Planet Ubuntu

Jeff Waugh: Welcome, Matt!

jdub — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:00:19 +0000

It’s wonderful to see that Matt Zimmerman has finally given in and started blogging. As a welcoming gift, I’d like to give him a hackergotchi. If it seems familiar, it’s because I tried to lure him into the blogging world with it way back in 2005! (You might want to click through for a hackergotchi of more conventional size…)

Fabián Rodríguez: Ubucon San Salvador on Saturday Sept. 6th! Save the date!

magicfab — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:54:10 +0000

I am thrilled to announce El Salvador Ubuntu LoCo Team will be hosting an Ubucon El Salvador next Saturday September 6th!

I’ll be spending next week in San Salvador and I thought it would be nice to meet some Ubunteros there. I wrote to their mailing list, one thing led to another and *boom* ! Having presented at Ubucons in Seville, New York City and San Francisco before I am really happy to add one to my list ! I am trying to think of any sentence in this post I wouldn’t end with an exclamation mark but I can’t !!!

A few emails and IRC chats were enough to settle on having a round table to discuss Ubuntu’s place in free software, Celvin Rivas will also be presenting about the state of Ubuntu in El Salvador. If there’s enough people interested there’s discussion about having some workshops - gotta love last minute things

From “Running an Ubucon“:

An Ubucon is a community driven, community organised event that is all about Ubuntu. These events often include a number of speakers, BOF sessions, demos, social events and more, and they are excellent ways to grow the Ubuntu community in your area, and to build an interesting and fun event. Ubucons are different to large Linux expos and conferences in that they are uniquely community focused and driven, and uniquely Ubuntu.

Greg Grossmeier: Ubuntu Bug Day - TOMORROW!

Greg — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:44:31 +0000

From Bug Squader Dereck Wonnacott:

This week’s target is *drum roll please* Thunderbird!
* 39 New bugs need a hug
* 36 Confirmed bugs just need a review

Bookmark it, add it to your calenders, turn over your egg-timers!
* Thursday August 28th
* http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20080828

Thats right, your favorite email client is up on the block ready for some triage help. Come out and help us make your emailing life better. Looks like a lot of Thunderbird bugs need some help with reproducing the issue.

Be sure to record your efforts by participating with 5-a-day.

See you in #ubuntu-bugs on Freenode tomorrow!

Mackenzie Morgan: Keep One Application Together

Mackenzie (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:31:14 +0000

One feature of VirtueDesktops that I really liked on OS X was being able to constrain an application to a specific workspace. It turns out Compiz has been able to do this for, well, since Beryl and Compiz became Compiz Fusion. For organization, I like to keep my Pidgin windows all in one place. I'm likely to miss them if they popup behind my Firefox, after all. Usually this means I notice

David Futcher: A (Working) Identi.ca Ubiquity Command

bobbo — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:37:17 +0000

I was off school ill today so I had ages to bum around the Internet looking for things to do. I decided to finally see what all the fuss over microblogging was about I tried to get a twitter account, but someone had registered my name already, so gave up and got an Identi.ca account (bobbo if anyone want know). I’ve always been a bit skeptical about microblogging, but after playing around with Gwibber and Identi.ca I can see how it can be really useful for keeping up to date with little things that people are doing, but wouldnt necessarily write a whole big blog post about.

After messing around with that, I read about Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity plugin for Firefox and decided to check it out. Ubiquity is nothing short of absolutely awesome. If you dont know what it is, then watch the little video here, where Aza Raskin explains what it is, much better than I could.

I decided to try and put the two new things I had played around with today together and post to Identi.ca with Mozilla Ubiquity. I found an Ubiquity command for Identica, which promptly failed to work and posted “[object Object]” to My Identi.ca account. Not a great start. I decided it was time to pull on my hacking hat and edited the existing Identi.ca command so it actually works now.

Install the command, open up Ubiquity, type “identi.ca ” and it will post it to your Identi.ca account. It also shows you how many characters you have left and warns you when you have gone over the limit.

You can get the command here and a screenshot here.

Jeff Bailey: Today's oncology visit...

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:35:40 +0000

...was brought to you by the letters A, O and K!

Getting the appointment with the oncologist is something we've been trying to do for months. So I'm pleased with the outcome that after the meeting and the review of the scans, she sees no need to radiation and such.

Yay!

Also in the good news category is that she's not seen a genetic component to an osteoblastoma. So while I will have to go for scans every 6 months for the next while and yearly probably forever, there's no need for the kids to do so.

(Oy. Kids. Plural. Still getting used to that...)

As always, thanks everyone for hugs, thoughts, and prayers. Next update: October, when I get an MRI, a bone scan, and have my final visit with this surgeon before the move.

Stephan Hermann: How Upstream and Downstream work together

shermann — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:31:04 +0000

Most people think, that I'm just sitting at home and do only stupid posts...That's mostly....truly....not right. There are a lot of things you do, when you are in this strange opensource business.

One of those things is attending conferences or attending fairs. Despite the fact that I'm really a funny guy sometimes, I do like to party with the folks from the projects. I think it's the only way to enjoy free time between real life work and opensource work.

The other thing I do is to have contact with other distro developers e.g. Gentoo, Debian or opensuse. When we meet (somewhere in Germany, mostly in a pub for a good beer and a good meal) we talk about the way we are working inside our distros, or what problems we face e.g. when we look at communities or development teams.

Another thing is to work with upstream projects on downstream topics.

This happened yesterday evening, while I was meeting up with Sput (Quassel IRC Dev) and EgS (Quassel IRC Dev , too). I told Sput "Manuel, you have only time until the 28th before our archives are freezing, so if you want to get your Quassel IRC Client 0.2.0 in, you need to release latest tomorrow". Sput was shocked, he phoned EgS, and when they were sitting together and drinking a nice "Kellerweizen" they decided to throw away the 0.2.0 release and go straight with the 0.3.0 release. I explained them, that we can push the 0.3.0 release and doing some more fixes over time. So when this release has some serious showstoppers, we will fix them. Fixing means: Quassel Upstream will send us backported patches, which are fixing those stoppers, and we will push them into the package. I think this is the way to go. If you have a good, much better a personal, relationship to some upstream developers, take this chance, explain them how the distro is working, when the freeze points are etc. It helps upstream to push things.

And if you think now: "Yeah, well, those guys are using Ubuntu, so no big deal"...no, EgS is using only Mac, and Sput is a Gentoo hardcore fanatic.

So thanks to the Quassel Development Team for this piece of great software...cu tomorrow for "The Dark Knight", hopefully...

Benjamin Mako Hill: Feminism in Practice

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:09:40 +0000

When my friends Karen and Annina were confronted with an offensive sticker on the laptop of someone working at our lab, they organized a very constructive and effective intervention.

I was so impressed that I made a short illustrated write-up of the story on my wiki.

Jonathan Carter: SARS Communication Suckiness

jonathan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:16:39 +0000

(rant)

I’m so frustrated with SARS (South African Revenue Service). They sent me an e-mail to notify me that I’ve received communication from them that require my attention. I click on the link which takes me to their website, enter my username and password, and it takes me to a page where I have to download the contents of the documentation in a PDF file. So, I do so.

When I opened the file with my PDF viewer, and it displayed that I require the latest version of Adobe Reader. This was already a bit frustrating, having to do so much work and still not being able to read my message. At least Adobe reader is packaged in Medibuntu, so I add the repositories and install it. 20 minutes worth of downloads later, I open the PDF. Yet again, it displayed “You need the latest version of Adobe reader to open this file”. Grrr.

I head over to Adobe.com, saw a link that says “Adobe Reader download”, where it also said “Latest Version”, and downloaded it. Turns out it is also Version 8.1.2, the same version available from Medibuntu, and it also doesn’t want to open the document.

After trying all different kinds of things, I’m still unable to open the PDF. Thanks Adobe, for implementing such horrible technologies in our government, and thank you SARS, for absolutely not caring about free software users, even when our government has a mandate to move over to free software itself.

Then again, it’s not like any government ever had a good reputation for keeping its promises. I don’t know how I expected ours to be any different.

Alan Pope: Launchpad to go Open Source by next OSCon

Alan Pope — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:31:17 +0000

This from Joey Stanford..

"The #launchpad team leads just developed a roadmap to open source Launchpad by the next #oscon conference. Really cool stuff!"

No pressure there guys..

Charles Davis: Joining the Unanswered Posts Team and Beginner Team

Old Soldier — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:46:21 +0000

With the interest so far today about Unanswered posts day on the Ubuntu Community Forums, I’d like to take a moment to plug two groups of helpful forum folks. The Beginner Team haunts Absolute Beginner Talk and tries to be helpful and welcoming to new Ubuntu users. To get more information on the BT you can [...]

Jono Bacon: Arf. Arf.

jono — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:05:49 +0000

419 Eater always amuses me - it is a website scam-baiters follow through with those Nigerian scam emails. Today though I read a case where someone manages to persuade the scammer to tattoo Baited By Shiver on his leg.

Read it here.

Comedy.

Aanjhan Ranganathan: Hello Planet Ubuntu!!!

aanjhan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:25:11 +0000

Goals 2008:

~~4. Get the Ubuntu membership~~

One more goal down. Yes! I got approved of my Ubuntu Membership on Aug 26th 2008 by the Asia and Oceania regional approval board. The IRC meeting logs can be found here.

Since this will be my first post on Planet Ubuntu, here goes a short intro on myself.

Name: Aanjhan “tuxmaniac” Ranganathan

Interests : Embedded Linux, FOSS VLSI Cad Tools, Electronics

What I (will) do: Masters Student (in another 2 weeks) at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Hangs out in #ubuntu-in, #ubuntu-motu, #ubuntu-bugs @ irc.freenode.net mostly.

Future with Ubuntu: Become a MOTU (in short)

Rest of the details can be found in this wiki page.

Thank you Ubuntu India folks and my wonderful set of FOSS friends for the wonderful support. Special thanks to Sankarshan and Runa, for continuously motivating me to keep contributing to Fedora and Ubuntu. Thanks to Jordan Mantha and Barry De Freese for the initial sponsorships and support extended when I was a newbie and was clueless where to begin. Ofcourse thanks a lot to the wonderful Ubuntu MOTU IRC folks for the great help extended in this ongoing learning process.

Looking forward to more uploads and bug triages.

Chao!

Jerome S. Gotangco: Ubuntu Love Day Manila 2008 and BarCamp Manila 1 - Huge success!

Jerome — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:26:27 +0000

What a week it was for the local tech scene in Manila, Philippines. We had 2 user generated events happening on the same week - what more can geeks ask for? BarCamp Manila 1 had around 80+ participants with 17 topics ranging from the Boost C++ libraries to thin clients and iPhone app development. Pizza, beer [...]

Oliver Grawert: Life update and new blog

ograblog — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:46:54 +0000

After i decided to finally not need my personal server anymore i somehow also stopped blogging, since i didnt feel like using a public blogging service …

Recently i often felt like having to tell stuff to the world, so here i am, back to life on wordpress.
Lots of stuff happened in the last year i spent without blogging so i’ll give a short bullet list of things…

* I never mentioned we moved from the little Eifel village we used to live in to Kassel

* LTSP was turned into a multi distro collaboration upstream project, fedora and gentoo joined upstream development (done collaboratively only by ubuntu and debian before) very closely and we work as a big team on the code ignoring distro barriers now. (opensuse sadly decided to fork off our code and work in their own corner on a kiwi based ltsp implementation… that doesnt mean its bad (it seems to work great) but we’d love to see them working upstream more closely with us). Here is a report of our first collaborative hackfest in portland last month (the next one is scheduled in early november in maine, if you are intrested to come, feel free to ping me).

* My work on the Classmte PC image is largely finished, if you have one of the granddaddies of all netbooks (yes it predates the eee) and are intrested in installing an edubuntu based image on it, ping me (i wont post the url publically here even though the site is available for everyone, to simply keep the load off the server)

* Doing all that subnotebook work with edubuntu somehow got me into the area of mobile devices where i do a lot of work now, in case you follow ubuntu development you might have noticed that we are switching to hal-input for Xorg. I noticed that somehow leaves out touchscreen users so i try to fix this regression before the intrepid release… In case you own a device with a touchscreen, please send me your lshal output and your working hardy xorg.conf and i will try to integrate support for your device.

* I got a warning that i am treating myself to bad …. Im out of hospital since two weeks now after having a so called TIA … living on coffee and cigarettes only over months doesnt work out, i cut down both massively, drink water like a drainpipe and started doing regular cycling as well as cooking. intrestingly the week of tests in hospital only turned out that i’m as healthy as i can be at my age, they didnt find nothing at all that could be responsible for teh incident beyond my way of life.

* LaserJock is back in edubuntu land … all my technical focused work the recent time left edubuntu somewhat in a maintenance only mode without much improvement, LaserJock recently returned and to push things forward again to get the educational bits and pieces in better shape.

* mdz blogs !

* Ubuntu mobile desktop … scotts post about Concept Distro somewhat fits with the (currently still exerimental) ubuntu-mobile desktop package …. a fully touchscreen manageable gnome based desktop system for 1024×600px based devices (i.e. the Samsung Q1 ultra) i’m currently playing with …

* I upgraded my mom’s laptop from edgy (6.10) to hardy (8.04.1) … no noticeable support calls so far

So i think thats the full set of most important milestones of my last year … i’ll try to be a well behaving blooger again from now on and hassle you less with such massive lists but keep single entries to single topics

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Developer Week II: This Time Its Personal

jono — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:32:44 +0000

DIGG THIS!

I am really pleased to see that Horseman Holbach has announced Ubuntu Developer Week.

Ubuntu Developer Week is a more detailed continuation of Ubuntu Open Week in which we have a week of IRC tuition sessions, but in this week very much focused on technical developer topics. The week runs from Mon Sep 1st to Fri Sep 5th and the fun happens in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.

The week is jammed with a range of incredible sessions, including Packaging 101, Upstream Bug Linkages, Introduction to MOTU, Soyuz and all that Jazz, Working with Ubuntu->GNOME QA (tips&tricks), How do I fix an Ubuntu bug, Introduction to BZR, Kernel module packaging with DKMS, Using the Launchpad Web Service API, Launchpad Hacks, bzr for packaging, How do I update a package properly, Introduction to PPA, Introduction to the Server Team, Various ways to patch a package, Automated Testing for the Desktop, A WebKit browser in PyKDE, Having fun with the Mozilla Team, How to avoid making Archive Admins unhappy, Ask Matt, Unit testing Python code, with code coverage measurement, Introduction to the Installer Team, Introduction to the Security Team, Kernel Discussion…

Daniel provides an overview of each session here.

Ubuntu Developer Week is just one of many initiatives that we have been working on to help the Ubuntu community grow and develop in the right direction. Others include Release Parties, Ubuntu Open Week, Global Bug Jam, Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, 5-A-Day, Harvest, Brainstorm, Ubuntu Developer Summit and many more in the pipeline. I am really proud of the work the horsemen are doing, and I am looking forward to hiring the fourth horseman/woman - if you are excited at the prospect of working on my team and alongside Daniel and Jorge, do apply.

I look forward to seeing the new blood that comes into the project to join the existing, well-oiled, arse-kicking blood that we have right now. Rock and roll.

Daniel Holbach: Second Ubuntu Developer Week!

Daniel Holbach — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:28:36 +0000

I’m extremely pleased to announce the second Ubuntu Developer Week! From Sep 1st to Sep 5th we’re going to have a great time in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.

Digg It!

There are Wiki docs, MOTU Videos, MOTU Interviews and we’re seeing more and more contributors each day. This is all good and well, but there’s nothing like talking to real people, asking real questions in a real-time environment.

The Ubuntu Developer Week is designed to give you an overview of what’s going on in the Ubuntu Developer world. Speak to the developers, learn, ask questions and finally realise “It’s true, I *can* make a difference by helping out here.”

Let’s take a closer look at the sessions we have:

Packaging 101 — MOTU Daniel Holbach will talk you through the bare-bone structure of an Ubuntu package and how to get there the easiest way.
Upstream Bug Linkages — In his session Jorge Castro will demonstrate the importance of linking Upstream bugs, acting as a liaison with upstream projects and be an important tie between upstream projects and Ubuntu.
Introduction to MOTU — Iulian Udrea has been very active in the MOTU team and will share his experiences with you and of course answer all your questions.
Soyuz and all that Jazz — Celso Providelo is not only going to run one session, he’s going to run two. This is the second one and will get you up to scratch on Launchpad’s Distribution Management.
Working with Ubuntu<->GNOME QA (tips&tricks) — Pedro Villavicencio is amazing. He’s from Chile, knows GNOME Bug numbers by heart and just generally a great guy. Obviously he’s in touch with the GNOME Bug Squad a lot, he will show you how to contribute to both Ubuntu, and GNOME at the same time.
How do I fix an Ubuntu bug? — Daniel Holbach will take you on the journey from finding a bug to work on, the process of fixing it and getting it integrated into Ubuntu.
Introduction to BZR — David Futcher has used bzr in his work on Ubuntu and will guide you on your way of learning one of the most important tools in today’s development ecosystem: distributed revision control.
Kernel module packaging with DKMS — Mario Limonciello will talk you through state of the art kernel module packaging with DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support).
Using the Launchpad Web Service API — Leonard Richardson and Barry Warsaw, two of the Launchpad hackers behind the Launchpad Web Service API will demonstrate a few examples and answer questions about the project that is hopefully going to put an end to all Launchpad screen-scraping.
Launchpad Hacks — Brian Murray, Ubuntu’s bugmaster does bug triage, bug statistics and chearleading on #ubuntu-bugs at day and writes Greasemonkey scripts at night. He’s done a lot of useful little hacks that make Bug Triage quicker and more fun. He will show you how.
bzr for packaging — After David Futcher’s session and if you’re into packaging, you should be ready to go for James Westby and the magic he will teach you. James is not only author of bzr-builddeb, but also heavily involved in DistributedDevelopment.
How do I update a package properly — If that’s the question you’ve pondering yourself, MOTU and Mentoring Mastermind Cesare Tirabassi is your man. Updating, Building, Testing, Tips and Tricks all included in the session.
Introduction to PPAs — Launchpad hacker Celso Providelo has put a lot of work into Soyuz and PPAs. He will explain how to make the best use of Personal Package Archives.
Introduction to the Server Team — Mathias Gug of the Server Team is a brilliant guy - always around to help you get started in the Ubuntu’s server land, generally helpful and easy to work with. His session will show you where to get involved if you’re into Ubuntu and servers.
Various ways to patch a package — Two great french contributors in the MOTU team, Christophe Sauthier and Didier Roche, are delivering this session: get ready to patch packages and make your changes fit neatly into existing packages.
Automated Testing for the Desktop — Ara Pulido has been busy working on automated Desktop tests for Ubuntu and will show how to make best use of them, how to get started and what to bear in mind.
A WebKit browser in PyKDE — You’re into KDE? Always wanted to start hacking? Jonathan Riddell is definitely your man: he’ll show you how much fun PyKDE is.
Having fun with the Mozilla Team — Firefox, Extensions, Xulrunner, Thunderbird, etc is right up your alley? Alexander Sack and the Mozilla Team are the people you’re looking for.
How to avoid making Archive Admins unhappy — Lots of changes Ubuntu Developers upload land directly in the archive admins for extra scrutiny checks. Steve Langasek gives the ultimate session to avoid common pitfalls and make archive admins enjoy their work with you.
Ask Matt — Matt Zimmerman is not only amazing, he’s also technical leader of the Ubuntu project, CTO of Canonical, chair of the Technical Board and great at playing the guitar. We are happy to have him here to run a Q&A session with him.
Unit testing Python code, with code coverage measurement — Debian and Ubuntu developer Lars Wirzenius is going to talk about code testing and code coverage measurement. If you want to learn how to write good code, make sure you don’t miss the session.
Introduction to the Installer Team — Ever wondered how Ubuntu’s installer works? Did you ever think: “I’d really like to get involved there.”? This is your chance, meet Evan Dandrea.
Introduciton to the Security Team — Kees Cook and Jamie Strandboge are amazing, they work day and night to keep your and your mom’s Ubuntu machine safe and secure. Want to get started in the Security world? Kees and Jamie will show you how.
Kernel Discussion — We have Ben Collins here who will lead the Kernel discussion. Ever wanted to help out Ubuntu’s Kernel hackers? Ever wanted to know how you can get a foot into the door in the Kernel team? This is your chance.

Check out the timetable, how to join in and the “rules“.

Jordan Mantha: updates

Jordan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:48:29 +0000

Network Manager

I’ve never really liked Network Manager all that much. Part of it is that I haven’t changed wifi networks all that much, and mostly because I have a static IP address at work. My usual network solution has been to create Home (let NM find my home wifi) and Work (turn off wifi and set up static IP on eth0) profiles in the Gnome Network config GUI. So when I saw that Intrepid wasn’t going all Network Manager and not install the Network config GUI by default I was pretty concerned. Sebastien Bacher convinced me to give NM a chance and after getting some bugs fixed I’m pleased to say that for the first time I’m only using Network Manager for network connections. I even did a bit of testing for Alexander Sack to see how the new Network Manager handled/parsed existing /etc/network/interfaces files. Awesome.

Ubuntu Quality

I’ve been rather busy with the PhD and other real life stuff, but I wanted to give a shout-out to a couple things going on in the QA realm. Leann Ogasawara has been working on the package-status-pages spec. A prototype can be seen at: http://people.ubuntu.com/~ogasawara/pkg-stats/openoffice.org.html . Stéphane Graber is also working on taking the XML output that Leann creates and making nice pages to go on qa.ubuntu.com. This will be a rather awesome addition to Ubuntu’s QA tools. Another cool project on the bug-metric front is work that Brian Murray is doing on the useful-bug-metrics spec. Brian’s working on gathering time-based data from Launchpad so that we can analyze things like the average time a bug sits in the New status, or how long it takes to get to Triaged, or even simply how long it takes to close bugs. This will add a whole other dimension to QA data that I’m really happy to see.

Edubuntu

One of my true loves is education. Creating a FLOSS environment for kids to grow up learning and exploring computing is a sure way for FLOSS to permeate society. Providing high-school and university students high-quality applications to learn and research is awesome. Showing students how to collaboratively develop technology, expand scientific knowledge, and empower open learning is revolutionary.

Edubuntu has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple years. Oliver Grawert and the rest of the crew have made some really great strides developing an LTSP educational server. More recently, LTSP has been shifted to the Ubuntu Alternate CD and now Edubuntu’s CD offering has moved to an Educational Addon CD containing ~500 MB of educational software and other useful packages.

For Intrepid Oliver’s been moving into the mobile arena and consequently Edubuntu has kind of been in a kind of a holding pattern, waiting to see what comes next. I’ve been doing a little work lately to make sure the CD is installable (KDE-Edu 3 -> KDE-Edu 4 required some seed changes) but there’s a lot more that could be done. I think we’re going to need some sort of Project Phoenix to revitalize, rejuvinate, and refocus the project. I’ve was really impressed with Cody’s Xubuntu Strategy Document and would like to see something similar (though probably shorter ) for Edubuntu. Anyway, if you have interest in Edubuntu or Linux in education (pre-school, K-12, university) we’d love to to see you in #edubuntu on IRC or edubuntu-devel/edubuntu-users mailing lists. We want to hear from educators, school sysadmins, developers, students, etc.

Pedro Fragoso: Hamster-applet on Intrepid

admin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:46:45 +0000

Hamster-applet [1] is the new Timer applet who just become a module of GNOME for the 2.24 .

This little applet helps you keeping track on how much time you spent during the day activities that you’ve set up.

The good news is that hamster is already available on Ubuntu Intrepid. Thanks to Luca Falavigna and Siegfried-Angel Gevatter .

Happy timing.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ProjectHamster

. Tags: applet, gnome, linux, ubuntu

Jorge Castro: Use UNIX or Die ...

jorge castro — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:03:46 +0000

Longtime sysadmin guy Ben Rockwood is apparently starting a podcast for sysadmins.

Ben and Cuddletech have been around /forever/ ... I remember his Enlightment pages being a boon for me in the late 90's when I was on my E kick. (Remember kids, everyone goes through an E phase.)

Bryce Harrington: Easy Dual-head in Ubuntu with Screen Resolution

bryce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:56:10 +0000

For Ubuntu 8.04 one of the projects I helped work on was a new xrandr-based screen resolution tool.

Unfortunately, Xorg currently requires you to specify the "Virtual" option in xorg.conf in order to do dual-head, if the combined desktop would be larger than the default maximum. This is nearly always the case, so it meant that in practice Screen Resolution couldn't setup multi-head displays for you.

Alberto Milone developed a Python xorg.conf reader/writer called X-Kit. Using this backend, we've been able to hook in a script that will detect when you need to adjust your Virtual setting, and offer to take care of it for you.

Here's some screenshots:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Eventually, upstream will be eliminating the need to manually specify "Virtual", so maybe by Intrepid+1 we'll not need this extra package, but for now it'll enable this (IMHO important) feature to work.

screen-resolution-extra and X-Kit are uploaded but haven't been promoted to main yet, so stay tuned for now.

Steven Harms: Harms’ Law

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:30:59 +0000

I am going to create a new law in my name: “Anyone who benchmarks a VCS will find their preferred VCS to outperform any other VCS by atleast double”. Now you know what to call this phenomenon.

Jonathan Carter: Cool stuff today

jonathan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:30:42 +0000

Akismet

By the time I write this, Akismet will have caught a quarter of a million of spam entries on my blog. Thanks again, Akismet!

Michelle Obama

This morning while driving to work, I heard excerpts from Michelle Obama’s speech that she delivered in Denver yesterday. I haven’t cried in nearly 13 years, but every now and again something happens that brings me close, that speech got brought me one of those moments. I think Michelle Obama will make an awesome first lady.

Monopoly World Edition

Hasbro (the company behind the popular game, Monopoly), will be releasing a new version of the game that contains popular cities around the world. The cities were chosen by votes on their website, and they have made the results public. My home town, Cape Town, got in at number 3. Awesome.

Nick Ali: Ubuntu on NBC

boredandblogging — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:51:05 +0000

Jane Silber posted on the ubuntu-news-team list that Ubuntu could get plugged on US TV Wednesday during a discussion of new notebooks.

Day: Wednesday, 27 August 08
Time: Between 9AM-10AM EST (east coast time)
TV Show: NBC’s The Today Show
Segment: Unknown, but during a discussion of new notebooks.

If you have access to a DVR, remember to record it.

Alan Pope: High Quality Live Ubuntu Video Podcast

Alan Pope — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:07:39 +0000

I've recently started a new job which calls for a 1.5 hour train journey each way each day. I like to keep my brain going during that time so I tend to listen to audio and watch video podcasts. I'll listen to the audio ones on my Nokia N82, and watch the video on my Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.

I recently stumbled upon a new (to me) video podcast which has an Ubuntu slant. Presented live every Tuesday at 23:00GMT/UTC (midnight BST), and available for download afterwards, I'm really enjoying Category5.tv.

Presented by Robbie Ferguson, and recently with a new co-host to help him stay on track, the show covers technical subjects with Q&A, how-tos and product reviews. Robbie has a professional, friendly, entertaining and informative style which I find refreshing in a technology podcast.

Being a live show means he gets some great interaction going with the listeners. Many other tech podcasts such as Tekzilla answer viewer questions, but with Category5.tv being Live, and with a 'chatroom' it's possible to extend questions, ask for clarification and also let Robbie know when he's fully answered your question. Despite the odd pause here and there where he waits for viewer replies, it's pretty slick. I've only watched a few of more recent shows via download, but I'll probably catch one of his live shows soon enough, even if it's just to say 'hi' and 'thanks'.

The chatroom I mentioned is actually an irc channel. You can join it to follow the discussion during the show and of course ask your own questions, and leave comments. If you have an irc client already then connect to chat1.ustream.tv and join the #category5-technology-tv0 channel to join the chat. If you already have a ustream user ID then you can use the "/nick" command to change your name from some random "ustream-guest-foo" so Robbie can address you better during the show :)

The most recent episode had a screencast type tutorial about DeVeDe, the DVD authoring package. I like to think of myself as a bit of an expert with Ubuntu, but there's always something new to learn. Having never really use DeVeDe in anger however, this was a useful how-to for me.

Maybe you too will learn something from this programme. Take a look and find out.

Miia Ranta: Dear LazyWeb: libnotify + Google Reader?

myrtti — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:45:44 +0000

I’ve tried a gazillion feed readers. I’ve used Liferea, yarssr, rssowl, irssi-rss, gdesklets…

As I’m a fairly mobile person (and in this case mobility can mean anything from shifting from using desktop computer to laptop computer to using only mobile phone and/or my Nokia 770), I’ve not been happy with having multiple instances of the same reader (or even worse, multiple different readers) running on several different platforms. On Sunday, I became very frustrated because of this, and although I love RSSowl to pieces, I’ve moved to the simplest and the most accessible feed reader, Google Reader.

This solution is not the best possible still, as I’ve grown accustomed to have libnotify or an equivalent alerting me with a bubble about new, unread entries. One solution to this is to publish all my feeds and use YET ANOTHER RSS READER, such as… “Yet Another RSS Reader”, also known as yarssr… *sigh* which ~~can almost do what I want~~also sucks and can’t do a thing I want it to do except make a pretty icon on the systray…

So. Is there any solution of my problem? I want to - at minimum - get a nice little bubble informing me that I’ve got unread feed items. Or, if not, would someone be willing to mentor me to create such an application (preferably cross-desktop, to be usable in all Ubuntu derivatives) with Python?

Stephan Hermann: FrOSCon 2008, Acer Aspire One, Body Back To Normal Parameters

shermann — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:01:22 +0000

FrOSCon 2008

Last Saturday and Sunday was FrOSCOn time, and as always it was a pleasure to attend this conference.

In 2007 I wasn't attending the FrOSCon, even as I was registered as speaker, because of the happenings in my last company, so it was really nice to see, that FrOSCon evolved. To all people making that event happen "Thank you very much for this great event" and especially to all helping hands, all people who were responsible for catering, cleaning up, making the lifes of the visitors, booth babes and speakers happy, a big hug and a big "Thank you".

Manuel (aka Sput) (Head of the Quassel IRC developer team), Patrick (aka Bonsaikitten) (Gentoo Developer), Sven (aka VaporUp) (SysAdmin of Netviewer AG) and I (aka \sh) (insert your favorite description here) were traveling from Karlsruhe to St. Augustin to have a good time. Sven didn't even know that he has to come with us, but Manuel and I were convincing him, and I think he was happy to come with us.

We joined the Kubuntu, Amarok and KDE Crew, and I was happy to see Marcus (aka Czessi) again and all the others (Moni, Franzi, Arthur, etc.). Also saying "Hi" to many people I last saw during the LinuxTag 2008.

A wonderful surprise was to (for very first time) meet Kris Köhntopp. Well, I was planning to have a drink with Kris for a long time (dunno, I think since I joined the Usenet in former times, 1992 or so), but I never made it. The last time when it was close was, when I worked in Karlsruhe, in the very same office as Kris, but Kris already left for MySQL^Wgood. :) But this time, during the FrOSCon it was happening, and I really have to say, he is a very imposant person. Charismatic, Friendly, and always a anecdote in place. Awesome.

The talks, as I heard, were very good, and I was very impressed of the BZR talk from MySQL, especially the way they work with it, and that they have a lot of branches/local repos.

Again, it was a pleasure and an honour to be back in my old home area and it was good to see that the FrOSCon crew is doing an awesome work. Thanks again guys, see you next year :)

The growing rate of Netbooks

Just before we travelled to FrOSCon, I bought an Acer Aspire One Netbook. I didn't bought the SolidStateDisk Version but the version with the 1GB RAM + 120GB Harddrive. And I have to say, I love it. I could choose between a Linux Version (Linpus Linux) and the Windows XP Version. As the Linux version is a bit cheaper, and I already knew, that I will put Linux on it, I bought the Linux Version one.

Linpus Linux preinstalled, I was really fascinated to see the easiness and simplicity of the UI which is greeting the user of this netbook.

Firefox, OpenOffice, a working webcam, two card readers, wifi, wired ethernet, 3 USB 2.0 Ports, SVGA Out, and a really good keyboard (for my fingers), everything you need to have a working computer for travelling. Right, you shouldn't use it as Developer Netbook, but as a replacement for business travelling it's fitting well.

Yesterday I was installing Ubuntu on it, with the Ubuntu Netboot Remix on it, and with tweaking some drivers for the wifi and webcam, it works like a charm. The only thing which doesn't work out of the box are the two card readers. But those two devices are recognized, when you insert two SD Cards and then rebooting the device. Hopefully this is being resolved in Intrepid, but I'll check the Linpus Linux how they do it, what drivers they use.

This morning I even found a post of Tiago, that there will be a special ubuntu netbook remix installation for the Acer device. Which sounds great. I just joined the IRC channel and let's see what I can do to help them. I'll write another, more detailed, post about this device later this day.

The most interesting part of this, you see more and more people using those netbooks during conferences. At FrOSCon I think more then 40% of the visitors were already using those netbook devices for taking notes during the talks or just sitting in the chill out area to check their emails and writing some blog entries or documents.

Body Back To Normal Parameters

As said, today my body is working in normal parameters...we had a lot of Kölsch but in general, we were doing fine. No one of us were really drunk, and everybody was having fun.

Just in case you are curious about the conference, you can find some pictures at various places:

Celeste Lyn Paul: 6 Research and Design Methods for Developers

seele — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:12:17 +0000

In addition to talking about the KDE Usability Project at Akademy 2008, Ellen and I hosted a KDE HCI Workshop.

90% of what I do as a designer is to try and understand problems and solve them. There are several research and design methods I use as a designer which can be simplified and modified in a way that developers can use them as well. In my workshop session, I gave developers several participatory and non-participatory methods they could use to help make more usable software. Here are 6 methods developers can use to help improve the usability of their software. These methods offer options which need no users, require user participation, are useful for user research, or are helpful in design and testing.

What is User-Centered Design?

User-centered design (UCD) is a methodology which considers the user’s needs, goals, and tasks throughout the development process. Basically, you want to keep the user in mind while you are planning and creating a product for them. You try to answer the What, Why, and How by understanding the Content, Context, and Use of a product in terms of its users.

Many of you are familiar with this comic.

UCD is understanding what the user really needs. UCD is also more than just usability testing. Usability testing is simply one of many methods interaction designers and usability engineers use to help create usable products. There are two classes of methods we use in UCD, participatory and non-participatory methods.

Types of Design Methods

Participatory methods are methods that users have an active role in design and development. Users become design partners and are involved in the planning, design, and testing stages the development cycle. Participants can be current or prospective users. Participatory methods include usability testing, surveys, and interviews.

Non-participatory methods are methods where users are not actively involved in design and development. Designers and developers involved in the development cycle try to keep users in mind while they are creating a product. Non-participatory methods include creating user groups and personas, task analysis, and reviewing user interfaces.

You do not need user participation to do UCD

Once you have decided you want to do an activity to help you improve your software, you must decide what it is you want to do.

More traditional research methods help you answer questions you might have about a user group, function or configuration option, or different design solutions. Design methods help you get stuff done, by establishing a usability baseline (to see how much you improve), find usability problems to fix, and improve the overall design and usability of your software.

Interviews

Interviews are a participatory user research method, usually done early in the development cycle during the research and planning stage (but can also be used later as a way of assessing certain features or functionality). It is exploratory in nature; you are usually trying to gather information to help answer a question instead of trying to validate or prove something. The method itself is quite simple — you just talk to users. It is a good idea to focus an interview activity around a single question or topic you are trying to solve. This allows you to gather much more information about a single topic by following up with specific questions.

Think about the type of questions you want to answer, For example, “How do you configure X” or “What do you do when you need Y”
Create a list of participants to interview (try to talk to different types of users)
Write an “interview guide” which lists background questions for the user and your research question
Take notes on the interview guide, it will help you stay organized
Compile your notes and talk about the results with your project.

User Groups

Creating a list of user groups is a non-participatory user research method, usually done at the beginning of a development cycle. It is a simple activity which involves one or more contributors making a list of different types of users of their application. When you create your different groups, you want to consider different dimensions which can effect use such as experience, roles, tasks and activities, and environment. Although no user participation is required, interviews can help supplement information you don’t know about a particular user group.

List the types of users you think use your app by various dimensions
Think of descriptive names to give the different groups of user types you find
Write a one or two line description of the group
List the types of tasks you can complete in your app
Look at your user groups again and add/edit and group information
If more than one contributor made a list, compare your notes and create a single list
Share the results with the rest of the project

Surveys

Surveys are a participatory user research method you can use to ask a lot of questions and gather structured data you can analyze. They can be used to gather all sorts of data including user demographics, frequency of feature or option use, and other useful information. Be aware that mailing lists and forums may not have all of your different user types represented. Keep this in mind when you are recruiting survey participants and analyzing your data.

Make a list of functionality or options in your app
Create a web survey which asks users how frequently they user or configure each of the functionality or options in the list
Send the survey out to you current or potential users
Analyze the results and look at the data in terms of overall usage and usage per user type
Compare the results with your current user group data and how your app is designed
Discuss results with your project

Task and Screen Diagramming

Creating system diagrams of task and screen flows is a non-participatory design method. These diagrams provide a different way to view and understand processes and how complex they are (and should be). It is helpful in nearly any stage of development because it helps plan and document processes and functionality. Diagrams can be simple and drawn on a napkin, or very detailed and drawn in Kivio, Presenter, or Dia.

Pick a single or group of related tasks to diagram
Begin diagramming the different paths for completing a task. Start at a high level and add then add details
Analyze your diagram. How complex is the diagram? Is it appropriate for how difficult the task is?
Review each of your user groups. Does the task make sense for all the user groups involved?
Discuss your findings and ideas with the rest of your project

UI Walkthroughs

User interface walkthroughs are a participatory design and testing method which can help you test functionality or design options with real users. You literally “walk” the participant through the UI, with varying degrees of guidance depending on how functional the wireframes, prototype, or beta software is. This is a type of usability testing, but the goal is to get immediate feedback in the middle of the development cycle instead of waiting until a release to test your design assumptions.

Pick a single task or feature you want to test. More than one or two tasks will be too much for a single session
Package the test software to make it easy for users to install and test. Alternatively you can use screenshots instead of compiled code
Ask the user to perform a certain task without giving away too much on how to do it. Pay attention to what the user does and not says
Repeat for 4-5 users. You do not need many because you are testing designs and your own assumptions; you are not out to prove anything.
Discuss results with your project, and possibly make changes to the app depending on the results of the walkthrough

UI Reviews (aka Heuristic or Expert Review)

UI reviews are one of the most common activities I do as a designer. It is a non-participatory design method you can use to find usability issues to fix. There are many types of issues you can look for, the most typical include the 10 basic heuristics, guidelines conformance and other industry standards and best practices (ISBP). These reviews work best if 2 or more people review the UI; a single person will not find all issues in an application and it is always good to have a second opinion on a design option. Out of all of the methods presented, this is both the easiest and most difficult to do. Many low-level UI issues are easy to find and check off a list, but higher-level (more serious) conceptual issues may take experience and practice to identify. Also, since you may be able to identify something as “wrong”, but not necessarily why it is wrong, it may be more difficult to convince your colleagues that it should be fixed.

Choose a few tasks to help you step through the app in a structures way.
Look for issues relating to the 10 usability heuristics, interface guidelines, and anything that might look or feel wrong
Record each issue with a screenshot and description of the problem. Include ideas on how to fix the problem
Compile results with other reviewers and consider design fixes
Discuss results with the rest of your project and plan which issues to prioritize

James Westby: I love a bad book

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:46:00 +0000

Last night I finished reading "Exit A" by Anthony Swofford. I had decided a while ago that I didn't like it, but it wasn't so bad that I had to put it down, so I stuck with it to the end. It wasn't a bad book, it was just poor in places, and disappointing overall.

I did prefer the act of reading the book to the book itself though. I have just read 10 or 20 draw-droppingly good books in a row. The previous book was "Disgrace" by J. M. Coetzee, which is stunning. Read it. I was beginning to think that I just possibly enjoyed most books a lot. Reading a book I didn't enjoy showed me that I just read a lot of good books.

I saw this one as a new release in a bookshop, and it had a piece of card with it, written by one of the members of staff in the shop. The card said something like "Swofford could have been forgiven for writing a poor second book, but he doesn't need to be, he can really write." I agree for the most part, he certainly could have been forgiven, and this book isn't bad enough that he really needs to be. It however not a great book, unlike "Jarhead", which I haven't changed my opinion on.

It wasn't just the act of reading a mediocre book that buoyed my spirits though. I wanted to like the book, so it wasn't just that it's not a famous classic like "Disgrace", so I'm not that much of a book snob. Also, it was really the card that caused me to buy it, even though I was drawn by the author's name, so it shows that my instincts are good, which gives me confidence when choosing books in the future.

The final aspect is the one that makes me happiest though. I know why it's not a great book. I can point to places in the book and tell you why they are bad. At school I was terrible in English classes, I didn't understand the first thing. Reading this book gave me confidence that I am learning while reading. Not only learning about life and the world, which I was already concious of, but also learning about language and writing. Even though I'd never be able to write like I would like to, I can at least comfort myself with the knowledge that I am at least able to partly understand the mechanics of good writing.

Bryan Quigley: Converting Dad to Ubuntu - Investing Site

gQuigs (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:03:32 +0000

My longest standing issue for converting my Dad to Ubuntu was one investing website that uses an ActiveX control. They do have a way for Firefox users though, but it doesn't work on Linux or with wine.

I eventually started trying to get IE4Linux (which uses wine) to get it to work. And it worked fine, except for the flash ads, which make the page unbearable to look at (the entire page flickers when any movement is registered in any flash window).

Now I couldn't just get rid of flash, because they used flash for videos on the site. And I don't have any interest in learning to block things in IE.

The eventual solution: IE4Linux with Moblock (Peerguardian for Linux) to block the IP addresses of Ad servers, so no more annoying flash ads.

Steven Harms: Quest for Glory 2 remake runs under Wine

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:40:30 +0000

For anyone who used to play old 80-90’s sierra games, the guys over at AGDI remade Quest for Glory 2. So far it is awesome, and runs under Wine as long as I don’t use an ATI card. Totally awesome.

Quest for Glory 2

Tiago Faria: Onelinux for the AA1

Tiago Faria — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:52:10 +0000

This is just a quick post to let owners of the Aspire One know that a remastered version of Ubuntu is being built for this netbook. If you’re interested in helping out drop by IRC (#onelinux on Freenode), which is pretty active, or send an email to our newly-created mailing list: http://lists.onelinux.org

Any kind of help is welcome!

Jorge Castro: Help test Openoffice 3.0

jorge castro — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:41:07 +0000

Chris "Chain Man" Cheney has put out a call for testing for OpenOffice 3.0.

Chris was just mentioning to me the other day how he doesn't have nearly enough bugs assigned to him and how he would love to have the community flood him with 3.0 bugs. I was shocked that he would be such a sacrificial lamb, but history is full of daring men and women who have taken one for the team.

Note: previous paragraph is a complete fabrication.

Brandon Perry: ClamAV Live CD 2.0 Beta released

Brandon Perry (noreply@blogger.com) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:14:27 +0000

I uploaded the beta of the ClamAV Live CD 2.0 today. I was able to bring the image down to 113 MB (more to come hopefully, as I close in on final). I need beta testers to make sure I haven't broken any key part. I have tested it myself, but I know my circumstances aren't the same as everyone else's.

Features included are the latest and greatest ClamAV engine yet (0.94RC1) and of course a smaller size and footprint. Currently, it is just the scanner on the CD, no chntpw or dban. Once I know that the scanner is working properly, adding the rest is trivial. The CD does include, however, ntfs-3g drivers, testdisk, the chntpw binary, and hwinfo.

If you are willing to beta test, you can get it here, and leave a comment if you find any bugs or would like to request a feature. I am also in #clamav-livecd on freenode if you want to catch me there.

Matt Zimmerman: Ease of use is a feature

mdz — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:51:15 +0000

It may be an undervalued one, though. Like many other examples of good design, the best user interfaces go largely unnoticed by their users. If a user consciously notices the UI, as something separate from the task at hand, it could probably be improved.

Ease of use is a frequent topic of discussion in Ubuntu. For example, one of the primary reasons why we chose the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu is that the GNOME project was making great strides in this area, as exemplified by the GNOME Usability Project and its Human Interface Guidelines or HIG. Nearly four years later, usability is still a key consideration whenever we discuss alternative applications. Ubuntu users don’t often consciously notice if their system has good usability characteristics, though. By definition, it’s behaving as expected, and it’s human nature that this usually goes unnoticed.

Facebook is another example of this phenomenon. Like Ubuntu, Facebook was a relative latecomer in its space. There were already plenty of social networking sites at the time, some with millions of users. Today, Facebook is winning, with over 90 million users and one of the most visited sites on the web. They did a number of things right, notably their strategy to make Facebook an application platform, but one of them was usability. Their site looked and worked like a single application throughout, rather than a loosely connected universe of ugly pages. They’ve recently launched a redesign which aims to make it even simpler and more consistent, showing that they’ve maintained this focus so far. They’re even running it in parallel with the old design to measure its impact.

How about Ubuntu? Most of the software in Ubuntu is developed by other communities, but many of the applications which originated in Ubuntu exist for the sole purpose of making it easier to use: gnome-app-install (Add/Remove), Update Manager, Ubiquity (our desktop installer), Jockey (our driver manager) and UFW (our work-in-progress firewall) primarily provide a simpler interface to functionality provided by underlying tools. A system programmer wouldn’t say that they add much in the way of features, but they enable casual users to do things they couldn’t do before.

Where could we do better? I’m interested not only in specific usability improvements, but in how we can improve our overall approach to ensure that we continuously improve. The first step is to figure out how to measure how well we’re doing, and be able to try out new ideas.

How can we, as a community of users and developers, do effective usability testing, and collaborate with upstream projects to process the results? I have some ideas, which I’ll write about separately.

Aanjhan Ranganathan: Bangalore trip and the “unplanned” hackathon!!!

aanjhan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:57:07 +0000

After quite some uncertainties from several parties involved wrt mutually convenient dates for meeting up in Bangalore, it finally happened this weekend. An accident involving the bus in which I was traveling, marked the beginning of this eventful weekend. God knows what the driver banged on when we heard a loud “Thud” and I (seated in the 2nd row) opened the screen to check what was wrong. The entire front cabin was jammed and the driver missing. We had to get out of the bus through the driver’s window as the doors were jammed and catch some other bus to get to Bangalore (yes, all by ourselves in the middle of nowhere. Driver absconded). Reached Bangalore safe and sound at around 0700 hrs (2 hrs late) on Saturday and was joined by Onkar later in the day from Pune. We had lunch and then headed to my ex-office where there was an “Open House” happening. Open House happens once in two to three years when the employees bring in their family members and show around the office and stuff. So we went in as a “family” of one of my partners in crime. They also “complimented” me with a nice WildCraft bag . Being a Saturday night and in Bangalore, the day is incomplete without a “Team Building” Session with good old fellow team builders. This time we had a Video Conference with one of our teambuilders joining in from Hildesheim, Germany on Skype with a bottle of beer and the traditional “Prost” marked the beginning of the 3 hr session…

The plan of action for Day 2 was to meet up at Parthan’s place. We planned to do a mini Bug Jam but it turned out to be a “hackathon” with Onkar and me working on the Windows port for gnusim8085, Parthan triaging a few bugs in Launchpad, Roshan (ubunturos) doing some Python reading and Barkha (baks17) trying to get GNU/Linux (Installfest ) on her newly bought laptop. We had great fun as you can read from here. Good news is “Gnusim8085.exe” is not far away *fireworks*.

The day ended with Ashish, Amit Modak, Onkar, Barkha and me having dinner at a chinese restaurant “Chung Wah” discussing random things and finally today, I bid goodbye to Bangalore for a few months to come. Back in Chennai and time is running out.. tick tick tick..

Complete flickr set of the Ubuntu India friends meet up.

Brian Murray: New Launchpad Greasemonkey Script

Brian Murray — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:50:36 +0000

I’ve added a new script to the Launchpad Greasemonkey Scripts project that I thought was worth sharing. The script modifies the color of a comment header if the comment is from the original reporter of the bug. It is also possible to set the color of the header by editing the script, I chose lightgrey as it seemed to clash the least with team icons. It looks like this:

I’ve found this quite handy when reviewing a bug report with lots of comments from many different people and hope you do too. Additionally, I’ve updated the lp_karma_suffix.user.js script to include the icon for Ubuntu Universe Contributors. You can see it next to Bryce’s name.

Jonathan Carter: Default packages

jonathan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:12:27 +0000

The Mother

My mother have been using Ubuntu on her desktop PC since just after Ubuntu 7.04 has been released. My mother doesn’t do much on her PC, she manages photos, browses the web, reads e-mail, keeps in touch with Pidgin and plays the occasional game. About 3 months ago, she bought a new laptop with Vista. I thought she’d get along with it fine, and with me being so far away from home so much these days, I thought she’d be fine. Well, she wasn’t. In fact, the laptop has been lying in a cupboard because she just couldn’t get things to work on it. She’s been visiting over the weekend, so I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it, and she’s very happy with it. She’s been telling everyone how nicely her laptop is working now since I’ve “upgraded” it

I did a Google search to find what people install on their mother’s machines, but couldn’t find anything really helpful. These are the packages I installed on my mother’s laptop:

thunderbird
gnome-ppp
some games from universe

I then just added some bookmarks to Firefox for the sites she often visits, configured Pidgin and Thunderbird, added a photo to her session info and imported all her music into Rhythmbox. So far everything is working very nicely.

The Server

These are packages I usually install on servers. Not all of these packages usually gets installed on all servers though. These are just a few favourites.

screen
mc
htop
debmirror
irssi
debootstrap
vim
toilet
figlet
openssh-server
ethstatus
ddclient
apache2
nmap
rkhunter
postfix
traceroute
links2
sshfs
strace
gpw
ccze

The Desktop

At least, my desktop, plus the packages on the server list.

wireshark
thunderbird
network-manager-openvpn
quanta
agave
build-essential
k3b
nautilus-open-terminal
fakeroot
freemind
debhelper
devscripts
strace
liferea
vlc
virtualbox

If there’s something else I should install by default and don’t know about, please leave a comment

Behind MOTU: Andrea Colangelo (warp10)

dholbach — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:25:06 +0000

Age: 28
Location: Bugnara, Italy
IRC Nick: warp10

How long have you used Linux and what was your first distro?
I first tried Linux in 1995, when I found a Red Hat 4.2 CD within a computer magazine I buyed monthly. I didn’t know anything about Linux and Free Software, but I tried it and was impressed from the philosphy behind it.

How long have you been using Ubuntu?
The first release I tried was Breezy Badger. Shipit still keeps my request for CDs, submitted in october 2005: it was great for me, since I had no broadband access at that time. I tried it from time to time,
mostly as a live CD, since I was pretty happy with Debian. A day I decided to give a try to Fedora, but didn’t liked it too much. Instead of reinstalling Debian, I downloaded Edgy Eft and love arose. Since then I use Ubuntu as my only, unique OS (apart from many other distros in my VMs).

When did you get involved with the MOTU team and how?
My first run with MOTU was in May 2007, but a series of troubles brought me away from the world of Ubuntu development. I tried again in October, on the edge of Gutsy release, when I sent an email to Cesare Tirabassi asking for a mentor. He drove my first steps in #ubuntu-motu and helped me uploading my first debdiffs. I still remember the first email in the hardy-changes Mailing List bringing my name! Then, the MOTU mentoring reception assigned Martin Pitt as my mentor, and the journey begun!

What helped you learn packaging and how Ubuntu teams work?
Well, learning packaging is an hard process. There isn’t a single “thing” that will teach you everything. My mentor has been an important parte of my apprenticeship, I encourage prospective developers to ask for one. #ubuntu-motu is an incredible resource. I asked a lot of things there to other MOTUs and contributors, and probably I have never been unanswered. Really, the best way to learn packaging is… packaging! Documentation and guides are a great starting point, but dirting your hands with stuff is always the best way.

What’s your favorite part of working with the MOTU?
Well, the feeling that you help shaping a distribution used by millions of people, and that your work can make happier even a single person in the world, it is a wonderful feeling. Further, the MOTU family is awesome. When you join #ubuntu-motu you feel at home. That’s a beautiful sensation!

Any advice for people wanting to help out MOTU?
Don’t be afraid to ask. Sometimes, even skilled programmers don’t know nothing about packaging. We have a lot of processes, procedures and even non-written rules that we should follow, and nobody knows all of them. Second advice: keep trying. Sometimes bugs are really nasty and fixing them is difficult. Or maybe the debdiff you provided has been rejected by a sponsor, altough you thought it was perfect. Well, don’t surrender, choose another bug (or address your sponsor’s remarks) and keep up the good work.

What are you going to focus on in Intrepid?
Currently I am mostly involved in sponsoring the work from our contributors. We have a lot of good guys who are helping a lot, and I enjoy uploading their works on the archives. After the Feature Freeze I will concentrate my efforts on QA activities. That’s probably the best period of the release cycle to tackle that. We always need for more and more people to do some good QA, so everyone is warmly welcomed to join.

Favorite quote?
I don’t have a favourite one among the many that I love. Anyway, thinking to the Ubuntu world, this one always come to my mind: “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”. People that are not Star Trek Fans can better understand its meaning here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDIC#Philosophy

What do you do in your other spare time?
Ubuntu and my girlfriend occupy most of it. Other than that: friends, cinema, Jazz music and good books.

Daniel Holbach: Ask MOTU

Daniel Holbach — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:46:27 +0000

Q: Can I modify Ubuntu bugs (in Launchpad) by email?

A: Yes, https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/EmailInterface is an extensive guide about modifying bug reports via mail. As long as your mail is signed, you can to almost anything.

Q: What do I need to bear in mind when requesting a sync?

A: A sync request will effectively overwrite all changes that were made in Ubuntu. Therefore you not only need to make sure, that the new Debian package builds, installs and runs nicely, but also:

Check the actual diff. Reading changelog entries does not suffice (ie. “This sounds like XYZ was fixed there too.”). If not all Ubuntu changes are present in Debian, we need to merge.
Make sure the tarballs in Ubuntu and Debian have the same md5sum. If not, we need to do a “fake-sync”.

Q: I have some time to kill and would like to fix some low-hanging fruit in Ubuntu. Any suggestions?

A: Check out Harvest. It aggregates low-hanging fruit from various lists. Just pick a few packages that you’re interested in.

–
My 5 today: #260865, #260498, #260550, #260062, #260370
Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day