Planet Ubuntu

Ronnie Tucker: Full Circle Side-Pod #3: Where’s the Neurotic Numbat?

Full Circle Podcast — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:40:47 +0000

Full Circle Side-Pod #3: Where’s the Neurotic Numbat?

In this episode; with great power, comes a big utility bill.

This is an extra, irregular, short-form podcast, which is intended to be a side-branch of the main Full Circle Podcast. Somewhere to put all the general technology, non-Ubuntu news and opinions, hobby-horses and general kipple that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Be prepared for a healthy dose of British sarcasm.

It’s been a while. We’re maybe half way through our summer recess from the Full Circle podcast, so this is either goodbye to season one or hello and welcome to season two.

News: Products die, divorce by Facebook, yet more lawsuits…

Interview: Matt Grove from Miserware describes Granola’s energy-saving ability

Expert Spot: Editing the Full Circle Podcast pt. 3: The Edit Environment

Feeds for both MP3 and OGG:

RSS feed, MP3: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed

RSS feed, OGG: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed/atom

The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats. You can either play the podcast in-browser if you have Flash and/or Java, or you can download the podcast with the link underneath the player. Show notes after the jump. Your Hosts:

Robin Catling (blog at http://catlingmindswipe.blogspot.com/)

Additional audio by Victoria Pritchard

Show Notes

1.06 | WELCOME and INTRO

2.25 | NEWS: round-up of some news items that caught my eye during the break.

Mark Shuttleworth announced the codename for Ubuntu 11.04,
We’re disappointed; where’s the Neurotic Numbat? The Numbat is a real, and endangered marsupial. Myrmecobius Fasciatus.
Microsoft Kin phone cancelled after a month
Google Wave RIP; wave developments ceases, Schmidt says ‘celebrate our failures.’
Everybody sues everybody:
- Lexmark sues 3rd party cartridge supplier
- Interval Research sues everyone but the yacht club (summarised in arstechnica coverage)
  Patents in question:
  Browser for use in navigating a body of information 2005,
  Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person 2008 ,
  Alerting users to items of current interest 2004
Intel buying McAfee, which probably means lock-down or DRM in more future hardware.
Google voice calls to gmail (gmail blog announcement and TechWatch on VOIP integration).
GoogleVoice Rate card for ‘insanely low rates’ but only til 2011.
Philadelphia’s $300 blog tax – Business Privilege Tax
MPEG-LA declares H.264 codec to be royalty free in perpetuity
Facebook entries admissable as evidence in divorce cases

13.07 | INTERVIEW: Matt Grove from Miserware

Energy-saving computing. It’s a neat concept, saving you money by saving you electricity. That’s money off your utilitiy bill while you do your bit to save the planet. Granola is software that improves the energy efficiency of your PC or laptop. A few weeks ago I spoke to Matt Grove from Miserware, who explained who it works…

34.57 | EXPERT SPOT: Editing the Full Circle Podcast – Part 3: The Edit Environment

45.05 | FEEDBACK: How to get in touch with us

45.55 | WRAP and OUTRO

Comments: on this page, using the comment form, OR; Send us a comment to podcast@fullcirclemagazine.org.
You can also send us a comment by recording an audio clip of no more than 30 seconds and sending it to the same address.
Comments and audio may be edited for length. Please remember this is a family-friendly show.

Please note: this podcast is provided with absolutely no warranty whatsoever; neither the producers nor Full Circle Magazine accept any responsibility or liability for content or interaction which readers and listeners may enter into using external links gleaned from this forum or podcast series.

Creative Commons Music Tracks

Opening: ‘Knights of the darkness’ by Zero Project (http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/516745)
Main theme: ‘CCMixter’ by Code (http://ccmixter.org/files/Mixro/16474)
Incidental: ‘Funkorama’ by Kevin MacLeod (http://music.incompetech.com/royalty-free/Funkorama.mp3)
Incidental: ‘Techno-dog’ by Unknown, original recording royalty free under Creative Commons v2.

File Sizes:

OGG 24.5Mb
mp3 19.8Mb

Runtime: 45 minutes 55 seconds

Full Circle Side-Pod #3: Where's the Neurotic Numbat? In this episode; with great power, comes a big utility bill. This is an extra, irregular, short-form podcast, which is intended to be a side-branch of the main Full Circle Podcast. Somewhere to put all the general technology, non-Ubuntu news and opinions, hobby-horses and general kipple that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Be prepared for a healthy dose of British sarcasm. It's been a while. We're maybe half way through our summer recess from the Full Circle podcast, so this is either goodbye to season one or hello and welcome to season two. News: Products die, divorce by Facebook, yet more lawsuits... Interview: Matt Grove from Miserware describes Granola's energy-saving ability Expert Spot: Editing the Full Circle Podcast pt. 3: The Edit Environment Feeds for both MP3 and OGG: RSS feed, MP3: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed RSS feed, OGG: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/feed/atom The podcast is in MP3 and OGG formats. You can either play the podcast in-browser if you have Flash and/or Java, or you can download the podcast with the link underneath the player. Show notes after the jump. Your Hosts: Robin Catling (blog at http://catlingmindswipe.blogspot.com/) Additional audio by Victoria Pritchard Show Notes 1.06 | WELCOME and INTRO 2.25 | NEWS: round-up of some news items that caught my eye during the break. Mark Shuttleworth announced the codename for Ubuntu 11.04, We're disappointed; where's the Neurotic Numbat? The Numbat is a real, and endangered marsupial. Myrmecobius Fasciatus. Microsoft Kin phone cancelled after a month Google Wave RIP; wave developments ceases, Schmidt says 'celebrate our failures.' Everybody sues everybody: Lexmark sues 3rd party cartridge supplier Interval Research sues everyone but the yacht club (summarised in arstechnica coverage) Patents in question: Browser for use in navigating a body of information 2005, Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person 2008 , Alerting users to items of current interest 2004 Intel buying McAfee, which probably means lock-down or DRM in more future hardware. Google voice calls to gmail (gmail blog announcement and TechWatch on VOIP integration). GoogleVoice Rate card for 'insanely low rates' but only til 2011. Philadelphia's $300 blog tax - Business Privilege Tax MPEG-LA declares H.264 codec to be royalty free in perpetuity Facebook entries admissable as evidence in divorce cases 13.07 | INTERVIEW: Matt Grove from Miserware Energy-saving computing. It's a neat concept, saving you money by saving you electricity. That's money off your utilitiy bill while you do your bit to save the planet. Granola is software that improves the energy efficiency of your PC or laptop. A few weeks ago I spoke to Matt Grove from Miserware, who explained who it works... 34.57 | EXPERT SPOT: Editing the Full Circle Podcast – Part 3: The Edit Environment 45.05 | FEEDBACK: How to get in touch with us 45.55 | WRAP and OUTRO Comments: on this page, using the comment form, OR; Send us a comment to podcast@fullcirclemagazine.org. You can also send us a comment by recording an audio clip of no more than 30 seconds and sending it to the same address. Comments and audio may be edited for length. Please remember this is a family-friendly show. Please note: this podcast is provided with absolutely no warranty whatsoever; neither the producers nor Full Circle Magazine accept any responsibility or liability for content or interaction which readers and listeners may enter into using external links gleaned from this forum or podcast series. Creative Commons Music Tracks Opening: ‘Knights of the darkness' by Zero Project (http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/516745) Main theme: 'CCMixter' by Code (http://ccmixter.org/files/Mix

Brian Burger: You Are Not Stuck In Traffic…

Brian — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 01:34:04 +0000

We say we are “in” traffic, dramatising ourselves as a lone vehicle of noble and rational intent, with a sea of malevolent, deadweight antagonists stretching endlessly fore and aft. It was in a bid to highlight the flaws in this position that a German transport campaign erected roadside boards reading: “You are not stuck in traffic – you are traffic.”

An otherwise quite ordinary Guardian Comment is Free column on the latest Chinese super-traffic-jam points out something I’ve blogged before: the exceptionalism of insulated, protected, self-absorbed car drivers.

We’re all traffic. Traffic is never “them”, it’s “us”, and that bears repeating in the (faint) hope it might eventually stick.

Ralph Janke: Ubuntu Beta is released

txwikinger — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:30:41 +0000

The Ubuntu Beta releases are out and need testing. For Kubuntu users the announcement is here. Testing can easily be done with testdrive. Please help to make the final release better by testing this beta!

Alan Bell: Ubuntu 10.10 Installfests

Alan Bell — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:14:51 +0000

We are looking forward to the release of the next version of Ubuntu, version 10.10 the Maverick Meerkat. In the UK we have a tradition of release day parties and there are several in the planning stages already. As this release will be on 10/10/10 it turns out that is a Sunday, and we should in theory have access to the final iso images slightly before the release date itself. This means we have an opportunity to run installfests during the day of release. I am not sure how many installfests there will be, or where they will be, but if you are in the UK or elsewhere and want to run a installfest in your local library or wherever you can find, then feel free to use this poster design based on an awesome Meerkat photo. The low resolution version was already CC licensed on flickr, I asked the photographer about the high res version and when he heard it was for an Ubuntu poster he gave us the high res version under the same terms!

So if you want to use this you can check out the svg source and the bitmap image on Ubuntu with:

bzr branch lp:~alanbell/+junk/installfest

Then feel free to edit it using Inkscape (it looks a mess in the image viewer, but don’t worry, it is fine in Inkscape), change the time, date, LoCo logo (would be great if other locos around the world get value from this) and print it. You will need the Ubuntu font to print it properly, I am hoping the font will turn up in Maverick soon, but there is some doubt about that at this stage. You may be thinking that the orange is too orangeish, that is because it is the correct CMYK colours for printing which are quite a long way from the RGB colour specification (I have another blog post on that I am working on).

If you are in the UK and want to run an installfest near you then get in touch because I have an even better offer for you. Give me the details you want for the venue and time and I will print out a bunch of them and post them to you courtesy of our company The Open Learning Centre and the shiny new printer we bought today.

Tell Someone Else!

Jorge Castro: Help us support StackExchange sites in Gwibber

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:10:00 +0000

Now that the OAuth apocalypse is over and my gwibber works again I had a thought of how to integrate with more services. Wouldn’t it be neat if we stretched out to other services, like say … the new Ubuntu Stack Exchange (I suck at GIMP, but you get the idea):

Since we do multiple columns you could do your favorite tags, unanswered questions, hot questions, whatever you like. Just like I do on my phone with Droidstack. You can just add whichever SE network site you wanted!

I’ve already chatted with Ryan Paul about it and he’d be happy to review a patch since him and Ken are busy with smashing bugs. If you’re interested in this kind of feature please grab the bug and rock it! https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gwibber/+bug/629826

Alberto Milone: How to set up “Web CoopVoce” (3G) APN on Android

Alberto Milone — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:47:55 +0000

I’m a satisfied owner of a Nexus One (loving Android Froyo 2.2) and today I decided to try a (volume based) 3G plan by CoopVoce.

There are 2 options available: either buy a 3G usb key or simply use 3G directly from your phone. In the former case (which I wasn’t interested in) the usb key works with Linux and you can even download a QT based dashboard which is supposed to set up the connection for you and it works on Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. While this definitely was a pleasant surprise, the lack of instructions to configure your phone wasn’t as pleasant. The website suggests to contact customer service so that they can provide you with the right configuration for your phone (but it seems that they’re not ready for Android phones). Long story short, I decided to download the dashboard instead and explore its contents hoping to find something useful to set up the APN myself. My research was successful and I thought I would share my findings with you.

Enter the “Settings” tool, then select “Wireless & network settings” -> “Mobile networks” -> “Access Point Names” and add a new profile with “New APN”.

Fill in the fields below as follows:

Name: CoopVoce APN: web.coopvoce.it MCC: 222 (set by default) MNC: 01 (set by default) Authentication type: PAP APN type: default,supl

Note: I’m not really sure if MCC and MNC are actually useful.

Leave the rest unset. Save and select your new profile, then go back to the Mobile networks settings screen and select “Data enabled” to turn on your 3G connection.

Since this is mostly aimed at people who live in Italy, here’s the Italian translation:

Per configurare una connessione 3G con CoopVoce (web 500 mega nel mio caso) su di un telefonino con Android, entrare nel pannello delle impostazioni e scegliere la schermata di configurazione delle reti (“Wireless e reti”), poi quella per le “Reti mobili” e in seguito quella dei punti d’accesso (“Nomi punti di accesso”). Aggiungere un nuovo APN e riempire i campi come segue:

Nome: CoopVoce APN: web.coopvoce.it MCC: 222 (impostato di default) MNC: 01 (impostato di default) Tipo di Autenticazione: PAP Tipo APN: default,supl

Nota: non sono sicuro dell’utilità di MCC e MNC.

Lasciare il resto non settato. Salvare e selezionare il nuovo profilo e infine tornare alla schermata di impostazione delle reti mobili e attivare la connessione 3G abilitando il traffico dati (opzione “Dati attivati”).

Martin Owens: Random Genetic Wallpaper

doctormo — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:46:39 +0000

I’m breaking my two week blog holiday early to bring you a super cool genetic wallpaper video:

View Video on Blip

As I show in the video, once you have a nice svg (manually edited of course) you can use the script to nudge elements in it. Comment here if you think this is cool.

Canonical Design Team: This week in design – 3 September 2010

Iain Farrell — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:10:23 +0000

This week was a short one in the UK but it seems as though we set out to fill it with as much as we possibly could! For a start we hit beta this week. If you’ve not upgraded to Maverick, you really should. We all have and are enjoying the updated Radiance and Ambiance themes. On the subject of arrivals we also welcomed Lilly to our web team this week – we’ll set her up on the blog in the coming weeks and coax a post or two out of her.

Elsewhere in the world of the web Ale asked you guys why you use Ubuntu. We’d love more input into this thread so if you have ideas leave them in the comments and join in the conversation. Another post which got a lot of interest this week was Otto’s post about the default wallpaper. This explains in some detail the idea behind our approach to this design and we’ll be updating you and hopefully roping some of into helping us make our grander ideas a reality in the next cycle.

Away from the blog we’ve been busily working on the font family which is extremely close to being ready to share more widely. We have a few bugs we want to review and in the next week we’ll be adding milestones to the project and assigning some bugs to future releases so everyone can see what we’re focusing on fixing in time for 10.10. The release is by no means finished in October. Much will be added and refined over time. More on that from the Dalton Maag team soon.

Maverick on netbook and desktop is also taking up a lot of our time as we work closely with the platform and DX teams to make sure all the work we do and that is contributed by you guys in the community, is rolled into the next release. Unity in particular is coming together and if you’ve not tried it yet you really should!

We also wished Charline “Bon Voyage” as she set off to Japan to take part in the EPIC conference and she’ll be talking about her experiences once she’s back from there.

And lastly, while we’re on the subject of travel, I got an e-mail this morning from Rick. He’s apparently still traveling and bumped into Jane at Linux Con. I await with interest the next mail I get from my missing statue!

Have a great weekend – especially our lucky American cousins who get a nice long weekend!

You In Ubuntu: People, Personalities, and Planners: Who's behind your FOSS events? Ohio LinuxFest Planner - Esther "Moose" Filderman

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:07:29 +0000

Amber Graner interviews Ohio LinuxFest Planner - Esther "Moose" Filderman. Take a moment to learn more about the Ohio LinuxFest and Moose in this interview.

Melissa Draper: Dear Planet.Fedora Pyromaniacs

melissa — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:21:23 +0000

After spotting the silly pyromania on planet.fedora earlier today, I thought for a while; Am I on Team Evil, or am I on Team Stupid. Then, I decided.

I’m on Team Linux.

You?

Benjamin Humphrey: Designing the new OMG! Ubuntu! site

Benjamin Humphrey — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:11:32 +0000

2010 has been a very important year for Joey and I and OMG! Ubuntu!

About 4 months ago we decided it was time to formalise the website and begin expanding the OMG! network. To do this we had to create some sort of over-arching entity that would allow us to easily refer to our products, because we aimed to have more than one. We also felt it was about time we started turning the OMG! brand into a commercial venture. We knew we wanted to start a company, and after about two weeks of trying to come up with names we finally settled on ‘Ohso.’

Tyler came to us with the idea of launching OMG! SUSE! and we let him have at it which expanded the Ohso network to two sites. With the launch of Ubuntu Gamer coming up before the end of the year, we’ll have three, and possibly four. We decided we needed some sort of user-facing image, and, myself being a stickler for consistency, found this idea of a network of very different but at the same time very similar websites an appealing design challenge.

We wanted to get away from Blogger as it was slow and very restricting in what we could do, so the new design couldn’t come soon enough. In July I sat down at my desk and started thinking of ideas. To start I wanted to create a nice colour pallete that we could use across multiple sites in varying levels – this would be the first relationship the network would have. It was important to establish something that kept the OMG! cheekiness and funk that we’re known for, but at the same time creating something elegant to raise the bar to that professional level. Looking at other tech sites, I could see that a lot of the time they have gone with function over form – being a designer, I felt we could have both. I wanted to make OMG! Ubuntu! the best looking blog on the internet.

Since we already had a very simple colour pallete with OMG! Ubuntu! purple and orange, I compared this to the new Ubuntu branding, aubergine and orange. Our colours are different to Canonical’s, with our purple being a lot darker and our orange being lighter, but I found they worked together well. In the new site design I wanted to convey a professional image, to me (and I think you’ll agree) the deep purples work better than bright oranges in doing this. The header is a gradient of OMG! Ubuntu! purple to Ubuntu aubergine.

Because orange is a bright colour, it’s very useful for attracting attention – especially when used in such contrast with aubergine. I decided to use orange sparingly around the site for highlights.

These two colours, along with varying shades of gray make up the bulk of the website colour pallete. But there was a problem with links – orange was too bright and not readable, and purple was already too prominent. I experimented with some aquas and blues which I used in the new Ubuntu Manual site design, and settled on a lovely deep aqua for links. I think this provides a nice middle ground between the luscious purples and candy orange.

Once I had settled on a colour pallete (which is very important) I started looking around for inspiration. With the new site we wanted to achieve a couple of imporant things regarding posts that the old blogger site didn’t do well:

Making featured posts more prominent
Allowing readers to easily find previous posts
Better social sharing

To feature current posts we decided on a large, prominent carousel banner that is 960 x 200 – this gives us a good way to show off breaking news stories, and we can have as many in the loop as we like. It’s consistent with the new Ubuntu web design, so readers should feel quite at home. I also wanted to make use of Joey’s funky and eye-catching graphic design which I know is something that makes OMG! unique. Scrolling down to read posts is a tradeoff, but if you visit any of the large Gawker Media or Weblogs sites, you’ll see they employ similar tactics to an even greater degree.

The original design

With almost 2000 posts dating back a couple of years (a lot of which are still relevant) it was important to get the most reuse out of this material. Combining a prominent and effective search bar with clear categories will hopefully allow readers to find what they want much more easily than trawling through the endless menus present in the old site. The five categories in the banner serve three purposes:

For new visitors to understand what the site is about at a glance
So readers can quickly filter something they’re interested in
To create an association with the categories in the header and then in the body

We have a new icon set (courtesy of ipapun) that comes in two flavours, light and dark, which means we can use these on other websites as well – giving some more consistency across the network. There are quite a few categories missing that we need to create more icons for, so we’ll slowly be expanding the set.

The posts themselves needed to improve on the current site in a number of ways:

More prominent social buttons for sharing
Clearer formatting and font
Better use of image collections
Excerpts for post previews

A lot of this was fixed simply by moving away from blogger. The new site uses a nice gallery plugin to handle image collections. The original design for posts was a bit different to what you see now – the floating categories on the left of the post also contained tags and sharing buttons. We soon realised this wasn’t particularly feasible for longer tags, and Joey wanted more prominent sharing buttons – now we have lovely tags down the bottom of the post, along with small sharing buttons, and then at the top of the post is a floating bar with Digg, Facebook and Twitter. It’s much less obtrusive than the last bar. You can thank Niall for that!

Hope you like grids

This leaves the side bar and footer. The side bar stuff was hacked up by Niall who spent quite a lot of time fooling around with the Facebook widget and the recent comments (pulled from Disqus) stuff, so that’s why they look quite nice. The footer is pixel perfect to my design – I wanted to achieve a few things with the footer:

More professional look
Obvious that the site is part of the Ohso network
Trademarks and copyrights for Canonical and Ubuntu
Links to other sites in our network and social pages
Links to static pages

I can’t really say much more about the footer other than it looks really good!

Our to-do list before launch

Overall, I feel the site is quite pleasing to the eye and a big improvement over the last site in terms of design. I think that we have established a unique look and feel, elements of which we will be able to use across many sites to give an excellent network consistency. I am pleased with how the this website has turned out, although there are a few bugs to iron out here and there. We launched the site on the date we set months ago, which is really good – sticking to the schedule without delays is a promising start for a small company like Ohso.

I love the site and I hope you guys do too, thanks for reading how it was created. We’ve got a lot more planned for the rest of 2010, so unfortunately we can’t celebrate just yet. Getting this website out the door is a huge milestone, but it’s back to work for us!

Ubuntu Gamer coming soon…?

For those more technically inclined, Niall (our web developer) will be posting an article about the challenges of creating a new website and moving service and server soon while keeping everything intact with (not much) down time.

Follow me on Twitter! I often tweet new ideas and upload teasers of designs I’m working on.

Amber Graner: Ohio LinuxFest Registration and Contest Deadline Extended

akgraner — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:08:40 +0000

According to the Ohio LinuxFest website the Registration and Contest Deadline for OLF has been extended. Below is the announcement from their website. I’ll be speaking at the UbuCon and on Saturday at OLF - Hope to see you there!!

Columbus, Ohio — September 1, 2010 — Registration for the 2010 Ohio LinuxFest has been extended through September 8th, and theregistration contest has also been extended until the 1,000the registration has been reached.

One lucky registrant will win an upgrade to the Supporter Pass, or a Professional Pass registration for Ohio LinuxFest 2011 worth $350, at the choice of the winner. Full details are available at http://ohiolinux.org/node/37 – sign up today and have a chance to win!
Online registration also qualifies attendees for door prizes and giveaways the day of the conference.

As always, the main schedule takes place on Saturday. The schedule kicks off with a keynote from GNOME Foundation Executive Director Stormy Peters, followed by five tracks of talks from open source and Linux experts like Taurus Balog, Amber Graner, Catherine Devlin, Dru Lavigne, Paul Frields, and Jon ‘maddog’ Hall. This year’s OLF also features a special medical track for those interested in the use of free and open source software in medicine.

The final keynote will be a real treat for Linux and open source enthusiasts interested in free media. Christopher “Monty” Montgomery of Xiph.org will be talking about next generation open source media formats.

Once again the Ohio LinuxFest is free to all, but space is limited. Sign up today at http://ohiolinux.org/register.html If you want to support OLF, the organizers have made a supporter package available for $65 that includes lunch and an OLF t-shirt. For those who want to attend Friday’s OLF University sessions, a professional pass is also
available for $350.

The Ohio LinuxFest is a grassroots conference for the open source community that started in 2003 as an inter-LUG meeting and has grown steadily since to become the midwest’s largest open source event. It’s an annual event for Linux and open source enthusiasts to gather, share information, and socialize.

You In Ubuntu: Ubuntu App Developer Week Announced!

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:52:49 +0000

Are you interested in developing applications on Ubuntu then this is the week for you! Ubuntu App Developer Week September 27 through October 1st, 2010

Amber Graner: Call For Ubuntu App Developer Week Sessions

akgraner — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:43:24 +0000

Ubuntu App Developer Week (formally Opportunistic Developer Week) was announced on The Fridge earlier this week.

“What is Ubuntu App Developer Week?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week is a week of sessions aimed at enabling and inspiring developers to write applications that scratch their itches. Our goal is to give all attendees a taste of the wide variety of tools on the Ubuntu platform that can be used to create awesome applications, and to showcase some applications that have been created and explain how they were put together.

“When is Ubuntu App Developer Week?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week is scheduled for Monday, September 27th through Friday, October 1st, 2010.

“Where will Ubuntu App Developer Week take place?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week will take place in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat on freenode.net.

We are now looking for Sessions and Session Leaders. Do you have suggestions for a session or would you or someone you know like to lead a session for Ubuntu App Developer Week?

We’re currently putting together the timetable for Ubuntu App Developer Week at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAppDeveloperWeek/Timetable

If you’re interested in helping others write good code, showcase interesting tools you use, share advice and answer questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Daniel Holbach (daniel.holbach AT ubuntu DOT com) or me (akgraner AT Ubuntu DOT com) and we’ll sort out a slot for you.

More information on Ubuntu App Developer Week Can be found at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAppDeveloperWeek

Seif Lotfy: Zeitgeist Log Manager (Mockup) – Giving Control to the User

Seif Lotfy — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:47:08 +0000

Blacklisting stuff from being logged, has been a feature in Zeitgeist for a long time now. Yet we never came to develop a UI for it.

So upon popular demand we started to mockup this feature.

The UI is simple and straight forward. (I sketched it using Pencil)

It uses much from what Sezen has to offer, in this case we use the same categories and the searching functionality. So when you search the categories with results get highlighted to allow you to control the logging of the results.

You can go toggle Incognito mode by setting Logger Status to inactive. This will block everything from getting logged in Zeitgeist.
Under General you can choose which Applications you want to log. In this case I am allowing Firefox to be logged but disabling Cheese and Banshee. The application lists will be pulled from the what has been logged by Zeitgeist as well as the applications installed. The option to add new applications to be logged manually is also possible through the add and remove buttons. Same applies for Directories.

The Documents/Music/Videos/Websites/People/Notes and Other Categories all use the same widget layout. You can enable and disable logging for all items of types of each category. In this case by toggling the Allow Logging Documents and controlling single items from a list populated by manually adding items using the Add Button. Remove Button on the other hand will ask you to remove all instances for all time. We will think of a way to delete single instances but for now it can be done over the Activity Journal.

This is just some initial mockups. If you want to join the development please join #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net and don’t hesitate to ask for guidance. If you have a better idea for mockups please don’t hesitate to present it to us.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Aron Xu: Work around of file name problem while unzip handling CJK encodings

Aron — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:43:29 +0000

Unzip 5.x has an option -O to specific the encoding of file names in an ZIP archive, but when 6.0 is arriving with unicode support, that option disappeared as well. CJK users need special cares on support and conversion of obsolete encoding while they are switching to utf-8.

Here is my workaround about this problem, install p7zip and convmv packages on your system first, then:
$ env LC_ALL=C 7z x file.zip
$ convmv -f gbk -t utf8 --notest *

File names extracted by unzip are not able to be converted to correct one whatever you do with it, but what is done by 7z can be converted by convmv.

Moving more on, we can automate this action to a script:
#! /bin/sh LANG=C /usr/bin/7z x -y "$1" | sed -n 's/^Extracting //p' | sed '1!G;h;$!d' | xargs convmv -f gbk -t utf8 --notest >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Save it us unzip.sh, then try:
$ sh unzip.sh file.zip
This will act as what unzip does, but with additional care about converting file name encoding from gbk to utf-8. Moreover, convmv can detect whether your file name is already utf-8 encoded and will skip it.

If your file names are encoded other encoding, please replace “gbk” with the appropriate name.

Ara Pulido: Multitouch testers in the Hall of Fame

Ara Pulido — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:56:55 +0000

Thanks to Daniel Holbach, the people testing uTouch and reporting back in the Multitouch Testing Tracker now appear in the Ubuntu Hall of Fame.

If you have been helping testing MT and you’re name does not appear there, is due to a bug in the ISO tracker, that prevents testers that haven’t set their Launchpad ID properly. This bug has been fixed, and it will be released in our next roll out of the testing tracker, but, in the mean while, there is a workaround that I explained in a previous post.

Please, if you are helping testing uTouch, check out how to appear in the Hall Of Fame.

Mackenzie Morgan: Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

Mackenzie (noreply@blogger.com) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:03:34 +0000

Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.

Eric Hammond: Improving Security on EC2 With AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Eric Hammond — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:47:53 +0000

A few hours ago, Amazon launched a public preview of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) which is a powerful feature if you have a number of developers who need to access and to manage resources for an AWS account. A unique IAM user can be created for each developer and specific permissions can be doled out as needed.

You can also create IAM users for system functions, dramatically increasing the security of your AWS account in the event a server is compromised. That benefit is the focus of this article using an example frequently cited by EC2 users: Automating EBS snapshots on a local EC2 instance without putting the keys to your AWS kingdom on the file system.

Before the release of AWS IAM, if you wanted to create EBS snapshots in a local cron job on an EC2 instance, you needed to put the master AWS credentials in the file system on that instance. If those AWS credentials were compromised, the attacker could perform all sorts of havoc with resources in your AWS account and charges to your credit card.

With the launch of AWS IAM, we can create a system IAM user with its own AWS keys and all it is allowed to do is… create EBS snapshots! These keys are placed on the instance and used in the snapshot cron job. Now, an attacker can do very little damage with those keys if they are compromised, and we all feel much safer.

The AWS IAM documentation is required reading and a great reference. This article is only intended to serve as a practical introduction to one simple application of IAM.

These instructions assume you are running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on both your local system and on Amazon EC2. Adjust as appropriate for other distributions and releases.

IAM Installation

Ubuntu does not yet have an official software package for AWS IAM, so we need to download the IAM command line toolkit from Amazon. This can be done on any machine including your local desktop. The IAM command line tools require Java so we need to make sure that is installed as well.

Eventually, you’ll want to install this software somewhere more permanent, but for this demo, we’ll just use it from a subdirectory.

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre unzip
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk
wget http://awsiammedia.s3.amazonaws.com/public/tools/cli/latest/IAMCli.zip
unzip IAMCli.zip
export AWS_IAM_HOME=$(pwd)/IAMCli
export PATH=$PATH:$AWS_IAM_HOME

The AWS IAM tools require you to save your AWS account’s main access key id and AWS secret access key in yet another file format. Create this AWS credential file as, say, $HOME/.aws-credentials-master.txt in the following format (replacing the values with your own credentials):

AWSAccessKeyId=YOURACCESSKEYIDHERE
AWSSecretKey=YOURSECRETKEYHERE

Note: The above is the sample content of a file you are creating, and not shell commands to run.

Protect the above file and set an environment variable to tell IAM where to find it:

export AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE=$HOME/.aws-credentials-master.txt
chmod 600 $AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE

We can now use the iam-* command line tools to create and manage AWS IAM users, groups, and policies.

Create IAM User

How you manage your users and groups is sure to be a personal preference that is fine tuned over time, but for the purposes of this demo, I’ll propose that for tracking purposes we put non-human users into a new group named “system”.

iam-groupcreate -g system

Create the snapshotter system user, saving the keys to a file:

user=snapshotter
iam-usercreate -u $user -g system -k |
  tee $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt
chmod 600 $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt

You will want to have this snapshotter keys file on the EC2 instance, so copy it there:

rsync -Paz $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt REMOTEUSER@REMOTESYSTEM:

Allow IAM user snapshotter to create EBS snapshots of any EBS volume:

iam-useraddpolicy          \
  -p allow-create-snapshot \
  -e Allow                 \
  -u $user                 \
  -a ec2:CreateSnapshot    \
  -r '*'

There’s a lot of preparatory and other commands in this article, but take a second to focus on the fact that the core, functional steps are simply the iam-usercreate and iam-useraddpolicy commands above. Two commands and you have a new AWS IAM user with restricted access to your AWS account.

Create EBS Snapshot

For the purposes of this demo, we’ll assume you’re using the ec2-consistent-snapshot tool to create EBS snapshots with a consistent file system and perhaps a consistent MySQL database. (If you’re not using this tool, then you could have simply used ec2-create-snapshot from any computer without having to go through the trouble of creating a new IAM user.)

Make sure you have the latest ec2-consistent-snapshot software installed on the EC2 instance:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alestic/ppa
sudo apt-get install ec2-consistent-snapshot

Create the snapshot on the EC2 instance. Adjust options to fit your local EBS volume mount points and MySQL database setup.

sudo ec2-consistent-snapshot                             \
  --aws-credentials-file $HOME/.aws-keys-snapshotter.txt \
  --xfs-filesystem /YOURMOUNTPOINT                       \
  YOURVOLUMEID

Follow similar steps to create users and set policies for other system activities you perform on your EC2 instances. IAM can control access to many different AWS resource types, API calls, specific resources, and has even more fine tuned control parameters including time-based restrictions.

The release of AWS Identity and Access Management alleviates one of the biggest concerns security-conscious folks used to have when they started using AWS with a single key that gave complete access and control over all resources. Now the control is entirely in your hands.

Cleanup

If you have followed the steps in this demo and you wish to undo most of what was done, here are some steps for reference.

Delete the IAM user and the IAM group:

iam-userdel -u $user -r
iam-groupdel -g system

Wipe the credentials and keys files and remove the downloaded and unzipped IAM command line toolkit:

sudo apt-get install wipe
wipe  $HOME/.aws-credentials-master.txt \
      $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt
rm    IAMCli.zip
rm -r $AWS_IAM_HOME

Make sure to wipe the snapshotter key file on the remote EC2 instance as well.

Support

If you’re looking for help with AWS IAM, there is a new AWS IAM forum dedicated to the topic.

Canonical Design Team: In Brazil?!

Iain Farrell — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:32:37 +0000

Came in this morning to a mail from Rick, my Meerkat who went for a walk a little while ago.

Apparently he was giving a keynote at Linuxcon!!

" ... Thanks all for coming, have a great conference!"

More as I get it …

Canonical Design Team: Just an average day in 2014

Iain Farrell — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:58:29 +0000

While I’m not convinced that Sweden will actually win the world cup there’s lots to like about this “five minutes into the future” look at how we might share content and interact with devices in a few years time. I’m setting a reminder in my calendar. I’ll catch you in 5 years, see if we made it

There are more videos on the http://www.youtube.com/user/TATMobileUI.

Discovered via the delightful Steve Clayton’s blog.

You In Ubuntu: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:19:05 +0000

Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released. See what's new and what you have to look forward to in Ubuntu 10.10.10, Ubuntu 10.10 Beta gives you that view into what is come.

The Fridge: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released

akgraner — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:35:17 +0000

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 10.10 beta.

Codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”, 10.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a smoother, streamlined boot experience.

Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install time cloud setup.

Ubuntu 10.10 Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

The Ubuntu 10.10 family of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today.

Ubuntu Desktop features
————————

The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This includes the new dconf and gsettings API.

Evolution was updated to the 2.30.2 version, which operates much faster than the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager.

Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter’s authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to improve performance.

The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls.

The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new “Featured” and “What’s New” views for showcasing applications, and an improved package description view. You can now easily access your package installation history too.

New Design: The boot process is cleaner and faster. New themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to music within the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta for details.

Ubuntu Server features
———————-

Cloud computing: The configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images (cloud-init) has gained new features in Maverick Beta, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format. Cloud image instances can now manage their own kernel and upgrade kernels with apt. This is done by using pv-grub, provided by Amazon.

Ubuntu Netbook features
———————————-

The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It includes the global menu bar. The date/time indicator now has a real calendar widget.

The standard photo management application has been switched to Shotwell.

Kubuntu features
————————

For Maverick, Kubuntu have merged the Desktop and Netbook images into one. Ubiquity, Kubuntu’s installer, will detect the screen size before the install and use either the Plasma Desktop workplace or the Plasma Netbook workplace as needed. Users will be able to switch between the two in System Settings.

Plasma Netbook now sports the Global Menu by default.

The standard web browser is now Rekonq, a KDE browser based on Qt Webkit.

Bluedevil has become the default bluetooth stack.

Pulseaudio is the default sound server.

KPackageKit updates bring a faster backend and an updated UI that provides a new Categories page, and new features such as a backup/restore tool for the list of installed packages.

Kubuntu’s installer (Ubiquity) now has updated look and layout.
Qapt-batch now replaces install-package as the update/batch-installer utility

KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications were updated to 4.5.0 (the recently released 4.5.1 update could not be integrated before beta release and will arrive shortly).

Qt was updated to the current 4.7 beta release.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/MaverickMeerkat/Beta/Kubuntu for more details.

Xubuntu features
————————

Xfce4 was updated to the current 4.6.2 release.

New default applications include: Parole (Xfce4 Media Player), replacing Totem Movie Player; Xfburn (Xfce4 CD/DVD burning tool), replacing Brasero; and xfce4-taskmanager (Xfce4 process manager), replacing Gnome-Task-Manager.

Edubuntu features
————————-

Edubuntu now includes Gnome Nanny, which provides parental controls in Edubuntu. There is new wallpaper included (periodic table breakout). In addition, an OEM Install mode is now available.

For those interested in learning more, there’s a new web site as well.
Check out http://www.edubuntu.org.

Ubuntu Studio features
———————————

In this release, Ubuntu Studio has better integration between Pulse Audio and JACK. JACK and Pulse Audio can now be used side-by-side if they are using different audio interfaces. If they are trying to use the same audio interface, JACK will take precedent. The network connections can now be configured with gnome-network-admin.

Mythbuntu features
—————————

In this release, Mythbuntu has updated to MythTV 0.23.1.

There is also a new backup and restore tool.

Other
——-

On the Desktop: GNOME 2.31, KDE 4.5.0b, Xfce 4.6.2, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, X.org server 7.5
On the Server: Apache 2.2.16, PostgreSQL 8.4.4, PHP 5.3.3, LTSP 5.2.4
“Under the hood”: Linux 2.6.35.3, GCC 4.4.4 (default) / 4.5.1
(optional), eglibc 2.12.1, Python 2.6.6 (default) / 3.1.2 (optional)

The full release notes can be found at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta

About Ubuntu
——————

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

To Get Ubuntu 10.10 Beta
————————————

To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Beta from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS,
follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MaverickUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 10.10 Beta; The following link will direct you to a download location near you:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/download

Or, choose the mirror closest to you:

Africa:

http://ubuntu.mirror.ac.za/ubuntu-release/10.10 (South Africa)
http://ubuntu.saix.net/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (South Africa)

Asia:

http://mirrors.sohu.com/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (China)
http://ftp.riken.jp/Linux/ubuntu-iso/CDs/10.10 (Japan)
http://ubuntutym2.u-toyama.ac.jp/ubuntu/10.10 (Japan)
http://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/ubuntu-cd/10.10 (Korea, Republic of)
http://ubuntu.qualitynet.net/releases/10.10 (Kuwait)
http://mirror.yandex.ru/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Russian Federation)
http://tw.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Taiwan)
http://ftp.linux.org.tr/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Turkey)

Europe:

http://ubuntu.lagis.at/releases/10.10 (Austria)
http://ftp.mgts.by/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Belarus)
http://ubuntu.ipacct.com/releases/10.10 (Bulgaria)
http://hr.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Croatia)
http://releases.ubuntu.cz/releases/10.10 (Czech Republic)
http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ubuntu-cd/10.10 (Denmark)
http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Estonia)
http://ubuntu.trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/releases/10.10 (Finland)
http://ubuntu.mirrors.proxad.net/10.10 (France)
http://ubuntu.mirror.tudos.de/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Germany)
http://gb.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Great Britain)
http://mirror.greennet.gl/releases/10.10 (Greenland)
http://speglar.simnet.is/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Iceland)
http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Ireland)
http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Italy)
http://ubuntu.mirror.root.lu/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Luxembourg)
http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.10 (Netherlands)
http://no.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Norway)
http://ubuntu.task.gda.pl/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Poland)
http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/ubuntu/10.10 (Portugal)
http://ftp.astral.ro/mirrors/ubuntu.com/releases/10.10 (Romania)
http://rs.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Serbia)
http://ubuntu.cica.es/releases/10.10 (Spain)
http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Sweden)
http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/ubuntu-cdimage/10.10 (Switzerland)

North America:

http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Canada)
http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/10.10 (United States)
http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu-releases/10.00 (United States)
http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/10.10 (United States)

Oceania/Australia:

http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/ubuntu/releases/10.10 (Australia)
http://mirror.linux.org.au/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Australia)
http://releases.ubuntu.nautile.nc/10.10 (New Caledonia)
http://ftp.citylink.co.nz/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (New Zealand)

South America:

http://mirror.pop-sc.rnp.br/mirror/ubuntu/10.10 (Brazil)
http://ubuntu.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/10.10 (Brazil)

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

The final version of Ubuntu 10.10 is expected to be released in October 2010.

Feedback and Participation
—————————————

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on freenode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

More Information
————————

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

[Discuss Ubuntu 10.10 Beta on the Forum]

Originally posted to theubuntu-announce mailing list by Robbie Williamson on Thu Sep 2 23:50:39 BST 2010.

Shane Fagan: How to turn Ubuntu into a Gaming platform?

Shane — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:03:39 +0000

I was thinking about this issue a lot. Games have a hard time on Linux with multiple sound architectures, different package management systems and not many ways to deploy their app easily. So the answers to these are use pulse audio, make a few different packages for different distros (which is expensive) or just deploy it on Ubuntu (which would piss off other distros) and deploying it at the moment is hosting it on your own website as a download.

In maverick we are getting a marketplace in the software center to sort out the deploying part and i presume thats going to have a centralized payment system so thats good for the game developers. My idea is that we can take this further. My idea is make something like like battle.net or steam (kinda).

Ok for those who don’t know steam is the payment management and distribution system for games and battle.net is just a payment management system for blizzard’s games.

So we have an SSO and now a marketplace, distribution and centralized payment system for maverick. Why not expose some info to games developers? The info that is needed depends on the game but if its something like WoW you would need the account info and if they paid for the game to log you in.

The idea is kind of a win win situation, the user wins because there is no login and its a simple system to handle everything for them and the developer wins because he doesn’t have to code a complex login system and he gets the payments handled too.

Thoughts?

Ubuntu Release blog: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released

robbiew — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:42:22 +0000

Releases are big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big they are. I mean, you may think it’s a long haul to release a single package or application, but that’s just peanuts to a distribution release. Because of this, we must work our way up to it, incrementally…bit by bit…milestone by milestone. So with that, we formally announce Ubuntu 10.10 Beta in all it’s glory. Please download and give it a whirl, and if you find a problem, by all means file a bug…but Don’t Panic.

For more information on the release, please see the announcement.

The Fridge: Code Hosting Maintenance Friday, September 3, 2010

akgraner — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:17:30 +0000

Launchpad code hosting will be offline Friday between 8.00 and 9.30 UTC for unexpected hardware maintenance. This means you won’t be able to browse, push to, pull from or otherwise access code hosted on Launchpad.

Going offline: 8.00 UTC 3rd September 2010

Expected back: 9.30 UTC 3rd September 2010

[Discuss Code Hosting Maintenance Friday, September 3, 2010 on the Forums]

Originally posted here by Gary Poster on September 2nd, 2010.

Launchpad News: Code hosting maintenance Friday, September 3

Gary Poster — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:33:48 +0000

Launchpad code hosting will be offline Friday between 8.00 and 9.30 UTC for unexpected hardware maintenance. This means you won’t be able to browse, push to, pull from or otherwise access code hosted on Launchpad.

Going offline: 8.00 UTC 3rd September 2010

Expected back: 9.30 UTC 3rd September 2010

Ubuntu Server blog: Server Team 20100831 meeting minutes

s3hh — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:06:30 +0000

Here are the meeting minutes. They can also be found
here
with full irc logs.

Agenda
- Review ACTION points from previous meeting
  - SpamapS to submit rubygems change proposal as Important bug in Debian and CC ubuntu-devel
  - jjohansen to review bug 493156
  - zul to review papercut status of bug 582963
  - ttx to make burnup charts available to people who want them
- Maverick development (jib)
  - Beta milestone release (ttx) – Beta-milestoned bugs and ISO testing
  - Post-beta work – Maverick bugs and release status page (ttx)
- Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
- Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (jjohansen)
  - pv-ops kernel status update
- Weekly Updates & Questions for the Documentation Team (sommer)
- Weekly Updates & Questions for the Ubuntu Community Team (kim0)
- Papercuts Maverick retrospective (ttx)
- Open Discussion
- Announce next meeting date and time
  - Tuesday 2010-09-07 at 1800 UTC – #ubuntu-meeting
Minutes
Meeting Actions
- jjohansen to provide tests for bug 582963 and request SRU
ACTIONS from previous meeting
- SpamapS to submit rubygems change proposal as Important bug in Debian and CC ubuntu-devel
  - submitted, discussion had, consensus reached…
  - rubygems 1.9.1 to be merged into ruby 1.9, and gems to be placed in /usr/local/bin
  - copious congratulations and kudos from all around to Spamaps
- jjohansen to review bug 493156 (“Please enable CONFIG_TASK_DELAY_ACCT”)
  - test kernel built, but not yet submitted for SRU
- zul to review papercut status of bug 582963
  - Done, in apache now
  - side effect in the form of a new SSl bug
  - zul may revert
- ttx to make burnup charts available to people who want them
  - http://people.canonical.com/~ttx/current-milestone-progress.svg is refreshed hourly
Maverick development (jib)
- beta cycle is winding down (ends this thursday)
  - we are mostly on track
- iso testing coming up soon
- jib and ttx finalizing RC plan on friday
- ttx described in detail how to prioritize work
  - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/MaverickReleaseStatus
  - Milestoned bugs — those have high priority
  - high priority meaning, spec work is even secondary
  - then you have “High, release targeted bugs”
  - and finally “Other release-targeted bugs” – targets of opportunity
- ttx points out that week between Beta release and FinalFreeze is time to fix seemingly basic bugs
Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
- QA team changing the way regression tags are used – RFC out soon
- mathiaz announces that he has automated all of the iso testing
Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (jjohansen)
- Bug #606373 – sporadic console output – looking for a race
- Bug #620994 (xen kernel BUG) – after extensive testing doesn’t affect, Maverick or Lucid
- Bug #614853 (kernel panic divide error) – could not replicate
- Bug 621175 (virtual kernel contains too many modules) – will have to be fixed post-beta
Papercuts Maverick retrospective (ttx)
- 48 targets; 25 bugs fixed; 8 invalidated; 3 waiting on upstream; 12 postponed
- ttx frets that the effort failed in bringing in new contributors
- kirkland asks how many users were made happier with Ubuntu Server
  - tough to quantify
- kirkland and mathiaz agree that it is nice dedicating time to fix small bugs
- hallyn and Spamaps concur that it was a useful exercise for learning about packaging
- We will further discuss at UDS-N
Agree on next meeting date and time
- Next meeting will be on Tuesday, September 7th at 18:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeti

Mackenzie Morgan: Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party

Mackenzie (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:45:23 +0000

Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!

I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged in, I ran screen -L, which logs the shell (both input and output) to ~user/screelog.0). Then I called up the user, gave them the IP address, username, and password. They logged in, and I told them to run screen -ls to see a list of open screen sessions. The output looks like this:

There is a screen on:
 2119.pts-0.marlyn (09/01/2010 06:32:03 PM) (Attached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-maco.

The next step was for them to type screen -x 2119.pts-0.marlyn Once they did this, we could each see what the other saw in our SSH session, and it was all logged. Great! I could keep track of what they were doing as they were doing it and review the logs later for a double check.

It's not a VCS though. If you know what directory they'll be operating in, you might want to run bzr init ; bzr add ; bzr commit -m "starting point" first, so you can later run bzr diff | less to see what files changed and keep a record of what changed, since while it might all seem perfectly logical while it's happening, recalling the exact changes won't be easy. The point of watching can be to catch them in the act if they try to do something that violates your security policy or to be given a demonstration.

EDIT: After a question in comments about how you keep them from opening another non-screen'd connection, my friend Peter suggested adding screen -xR to the user's ~/.bash_profile, so it forcibly connects to the screen session. Thanks, Peter!

Matthew Helmke: The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology

matthew — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:40:06 +0000

It has been a while since I have reviewed a manga book. This is one of several atypical educational books that use graphic art to help teach difficult concepts or illustrate the action. This is another wonderful entry in the “Manga Guide to…” series that I have been reviewing.

The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology follows the actions of a two students who failed their molecular biology class and have to take a special summer course. The story line is enjoyable and eases the reader’s entry into the topic rather than being a distraction.

The book covers all the main questions and topics you would expect: what is a cell, what are the common parts of a cell, how do cells combine to make various organisms, what are proteins and how do they function within a cell, what is DNA and what are genes and how do they work to express the information coded in them? My favorite part was chapter 5 which focuses on potential applications for everything discussed earlier and theorizes what the future may hold in the field.

I work in a software project that is helping biologists do research, including helping process the vast amounts of data that comes from genetic sequencing. As a result, I have become familiar with most of the content this book presents. I believe the book is accurate and it is clear. The story created to assist with that presentation is enjoyable as well. I have a seven year old daughter that is reading the book with great interest. Some of the science is above her grade level, but her attention remains fixed on the art and the story and she is absorbing some of it as she reads.

Overall, I would say the book is a success and recommend it without reservation.

Disclosure: I was given my copy of this book by the publisher as a review copy.

Share and Enjoy:

Laura Czajkowski: The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities Part 2

Laura Czajkowski — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:27:55 +0000

I blogged a while back about Barry doing his Masters Thesis on The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities which looked at the Ubuntu Community, he handed it in yesterday and I know some folks were curious about results so I asked him to write a small piece for the blog:

Barry Smyth:
In early 2010 I sat in on a seminar on Open Source Software and the community in Ireland, organised as part of my masters course in DIT Kevin St. One of the speakers was Laura Czajkowski. It was during her
talk that I saw the commitment she had to the community and it begins a process of thought about what drives individuals to offer their time and effort to Open Source Communities.

The course that I was studying was Computing but specialising in Knowledge Management (KM). Knowledge Management is the realisation that knowledge is an organisations greatest asset. We constantly hear
the term Knowledge and Smart economy being touted by the Irish government at the moment. They like so many large organisations realise that it is what we know and don’t realise we already know can
be our greatest resource.

Within companies it is commonplace for individuals to hoard knowledge, we do this for various reasons.

We are not confident about what we know, and are afraid others may disregard our knowledge.
We fear giving our knowledge freely, as it may make us redundant.
We find it difficult to articulate our knowledge.
We do not have the tools available to record our knowledge.
We simple do not realise that we possess some knowledge.

KM is about accessing the knowledge within people, teams, departments, organisations, then storing that knowledge in an understandable or codified fashion, and finally making that knowledge available and
easily accessible to others. Some prime examples of where KM can work effectively is in the Pharmaceutical industry, where the process of getting new drugs to market can be as long as 12 years. Most of the large pharmaceutical companies have implemented large KM projects. One in particular cut the time for filling applications to the European and American drug boards in half. The KM systems they installed held the knowledge of previous employees and former workers of the American Federal drug Administration (FDA). Due to their expertise as to what information was required in an application, these applications could be filled out much faster. As you can imagine the saving of several years in getting a drug to market is worth a considerable amount of money to drug companies. This is can be the power of KM.

However what many organisations find when they implement KM initiatives, regardless of the money, time and expertise that they throw at it, is people seem unwilling to share their Knowledge. There are drivers that motivate and barriers that prevent people from sharing their knowledge.

Within Open Source communities, we have a group of people who come together to freely share knowledge. This makes it an ideal place to investigate positive motivations. If KM initiatives could replicate
the motivations within Open Source Communities then their initiatives could prove far more successful.

Back to my story, I began to realise that the Ubuntu community could offer me a perfect environment to investigate motivations to knowledge sharing. In May I contacted Laura and told her about my Idea. Within days we
were sitting down together in a lab in DIT and Laura was showing me around the Ubuntu community. Over the course of the next 3 months with Laura and several other members of Ubuntu’s community I had fashioned
a suitable experiment. The experiment would utilise the existing social networking pages (Launchpad) within the community and over a period of Two weeks would email an advertisement of one of those profiles to the mailing list of the Irish team. I would then survey the Irish team to ascertain the usefulness of the experiment. The idea of the experiment was to measure the levels of trust needed for knowledge sharing, and whether tools like Launchpad could assist in people getting curious about others in the community. This is the starting point of building relationships and trust. The experiment received great support from the community and I had a fantastic response to the survey. The experiment idea was even taken on board as a continuous feature by the UK and North Carolina teams. The results of the experiment did indeed indicate that, firstly trust
is important to knowledge sharing and secondly tools like launhpad if used in a proactive manner can initiate contact between members of the group.

Overall my experience dealing with Laura and the rest of the Ubuntu community was extremely pleasant. I could not of asked for any more help or enthusiasm. It was a privilege to get an insight into a remarkable community.

This is an extract of some of the projects findings:

The project’s findings clearly suggested the varying forms of trust. That initial conversations between members in the Ubuntu community did lead to greater curiosity of others.
This can then lead to a process where two individuals will get to know more about each other and strengthen the bonds of trust between them.
The project also identified tools as being very important within online communities in building familiarity and trust.
Correspondence and direct communication was identified as being the most important tool in which people will get to know one another and build trust.
The project results suggested that the availability of social networking tools in this case Launchpad was utilised by members as a means to gain more knowledge about other users. However it also suggested that this was after initial correspondence with that individual. Curiosity of others increased after correspondence with them. This would suggest that tools are very useful in the process of building trust and friendships in virtual communities.
Communities where there is little correspondence however may not benefit from this trust building processes and utilisation of community tools. This is where the project findings are so useful. They clearly suggest that by advertising members profiles can initiate curiosity in them. Traffic to the profiles and results of the survey indicate that this is the case. This can be an important initiative in implementing the trust building processes in communities and subsequently the sharing of knowledge. It can help drive the initial stages of a KM system and could become an important part of the familarisation and trust building process.
The building of friendships was indicated as being one of the main motivators of membership in open source communities and thus the free sharing of knowledge. Trust is a vital element in any friendship and therefore any tools that can facilitate this are very valuable in creating a healthy dynamic knowledge-sharing environment.
The findings imply that a proactive approach is needed within a community to initiate the trust building process, that although members desire to build relationships of trust with others they may need a push to do so.

Thanks to Barry for the update, if anyone wants to drop him a line here is his email address.

Stephan Hermann: Just in case you are a HP BL4* G6/7 user

shermann (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:17:42 +0000

and you have an HP NC 511i Emulex Dual Port 10GB Ethernet/ISCSI/FoE Adapter on board,
it works with Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick (Daily from Yesterday).

The only bug, which is now known as LP bug #628776, is that in the installer kernel module udeb packages the be2{net,scsi} modules are missing.

When you continue the installation without network Ubuntu Lucid/Maverick comes up and detects this card and loads the kernel modules.

Daniel Holbach: Holidays

Daniel Holbach — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:50:03 +0000

Visa, finally got it

Tuesday next week is my last working day and I’ll be gone for three weeks, without laptop. If you have anything really urgent, talk to any members of my team, Michael or Ara, they know how to get in touch with me.

I’m very much looking forward to this one and happy to meet Mehdi of the LoCo team there!

I’ll be back on 29th September.

Belinda Lopez: Ubuntu in Education

dindafoss — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:42:46 +0000

Wow – I’ve already been amazed at learning about some of the great things happening with Ubuntu in Education. At every level, Ubuntu in schools and learning just makes sense. Yesterday I was pointed to this great map showing school deployments in Finland: http://bit.ly/amFiOO . Greece is right behind them and lots of schools in the US are reporting success using Ubuntu as well. The work is being done by both volunteers and Solution Providers.

The Andalusia deployment of over 200,000 systems is well documented and Amtron deploying 28,000 in Assam in northern India and Oxford Archaeology and Johns Hopikins and Oakland University and the list continues to grow. Next week I’m visiting a local school in my backyard of Houston, TX that has migrated to Ubuntu using Moodle and other open source SIS (Student Information Systems). The project lead is also the volunteer coordinator of the Moodle Core Contrib team. I had to travel out of town to meet him and learn about this great project. I’m really glad I did!

Next up, the Edubuntu team is still being driven by the unstoppable Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) and everyone is welcome to stop into #edubuntu and join the weekly meetings on Tuesdays to add your voice.

Who am I? I’m Dinda! I came into the world of open source and Ubuntu some five years ago b/c of my interests in Education and all things learning. You might have seen me around various projects but now I’ve taken on the temporary role of looking at everything related to “Ubuntu in Education” and creating some materials to help anyone who wants to use Ubuntu for learning. Are you a student? parent? educator? Sys Admin or IT staff at a school/University? Voter? Decision maker or Service/Solution Provider? What do you need to make Ubuntu a success in your school? Email me or add your comments here.

Canonical Design Team: Why do you use Ubuntu?

Alejandra Obregon — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:02:24 +0000

We’ve been looking at making developments to the Ubuntu website that explore and highlight the reasons for using Ubuntu above and beyond the features of the products. One idea we had was to invite community members and Ubuntu users to tweet or post about why they use Ubuntu and display this on the site. The community’s voice on the website would demonstrate one of the key drivers for using Ubuntu: showing the strength and commitment of the community, not just telling visitors about it. Adding the voice and personality of the community to the websites will enable members and users to participate in our site’s messaging and to share their passion for the concept and principles on which Ubuntu is based.

We decided to run a test yesterday to see how you responded and whether there was interest. There are some great replies. Our favourite so far:

More can be found on Twitter: #iuseubuntubecause and identi.ca: #iuseubuntubecause

Please post your own and raise awareness so we can get a broader response.

Have you got any other ideas for how we can bring this to the fore on our websites?

Dougie Richardson: Install web applications locally on Ubuntu

Dougie — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:46:56 +0000

I was talking with someone yesterday who is hacking a WordPress theme together. If you work with web sites, being able to run a site locally allows testing, experimentation, developing new themes and even just checking that a software update isn’t going to break your site. You might want to keep a web application on a local network and away from the Internet – such as StatusNet, a Wiki or a project management application. All we need is to install a LAMP stack – Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. We’ve already got the “L”!

Synaptic (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager) lets you install common groups of packages (Edit->Mark packages by task…) in this case a LAMP server. You can do the same from a command line using “sudo tasksel install lamp“. Once the components are installed, you’ll be asked for a root password – this is used by MySQL and is not the system’s root password.

The default web root is /var/www – if you check it now there is an index.html. Open a browser and enter the system’s address (usually http://localhost/), you’ll be greeted with the contents of that file so we know the system is working. So how do we get our own files up?

Apache uses virtual hosts – we can have multiple sites on the same server. Each site is defined by a configuration file in /etc/apache2/sites-available. If you look there now, you’ll see the default site, we can use this as a template for a new site:

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress gksu gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress

You need to change DocumentRoot and Directory to point to the folder your site is going to be in. So lets say you want to use a folder called “wordpress” in your home folder, change “DocumentRoot /var/www” to “DocumentRoot /home/USERNAME/wordpress” and “<Directory /var/www/>” to “<Directory /home/USERNAME/wordpress/>“. We can also give an alias, so we access individual sites by name, to do this add the following “ServerAlias wordpress“.

You can then add “wordpress” to /etc/hosts (change the line that reads 127.0.0.1 localhost to 127.0.0.1 localhost wordpress) and use the address “http://wordpress” to access your site.

Ubuntu has a utility to add the site to Apache which will also need restarted:

a2ensite wordpress; sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If you’re only going to be using one site it would be easier to use the default site (which is already configured). Ubuntu adds the first user to the www-data group, so you can either change the ownership of /var/www or add a sub-folder with either the user’s ownership or membership of www-data (note you’ll need to change the group permission too). I’m adding a folder I own:

sudo mkdir /var/www/dougie; sudo chown dougie:dougie /var/www/dougie

This can be accessed by http://localhost/dougie. I’ve seen a few forum posts saying that people have issues with folder permissions and there are some misconceptions. I’ve even seen it suggested to edit everything with “sudo nautilus”!

Now with the letter “A” out of the way we can deal with the “M”. Most web applications need at least one database. Remember that MySQL password?

mysql -u root -p

A good example is installing WordPress. Download and extract the contents to your web folder (in my case /var/www/dougie). Create a new database called “wordpress“, with a user called “wordpress” and a password of “wordpress” by entering each command at the prompt:

create database wordpress; grant usage on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost identified by 'wordpress'; grant all privileges on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost;

Type “\q” to exit then open a browser and go to your site, for me that’s http://localhost/dougie.

So lastly we get on to the “P” – PHP. Apache will recognise and run PHP, however be aware of a caveat I’ve noticed in Ubuntu. If you try to use your system hostname instead of localhost in Firefox, it will try to download rather than run PHP files. I believe this is due to the system hostname resolving to 127.0.1.1, a solution to Debian bug #316099.

PHP applications often have their own installation scripts, which WordPress does. Enter the database details we just created on the WordPress install screen:

Once the rest of the screens are complete, you’ll have WordPress installed.

So to recap, all we need to do to add an application is create a virtual host so Apache can serve it up; create a database for it to store data; and configure the application – often via a browser interface. Now you can hack away at those WordPress themes to your heart’s content.

More information is available from the Ubuntu Server Guide.

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Paolo Sammicheli: LoCo Testing Team HowTo

Paolo Sammicheli — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:28:05 +0000

I finally completed the wiki page about the Italian experience in ISO Testing:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/LoCoTeam

I would really love if other LoCos would like to start ISO TESTING contributing in making Ubuntu everyday better. I also ask you to continue improving that page sharing your experiences as well.

Ciao!

Canonical Design Team: Happy Beta day everyone!

Iain Farrell — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:46:27 +0000

Happy Beta Release day one and all. If you’ve not yet upgraded surely now’s the time

Christophe Sauthier: Handicap accessibility meeting for open communities webmasters

Christophe — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:12:02 +0000

This blog blog is taken from Kinouchou's blog. And since she wanted to reach as many people as possible, she asked me to relay it here. So please if you have any comments, post them on the original blog post.

Handicap accessibility meeting for open communities webmasters

Accessibility and free software are two very important issues for me, that's why I didn't hesitate to join the accessibility and free software workgroup of the APRIL association in December 2009, in order to combine both aspects of these issues. I am also involved in the French-speaking Ubuntu community, who works actively on redesigning the website. A lighter, more aesthetic version of the website is a good thing, but improved accessibility is better. Given that many different tools are used to operate the website, it is rather difficult to know the different rules to make them accessible.

The idea is to organise a one-day meeting with webmasters from the different free software communities and with a specialist in digital accessibility. Armony Altinier, in charge of the accessibility and free software workgroup, accepted to join the meeting as a specialist. So, this is a great pleasure for me to announce that the meeting will be held in Paris on Saturday, the 20th of November 2010 at the Fondation pour le Progrès de l'Homme. The goal of this meeting is to help "free software developers who act as volunteers to improve the accessibility of the community websites they are in charge of". This free meeting will be the opportunity for participants to establish or widen their knowledge of the stakes related to digital accessibility, to learn to grasp its rules and to think on concrete cases, i.e. their websites.

Any community promoting free software is entitled to participate. the only conditions are to be the webmaster in charge of the community's website, to master HTML/CSS, to know how scripts work and to commit to improve the accessibility of their website. All information is available on handicap accessibility and free software wiki page.

Duncan McGreggor: HCI at Canonical

Duncan McGreggor (oubiwann@gmail.com) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:56:08 +0000

uTouch

Back in March, I blogged about future possibilities (in a blue-sky sense) of multi-touch, mentioning the project management I was doing for MT hardware kernel driver support in Lucid (and then proceeding to dive into the deep end of speculation). It's now an Ubuntu cycle later, and holy crap... I'm having a hard time finding the words. I think the blog title says it all. But I'll try to elaborate :-)

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed the big announcements we made a few weeks ago:

uTouch mail list announcement
Mark Shuttleworth's blog post
The Canonical uTouch announcement
Chase's blogging extravaganza (uTouch, MT architecture, Magic Trackpad, Trackpad update)

For the next few days, we were all over Google news. This was quite a shock, given that we'd been heads-down into the project for so long and hadn't really come up for air nor fully anticipated the impact (to others or ourselves). Needless to say, after the intense amount of work that the team had engaged in over the previous couple months, this was quite gratifying, if somewhat unexpected.

There has been a lot of discussion in blog posts, mail lists, IRC (#ubuntu-touch on freenode.net), Launchpad bugs and merge proposals, etc., so much so that touchscreens now pursue me feverishly when I sleep at night. I'm really not interested in writing more of the same :-)

As such, I want to mix things up a bit...

HCI Remixed

I've been reading an amazing anthology of essays on human-computer interaction. I still haven't finished the book (yeah, I've got about 10 in-progress titles on my nightstand), but am relishing every word in this particular collection. The book is HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community.

While doing some research at the beginning of the Maverick development cycle, I came across HCI Remixed at the local library -- the title intrigued me and I couldn't resist. Weeks later, after having maxed out the number of times I could renew the book, I just purchased it -- I simply couldn't get enough of the book. Every essay I'd read up to that point was fantastic; each one provided volumes of information, experiences, insights, ideas for follow-up, etc. Whenever I finished one essay, I spent days and sometimes weeks reading up on references, pondering the past and future of human-computer interaction.

Due to the unusual nature of the book, describing it is surprisingly difficult. That being said, the MIT Press page gives you a great taste:

Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.

If you're into HCI, learning from others, and discovering new sources of inspiration for your own work, this is simply a must-have book :-)

A Small Piece of History

By the time I checked the book out of the Golden public library, it was May and we had begun building the MT team. By July -- once it became clear how astounding the team's work was -- I realized that in 10 or 20 years I could very well be writing an article about Henrik, Chase, Stephen, Ikbel, and Rafi. Much like those in the book, I could be sharing the conversations I'd had with Stéphane Chatty, Mark Shuttleworth, Neil Patel, David Siegel, and John Lea. And that's only the crew which which I was collaborating or discussing directly. There are a lot of folks who've been working very hard on multi-touch infrastructure solutions and exploring ways of integrating these for several years (e.g., Peter Hutterer and Carlos Garnacho).

Though many foundations have been laid, as of yet (to the best of my knowledge), no Linux distribution has released a multi-touch stack that integrated gestures in a unified manner across everything from applications to window managers and beyond. This was something that Mark wanted us to provide to the open source world. In this spirit, the multitouch team hasn't just hacked things together to get a product out in time. A lot of generative, creative thought and care has gone into uTouch. A lot of original problem solving has taken place. Physics PhDs, kernel hackers, X.org hackers, driver creators, application integrators, toolkit gurus -- all of this knowledge was concentrated, applied, and used to distill a first approximation of what a gesture stack in Linux could look like, using the latest available technology and methodologies.

To be honest, we weren't really sure we could pull it off. There was a very good chance we could have failed at our task, quietly chalking up the loss as a lesson learned. Now that we've managed to shape these ideas into actual software, taken the threads of dreams and woven something real, we are thrilled to be engaging with others to see where all of us can take multi-touch and gestures from here.

Thanks to expert input from the wider open source community, we're already looking at ways in which we can improve upon the first version, ways of bringing new ideas and experiences to developers and users of multi-touch hardware running Linux. Things are only just warming up, and the greatest contributions have yet to be made. Every single person in the community has before them a world of possibilities for getting involved and creating the future human-computer interfaces for the free and open source world in the coming weeks and months. These are indeed exciting times.