Planet Ubuntu

Shane Fagan: My thoughts on Games for Linux

Shane — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:40:48 +0000

I went on a quest to find an awesome game for Ubuntu. It doesnt matter how much it costs I just want an awesome game. So there are some ones that most people know about Heroes of Newerth, Nexuiz, Warsow, OpenArena, Tremulous and a load of id software games.
So we have lots but most of the good ones are first person shooters. So what about massively multiplayer online games? On windows and mac they have Wow and we can run that on wine but it isnt exactly ideal. So I went looking for some good mmorpg games and i found two games that dont look bad Neverwinter Nights and Vendetta Online. Oh and if you count Heroes of Newerth we have 3 good online multiplayer fantasy games and lots of FPS games already available.
The problem is that there isnt enough people using linux yet to justify most companies making games for Linux but its great that id software and a few other nice companies accommodate us.
So what we need is for lucid+1(10.10) we get as many good games in the software center. So commercial or free, proprietary or free software lets make everything available. Lets have some fun
EDIT: I got neverwinter nights wrong its not a MMORPG, its just a RPG. Whoops :/

Jorge Castro: Using testdrive to save time on testing.

jcastro — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:00:22 +0000

mpt pinged me today to ask why Empathy has two icons in the panel.

That’s odd, what is that yellow icon on the left?!? I responded that we didn’t we ship it that way, we ship it with messaging indicator support built in! You have to go check a box to turn that off. Likely he flipped the box at some point in his install and forgot about it. This happens to everyone all the time!

I don’t maintain Empathy, the desktop team does, so how did I know we shipped it that way out of the box? I checked on a new system, with a fresh ISO from the day before, right then and there when he asked the question. How do we keep track of what we’re shipping by default and what we’ve customized on our own day-to-day PCs?

Enter testdrive. It’s in Lucid already or if you’re in Karmic use the PPA.

After that I dragged the little wheel into my panel. When you click on it you get something like this:

Now you need to wait for a minute. The first time you do this it will download the whole ISO. So just stick an old one in the cache directory or let it sync. Don’t worry, after the first time it gets much easier. Then a few minutes later we can confirm our findings:

Aha, indeed by default we don’t ship that weird icon in the tray. Whew! The best part of this is tomorrow when we need to know about how something is working in the default install we just click on the wheel, let it sync, test, confirm, and then move on! And since it keeps a cache you never have to redownload the whole ISO. And there’s things in there for -server, netbooks, and other arches, so it’s handy to check things across different kinds of Ubuntu.

This is great for confirming bugs and checking out what’s new!

Tagged: kvm, testdrive, ubuntu

Matt Zimmerman: QCon London 2010: Day 2

Matt Zimmerman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:43:50 +0000

I was talk-hopping today, so none of these are complete summaries, just enough to capture my impressions from the time I was there. I may go back and watch the video for the ones which turned out to be most interesting.

Yesterday, I noted a couple of practices employed by the QCon organizers which I wanted to note, to consider trying them out with Canonical and Ubuntu events:

As participants leave each talk, they pass a basket with a red, a yellow and a green square attached to it. Next to the wastebasket are three small stacks of colored paper, also red, yellow and green. There are no instructions, indeed no words at all, but the intent seemed clear enough: drop a card in the basket to give feedback.
The talks were spread across multiple floors in the conference center, which I find is usually awkward. They mitigated this somewhat by posting a directory of the rooms inside each lift.

Chris Read: The Cloud Silver Bullet

Which calibre is right for me?

Chris offered some familiar warnings about cloud technologies: that they won’t solve all problems, that effort must be invested to reap the benefits, and that no one tool or provider will meet all needs. He then classified various tools and services according to their suitability for long or short processing cycles, and high or low “data sensitivity”.

Simon Wardley: Situation Normal, Everything Must Change

I actually missed Simon’s talk this time, but I’ve seen him speak before and talk with him every week about cloud topics as a colleague at Canonical. I highly recommend his talks to anyone trying to make sense of cloud technology and decide how to respond to it.

In some of the talks yesterday, there was a murmur of anti-cloud sentiment, with speakers asserting it was not meaningful, or they didn’t know what it was, or that it was nothing new. Simon’s material is the perfect antidote to this attitude, as he makes it very clear that there is a genuinely important and disruptive trend in progress, and explains what it is.

Jesper Boeg: Kanban

Crossing the line, pushing the limit or rediscovering the agile vision?

Jesper shared experiences and lessons learned with Kanban, and some of the problems it addresses which are present in other methodologies. His material was well balanced and insightful, and I’d like to go back and watch the full video when it becomes available.

Here again was a clear and pragmatic focus on matching tools and processes to the specific needs of the team, business and situation.

Ümit Yalcinalp: Development Model for the Cloud

Paradigm Shift or the Same Old Same Old?

Ümit focused on the PaaS (platform as a service) layer, and the experience offered to developers who build applications for these platforms. An evangelist from Salesforce.com, she framed the discussion as a comparison between force.com, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure.

Eric Evans: Folding Design into an Agile Process

Eric tackled the question of how to approach the problem of design within the agile framework. As an outspoken advocate of domain-driven design, he presented his view in terms of this school and its terminology.

He emphasized the importance of modeling “when the critical complexity of the project is in understanding and communicating about the domain”. The “expected” approach to modeling is to incorporate an up-front analysis phase, but Eric argues that this is misguided. Because “models are distilled knowledge”, and teams are relatively ignorant at the start of a project, modeling in this way captures that ignorance and makes it persist.

Instead, he says, we should employ to a “pull” approach (in the Lean sense), and decide to work on modeling when:

communications with stakeholders deteriorates
when solutions are more complex than the problems
when velocity slows (because completed work becomes a burden)

Eric illustrated his points in part by showing video clips of engineers and business people engaged in dialog (here again, the focus on people rather than tools and process). He used this material as the basis for showing how models underlie these interactions, but are usually implicit. These dialogs were full of hints that the people involved were working from different models, and the software model needed to be revised. An explicit model can be a very powerful communication tool on software projects.

He outlined the process he uses for modeling, which was highly iterative and involves identifying business scenarios, using them to develop and evaluate abstract models, and testing those models by experimenting with code (“code probes”). Along the way, he emphasized the importance of making mistakes, not only as a learning tool but as a way to encourage creative thinking, which is essential to modeling work. In order to encourage the team to “think outside the box” and improve their conceptual model, he goes as far as to require that several “bad ideas” are proposed along the way, as a precondition for completing the process.

Eric is working on a white paper describing this process. A first draft is available on his website, and he is looking for feedback on it.

Modeling work, he suggested, can be incorporated into:

a stand up meeting
a spike
an iteration zero
release planning

He pointed out that not all parts of a system are created equal, and some of them should be prioritized for modeling work:

areas of the system which seem to require frequent change across projects/features/etc.
strategically important development efforts
user experiences which are losing coherence

This was a very compelling talk, whose concepts were clearly applicable beyond the specific problem domain of agile development.

Alan Pope: Why (I think) Ubuntu is Better Than Windows

popey — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:27:09 +0000

When comparing operating systems people tend to roll out the same old reasons every time. I think those of us who use Ubuntu are already aware that we have less viruses than Windows, less malware, it’s free of cost and so on. I’m sure we’ve pointed out plenty of times that you’re legally entitled to copy the CD and even create your own remix.

However I wanted to look at some of the things I’ve done recently on Ubuntu that under Windows would be costly, difficult or impossible. So without further ado here’s my:-

Top ten things you can do with Ubuntu, that you’d find hard, costly, impractical or impossible with Windows, which clearly makes Ubuntu better (in my humble opinion)

Snappy title huh?

Hardware support is better than you think

In the last year I have added the following hardware devices to my system and they were all fully supported out of the box with zero driver installations, no reboots, no 3rd party downloads. Truly plug and play.

HP Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax – everything worked including the memory card slots and network auto discovery.
Logitech USB headset – microphone and headphones worked with pulseaudio, and even enabled me to switch music playback dynamically from speakers to headset with the ‘pavucontrol’ utility.
Bluetooth dongles – never had a single one fail, and I’ve bought some really dirt-cheap devices here, where ordinarily I’d be wary about hardware support.
Ortek infrared remote control – again, I just plugged in the USB infrared receiver and it was working before I’d put batteries in the remote control.
3G dongle – this was surprising but again, plug in the USB dongle and network manager on Ubuntu spotted it and let me use it for internet access. The same happened with my Android based cellphone
USB Apple Ethernet adapter – amusingly on the bag it comes in it says “Only compatible with Macbook Air”. This runs the internal half of my firewall
Nintendo Wii USB Ethernet adapter – the list goes on

Of course it’s not perfect, there are still some hardware manufacturers who fail to support Ubuntu, but the point stands, it’s better than most people think. Your mileage may vary, I don’t doubt that, but this is my blog outlining my experience.

Access more than 4GiB RAM on a 32-bit install out of the box

Many 32-bit operating systems including Windows XP, Vista and 7 support a maximum of around 3GiB RAM. With Ubuntu 9.10 the 32-bit install detects how much RAM the machine has and if it’s more than 3GiB you should get a ‘PAE-enabled’ Linux kernel. With no additional work required on your part, you get access to all the RAM in your PC. So you don’t have to switch to 64-bit Ubuntu if you don’t want to, and still access all your RAM. If you’re already running Ubuntu and you upgrade your RAM you can just manually install the above named kernel to get access to all that lovely memory. Om nom nom.

Easily create a bootable, functional operating system on a USB stick

Ubuntu ships with “USB Live USB Creator” which takes an ISO image and creates a bootable USB stick from it. Simply download an Ubuntu ISO image from http://ubuntu.com/download and start the USB creator application on Ubuntu from System -> Administration -> USB Creator.

Tell USB creator where the ISO image is, and it can prepare and write the contents of the ISO image a USB stick of at least 1GB in size. If you have a CD already and not an ISO image then you can use mkisofs to make an ISO image, and then make a USB stick from that, which will save a 700MiB download.

Find out where each file comes from

The typical desktop PC has many thousands of files on the boot disk. Much of this will be your own data in your home directory, but there’s a lot that’s required by the system to boot up and function. Sometimes you might want to know where a file came from.

It may be that you’re a curious user, wanting to know how things got onto your machine, or perhaps you’re diagnosing a problem with an Ubuntu installation. Either way it’s trivially easy to find out where files came from – if you stick to installing packages either from repositories or manually downloaded .deb files.

For example I might be diagnosing a problem with my system – maybe a program is eating CPU – and I want to know where the culprit came from. Knowing which package the process lives in is a good way to find out why you have it (because the name and package documentation may describe it well enough). Also if I wanted to file a bug against that program, I’d need to know what package it’s in. Lets say in this example that my system is sluggish. I might use the System Monitor to identify the process eating up CPU time.

Note: In the above screenshot Skype happens to be idle, but this is how I might discover the process name if it was chewing up my CPU.

I can use the command line to discover where that file is located on the file system using the which command:-

$ which skype /usr/bin/skype

I can then use the dpkg command to find out which package installed this program:-

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/skype skype: /usr/bin/skype

We can even combine the two commands:-

$ dpkg -S `which skype` skype: /usr/bin/skype

Tip!: If you use zsh instead of bash as your shell you can apparently use ‘=’ instead of ‘which’. So that would look like this: $ dpkg -S =skype. Thanks to Scott James Remnant for that tip via IRC

So this tells us that the ’skype’ package installed the ‘/usr/bin/skype’ program. Not surprising really, but you get the idea. Also worth knowing is dpkg -L which lists all files installed by a package.

Email me when system updates are available

I have an Ubuntu PC behind my TV which I use to watch streamed video via Boxee. More often than not the TV is switched off, and when it’s on it’s showing the Boxee user interface and not the Ubuntu desktop. So I don’t tend to see any update notifications – in fact I don’t want to see them – especially if I’m watching telly.

I’d like to know when there are updates pending on that system, so I have configured it to send me an email when there are updates available. Installing a package called apticron. Just edit /etc/apticron/apticron.conf and maintain the “EMAIL” setting, placing your own email address in the quotes, and remove the # from the start of the line:-

EMAIL="alan@example.com"
Then wait. Each day apticron will run and you’ll get an email telling you what packages need updating.

root@revo1 to me show details 9 Mar (2 days ago) apticron report [Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:12:09 +0000] ========================================================================

apticron has detected that some packages need upgrading on:

revo1
[ 127.0.0.1 127.0.1.1 10.10.10.124 ]

The following packages are currently pending an upgrade:

gnome-screensaver 2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5
micromiser-beta 2.1.2-0karmic1

========================================================================

Package Details:

Reading changelogs...
--- Changes for gnome-screensaver ---
gnome-screensaver (2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5) karmic-security; urgency=low

* SECURITY UPDATE: information disclosure via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/11_CVE-2010-0285.patch: make sure to show windows that
are added in src/gs-manager.c.
- CVE-2010-0285
* SECURITY UPDATE: locked screen bypass via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/12_CVE-2010-0422.patch: improve window handling logic
in src/{gs-grab-x11.c,gs-manager.c,gs-window-x11.c}.
- CVE-2010-0422

-- Marc Deslauriers Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:48:56 -0500

--- Changes for micromiser-beta ---
micromiser-beta (2.1.2-0karmic1) unstable; urgency=low

* Initial release

-- btbuilder Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:18:06 -0500
========================================================================

You can perform the upgrade by issuing the command:

aptitude full-upgrade

as root on revo1

--
apticron

Note: You may need to some basic configuration of the mail system on the machine sending the mail. The default mail transfer agent is ‘postfix’ and it can be configured with:-

sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix
Once that is done you can look forward to receiving mail whenever your system needs to be updated with details of the updates required.

Go from blank disk to fully installed in under an hour

On most moderate hardware these days a standard installation of Ubuntu takes around half an hour. Getting all the apps you need for daily use might take a little longer. However if you take note of what apps you use regularly the additional applications can be installed pretty quickly, and in one big hit.

Whenever I’m installing Ubuntu 9.10 whether for myself or friends, there’s a set of things I tend to do post-install that rarely changes from one machine to another. This usually consists of installing audio/video codecs, fonts, updated video driver, flash, java and a few other bits and pieces. Some of that comes from the standard Ubuntu repositories, and some from 3rd party repositories or PPAs. Once the installation of Ubuntu is complete and all updates have been installed there’s just a few lines to paste in and then I leave it to run for a while.

# Add repo for Lifesaver screensaver sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cmsj/lifesaver # Add repo for chromium daily build sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa # Update local package lists sudo apt-get update # Install all the stuff! sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras \ # Installs flash, codecs, java, fonts chromium-browser \ # Installs daily build of Chromium lifesaver \ # Install lifesaver screensaver gtk-recordmydesktop \ # Install app for recording screencasts gnome-do \ # Install Gnome-Do vlc \ # Install VLC media player openssh-server \ # Install SSH server for remote access smbfs \ # Install samba client for accessing Windows shares gwibber # Install microblogging client

Building a list like this can significantly reduce the amount of time taken to get up and running with Ubuntu. What’s especially cool about this is there is no need to visit any third party websites or download external installers. Those applications listed above are the ones I use regularly, you will have your own set of “must have” packages. What are they?

Move a hard disk

Ubuntu has no direct equivalent to “Windows Genuine Advantage” fortunately. This is the tool that seeks to reinforce the Microsoft End User License Agreement for Windows users by causing havoc when system hardware changes. Windows also has quite a fit when you move a hard disk from one system to another as it detects and installs new drivers for all the newly found devices.

Ubuntu does most of its hardware detection automatically at each and every boot-up with no user interaction. As a result you can take a hard disk containing a standard install of Ubuntu from one system and put it in another and expect it to work without much effort. The only time I have had an issue is when I have made some manual configuration changes for the specific hardware in the computer.

For example if you have installed and enabled the nVidia binary driver and configured it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the target computer doesn’t have an nVidia graphics card then it might fail to start the graphical environment due to it being forced to load the ‘wrong’ driver. In this instance probably the easiest thing to do is backup and remove the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart the machine. At that point it will automatically detect the video hardware and should work much the same as a standard install.

Compiling and packaging applications for older OS releases

With the 6-month release cycle some people can feel left behind if they don’t upgrade to the next release promptly. Ubuntu has a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years to cater for many users who wish to stay with one stable release. Ubuntu 6.06, 8.04 and the upcoming 10.04 are all LTS releases, with all other releases being non-LTS.

There will always be some users who are not on an LTS release, but have still chosen to stick with their currently working system rather than upgrade. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it can lead to users wanting a newer version of a package to be ‘backported’ to their release of Ubuntu, whilst the rest of the development community have moved on. There are developers who backport applications from newer releases to older ones, but they don’t backport everything, and there is a finite resource of developers available to do this task. The good news is that with a little time and effort, you can do this yourself.

I recently had a friend who was using Ubuntu 9.04 with an nVidia graphics card using the driver supplied, but he wanted to try the newer driver from Ubuntu 9.10. It’s generally not recommended to take a package built for one version of Ubuntu and just install it on an older release. It may work, but there’s no guarantee, and it can break the system in unpredictable and catastrophic ways.

So I took the ’source’ code from Ubuntu 9.10 and used the tools provided in Ubuntu to rebuild the driver for 9.04. This was a trivial thing to do. The really cool thing is that I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit and was able to build the driver for Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit on my local PC. Once I was confident that it worked I uploaded it to my launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) where it was built for Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

So not only was I able to backport a driver to an older release, but I also built it for an architecture that I don’t even run myself. The observant among you may have noticed that the package I built is not open source – the nVidia driver is proprietary code. Yet I was still able to take the packagable parts and in only a matter of minutes have it rebuilt for another release.

All the commands I used (dch, debuild, pbuilder-dist, dput) are well documented tools for managing, building and uploading Debian packages (.debs) and their contents, and of course, they’re all freely available in the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu Masters of The Universe (MOTU) are a helpful bunch and their pages can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU and on irc in #ubuntu-motu.

Fixing a bug

Whilst it’s easy to dismiss this as an advantage only if you’re a coder, let me first say that I’m not a developer at all. I can just about read someone elses very simple code with some help and google, but I don’t really ever write anything myself. So if I can fix a bug, anyone can!

I recently discovered a very simple bug in the ifdata command which I filed in launchpad – the Ubuntu bug tracker . With a little help from some of the Ubuntu developers – who were keen to help me – I was able to create a patch, test it and submit it to Ubuntu and upstream to Debian. The critical step that really made me consider even trying to look at this bug was that the source was available and easily installable. I was able to identify the package containing the buggy command:-

$ dpkg -S `which ifdata` moreutils: /usr/bin/ifdata
Once I knew the package name I could download and unpack the source code for that package very easily with one simple command:-

$ apt-get source moreutils Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done NOTICE: 'moreutils' packaging is maintained in the 'Git' version control system at: git://git.kitenet.net/moreutils Need to get 37.8kB of source archives. Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (dsc) [822B] Get: 2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (tar) [37.0kB] Fetched 37.8kB in 0s (191kB/s) gpgv: Signature made Tue 05 May 2009 20:19:33 BST using DSA key ID 788A3F4C gpgv: Can't check signature: public key not found dpkg-source: warning: failed to verify signature on ./moreutils_0.35.dsc dpkg-source: info: extracting moreutils in moreutils-0.35 dpkg-source: info: unpacking moreutils_0.35.tar.gz

The tricky part for me is then actually finding the incorrect code in the program. With a lot of help from a good friend and after asking on-line I was able to create a patch. I tested my patch and submitted it to the developers for review. That process is all well documented and I was supported through the process by Ubuntu developers.

All in all it took me a few hours to get this done, spread over a week or so. Not a massive investment of time, and I’ll certainly be quicker next time, now I have learned how to handle bugs like this. Plus I now have a better understanding of the packaging system which helps me with other great things.

Re-install the OS and Applications without losing your data

A default installation of Ubuntu wil place all the operating system files and user data in one partition on the disk called the ‘root partition’ or /, and a second partition for swap. Many users like separating their OS/apps from their user data, so they create a separate partition for /home. This is useful for a number of reasons including allowing you to reinstall the OS on the root partition without touching your data in the /home partition. One little-known feature of the installer on the Live Ubuntu CD is that you can do this – reinstall the OS and not wipe your data – even if you dont have separate partitions for / and /home.

Ok, so you want to reinstall the OS but keep your data in /home. Perhaps you want to upgrade but prefer a clean install, or maybe you’ve played with the system a bit too much and it’s become damaged, and you’d like to quickly ‘reset’ everything with a reinstall. Simply boot from the Live CD and run the installer. When you get to the partitioning step, choose ‘manual partitioning’ which takes you to the more advanced partitioning tool. Select your root partition for installation but don’t tick the “format” checkbox. Continue with the installer as normal.

The installer will recursively delete all files (except those in /home) before copying the new install files onto the disk. Create the same first username during the installer and it will re-use the /home/username folder as your home directory, with all your files intact.

Note: Some user data files (such as mysql databases which are in /var) may be stored in other folders than /home, so you will probably want to back the system up before hand in case there are any files you need to recover.

So those are 10 things I do with Ubuntu that I’d have a hard time doing on Windows. It’s arguable whether you’d need to be able to do some of this stuff, and that I accept.

I realise that there are Windows-based tools that can replicate/emulate some of these tasks, or maybe Windows Vista or 7 can do some of the above tasks. I kinda stopped bothering with Windows after XP, so my knowledge may be lacking. Feel free to correct me in the comments, or suggest what you can’t live without.

Daniel Holbach: Ubuntu Global Jam – what’s it all about?

Daniel Holbach — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:03:55 +0000

You want to know what the Ubuntu Global Jam is all about? It’s easy.

Any of the Ubuntu Jams is a session where people get together locally (yes, in real time and in a real place) and do something to make Ubuntu better and have lots of fun. At the Ubuntu Global Jam we are going to have lots and lots of different kinds of jams around the world for a whole weekend. Make sure you add 26th to 28th of March to you calendar.

Part of our menagerie of Jams are:

It just depends on what you really enjoy doing.

It doesn’t matter if it’s just you and your friends meeting at your house for a jam or if you get together a giant LoCo team to rock out and jam, in any case, we want you to add yourself here.

If you’re all new to organising jams, you might want to do one or more of the following:

talk to the fine people in #ubuntu-locoteams
mail the fine people on loco-contacts and/or ubuntu-event-planners
attend the fine Ubuntu Global Jam tuition sessions (#ubuntu-locoteams: 12 March, 9:00 UTC: Packaging Jams, 16 March, 9:00 UTC: Translation Jams)
blog about it and let your friends know!

Mirco Müller: OpenGL 4.0 specification

MacSlow — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:54:45 +0000

The Khronos group just announced the OpenGL 4.0 spec. That’s some major news! I still have to get my hands dirty with geometry-shaders, GPU-tesselation and OpenCL *sigh*

Launchpad News: Getting started with launchpadlib: Launchpad’s Python library

Matthew Revell — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:45:33 +0000

Launchpad’s strategist, Jonathan Lange, has started a series of blog posts on getting started with Launchpad’s Python library, launchpadlib:

launchpadlib is the Python client-side library that talks to Launchpad’s own REST API. It turns out that customize scripted control of a bug-tracker-code-hosting-translation-distribution-building-cross-project-collaboration thing is actually quite handy.

Catch-up with the first two posts in the series:

And you can subscribe to Jonathan’s blog or follow blogs from both Jonathan and other members of the Launchpad community on Planet Launchpad.

Dax Solomon Umaming: Smart’s ZTE MF627 on Karmic

Dax Solomon Umaming — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:34:46 +0000

This is my last night on Karmic Koala ‘coz tonight, I’ll be upgrading to Lucid. So I decided to try out my 3G stick from Smart and test it on my buggy Koala (MSI Wind issues mostly). Whaddaya know? It still works.. although I’m not quite sure if it works out of the box or because I still have Liam Green-Hughes’ usb-modeswitch and zte-mf627-switch old Jaunty packages.

The speed can’t compare to my broadband DSL, but still acceptable if I’m on the road.

Melissa Draper: Random winner!

melissa — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:29:11 +0000

Monday saw the announcement of the International Women’s Day competition winners.

Well, most of them. Jono had unfortunately misunderstood what we had asked of him and hence promoted, and not drawn the second winner randomly. Oops! (We’ll blame it on his runaway glasses). Thankfully, being a man of his word, he has managed to right this. During his q&a ustream broadcast yesterday, he drew a truly random winner… Caterina Brigandi!

Congrats again to Elvira, Karen, Jen and now Caterina! Thank you all so much for participating.

Dylan McCall: Why menu bars are evil, take 54304

Dylan McCall (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:13:39 +0000

Seif Lotfy posted excitedly about Ian Cylkowski's in-depth Nautilus redesign mockup.

I found it very nice and refreshing, too. However, I noticed one strange thing: the menu bar just up and vanished. Ian`s incentive intrigued me:

Hidden Menubar: I’m not going to take sides here on whether we should still be having a menubar in applications or not; it’s another minefield of opinions and flaming. I’m personally fine with a menubar inside the application, but I also happily use applications that tuck away the menubar under a single icon (think Google Chrome). But I do think that we should have the option here. In my mockup, all the menubar settings can be brought up with the settings icon (first icon after the pathbar). But if you would like to see the menubar permanently then this, too, should be an option.

Being one of those people who considers the slightest growth of an options dialog a crushing defeat, I just have to debate that. Hopefully this won't cause the flame-war Ian predicts. That would be a bad start for my first aggregated blog post. (Hi, Planet Ubuntu!)

What I would like to do is go over why Chromium's menus are great, and why they absolutely are not just “tucked away under a single icon” but intentionally designed that way and inseparable from that particular approach. It's about simplifying the menu so it relates to the two distinct subjects the user interacts with: the application and the current page.

There are millions of things I dislike about menu bars, but that would take all year to discuss. (And I have different things to fix). I'll just vent about two problems which relate closely to each other:

They traditionally consume 100% width. A small menu bar looks wimpy. Half of that menu bar will inevitably be wasted space no matter how hard the developers try to cram stuff into there.
There is a strange urge to duplicate everyone else's menus for consistency and have as many of these as possible. For some reason the uniqueness of an application is expected to vanish at the menu bar, which becomes an abstract world with words like “File” referring to web pages, photos, applications and video clips alike. Menu bars are popular things for accessibility, so I wonder if this abstraction helps in that regard or hinders.

Having said that, GNOME applications deserve some credit for usually replacing the title of the File menu with Music or Photos. Yet, the generic top-left-most menu is still there in spirit.

As we can see from the gnome-terminal screenshot, though, the File menu's spirit is weak. Challenge of the day: name one file related thing there, then explain why adding and editing profiles should be in different places.

So, Chromium is interesting because it is one of few applications to finally take a bold step against the '90s fashion in menu bars. First of all, the distinct lack of a menu bar clears up the interface considerably. Then they accept that, to an end user, the browser is not interacting with “files” but with web pages. So, the File menu becomes a Page menu. Completely. They also throw away all the baggage that the File menu used to have.
...and that is where the magic happens. Now the menu has a far more powerful, meaningful context. Actual useful functions can be put there that are of importance to people and relevant to what they are doing. Things like zooming, printing, copying and pasting inside pages.

The remaining stuff happens in the context of the Application menu (the wrench). Quitting, opening windows, changing preferences, dealing with bookmarks; anything that is related to the application as a whole, not the current page. Since Chromium was designed with a logical scope, that is everything else it does except extensions.

I think we can do a lot better then the traditional menu bar. Just yanking it out, though, won't do us much good.

Dylan McCall: New stuff for ubiquity-slideshow!

Dylan McCall (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:13:12 +0000

Remember that slideshow when you did a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic?

For Lucid, ubiquity-slideshow is rocking, if I may say so myself :)

First of all, a quick refresher: this is a really simple project with the goal of providing an introductory slideshow that runs when people install Ubuntu. The ubiquity-slideshow packages are all content packages, then Ubiquity displays that content at the right time.

The slideshow is implemented with Webkit, since all the cool people use Webkit. (It also renders things nicely, it's flexible, quick, we can quickly throw it on the web, people can make content really easily, and Javascript allows us a good split between interactive goodies and actual functionality like installing the operating system).

As far as content is concerned, I try to keep this different from other introductory slideshows in the content that I maintain. It doesn't try to sell the product as people install it, instead providing some exciting points of action for getting started. Not as vague as you get in Windows' slideshows, but not an in-depth how-to either.
The idea is really summed up in the first slide: Through this I want to encourage new users to explore Ubuntu and really discover how awesome it is (instead of what buttons to press).

(I admit it: I am obsessed with whitespace)

So: Lucid... Lots of new stuff here.

First of all, the project is now providing separate slideshows for Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu installations. It's also really easy to add more, so anyone who wants in on neat slideshowy action can!
I'm hoping to get an Ubuntu Netbook Edition slideshow in there, too. It isn't perfect at the moment, so if you have any suggestions for what needs to be done or said, please let me know or write to the ubiquity-slideshow mailing list on Launchpad!

Translations aren't horrific to work with any more. It's still possible that strings may change before documentation freeze, but the gist of it is we just have one translation template that has all the text for each slideshow. You can go through the list on a rainy afternoon and have your favourite distro's installer slideshow completely translated for your locale.

Speaking of strings being changeable, if you see any errors, things that sound strange, things that are useless, things we need or things that you could say better, please file a bug or let me know. I keep a recent copy of things at http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/ubiquity-slideshow-ubuntu

Michael Forrest and Otto Greenslade, from the design team, sent me a mockup and some graphics to fit with the exciting new Ubuntu branding. I worked them into the CSS and played with the text a little. Thus, behold, the proposed new look for the Ubuntu slideshow!

The whole thing can be seen on the web. It is a little bit larger than the one in Karmic.
Imagine it in Ubiquity, without a border, inside the awesome new Ambience theme, gracefully connecting to the title bar. Mmm...

Keep in mind this is still a proposal, just fully implemented (granted a few clunky bits).
Any constructive feedbacks or cries of “stop, you maniac!” are certainly not in vain :)

Thanks for listening!

Kees Cook: openssl client does not check commonName

kees — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:47:58 +0000

I realize the openssl s_client tool tries to be upper-layer protocol agnostic, but doesn’t everything that uses SSL do commonName checking (HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, POP, XMPP)? Shouldn’t this be something openssl s_client does by default, maybe with an option to turn it off for less common situations?

Here it doesn’t complain about connecting to “outflux.net” when the cert has a CN for “www.outflux.net”:

echo QUIT | openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/certs \
  -connect outflux.net:443 2>/dev/null | egrep "subject=|Verify"

subject=/CN=www.outflux.net
    Verify return code: 0 (ok)

Martin Owens: Ubuntu Learning: Where Are We?

doctormo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:30:21 +0000

The Ubuntu Learning project has been quietly working away for the past six months, most of what we’ve been working on has been the technology to invite new contributors into the mix and get materials published, the plan for what we’re going to write and how to focus in on just a handful of topics so we can really get down to writing.

So you’ve probably read about the technology, GroundControl is a learning project tech. It’s built to allow writers to contribute their knowledge with minimum of fuss. The GroundControl project is suffering a little bit of a delay from changes in launchpad, but a lot of this is because the technology was before it’s time and launchpad and the ubuntu desktop need to be made more talkative before GroundControl and many other launchpad apps will really work nicely with launchpad.

The creation of the build functionality is all there, you just write a bunch of text files and hit go and it compiles your course into a nice book, with side book for lesson plan. There is more work that could be done on the GUI for hitting go, but that’s a nice to have.

The moodle website is pretty much functionally done and we can add classes when ever we like. There is a major need for a theme to be developed, something cleaner than the standard moodle installed theme with our own branding etc. But that’s on our todo list.

I’ve set up a physical systems administration class again for April onwards, this means I’ve taken control of the systems administration course and will be developing it further as the class proceeds. Nigel is still progressing with the teaching track and Elizabeth is collecting information on the Desktop track, hopefully there is plenty of room for collaboration with the Ubuntu Manual project there.

We’ve got a team meeting coming up on Monday 15th 23:00 UTC and we’re a year into our project here so we’ve going to be looking at a way to organise ourselves better. This might include some leadership reorganisation and it’s probably going to involve discussion in how we can get more people involved.

If you feel like learning materials and teaching FOSS topics is very important to the progress to world domination as we do; then please do join us at our meeting and tell us how you think learning materials should be produced and published. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Jorge Castro: Ambiance Themes for Chrome/Chromium

jcastro — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:42:27 +0000

Found these if you’re looking for a Chrome/Chromium theme to match Lucid:

I had to turn on the system titlebars to make it fit the desktop which I have to get used to since I have grown accustomed to the melded tab/titlebar. Enjoy, and thanks to tobiash for making these!

Tagged: chrome, ubuntu

Kees Cook: Clearing /tmp on boot

kees — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:48:14 +0000

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

Harald Sitter: Debug packages and PPAs

apachelogger — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:32:11 +0000

Debug packages and PPAs

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

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

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

PPAs figured out

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

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

Why there is no -dbg

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin Drung: Translations of package descriptions

overbenny — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:48:30 +0000

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

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

Example package.info:

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

What do you think about this idea?

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

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

Jorge Castro: Add your LoCo to the List!

jcastro — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:04:39 +0000

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

Tagged: jam, loco, ubuntu

Rick Spencer: Quickly Task List Progress

Rick Spencer (noreply@blogger.com) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:17:35 +0000

Well, Monday night I went out for beer with my wife. Last night I cooked dinner and spent time with my kids. So, good nights, but no progress on my Quickly Task List.

However, I made some good progress #5 and #6 today.

Well, #6 was just: $bzr rm camera_button.py, so not much accomplishment there.

However, I made solid inroads for #5, documentation for #quickly-widgets. I got PressAndHoldButton totally documented, and did the module documentation for grid_column.py, which included a bit of work to document how to create a custom column for a DictionaryGrid.

Speaking of DictionaryGrid, I got a question from a developer using it about how to respond to edits in the DictionaryGrid. I realized that I did not make this easy. It's easy to enable the UI for editing, but in order to receive a signal when a change occurred required iterating though the columns and attaching to each column's edited (or toggled) event. So I fixed this by adding a "cell-edited" signal and that's in trunk now.

It's so important to be getting feedback from users. Otherwise, you don't know the right use cases, and you can miss obvious things like this.

Amber Graner: Hug Day/ Bug Day - Targeting Ubiquity

Just Me, Amber! (akgraner@gmail.com) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:06:13 +0000

This week's Hug Day will focus on Ubiquity!

and

YOU'RE INVITED!

WHERE: Ubuntu IRC Channel - #ubuntu-bugs on freenode [DOT] net

DATE: Thursday, March 11, 2010

TIME: All Day

PURPOSE: Squashing Ubiquity bugs

ABOUT EVENT: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20100311

HOW TO HELP: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpingWithBugs/

For more information: Hug a BUG? or at least those who fix them!

(originally posted to https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-news-team/2010-March/000884.html by Kyle Law)

Matt Zimmerman: QCon London 2010: Day 1

Matt Zimmerman — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:44:54 +0000

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

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

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

Jason Gorman: Beyond Masters and Apprentices

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

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

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

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

He then outlined the fundamental principles of his method:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julian Simpson: Siloes are for farmers

Production deployments using all your team

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

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

His people tips:

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

Next, a few process suggestions:

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

and then tools:

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

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

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

Getting distributed webservices done with Nosql

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This led them to an architecture based on:

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

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

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

Their list of lessons learned:

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

Andres Kitt: Building Skype

Learnings from almost five years as a Skype Architect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Richard Johnson: Google Maps Goes Cycling

nixternal — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:34:32 +0000

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

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

Collin Pruitt: Saving Money with Ubuntu

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:04:00 +0000

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

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

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

Ubuntu is a free and open source operating system based off the Linux kernel. It is a complete and fully functional operating system and set of applications that you can use to browse the web, read email, compose documents and spreadsheets, and so much more. Almost any day-to-day activity that you can do with Windows you can do with the applications included in Ubuntu. If there's something you need to do that you can't do with the included applications, there's probably an application in the Ubuntu software repositories that does what you need.

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

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

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

If you want to test drive Ubuntu before installing, pop the CD into the CD drive and it'll boot into a "Live CD", which is a normal Ubuntu desktop but running entirely in RAM, without even touching the hard drive.

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

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

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Søren Bredlund Caspersen: Open Source Days 2010

Søren Bredlund Caspersen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:59:24 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Holbach: Ubuntu Global Jam

Daniel Holbach — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:25:24 +0000

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

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

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

More good docs here and here.

Benjamin Drung: Ubuntu units policy

overbenny — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:15:53 +0000

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

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

Nick Barcet: GWOS sees Ubuntu running on business servers

Nicolas — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:50:55 +0000

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

The Fridge: 1st Annual Ubuntu Women Project "How I discovered Ubuntu." International Women's Day Competition Winners announced

nhandler — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:28:17 +0000

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

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

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

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

***Elvira Martinez "tatica1" ***

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

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

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

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

Some of my concerns were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***Karen Y. Perez***

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

***Jen Phillips***

Learning to Fly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Og Maciel: GNOME Developer Kit, follow up

OgMaciel — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:24:57 +0000

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

Here are the preliminary results so far:

VMware image: 42 downloads
Installable ISO: 26 downloads
RAW filesystem image: 17 downloads

About GNOME 2.29.92

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Owens: Through the Polarising Looking Glass

doctormo — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:06:58 +0000

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

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

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

Richard Johnson: Consulting Gig and Microsoft Sales Bash

nixternal — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:21:41 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jono Bacon: System 76 Lemur Review

jono — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:49:04 +0000

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

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

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

So first, the specs:

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

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

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

The Machine

OK, let’s zip through the summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Default Install: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

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

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

Running Lucid

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

Conclusion

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

Mike Basinger: Mac Like??

Mike — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:43:35 +0000

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

Jono Bacon: I Never Realized…

jono — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:14:55 +0000

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

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, we are ready for you.

Harald Sitter: Opportunistic KDE/Kubuntu Debugging

apachelogger — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:38:30 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rubén Romero: SpreadUbuntu needs YOUR help with the new branding + UDS Sprint

huayra — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:21:06 +0000

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

_ _

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

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

Some things to discuss:

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

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

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

_ _

My addition:

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

Thanks in advance for your help!

Thorsten Wilms: Design in Collaborative Projects

thorwil — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:15:37 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under: Illustration, Planet Ubuntu, Thoughts

Martin-Éric Racine: gThumb: thank you for breaking my workflow!

Martin-Éric (noreply@blogger.com) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:00:47 +0000

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

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

Post Scriptum

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

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

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

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

Chuck Short: Daily builds for QEMU-KVM.

zulcss — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:12:08 +0000

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

Jorge Castro: I see what you did there…

jcastro — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:19:53 +0000

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

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

Tagged: launchpad, patches, ubuntu