the various ways that women become Ubuntu users, contributors, and developers and at the same time not only have those stories as examples but also as a growing gift of encouragement and inspiration to women.

In order for events/competitions to be successful it takes community participation, and a heart felt thank you to all those who participated by submitting their personal "How I discovered Ubuntu." stories, those who took the time to vote, those who helped promote, and those who supported this initiative as well as offer encouragement to those might not have submitted their stories otherwise. I am grateful for everyone involved in the Ubuntu Women Project and greater Ubuntu Community as a whole who are continually helping to provide both the platform and encouragement for women to contribute to Ubuntu.

The winners of an awesome prize pack are: Elvira Martinez and Karen Y. Perez with honorable mention going to Jen Phillips as well. CONGRATULATIONS!!!! Here are there stories:

***Elvira Martinez "tatica1" ***

Today my Honduran team mate Diego Turcios shared with me this link to Amber’s blog that excited me to finally write about how I met Ubuntu. I wanted to share this a while ago but I feel motivated about doing it through Ubuntu-women and not just for the sole interest in participating in the contest. I think it will be very interesting to hear how other women became interested in Ubuntu and others may be interested in my experience, specially considering that I am not the “computer girl” precisely.

After nearly 20 years after my high school graduation in Colombia Lycée Français Paul Valery, I found again one of my classmates through Facebook (I guess) Fabian Rodriguez known as MagicFab who after asking him what he was doing today, he mentioned Ubuntu as part of his activities. And I say activities, because Ubuntu is much more than an operating system.

I’ve always liked the world of computer science and unfortunately that was not what I studied, but I learned on my own how to manage, fix, clean my home machines. I could say that the world of computers is my passion and when Fabian told me about this, I knew it was no fluke.

I remember the first thing I said was: Ubuntu what?? How do you eat that?? And then after a brief speach about it and some information he sent to me to read on the subject, dropped his usual phrase, “If you want to install it, I can help you do it now”. Well, two days later, I was harrassing Fabian to help me install Ubuntu after a bunch of questions I had.

Some of my concerns were:

1. If I would be able to use MSN and Skype with camera and audio included.
2. My biggest question was if I could run iTunes on the computer (tool my daughters and my husband use).
3. If Windows had to be removed to use Ubuntu.
4. If I’ll have Office, PowerPoint or Excel with Ubuntu also and if so, would be so easy to use as those.
5. If I was going to be able to install Ubuntu alone, long distance with Fabian’s instructions.

Well, the day I gave a YES myself to Ubuntu, began with a phone call from Fabian from Canada. After downloading into my own computer some files, we start by checking whether they were good and then install it. I remember Fabian told me, don’t install it yet first test it. Then after his explanations that I could partition the computer and leave Windows intact but also have Ubuntu too I said “Let’s do it and install it now”. And so it was, on the phone, with his help, that I installed for the first time in one of my computers Hardy 8.04 and some months later in another Ubuntu 8.10.

When he finally said, “Take a last click and you’re done, finished,” I could not believe it!! First, I had allowed to risk to install another operating system on my computer and two, that I had done through instructions by telephone. That meant that it could be do so easily! That’s how my story began with Ubuntu in June 2008 : D

Months later I bought an Acer Aspire One that came with Linpus and my next challenge was to install Ubuntu on it. It was a laptop (and not a desktop) and needed a version for netbooks so I tried first to fight with LPIA platform with which I ended up frustrated because after installing it did not work and gave me error. Then it was new to me to download an ISO file to my laptop and also install it throught a USB. I think it was two weeks without my computer, sweating and suffering, but with some help of several friends of the Honduran community I finally had Ubuntu on my Acer. I remember I installed 8.10 version which gave me enough slow problems on my laptop, but when I upgraded to 9.10, I was sooo happy;)

From Ubuntu, I further research, looking and learning how to move in the Ubuntu world. As part of that and then again by MagicFab’s suggestions I learned how to participate via IRC in different communities, to tell my experiences with applications in Ubuntu, I dared to start my own blog for the first time telling my experience with the Ubuntu Desktop Course (elearning), learned to use my blog as a tool through which I can inform others about Ubuntu, participating in lists of the communities I belong and learned how to handle wiki, blueprint and documentation pages to share information to others.

Today I am part of the community and am in several team where I hope to be able to support as I learn from everyone’s experiences too. I am a member in the communities of Ubuntu Honduras, Colombia, Women, Guatemala and El Salvador. Almost daily I am present in IRC channels of Honduras, Colombia and Women getting feedback and contributing wherever I can. I still can not work actively participate in all these media but try to do when I feel more confident about the subject. English is my third language, so I am kind of shy in the ubuntu-women channel.

Today I know that there is Free Software and Ubuntu exists there with all its benefits over other systems. I also know that although I did not study computers, I can handle and learn thousands of things about it and help knowing others that will benefit too.

Today I belong and work hand by hand with others in the Honduras Ubuntu community, promoting Ubuntu in the country, mostly in San Pedro Sula where I currently reside. With the support Fabian gave me, I revived the group that was practically abandoned and we are trying again today to show people of Honduras that Ubuntu is the best choice when it comes to choosing an operating system. Every day I try to learn more and see how I can support other Ubuntu users here and elsewhere. I am very excited to be part of this team and I love to learn and collaborate with this good cause;)

Since I started being part of this community, I had the opportunity to share with others from other distros like Fedora or Debian. There is little that I have experienced them, but for now I’m only interested in Ubuntu.

My name is Elvira Martinez or tatica1 as I I’m known in the community and my main challenge is to convince my daughters and my husband that Ubuntu is the best choice when we talk about operating systems.

***Karen Y. Perez***

When I was a little girl i saw my dad studying computer science to eventually working on projects. Like most little girls I admire my dad more than anyone in the world and I always tried to be just like him. I read many books like him, I begged for my own laptop and fell in love with space. Since then my passion for science, math and technology developed. There were moments where I loved chemistry more than physics and times where math was better than astronomy. But, my passion for computers never faded once. Each year I pleaded my dad to teach me how to program because his code was like a puzzle i need to understand. So, every so often he would teach me bits and pieces but only enough to keep my curiosity afloat and have me do my own research. One day I stumbled across one of my dad’s Unix books in his library. I didn’t really understand much at the time so I tried my very best to read it and eventually I did some research on-line. While doing my research I read about Linux and I saw what the open source revolution was all about. I taught myself as much as I could and I decided to convert my laptop to Linux for the first time in ‘09. Ubuntu has helped me with my studies in computer science and helped me stay open to new things of course including technologies. The last thing a geek needs is to not want to explore outside of the box. I guess you can say I’m a self pro-claimed fem-geek and I couldn’t imagine life any other way. Although, I am no professional yet I do try to talk to other girls and show them how great of an experience using Linux Ubuntu is as well as many other great “geeky” technologies. I hope to one day show young girls that there is more to life than fashion. That you can be as “fashionable” as Barbie and yet be an astronaut.

***Jen Phillips***

Learning to Fly

Some years ago, I used to travel everywhere by bus. The company that ran it was called Microsoft, and I used the Number 3.1. It generally got me where I needed to be, but it took a bit of an odd route to get there, and it would often stop at seemingly random points. If I fancied a change, I could take my walkman, or a book. It wasn’t the most comfortable ride, but it did ok, and I was used to it. After a while, the company decided to upgrade all their busses and change all the routes - and put the fares up. I went onto the Number 95, and everything looked nice and shiny, although I missed my stop a couple of times because I wasn’t used to the route. After a while I realised that although the route didn’t take the same detours, it took new ones, so I didn’t really get where I was going any faster. The busses all seemed to get a bit dingy after a while, too. Still, I had my CD walkman, and it became familiar again.

Eventually, I took the plunge, and got a car. I loved the freedom - I could go where I wanted to go, when I wanted to go. I wasn’t constrained by having to have the right money, and I didn’t have to stop for the sake of everyone else. It was a SuSE, and it was mine and I loved it. Except, any time anything went wrong I had to ask for help. When the radio stopped working, I had to get someone else to fix it. If i couldn’t find a particular stick or button, I had to get someone to show me where it was. It also wouldn’t play any of my old CDs. In short, it was frustrating. I tried a couple of other cars, but they weren’t any better. I took ages getting my Debian to even start, and somehow had a knack for stalling it before I got to the end of the street. Eventually, I gave up and went back to the bus - the XP route now had air conditioning and contoured seats, and I could cope with the delays (and occasional breakdowns) because it did tend to get me there in the end.

Then one day, something quite miraculous happened: someone gave me a pair of wings. In only a couple of lessons, I was flying! I no longer have to wait for the bus, and I don’t need a mechanic to come and rescue me any more. If I want different music, I can just pick up a media player and set it going. If I want to dye my wings a different colour, that’s easy too. I decide which route to take - I’m not even limited by roads any more. The best thing is that flying feels so natural - like walking only better. I call these wings “Ubuntu”.

These story submissions along with all the others are available on the Ubuntu Women Project wiki pages.

Without the efforts of Ubuntu Women Project team member, Melissa Draper, the competition may have never made it to the community, the time and talent she personally put into this competition by drafting the competition as well as writing the voting submission application was awesome! - Thanks Melissa!

It is also important to say thank you to the sponsors of this competition, Rikki Kite, Associate Publisher, Linux Pro and Ubuntu User Magazines, for donating Linux Pro or Ubuntu User Magazine subscriptions (choice of one per winner), to Canonical for donating the Ubuntu Backpacks, notebooks, pens, lanyards, pins and T-shirts, at last but not least to Jono Bacon for making the announcement of the winners as well as for copies of Art of Community.

Again, Congratulations to the winners of the prize packs as well as all those who submitted your person Ubuntu discovery stories. I can’t wait to read the submissions for the 2nd Annual Ubuntu Women Project “How I discovered Ubuntu.” International Women’s Day Competition, so mark your calendars and work on YOUR personal discovery of Ubuntu to help celebrate 100 years of International Women’s Day.

REMINDER: If you or someone you know would like to find out more information about the Ubuntu Women Project there are several ways to do so - website, mailing list, IRC channel(s), and Ubuntu Women Forums

[Discuss the International Women’s Day Competition Winners on the Forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by Amber Graner on Tue Mar 9 04:46:28 GMT 2010

Just wanted to update everyone who showed interest in the new release of GNOME Developer Kit I announced yesterday. Based on some preliminary statistics I collected in the (less than) last 24 hours, it seems that the VMware image type got the most download, followed closely by the installable ISO format. I guess that was due to VirtualBox being able to use *.vmdk files and some people opting for the free virtualization tool.

Here are the preliminary results so far:

1. VMware image: 42 downloads
2. Installable ISO: 26 downloads
3. RAW filesystem image: 17 downloads

Due to the number of downloads and and comments I received, I felt that I should provide with some background on how to install/remove packages and update your system using the conary package management system. So here you go:

The package management system behind the GNOME Developer Kit is called conary and is considered by many as the next generation package management system when compared to some of the popular options out there. One of the reasons behind this claim is the fact that your entire system is actually completely maintained in a versioned state, and conary is always “aware” of what is installed on your system and what files and dependencies make up the entire “set”. This allows for some pretty nifty operations such as rolling back to a specific state of your system.

In order to check for new updates for your system, open a terminal and run the command sudo conary updateall. conary will then check for updates and prompt you to accept the update or not. Please keep in mind that the first time you run conary for the first time, you will experience a delay as your entire system gets analyzed in preparation for the changes that are to take place. All subsequent actions performed will be much faster, I promise. If after a while you don’t feel like waiting for the prompt, add –no-interactive to the update command to have your system updated automatically.

Now, let’s just say that you decided to install something new, such as Banshee. Easy, just run sudo conary update banshee (remember to add –no-interactive for no-hands updates) and voilá!

Want to know what was actually installed on your system? conary q banshee will tell you what version of banshee was installed. How about what files were installed? conary q –ls banshee will give you a list of all the files that were installed and conary q –lsl banshee will give you the long list with file permissions and modes.

Changed your mind and want to remove banshee from your system? sudo conary erase banshee will take care of that. Want to actually roll your system back to the state it was before you installed banshee instead? sudo conary rollback 1 will rollback your system exactly one transaction. Want to go further back? Just increase that number to represent how many transactions to roll back. Want to rollback but don’t remember what point in time you want to go? sudo conary rblist will display a list of all transactions and what was changed. Note that each transaction is preceded by the letter “r“, so if you want to rollback to the point r.15, then use sudo conary rollback r.15 (and don’t forget that “r” or you’ll rollback exactly 15 transactions instead).

How about searching for a package? If it is something that it is already installed on your system, then conary q [package name] will give you the information you want. If the package is not installed on your system yet, then conary rq [package name] is what you need, though since conary does not yet make use of metadata, you’ll need to know the exact name of what you’re looking for. Now, let’s say you want to find out what package provides the command /sbin/service? Use conary q –path /sbin/service to find out that initscripts:runtime=8.81.2-0.11-1 is responsible for providing it (use rq if you want to search the remote repository).

Well, I think this is enough to get you going. You’ll probably want to install Flash and media codecs to enjoy browsing some sites and listening to your media, so let’s apply what we’ve learned so far and run: sudo conary update flashplayer group-codecs

If you’ve stayed with me until now, you may want to read up on what else conary can do or even consider packaging for GNOME Developer Kit. Your help will be greatly appreciated!

This week Disney’s 2nd Alice in Wonderland in 3D came out and I had the chance to go see Avatar in 3D… ok that may not make sense to normal people, but the further towards the end of a films run you see it, the more money the cinema gets and the less money the studio gets. I only mention Alice because I wanted a cool blog title.

What I love about these 3DReal films is that they give you polarising glasses. And I wanted to know what kind of geeky fun could be had and I’ve hit upon a surprising use for them:

If you’re a designer or an artist you often have to change the mood of a picture or design, making things more blue, yellow or red to get the right setting. Well using these glasses you just have to tilt your head to the right to make an LCD look more blue and tilt to the left to get a more yellow image. It’s really very cool.

So, here I am, a bit peeved but more humored than anything else. Today I spent some time with a client of mine, actually a friend. His company asked me to come in and sit in while 5 other companies bid on a project they are working on. I listened to sales people all day long, and it isn’t like I have anything against all sales people, just a vast majority of them. My head was spinning when it was all over with. So, I got to listen to 4 companies give their spiel about using Linux here, possibly Windows there, and one even promoted the idea of using Macs as the workstations. Interesting stuff by these 4 companies, yet still boring as hell. Then come sales dude number five, the second or maybe third largest tool I have ever had the great privilege of meeting in my life. He comes prepared no doubt, gives us a groovy presentation handout, business cards, and even a pretty cool pen. I love swag, so I grabbed a handful of pens. I flipped over this guys business card before he introduced himself, and there it was, in big bold letters, Microsoft. Rock on, this should be entertaining, and boy was it!

I will not go in to details on who this guy is or what he does either at Microsoft or one of their partners, however Microsoft was on his business card, bigger than anything else. Anyways, he starts out rocking. He had me impressed, all kinds of charts, cost cutting avenues, cost and benefit analysis which made my socks roll it was so damn sexy. He even had the project mapped out, which none of the other 4 groups had done. Thus far, literature wise, he dusted the other 4. I was starting to cheer for this dude, got a little hot and bothered there for a second, sorry, back on track here. So, he finishes his Microsoft talk, and it was great this far. Then he thanks the other 4 groups there, and seemed really nice, until…”Let me show you where these other groups don’t make the mark, seriously Mac? Let’s start by showing you how they have this whole Linux thing wrong. First it is created in the basements of unemployed hobbiests, it isn’t as secure as its made out to be, and needless to say all of the patents they are infringing upon, therefor making it a liability for you to even use.” Now that was paraphrased, but my jaw was on the ground. He knew I literally just shat myself, but what he didn’t know is I am a Linux fanboy and hacker. I was actually dressed a little nice, wearing my typical wise guy hat. He said something else, but I can’t remember what it was, all I remember is I grabbed my laptop bag like it was my gun holster, and from it I pulled out my 9mm. Err, I pulled out my netbook, which has 2 stickers on there, and both say Kubuntu.

He just chuckled at me, which I think infuriated me more than what I had just heard. So now he tries to explain himself, back peddles at least to the point where he admits there are great corporations behind Linux development. But the 4 other groups that were there and myself really wanted to know, and before I could say anything, the CEO of the one group, Mandy I think her name was, chimed in with a, “Could you please explain the patents Linux infringes?” He gave her a brief look, and she went all comedian on him, and I had to hold back everything just not to start rolling on the floor. She lets out a, “No, before you continue, can you please explain that, as I would hate to be sued by some insane company for something they think is theres.” He wouldn’t answer at all and would only state he wasn’t allowed to speak about it. Oh boy, I am peeing myself by this time. So I look at my buddy, and I had to do it, some of you might have heard me say it before, but I just had to do it.

You know, I have been thinking about writing a piece of software that did nothing but infringe upon every software patent there was.

Brief pause, trying to get the people to do the, “OK dude, wtf are you getting at?” And when I got that look, I finished with…

But it’s to late, as Microsoft beat me to it.

Yes, very childish and immature, but it had to be done. So, that was my Microsoft bash. Listen, if you are a salesman, especially a Microsoft salesman or partner, don’t do your unfounded threats in a professional manner. You might be surprised that the people sitting in the room might just see right through you, and today, they saw through you, big time! In the end, it looks like there might be a combination of 2 of the companies used. One of the companies is the one who suggested the Macs as the workstations, and the reasoning behind it was good. On the server side, there will be Linux. In the end, a very entertaining day. Even this former or current FBI Cyber Security guy even poked fun at the Microsoft salesman. Supposedly he is one of the gentleman that also helped rip off the state of Illinois with frivolous claims about Linux, and boy did Illinois fall for it.

Anyways, just wanted to share that with everyone, as it was a fun story, probably a more of a “You had to have been there.” Now this salesman wasn’t the only one to bend the truth or outright lie, so salesman, be careful, not everyone is dumber than you anymore!

This blog entry represents the views of me, myself and I, and does not represent the views of my employer (Canonical) or System 76. While I have decided to write a review of this specific machine, there are many vendors out there who ship Ubuntu on their machines and this review does not favor System76 over these other vendors. Heck, I am happy to review their machines too if they want.

Recently I got one of these new System 76 ultra-thin laptops, the Lemur:

System76 are well known in the Open Source community for shipping Ubuntu on their machines, being active community members and for helping LoCo teams with machines too. I have never owned a System76 box so I thought this was a good opportunity to give it a ride and share some feedback.

So first, the specs:

• Display: 14.0″ HD WXGA Super Clear Ultra-Bright LED backlit (1366 x 768)
• Graphics: Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics
• Audio Output: Intel High Definition Audio
• Networking: Gigabit LAN (10/100/1000), WiFi
• Wireless: 802.11 agn
• Expansion: Express Card 34 slot
• Ports: HDMI, VGA, 3 x USB 2.0, Headphone Jack, Microphone Jack, SD Reader
• Camera: Built-In 1.3 MP Webcam
• Security: Kensington® Lock
• Power Management: Suspend & Hibernate
• Battery: Lemur UltraThin Li-Polymer Battery Pack
• AC Adapter: includes one AC adapter
• Dimensions: 13.38″ x 9.09″ x 0.90″ (WxDxH)
• Weight: 3.5 lbs

The machine I got has an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3 GHz 800 MHz FSB 3 MB L2 (10 Watt), 4GB RAM (DDR3 1066 MHz 1 DIMM) and a 80 GB Intel X25-M Solid State Drive.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure: I don’t really do reviews, so this is going to be a quick run through the details, not a 150-picture unboxing and War And Peace epic of every minor detail of the machine. I just wanted to get my experience down as quickly as possible so I could share my feedback with others.

The Machine

OK, let’s zip through the summary:

The machine is a really sleek looking bit of kit. The first thing that struck me is how well designed it feels: it doesn’t feel like a randomly thrown together collection of components. It is thin and incredibly light, and has a very Apple-ish feel to it. It passed what I am calling the Lost Test: that is, when laid in bed at night watching Lost on Hulu with said laptop rested on your chest (for that IMAX effect), how many episodes can you get though before you feel like your heart is about to overheat and stop working. It’s lightness and lack of heat helped it pass with flying colors.

The screen looks great, doesn’t seem to smudge easily and is nice and bright. I like the fact it is a widescreen, something I miss with my current Thinkpad.

The keyboard is pretty much ok: it ain’t no Thinkpad keyboard, but of all the laptops I have owned and that are buried in my laptop graveyard, the Lemur’s keyboard feels better than most. The keys are wide enough and I love the fact that there is no Windows key, but instead an Ubuntu key. I want to see more of that, yes I do.

The trackpad is long and feels pretty good, and the buttons don’t look like buttons but instead areas on the trackpad near the bottom where you can push down: this makes it look really sleek. Unfortunately at first the buttons are a little hard to press, but I have noticed that they are getting easier, so I think they just need breaking in a little.

With the current configuration of processor and RAM, this thing is shit off a shovel fast. It zips along like no-ones business, and Ubuntu is up and running in a matter of seconds. While I didn’t test any hardcore 3D games on there, it runs Compiz great with the extra effects switched on.

Sounds works great, the speakers sound surprisingly good and the built-in webcam works well too. Finally, the battery life seems fine in terms of life, but not outstanding. Then again, I am used to my extra-long-life Thinkpad batteries.

My only real gripe believe it or not is the packaging the machine comes in: it visually looks cheap with a large generic “notebook” logo and doesn’t reflect the swishness of the machine encased inside it. I spoke to Carl Richell, founder of System76 about this and he has acknowledged it is an issue and they are keen to fix it: he said they really want every essence of the System76 experience to feel sleek. Good man.

The Default Install: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

It is just incredible driving back from picking up a computer from the UPS warehouse and knowing that it already has Ubuntu pre-installed. I have never bought a pre-installed Ubuntu computer before, so I was curious to see how it looked. I got it home, switched it on and it threw up the installer’s configuration settings: I entered my details and the system was ready to roll. I was left with pretty much a default installation of Ubuntu: there is not the horrible bundled collection of software you don’t want and ugly vendor wallpaper that you find if you buy a typical Windows pre-loaded machine. Good work System76 on shipping what I consider a great representation of Ubuntu.

Other than that, nothing much to say: everything just works as you would expect.

Running Lucid

Being part of the Ubuntu development team, I was keen to get Lucid on there. I used Update Manager to update to Lucid and installation was smooth. Once again everything works: any bugs that I have found have not been specific to this machine, but replicated on my other Lucid machine. What is really noticeable is boot speed on the SSD: it is bonkers fast.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think the Lemur is a beautiful machine, and combined with what I consider a beautiful Operating System, particularly with the new fit and finish of Lucid. When running the Lemur it really feels like great design in hardware and software meeting well. I would happily recommend this machine to others.

I keep hearing how Mac like the new theme for Ubuntu 10.04 is. I prefer to view it as less Windows like than more Mac like .

…that this part of my desktop could feel so sleek:

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, we are ready for you.

Back in the days, we did not have capabilities to find and install debug packages with Dr. Konqi in KDE. But those times are over!

Debug packages are important, well, actually very important. When an application crashes it is in most cases possible to create a so called backtrace. A backtrace ideally provides the developer with the precise location in the source code where the crash happened. Fixing a crash without this kind of information is almost impossible, and the more information are available in the backtrace the better. Debug packages contribute to this in that their content are debug symbols, essentially those are the references that are used in the backtrace. Now, usually you do not need to have this information to use the software, which is the reason a lot of distributions strip the symbols into these seperated debug packages (one can save a big deal of disk space by removing them).

In case you did not yet hear of Dr. Konqi. It is a very useful tool that usually pops up when a KDE application crashes. It then tries to get all information necessary for you to create a perfectly useful bug report.

There is big of a problem, on the one hand you do not want to waste disk space and network traffic for these debug symbols, even though like 99% of the regular users will not need them, and on the other hand you have Dr. Konqi which is trying to obtain a high quality backtrace that enables developers to quickly process a bug report and fix a crash in their software.

Not KDE 4.4not GNOME 3.0 and not KDE SC 4.4but Dr. Konqi 2.1 comes to rescue and now allows distribution developers to create scripts that take care of the find an installing of debug packages, so that the debugging experience becomes a bit better. Well, obviously debugging is not much of a user experience eitherway but at least getting a backtrace is now more barable than it was before.

The system is quite simple. Dr. Konqi calls an executable, passing it all files for which no debug symbols were found for as arguments, then the executable tries to find and install the appropriate packages and returns back to Dr. Konqi. Straight forward really

Since I am, amongst other things, Kubuntu developer and since this blog post is tagged ‘kubuntu’ of course I am only blogging about this because Kubuntu today got support for this fancy new feature . Should you encounter a crash in upcoming Kubuntu 10.04 Dr. Konqi will not only tell you how good the quality of the automatic generated backtrace is, but also show a button with which you can install missing debug symbols.

Additionally I might mention that Kubuntu has a new mantra of using C++ whenever possible (in opposite to the former one, which was to use Python whenever possible), hence the application standing behind this new features is written in C++ and got the fancy name kubuntu-debug-installer.

In case you care, the code is available on launchpad, and fairly simple. It really just creates a thread and uses dpkg -S to find the appropriate packages. In later versions it will also be able to use other means of looking up debug packages and be able to add a super secret Kubuntu repository for debug packages automatically, if necessary.

What I would like to see for future KDE releases is the possibility to directly tie a plugin into Dr. Konqi instead of having to create an independet application. But for now we’ll try to get kubuntu-debug-installer the ability to use different algorithms for finding the appropriate debug packages (also using different tools, since for example apt-file performs better than dpkg-query, but requires an up-to-date cache etc.) and of course support of a special Kubuntu repository that contains debug packages for all and every official Kubuntu package.

I’m re-blogging Evan Boldt’s message to the SU team:

_                                                                     _

SpreadUbuntu is participating in the new Ubuntu branding project. We want to start some discussion about the new layouts, design, and logo.

Please take a look at this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/Projects/SpreadUbuntu/Brand

Some things to discuss:

• New Logo
  Check out the current versions. See what you can make out of it. There is a source file on the wiki. Upload it to the wiki when you are done!
• Navigation
  • Where should the navigation be placed? The ‘primary’ navigation (get, make, translate, and share) is on the left (top for the home page)
  • To match the other websites, it should be moved to the orange bar at the top, yet the logos and descriptions are still desirable.
  • What would be the best way to keep them?
  • Where should secondary navigation be placed? Currently it is on the left side only for logged in users. If the primary is moved to the top, the secondary will be the only thing occupying the left sidebar, which would be a weird transition from not logged in to logged in.

• Front Page
  • What improvements can be made to the home page? Is there any information it needs?
  • Is the current layout ideal? Nearly no visitor clicks any of the ‘top rated materials’. Instead, they go for a ‘media’ or click ‘get materials’.
• Font
  Browsers with support for @font-face are growing large enough that we can pick whatever font we want. Do we want to use something like Liberation Sans for all text?
• Materials Node
  This is the layout you see when you click on a material you want, and you are given the option to download images or source. It displays information about the material. How can this be brought to the new style?

Please make some mock-ups of what you want to see happen, and add it to the wiki at the top in the appropriate section.

_                                                                     _

My addition:

• An initial mock-up can be seen here. SpreadUbuntu uses Drupal 6 and as such our theme should be usable for the whole Ubuntu Community once it’s done. – Yes this is our way to say hi to the Ubuntu-Drupal team
• The SpreadUbuntu team is planning a Sprint on the next UDS. Key resources of the team will gather in Brussels, Belgium in May and work on implementing the necessary changes, adaptations and requirements (social, political and technical) of the site so it can graduate as a Ubuntu marketing team project and become a official resource for the Ubuntu Community.
  • If you are interested in being part of this several-days-running-sprint or want to join the (yet to be applied for) Community session please contact me directly by email:  huayra _@tt_ ubuntu _d.t com

Thanks in advance for your help!

If you just let things happen in a collaborative project with design/artwork needs, you will likely see a few people creating proposals that mostly cover the same ground. They all will base there work on their own assumptions regarding various aspects of the project. This might not even happen consciously, but be more about gut feeling.

The same applies to other collaborators providing feedback. Everyone has an opinion on matters of design. People talk a lot of what they like or don’t like, seldom giving reasons.

This way there is no shared idea of what should be achieved and how to judge proposals. No common ground for collaboration.

A collaborative project should have a documented mission statement/vision/set of goals. You need to define where you wan to end up, before you can take care of getting there. Otherwise you rely on chance alone. This is especially important for artwork, because it shouldn’t be about individual taste or the latest fashion, but rather be constructed to help further the goals of the project.

Even making some people unhappy is better than having no direction.

You should work from a mission statement, a project briefing, towards defining your audience, the desired tone and your message. This will be your measure to decide what is and isn’t appropriate regarding design and artwork.

Your audience, your users might be quite different from your collaborators.

There’s also the aspect of breaking a big problem down into a set of smaller ones. This helps with covering every aspect and detail. As far as there is subjectivity, it’s much better to deal with it in small parts instead of at once, for the entire design.

Filed under: Illustration, Planet Ubuntu, Thoughts

Just a kind thank you note to the gThumb authors for completely breaking my workflow by re-inventing the paradigm used to save imported pictures. Until now, all my pictures landed in a predictable location, using a predictable filename pattern that was easily searchable. Not anymore. Now, files land into my home directory, according to some recursive folder pattern that further complicates searching for files and requires a few more clicks to accomplish. Dammit! Couldn't you at least make this configurable, so that those of us who prefer to retain the old paradigm can?!

Note: re-inventing an application's paradigms is always a very bad idea. If you're a software developer who is reading this, please keep it in mind and go scratch your itch to change the world somewhere else. Thank you.

Post Scriptum

Many thanks to Damon Lynch for pointing me to his own professional picture importer called Rapid. This is an extremely configurable importing tool and, lo and behold, Damon even offers builds for Ubuntu via his PPA!

Still, the consequence of this mess is that migrating to Rapid means that I'll be loosing gThumb's simple but extremely efficient editing tools. To me, one strength of gTthumb was this unique combination of picture importing with basic editing tools. Now, I'm forced to split these interconnected tasks, simply because someone chose to completely rethink gThumb's paradigms. I'm of course aware of Gimp's existence, but repeated attempts at mastering it made me conclude that it's entirely the wrong software for my needs and essentially overkill. By contrast, gThumb offers just enough tools to enable someone to crop images to useful sizes and to adjust color balances in easy steps; it does the job without hassle, which is not the case with Gimp.

Thinking out loud, it is precisely on days like these that the urge to create my own Linux distribution keeps on coming to mind. Retaining consistent paradigms in the desktop environment and applications that I use, not to mention maintaining the number of duplicate libraries to a bare minimal, has been a constant struggle and, noticing how some developers' urge to re-invent the wheel every other day, using whatever new programming language of the day, persistently takes precedence over keeping system resource consumption to a bare minimum and over preserving user sanity, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Free Software has veered way too far into the bazaar and urgently needs a copious amount of cathedral to make it usable for mere mortals again.

Some dpkg-based distribution where the only scripting language allowed is Bourne shell and the only programming languages C or C++ comes to mind. Of course, this would also require porting popular application from e.g. Java, Python, etc. which would be a colossal amount of work. Still, I think that the time has come for this to happen. As an added bonus, this would make applications usable again on embedded devices with spartan CPU, RAM and storage resources, so this project could generate huge benefits to the embedded Linux industry. Based on my experience at my previous jobs, I have a rather clear picture (pun intended) of what needs to be done and of who I would hire to make it happen. What I'm missing are investors. Who's with me?

In the ongoing project of ubuntu server dailies we have added qemu-kvm to be built daily from the upstream git archive. You can find it here.

Brian Murray finds out what makes LP’s new patches view awesome.

Not bad! Karl Fogel is currently working on hiding the Fix Committed and Fix Released bugs by default so it’s more of a queue than a huge pile in your face. I am keen to get more feedback on +patches and how it affects your team so don’t be shy!

Tagged: launchpad, patches, ubuntu

UPDATE: Thanks Alberto Ruiz for pointing out that VirtualBox can use .vmdk files, so the VMware image can be used for that purpose.

Thanks to the incredible work of Zhang “Jesse” Sen and Vladimir Melo, a brand new release of the GNOME Developer Kit has been published! “What’s new”, you may ask? Everything, since all packages are built directly from git.gnome.org! But that alone is not what makes this release so cool, but the fact that the final image went through a dramatic “diet”, shedding a lot of its “weight” and going from a 1.4GB monster to less than 700MB of pure GNOME goodness!!!

From Screenshots

Firefox was replaced by Epiphany and codecs and fancy-Nancy stuff was scrapped to make room for a lightweight release for developers and translators!

So go ahead and try the new images today:

• x86  VMware (R) Virtual Appliance 636 MB, SHA1: 4b4266fc1a65189d65efd7f3ac51797396babf78
• x86  Appliance Installable ISO 697 MB, SHA1: c3345cadae9c7338d0b92ba0ad1a187930652357
• x86  Parallels, QEMU (Raw Hard Disk) 644 MB, SHA1: e3dbbff4e65f8e086f422885a24d8ee04bc89f44

This weekend, I went with bokunenjin to the 100.tea.bowls exhibit hosted by The Art League which lives in Old Town Alexandria’s (VA) Torpedo Factory. The quality of tea bowl styles, purposes, and quality varied, but we were both impressed with some of the available pieces. Most of them were also very affordable! There were several I would have loved to purchase and bring home with me, but I settled on one particular piece. This bowl was done by artist Jennifer Dinkelmeyer.

Although the piece was unnamed, I will call it Koi Pond. The colors and bumps around the outside of the bowl remind me of koi gliding under the water and occasionally breaking the surface in search of food. The black base color of the outside and inside of the bowl reminds me of cold, dark, and muddy water. Perhaps this bowl could be a metaphor for that first walk after winter through the garden to see and feed the koi.

The bi-annual ikebana show was also colocated with the 100.tea.bowls exhibit. Some of the pieces were interesting in more ways than one. The ikebana (japanese flower arranging) on display were also a — sometimes violent — contrast to the chabana (flower arranging for tea) I’ve seen.

Take a close look at this beautiful image by John Rogers of the Austin skyline ... Do you see some purple? Maybe some orange? How about a few clouds? Reminds me a bit of the new Ubuntu color scheme...

Well the Texas Linux Fest committee has accepted my proposal to demo the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud!

So if you're interested in seeing a demonstration of the 10.04 LTS Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud in action, join me in Austin, Texas on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at the first ever Texas Linux Fest.

In my presentation, I will use:

• One free Ubuntu Server ISO (10.04 Beta2 64-bit) burned to a USB stick
  
• Two laptops, and
  
• Twenty Minutes
  

And you will witness the ease of deploying an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), Canonical's open source implementation of an Amazon EC2-compatible cloud that you can run locally, in your own data center and on your own hardware.

In this presentation, you will learn about the UEC, Eucalyptus, Cloud topologies, the installation process, registering nodes, running and terminating instances in the Cloud, and the UEC Image Store.

Bring a blank 1GB+ USB key and I'll even burn you a copy of the same ISO I use in my presentation.

Cloud Computing is here, and Ubuntu is a phenomenal platform on which you can construct your private Cloud today. Since 2004, Ubuntu has revolutionized the Linux desktop. Attend this session and learn how Ubuntu is changing the landscape of the Linux server.

:-Dustin

Whilst I was quite happily sleeping yesterday morning, the International Women’s Day competition winners were announced. The popular vote prize went to Elvira Martinez “tatica1″. The second prize went to Karen Y. Perez, and Jen Phillips got an honourable mention for her awesome analogy-style story.

You can read all the stories and see the record of votes on the Ubuntu Women wiki.

Thanks so much to everyone who entered and voted (and Jono for announcing). The competition was heaps of fun to organise and now we have lots of stories to show that we forge our own paths to Ubuntu just like the guys do!

I meant to blog about Harvest a long time earlier already. With the help of fantastic people like Paul Hummer, James Westby and Dave Walker, we got to the point were almost all of the ideas we wanted to have in the new design are implemented:

• Commenting,
• marking opportunities irrelevant,
• package set based information
• lots of others things

It’s going to be online soon, but there’s still a few things that would be nice to have resolved. If you know a bit about Django, Web UIs, python or want to dive right in, I’d appreciate your help with making Harvest rock.

1. $ bzr branch lp:harvest
2. $ less harvest/INSTALL
3. follow instructions
4. help make Harvest rock!

It's always nice to see the amount of interest that just a simple table at say, Geekfest Montreal can generate. We gave out a couple of CDs, showed off 10.04, and generally got a very nice amount of support and interest for the Ubuntu-QC LoCo and our Global Jam event.

These two guys shed about 42 pounds of fur per day (it seems), and I like robots and automation, so a few weeks ago, I bought a Roomba.

Really neat...at least in principle.

However, the stock Roomba is simply incompatible with my house. 100% of the daily runs concluded prematurely with the Roomba inevitably stuck under my couch.


That sucks. And not in the vacuum cleaner sort of way that it's supposed to suck. Throw the automation out of the window if you have to un-wedge the machine from beneath your furniture every time, and it doesn't make it back to the recharging station.

Time for a bit of ingenuity...

I had unused four adhesive rubber "feet" that came with a wireless router (or something). I stuck these to the top of the Roomba sensor, adding about 2cm of additional required clearance, and poof--a working robot again!



Five days running now, and not a single wedging ;-)



:-Dustin

Did you ever have to deal with source packages and found the variety of patch systems simply mind-boggling? I certainly have.

Enter: the unstoppable Michael Vogt.

If you are running lucid and don’t have ubuntu-dev-tools installed, install it now. Forget about all the crazy stuff and incantations you might need for random patch system X, Y or Z (it supports cdbs, dpatch and quilt at the moment), just type:

edit-patch <name-of-patch>

and it will do the rest for you, even remind you do make use of the patch tagging guidelines.

Michael simply rocks! Give him a hug and if you find bugs in edit-patch, file them.

For those unfamiliar with the title of this blog post, let me introduce you to one of the most important tags in Launchpad: regression-potential.

What bugs tagged as regression-potential mean? Basically, they mean that a regression has been found in the development release of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx, at the moment of writing).

Why are they so important? Because it means that a regression has been found but, good news, we still can do something about it.

These bugs are specially important in the kernel. Nobody likes to see hardware, working in previous versions of Ubuntu, failing once upgraded to the new one.
Jeremy Foshee, a QA member of the Kernel team, is trying to avoid as many regressions in the kernel as possible. As announced in several mailing lists, he is going to be organizing a weekly bug day of kernel bugs marked as regression-potential from today and until the release of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). If you want to help avoiding regressions in Lucid, every Tuesday, you can check the Kernel Bug Day page, which includes a list of bugs that need some love. If you have doubts on how to help, please, join the kernel team on #ubuntu-kernel at freenode IRC, and feel free to ask any question.

The more people helping triaging regression-potential bugs, the fewer regression-release bugs Lucid will have.

Well this will be a short and sweet one, I have generated a simple wallpaper for Lucid for my laptop. (1920x1200), thought I would share it with all of you. Hope you everyone likes it.

Download

I’ve finally soldered on the LEDs for the Cylon DorkShield I designed and got built in a recent DorkBotPDX PCB run. I’m having trouble with the programmer, but I got the shield mostly working:

Which is more powerful?

Say we have a software project in the FOSS community and say it needs to have 5 developers work on it, spending a total of 90 developer days between them in order to get it to a usable state. That’s a fairly large amount of work and most people will dismiss the project, as it’s not in a usable state.

This is the FOSS bootstrapping problem. If you can’t find a way to boot your project, then you’ll be toiling on it for years. Slowly becoming more behind with the technology. Most programmers don’t want to do that.

To solve this you can inject money into the problem. Get a decent amount of investment at the start a simply pay programmers to make the thing work. This is a good way to do it as I like it when programmers get paid.

Otherwise your going to have to drum up some community support and it’s going to need an awful lot of faith in the leader, the project idea and the prospects of it succeeding. Telling a bunch of people that it will succeed with their help is rather hard if you need a bunch of people to all believe it in order for it not to be a lie.

But, isn’t money just faith too? sure your not investing your time any more, but your investing your money and in some quarts that may be worse. Does this mean that we should be able to start interesting projects or does this mean that we have to gradually, very slowly work our way up to the goal with small pieces, evolve them forward with what we have to prove their worth first?

Your thoughts?

A few weeks ago, the GNOME Foundation has been contacted by the organizers of the Idlelo conference in order to get a GNOME presence during the event. Quoting the website of the event:

IDLELO is one event for FOSS practitioners, developers and advocates as well as governments to showcase results, share experiences and challenges, review progress on the continent in diverse domains and chart a way forward for an African future grounded in true ownership of technology. IDLELO is therefore a premier international forum for the presentation of research results in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Africa.

The event will occur in May, in Accra, Ghana.

There have been many discussions in the past about how to get more community involvement in Africa, and there's no magical solution. But a good first step is, for sure, to be present at events that are being organized on the african continent. We're already sending Luis de Bethencourt to FOSS Nigeria, and we want to be at Idlelo too.

If everything goes well, the amazing Fernando will go deliver training sessions before the conference itself; but we need one more person to man a booth during the conference. While this is not a hard requirement, we'd still like to have a GNOME Foundation member who feels empowered to talk in the name of the Foundation. If you're interested in representing GNOME at Idlelo, please get in touch with the board. I'm sure you'll enjoy it!

Amber Graner: Today we talk to Emma Jane Hogbin, Technical Author, HiCKTech creator, Drupal Guru, Ubuntu Member and the list goes on. Before I want to say thank you for taking the time to tell us about your journey into the Ubuntu Project. Emma can you tell us a little about when and how you got involved in FOSS? Also, How and when did you get involved with the Ubuntu Project?

Emma Jane Hogbin: When I first graduated from university I chatted with various companies to find out what kind of work I wanted to do. (My degree is in Environmental Science, but I took a job as a project manager for a Web design company that specialized in web sites for environmental groups.) One of the companies that I met with had an entire shelf of Adobe software boxes. I made a comment about warez sites, and the owner of the company responded by saying that carpenters don't steal their hammers. My father is a wood worker, so this hit home in exactly the right way for me. From that point on I started looking into free and open source tools.

I spent a year using only FOSS software on Windows before making the final switch to the Linux desktop (Debian). I immediately had problems with my laptop and had to patch and recompile my kernel. The Debian mailing list encouraged me to write up the steps I'd taken to fix my problem. Werner Heuser (tuxmobil.org) encouraged me to publish them with the Linux Documentation Project. From that point on I have been at least peripherally involved in the desktop communities for the distro that I use.

AG: Emma you are involved in so many wonderful projects; you took part in Ubuntu Open Week (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek) with a session on "Writing a Book" (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/openweekKarmic/WriteBook). Can you tell us about your Drupal Book and other technical writings you have done.

EJH: Front End Drupal, my first book with a Real Publisher, has been a fantastic journey. I love teaching. It isn't so much about being the authority though. I love it when my students leap beyond what I've said and make their own predictions about how things work. Front End Drupal isn't your typical computer book. It has lots of little bits to keep the reader interested. From ponies, kittens, and ducks to pirates, orks and hobbits, Front End Drupal is actually a "readable" book.

I don't always inject my sense of humour into my technical writing though. When I'm contributing to a collected work (such as a documentation project) I tend to be more "straight" in my writing style. This makes it easier for other contributors, and also for the reader who may be jumping in and out of the documentation at various points. To date I've contributed documentation to a number of open source projects including Bazaar, Drupal, The Linux Documentation Project, and Ubuntu.

AG: Your HiCK Tech site is full of amazing classes? First what is HiCK Tech the conference? What is HiCK Tech the Company? How did you come up with the idea behind it? And What Classes are offered there.

EJH: HICK Tech the conference is a one-day rural technology forum that addresses How the Internet Connects Knowledge. The goal is to highlight the amazing achievements in rural technology (including bovine breeding, and linking remote hospitals to track disease); but also to share some of the innovative "high tech" things that happen in the big city. I live in a rural community and felt isolated from all of the conferences that were happening in big cities. Instead of being upset about what I didn't have, I decided to throw myself a conference that had all the elements that were important to me.

From the one-day conference an entire consulting company has emerged (HICK Tech the company). The things that I deal with as a small business in rural Canada are not unique. Open source software can solve nearly all of the problems that are presented to me by my clients. HICK Tech tries to figure out how to pool resources to make technology even more affordable. I've given several talks on my 100 Mile Client Roster and have started to collect this information at www.100mileclientroster.com in an attempt to help other small businesses earn a living in their communities.

The classes that HICK Tech offers all help small businesses get more from technology. The students are small business owners who need to learn specific skills to keep their own Web presence up-to-date. I've also had interest from designers who want to learn open source tools; and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to launch their own Web design business.

AG: The first time I spoke with you was in the Ubuntu Women IRC Channel on Freenode, so I know you are involved in this Project, can you tell us about your involvement with this Project and also are there any other teams/groups/projects that focus on Women in Open Source you are involved in or could recommend.

EJH: My initial involvements with the UW project were focused on moving beyond a gendered social space. While I think these spaces are incredibly important, we are at risk of never moving beyond them to participation in the broader community. Within the UW project I have mostly worked on community advocacy. I encourage other women to step up to their passions and take part in the larger FOSS community. I have actively encouraged women to present at conferences, and to apply for sponsorship to events. I help squash the "I'm not good enough" bug and empower women to feel confident about their abilities, and to ask questions when they need help.

Women should feel welcome in any community they want to be a part of. The reality is that not every community welcomes newcomers with grace. Every contributor to open source projects needs to be able to feel their time and opinions are going to matter. Sometimes it can take a couple of attempts to find someone in a project who will be a good mentor. I encourage everyone to be persistent when they are passionate; but to move on when the fit doesn't feel good.

AG: Are there any other FOSS projects, such as your documentation work, that you are involved in that you would like to take the time to share with everyone?

EJH: I'm really excited about all of the great work that's been happening in the world of documentation. This year I hosted what I believe is the first ever open source documentation conference. We had contributors from many different open source projects and participants from four different countries. Usability is getting a lot of attention these days, and I think it's only a matter of time before people realize how important user help and documentation are to the user experience. The conference will be running again in 2010. People who are passionate about user help and documentation are encouraged to create an account at www.writingopensource.com.

AG: When I read about how you released the pattern for you one of your knitting projects a bell went off for me anyway: GPL can be used for many things only one of which is Operation Systems and Code. I have seen first hand the brilliant and complex knitting projects you work on, and I have seen pictures of the now famous Drupal Socks you have knitted as well. Any plans for some Ubuntu socks, other items? Can you tell us about the GPL license you released the pattern for the socks under?

EJH: Not all community contributions have to be made in front of a computer. It's true, I did knit the Drupal socks. A friend of mine had given me countless hours of free tech support to help me with some Drupal problems I was having. As thanks, I knit him a pair of Drupal socks.

Druplicon, the mascot, is licensed under the GPL. I felt it was only fair to release my "code" back into the commons under the same license that made it legally possible for me to knit the socks. The pattern is available from http://www.emmajane.net/craft/drupal. It has been featured at many DrupalCon conferences as well as in CRAFTzine (http://craftzine.com/). I don't have any plans to knit other logo items, and if I did it would only have to be an open source image that I was replicating. Crafters who are interested in creating logoed items may find knitPro (http://www.microrevolt.org/knitPro/) useful. This software was definitely part of my toolkit when I first created the sock pattern.

Crazy things like socks are a great way to show people that it's not just the code that matters, the part that really matters is the passion to volunteering in whatever way suits you best. Knitting the socks has given the Drupal project far more exposure than if I'd contributed the same amount of time in code patches. We need to embrace all positive contributions—no matter how wacky they seem.

AG: Also can you tell folks about the award you created and the process in creating the award.

EJH: This fall I created a tech award at my local high school. It was remarkably easy. This year's recipient, Sadie Hewgill, is now enrolled in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She was granted the award for demonstrating creative use of technology. I created the award because I wanted a simple way to make one girl feel proud of her technology-related accomplishments. The only way to affect real change is when each person you reach out to feels personally connected to the change you are seeking.

The award I created isn't about having the best marks or winning buckets of cash. It's about being excited about technology; creating award winning technologists; and about having an entire gymnasium of people clap because you did something special. On my blog I wrote up the steps I took to create the award (www.emmajane.net/howto/create-award). I hope it will inspire others to find creative ways to encourage even more girls to stay interested in the skilled trades and IT.

AG: FOSS contributor, Author, Conference Planner, Mentor, Savvy Businesswoman, to Community Contributor both in your hometown and the FOSS communities, is there anything I have left off of forgotten to mention that you would like to tell people about?

EJH: I think you've covered everything. As always, you've asked great questions. Thanks, Amber!

AG: Emma thank you so much for taking the time to wear yet another hat in the roll of interviewee and spend some time sharing a little about you and your adventures in, and around the Ubuntu and FOSS Communities. I always walk away having learned something from every conversation we have. It is my hope that others will be inspired by the things that you do and are involved in, just as I continue to be. Thank you for all you do and thank you again for your time with this interview series.

[Discuss Emma Jane Hogbin’s Interview on the Forum]

Originally posted by Amber Graner in Full Circle Magazine Issue #32 on January 1, 2010

Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.

Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened – corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn’t help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn’t see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.

Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was ’satisfied’ with the support. I said ‘no’ of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to ‘yes’ because the agent had provided me with the correct answer – which was that he couldn’t help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn’t.

So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card – it’s a modular MXM 6800Go – but never bought one. They’re quite rare and command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He’d read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to ‘reflow’ the solder. Many reports online say this works.

I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don’t do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn’t want you to blame me would I?