If you still remember my pet project BillReminder and want to learn what’s going on with it, go check the project’s latest post!
BillReminder with charting support
A huge thanks to nosklo, Patryk, and Toms for their help, and if you’re looking for a young python project to help out, please consider looking at BillReminder!
The battery applet in KDE Plasma 4.4 has gotten some nice improvements. First of all, I wasn’t really happy with the layout of its popup dialog. It looked messy and didn’t scale well with bigger fonts. During Tokamak3 in September, I started improving this. To make it look calmer, I reduced the amount of edges widgets are aligned to. The previous version used nested layouts, which lead to widgets not properly aligned with each other. This creates a rather messy look. For 4.4, I’ve reworked the layout and reduced everything to only one layout and attached the battery in the popup off-layout in the top-right corner. I thought about using an AnchorLayout for this, but a simple setGeometry() to position the battery top-right would work as well, so I went for KISS. I also replaced the text on the "Configure Power Management" button with a tooltip, reducing visual clutter but keeping this handy in-context shortcut to easily get at the more advanced power managment settings.
The battery popup now resembles a FormLayout more closely, which should make it more consistent with how other dialogs in KDE are designed, so that’s a bonus in consistency. The two screenshots show the old and the new version of the applet side-by-side.
One wish came up more than once over the past months. Some (very vocal) users would like to see the battery showing the remaining time when it’s running on battery. Normally, the applet would show the charge percentage, which is a rather abstract number. (How long is 37%?) Now unfortunately, there’s no way to give an accurate estimation oft the time that’s left, since it largely depends on the usage patterns. You check the battery, it says "10 minutes left", then you start some app that exercises your CPU and disk and suddenly the machine goes into suspend after 3 minutes. Quite possible, and the usage scenarios and differences in modern portable hardware are such that there’s really no way to accurately predict the remaining battery lifetime. In the Plasma team, we decided that we rather not show the user unreliable information, since there’s only a very small group that understands that this number is almost black magic, and often simply wrongly reported by HAL. There’s well over 200 emails on that subject, mainly on the Plasma mailinglist and everytime this topic comes up we hear how much KDE must suck if this tiny little feature isn’t available. We’ve made this feature available in KDE 4.3, as a hidden config option (meaning that you cannot enable it using the configuration UI, but it’s there if you enable it in the configuration file. I had tentatively disabled this code during the larger part of the 4.4 development cycle to see if I’d get away with ditching it, and it didn’t quite fit in with the new layouting for the popup.
Lately, the same discussion came up again, hopefully for the last time, since I submitted a patch yesterday night that brings the remaining time back (still as hidden config option, and that’s about as far as we will go). No, there won’t be a checkbox since I don’t want to confront users with information that’s most likely bogus and highly depends on what you’re doing at this very moment. As the option needs a power user to understand what this info really means (i.e. an estimation that’s completely off or not, depending on what your BIOS or ACPI subsystem reports), I think we can reasonable expect that adding a line to a config file is easy enough for those who really, really, really want it.
So, for reference, here’s how you get the remaining time display in the battery applet.
showRemainingTime=true
[Containments][3][Applets][7][Configuration][Applets][30] geometry=140,2.5,30,24 immutability=1 plugin=battery zvalue=0 [Containments][3][Applets][7][Configuration][Applets][30][Configuration] Share=false showBatteryString=false showRemainingTime=true
The remaining time will now be shown if it’s non-zero (obviously bogus since the machine would be off then) and the battery is discharging. If in doubt, use “plasmaengineexplorer –engine powermanagement” to check wether Solid reports the remaining time at all, and that it’s non-zero. The remaining time could also be shown while charging, but this apparently isn’t supported by my setup, so I can’t test it.
Also during Tokamak3, Dario fixed a bug that would switch the display’s brightness back to 100% after it was dimmed because the machine had been idle. So if you’d set it to 50%, and it would then dim after some minutes of idle time, you’d move the mouse and it pops back to 100%, while it should go back to 50%. That’s fixed as well, and the patch has also been backported to KDE 4.3. You probably are already running with this fix.
I’ll cut right to the chase. I have a 2.5 year old Toshiba M400 laptop which is also a tablet PC, and the rotate options don’t work ‘properly’, and they never have. Many others have similar laptops, and theirs “don’t work” either. I’d like this to be fixed, but don’t know how to achieve that.
I didn’t buy the laptop because it was a tablet PC. I bought it because at the time it had the highest resolution (1400×1050) at a low physical size (12.1″) with built in 3G. If anyone ever asks “do you use it as a tablet PC” the answer is “no”. If the tablet features worked I’d probably use it as one more often.
The issues with this laptop:-
The screen doesn’t autorotate when you swivel it round.
This means you have to use the graphical screen rotation tool either before you swivel the screen or after. Either way you either end up with the desktop screen upside down, or having to man-handle the laptop so it’s up the right way, or use the UI upside down for a moment. This is naff. It should automagically do this as it does on Windows.
There is a graphical tool for rotating the screen, but no graphical tool for rotating the tablet.
The tablet is an input device which has no graphical tool for rotating. Ideally the screen rotation tool should ‘know’ that the PC is a tablet and should rotate the input device. Alternatively a separate graphical tool should exist which has options for rotating the tablet input device.
The screen and tablet don’t rotate together
If I do rotate the screen using the graphical tool I end up with the tablet and screen out of sync with eachother. Using the tablet pen the directions are inverted (left is right, up is down etc) whilst the screen is rotated. There is a command line tool in the wacom-tools package which can rotate the tablet, but no GUI, and nothing that keeps the screen and input device in sync.
I attended a sesion called Better touchscreen support at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit but it was sadly only concerning touch screens, not tablets. I did raise these issues in the session but nobody really has any time or inclination to fix them, despite there being at least two devices in the room of this type.
Over the last 2 years I have spoken to various developers who work in the areas covered by this and nobody really seems interested in fixing this. I get the usual “feel free to submit a patch”. I’m not a coder 
There are various scripts and fudges online that can achieve some of this, but none of it is integrated into the existing tools and none of it is shipped with Ubuntu. This makes me sad. Anyone fancy helping?
Package: mycompany-backup
Version: 0.1
Section: mycompany
Priority: optional
Architecture: i386 or amd64 or all (however all sadly doesn't work with the next part of this guide)
Essential: no
Installed-Size: 10
Maintainer: My Name
#/bin/sh
SAMIAM=`whoami`
sleep 60
gvfs-mount mount smb://$SAMIAM@server/$SAMIAM #User must have saved password for share
rsync -rv /home/$SAMIAM/Documents "/home/$SAMIAM/.gvfs/$SAMIAM on server/BACKUP" --log-file="/home/$SAMIAM/.gvfs/$SAMIAM on server/BACKUP/latest"
The day has come!
Yesterday I dropped the superfluous hal dependency from gparted, today I uploaded gdm to stop using hal for getting the keyboard layout and use libxklavier instead.
I also applied Julian Cristau’s udevified X.org branch to our xorg-edgers packages into my halsectomy PPA, created some udev rules for udev-based X.org input detection ([1], [2]), and off we go: that was the last hal reverse dependency. My system now fully boots and works without hal.
When Ubuntu 9.10 releases, pppoe connection via NetworkManager is impossible because some bug in it. So I switched to the traditional but workable way – pppoeconf, now the problem seems to be solved when using nm team PPA, so I plan to turn back.
But during my process, there are some other problems. Firstly nm cannot handle the connections automatically; secondly we cannot edit connections system wide.
Here are the correct steps:
First, add “NetworkManager daily trunk builds for ubuntu” PPA:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/trunk/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/trunk/ubuntu karmic main
Second, comment out line “exec pppd call dsl-provider” in /etc/ppp/pppoe_on_boot, that is to say disable my previous “pppoe on boot” setting which is configured by pppoeconf.
Third, rename /etc/network/interfaces to backup file. NetworkManager will only handle connections which haven’t declared in interfaces, if you didn’t any tunning on such file, you can delete it, but backup before doing any change is a good habit, :)
Forth, edit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.network-manager-settings.system.policy , find out the line contains “System policy prevents modification of system settings”, and below it there is a “auth_admin_keep“, change it to “yes“. This will enable you to edit a system wide connection. If you consider this will do harm to your security, then revert the change once you have set up your connection correctly.
Fifth, reboot your system, because these settings won’t take effects even though you have run “sudo services network-manager restart” and “sudo services networking restart”.
Now it is working on my system, cheers!
Many projects that I work on, or follow the development of, and granted there may be a large selection bias here, are showing some of the same tendencies. Combined these indicate to me that we need to change the way we look at becoming a trusted member of the project.
The obvious change here is the move to distributed version control. I'm obviously a fan of this change, and for many reasons. One of those is the democratisation of the tools. There is no longer a special set of people that gets to use the best tools, with everyone else having to make do. Now you get to use the same tools whether you were the founder of the project, or someone working on your first change. That's extremely beneficial as it means that we don't partition our efforts to improve the tools we use. It also means that new contributors have an easier time getting started, as they get to use better tools. These two influences combine as well: a long time contributor can describe how they achieve something, and the new contributor can directly apply it, as they use the same tools.
This change does mean that getting "commit access" isn't about getting the ability to commit anymore; everyone can commit anytime to their own branch. Some projects, e.g. Bazaar, don't even hand out "commit access" in the literal sense, the project blessed code is handled by a robot, you just get the ability to have the robot merge a branch.
While it is true that getting "commit access" was never really about the tools, it was and is about being trusted to shepherd the shared code, a lot of projects still don't treat it that way. Once a developer gets "commit access" they just start committing every half-cooked patch they have to trunk. The full use of distributed version control, with many branches, just emphasises the shared code aspect. Anyone is free to create a branch with their half-baked idea and see if anyone else likes it. The "blessed" branch is just that, one that the project as a whole decides they will collaborate on.
This leads to my second change, code review. This is something that I also deeply believe in; it is vital to quality, and a point at which open source software becomes a massive advantage, so something we should exploit to the full. I see it used increasingly in many projects, and many moving up jml's code review "ladder" towards pre-merge review of every change. There seems to be increasing acceptance that code review is valuable, or at least that it is something a good project does.
Depending on the project the relationship of code review and "commit access" can vary, but at the least, someone with "commit access" can make their code review count. Some projects will not allow even those with "commit access" to act unilaterally, requiring multiple reviews, and some may even relegate the concept, working off votes from whoever is interested in the change.
At the very least, most projects will have code review when a new contributor wishes to make a change. This typically means that when you are granted "commit access" you are able or expected to review other people's code, even though you may never have done so before. Some projects also require every contribution to be reviewed, meaning that "commit access" doesn't grant you the ability to do as you wish, it instead just puts the onus on you to review the code of others as well as write your own.
As code review becomes more prevalent we need to re-examine what we see as "commit access," and how people show that they are ready for it. It may be that the concept becomes "trusted reviewer" or similar, but at the least code review will be a large part of it. Therefore I feel that we shouldn't just be looking at a person's code contributions, but also their code review contributions. Code review is a skill, some people are very good at it, some people are very very bad at it. You can improve with practice and teaching, and you can set bad examples for others if you are not careful. We will have to make sure that review runs through the blood of a project, everyone reviews the code of everyone else, and the reviews are reviewed.
The final change that I see as related is that of empowering non-code contributors. More and more projects are valuing these contributors, and one important part of doing that is trusting them with responsibility. It may be that sometimes trusting them means giving them "commit access", if they are working on improving the inline help for instance. Yes, it may be that distributed version control and code review mean that they do not have to do this, but those arguments could be made for code contributors too.
This leads me to another, and perhaps the most important, aspect of the "commit access" idea: trust. The fundamental, though sometimes unspoken, measure we use to gauge if someone should get "commit access" is whether we believe them to be trustworthy. Do we trust them to introduce code without review? Do we trust them to review other people's changes? Do we trust them to change only those areas they are experts in, or to speak to someone else if they are not? This is the rule we should be applying when making this decision, and we should be sure to be aware that this is what we are doing. There will often be other considerations as well, but this decision will always factor.
These ideas are not new, and the influences described here did not create them. However the confluence of them, and the changes that will likely happen in our projects over the next few years, mean that we must be sure to confront them. We must discard the "commit access" idea as many projects have seen it, and come up with new responsibilities that better reflect the tasks people are doing, the new ways projects operate, and that reward the interactions that make our projects stronger.
Seriously, is removing Gimp from a default install of Ubuntu that bad? Bad enough for you to leave Ubuntu for some other distribution? I have been reading blog posts, news sites, blog comments, IRC, Twitter, and Identi.ca, and what I am seeing simply amazes me. Thus far, the popular topic to these complaints is that Ubuntu is making the desktop even dumber. So, if Ubuntu is making the desktop dumber, I guess in the past it has made many lazier? I mean, installing Gimp isn’t a big deal. I am a Kubuntu user, and KDE user of other distros, and none off the top of my head include Gimp. Just now, I had to reinstall my system because my hard drive blew up. In just over a minute I had Gimp, the Plugin Repo, and Inkscape installed. And for you all who are going crazy over the decision, just know that the developers of Gimp agree with the decision:
“That is pretty much in-line with our product vision. GIMP is a high-end
application for professionals. It is not the tool that you would advise
every user to use for their casual photo editing. And as far as I
understand this, it’s not that GIMP would not be available for Ubuntu
users. It’s simply not installed by default.Sven”
HERE is a comment from the Gimp world supporting it, HERE is another, and another. I use Zsh, Ubuntu doesn’t ship that by default, I am going to go take a turkey hostage now!
Simmah down nah! It isn’t the end of the world. When Ubuntu switches to KDE in 2012, then it will be the end of the world!
"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice."
-Meister Eckhart
"Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action.
-W.J. Cameron
Open Source for Tunisia
Le 16 décembre prochain se déroulera à Sousse la première rencontre “OPEN SOURCE FOR TUNISIA”. Cette première rencontre a pour but de promouvoir l’utilisation des logiciels libres en Tunisie auprès des enseignants et étudiants en TIC, des entreprises privées et des administrations publiques. De même cette journée marquera la naissance du groupe “OPEN SOURCE FOR TUNISIA” dont l’action sera essentiellement ciblé vers l’organisation d’ateliers pour la vulgarisation de l’utilisation des logiciels Open Source et la promotion des technologies venant du monde du libre.
À la question “Quels sont les objectifs de ce Groupe ?”, M. Ramzi Youssef, initiateur de ce groupe, répond :
Le groupe ‘Open Source for Tunisia’ a pour objectifs la promotion et la vulgarisation de la culture Open Source en Tunisie en créant un espace virtuel de rencontre et d’échange d’idées et d’expériences dans le domaine du libre.
Le séminaire du 16 Décembre prochain est une occasion de rencontre entre trois mondes différents :
1- Les étudiants, universitaires et associations d’une part.
2- Les sociétés et entreprises qui vont présenter leurs solutions basées sur les technologies du libre.
3- Les sociétés commerciales et industrielles, à qui on va essayer de présenter ce que le libre peut leur offrir en remplacement aux solutions propriétaires.
Au programme de cette rencontre il y aura quelques conférences et des tables rondes pour présenter et discuter du libre en Tunisie.
Pour plus d’informations : http://opensourcefortunisia.org
L’affiche de la journée (png) : http://ubuntu.nizarus.org/v/ost/Ost-affiche.png.html
My VPS is kindly provided by a friend of mine (if you really want to know who, drop me an email, I’ll forward them on to him). And this weekend – he’s scheduled some downtime on the server – so the site will be offline for a while around 2100UTC (incase anybody happens to be trying to access it).
I just thought I’d make anybody aware – hopefully we won’t be offline for too long!
Ubuntu Chile, one of the first Ubuntu Communities in latin america has a new LoCo Team Contact. Mauricio Peñaloza writes:
Well, after a couple of months as the LoCo Cotact of Ubuntu Chile, i’m very pleased to give the charge in very good hands! Yes, i’m talking about Cristian Barahona (aka cristianvirtual), he’s one of our Council Member, and the most important thing a very good person. I hope he will make a good job with the help of all of us.
The LoCo Council joins Mauricio in welcoming Cristian and wishing Ubuntu-cl the very best.
When I was in Kenya in July 2008 with Camara teaching people how to use Ubuntu Linux, I brought a hard drive mirror of apt with me. Over in Africa bandwidth is slow and expensive, I was able to use this apt mirror to install new software easily over in Kenya. I gave a talk at OSSBarCamp about Using Free Culture in an Internet Free World.
I’m doing it again. A friend of mine in Kenya asked for a new harddrive. So what would you put on a harddrive going to Kenya?
I asked on the Ubuntu NGO mailing list, and got some great responses, from Ubuntu Screencasts, printer drivers, and wikipedia dumps. What else in the free culture world is there?
The Ubuntu Nicaragua LoCo Team celebrated the release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala with two events in capital city Managua.
The fiesta kicked off on November 12, with a series of conferences in the Central American University (UCA).
I gave my usual talk about how to get involved and contribute with the community. Second on line was benevolent dictator Adolfo “K” Fitoria, who showed us the latest news on Kubuntu 9.10, followed by the Gnome fan-boy José Ernesto Dávila with all the goodies in Ubuntu 9.10, including a great presentation of gnome shell. The multimedia guru Rodrigo “RoRo” Rodríguez introduced us to video and audio editing in Ubuntu and last, but not least, daredevil Marcelo Gutierrez showed us the awesomeness of Xubuntu. 9.10.
It was a cool event, lots of new faces and many people interested in getting involved with the community. After the event, the party continued with some cold beers at a local bar.
The following week, on November 20, the Ubuntu Ninjas crashed the Pizza Bash 11 event at the Mansión Teodolinda hotel.
We had a lot of fun (well… not me, I got to work 
). There was some BoF sessions, including one about GPG keys and the atendees got the opportunity to test drive Karmic.
And after the event… yes, you guessed it! More beers!!
Special thanks goes to Neville Cross from the local Fedora community for taking pictures of both events and for letting us raid the PB11 event.
As I was dozing off last night, there was a commercial on the radio for a place in Worcester, Massachusetts called The Computer Hospital. The advert was describing how they can fix problems on any system. I was thinking to myself: “I bet they can’t help me figure out my recent Kmail crashiness” as I was entering dreamland. Then the next statement shook me completely awake:
The Computer Hospital is now offering Linux as an alternative OS to all our clients. Discover the fun of a hassle free OS no more viruses or spyware ever again. Tons of free applications for just about any task also run most of your favorite windows apps in a trouble free environment.
!!!!!
This is sooo cool! An actual radio advert offering Linux from a local computer shop! not local to me by about 232 air miles (or a 4.5 hours’ drive) , mind you, and the ad was on at at about 1AM. I am hoping they are aired more often and during more regular hours. The radio station is powerful enough to reach all the way up here to Maine, so there is the potential for a significant number of people in New England to hear about Linux.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!
Posted in planetubuntu
During UDS Vincent and I made sure we shared a room so we could talk a bit about what we wanted for the future of bzr-upload.
To ensure we didn’t loose any of the conversation, he took notes and sent them to me, so now I’m passing them on for those of you interested in contributing or just knowing what features are in the pipeline.
* Create a .bzr-upload-ignore file that ignore any action for which one the paths matches an ignore regexp. Use the working tree version by default, fallback to the versioned one otherwise
* New command: “bzr upload-files FILES” to allow uploading individual files. Upload the specified files if no uncommitted
changes exist, –force overrides the uncommitted changes check.
* New command: “bzr upload-check”. Walk the remote site ensuring that every file still has the same content that the local version –restore optionally restore the remote content to the local value. Optionally for remote sites implementing ssh and providing an md5 binary, the check can be implemented by comparing the local and remote md5 avoiding the full downloads.
It’s Thanks Giving day here in the USA and what better day than to ask a question about consumerism: Is the direction of Ubuntu gearing it’s self for simple consumer grade computing?
Disclosure: I’ve always held out hope of getting inkscape included by default in Ubuntu.
A clue is in the recent planned removal of Gimp from the Lucid CD, if you look at the size of gimp and all it’s dependencies on the CD, you find lots of fat, so it’s not a surprise that it’s under pressure to be removed. Although devels explaining the removal with hand waving that F-Spot is to be the replacement was surely a bad political misstep, even if it’s probably a reasonable technical move.
The problem for me is a lack of regard for what I like to call: “The involved user”, people who are not just consuming data from their computers but are involved and get the feeling that their involvement is welcomed by default. This has always been something that distinguished FreeDesktops like Ubuntu, they contained not just programs for viewing interesting things, but all the tools required to also make a great deal of them.
This is what Walter Bender of Sugar labs would call “Making the mountains of learning available and visible to clime for everyone, even if only a few end up doing so”. That’s why we bother to make careful selections on what goes on the CD, those applications are the chosen few that will shape and mould the users understanding of the capabilities and user expectations of the system.
The mountain that is the drawing arts was just painted pink and a Someone Else’s Problem field was set up, rendering the entire artistic field invisible to new users. How do new users discover that they can make artworks with their computers? No solutions have yet been devised to solve this discovery problem. I’d like to point out that even windows has MS Paint, people who want to paint have a clear simple method for doing so on their computers and then they figure out that there must be better tools and are motivated to find them.
I think this simplified direction stems from a perception that Ubuntu should not be “for human beings”, but for the lowest common human possible (“Linux for Neanderthals” anyone?). This is at best a caricature that the devels have set up in their minds, imaginary people that we convince ourselves must be served in order to fix bug #1. These are the common people who only ever retouch the red eye in their photographs and never do anything creative like stick the head of their aunt onto the body of an donkey as an April Fools joke. These are the people who are not and will never be interested in a computer more functional than a television, and more fool those that present these users with any sort of creative outlet.
What makes this journey down to common denominator interesting is that this simple user case is and will be solved by other products. ChromeOS, Android and iPhone and is already looking to take the market of all those people who just want to go online and never want to do anything useful, and they’ll probably be doing it better than Ubuntu. Does Ubuntu really want to strip anything interesting and unique away from it’s default selection, so the only thing we’re left with is a rather bland bare bones base that we will always have to install extra programs on top of?
Surely the art of the computer is not just to provide a google-box for the sofa generation, but to furnish people with the tools and just as importantly the visibility that these tools exist and are available to everyone. Perhaps the problem I have with the direction being taken is not anything technical, but is a lot more to do with the myopia that surrounds a certain expectation about what the council estate users will want from their computers.
Perhaps in the end, if we can’t have tools like Inkscape, Audacity, Gimp and OpenOffice installed by default, then perhaps we should have a good mechanism that clearly shows their availability and install them through it, it was talked about at the session that we should have the software center provide this featured app list, perhaps that will work. And for poorly connected nations such as those in Africa, perhaps we should master a second CD to send to them. One that contains all the debs that complete their systems and give them creative tools as well, instead of struggling to decide what to include on a single CD and causing headaches for anyone not on the list of designated target consumers.
Well, getting into the swing of things and smokin’ diesel! Half way though the week already can’t believe it’s going so fast.
Community Track Roundtable – going through our list from yesterday and marking items off that need to be address in priority, ones that need a full session were schedule and others that weren’t were discussed in the room.
Next steps for Ubuntu NGO- this is my pet project, it started off as a roundtable last May in Barcelona. Now we’ve a team, a plan and objective. It’s a rather strange team in many ways, while there is some order, we kind of do our own thing, so this session was to firm up peoples areas, and what they are doing. We’ve cleaned up the wiki making this clearer. Identified areas we can work on or people we need to find and gain help from.
So Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, Daniel Holbach are going to be looking at the technical side of things, and I am going to be looking at the Advocacy with Penelope Stowe. From the interview series I’ve been able to get feed back on areas where Ubuntu is falling down but these don’t just apply to NGOs so I spoke with Ivanka as I know her team had the Paper cut series which I really enjoyed reading. Sitting down with her I wanted to learn how I could use this type of logging a bug for the NGOs and Andy Whitcroft who was sitting near by came up with Paper Jams! So I’ll be logging paper jams for NGOs soon!!
Hopefully by us increasing a little more order into the team we shall be able to showcase some of the NGOs who use oss and also help them with issues they find! That is my goal!
Next Steps For The Ubuntu Women Project – Session 2/3 involved more clarifying some of the discussions from the 1st session, the idea of a 2nd channel, to be used as a “safe space” should the need to have a discussion in there but not be used the whole time. To introduce logging into the main channel like every other Ubuntu channel. There seemed to be confusion that by calling one channel safe the main channel was not safe. That is not the case! The main #ubuntu-women is safe and inviting to EVERYONE!
Throughout the week I did clarify a number of times everyone is welcome, both male and female to the channel. What I would like to see is that every LoCo team encourage it’s female members to join our team, join us online or on the mailing list, if they are shy joining, why not join yourself and introduce yourself to the channel and introduce the new member you are brining in. Ask questions! I would also encourage LoCo teams to add the topic of Ubuntu-women to your IRC meeting agenda, as there seems to be some confusion as to why the team exists, and I think if we start in our own back yard we can help improve the visibility of the team and highlight its work.
There were other streams going on today, but for me the above were the highlights of the day and I suspect many people will not want to read a day by day blow hour by hour! So trying to highlight what stood out for me
Social night out, impromptu ice skating and shopping spree – Turns out injuries happen on ice! We had 3 people fall, one concussion and one sprained ankle chipped bone! Told him to to go the doctors! stubborn!! So again I feel the need to highlight why social gatherings outside of the 9-5 remit of any day is worthwhile!
You get to meet people you normally won’t meet, talk to or interact with. The same goes at UDS. I can be found in the Community stream, and for the most part that’s the only stream you will find me, short of Q&A and a topic I see I want to participate in. The same can be said for any other stream and person at UDS. They may not interact outside of dev, foundation, desktop etc. I got to meet Scott James Remnant and Colin Watson at ice skating, and to be frank, I’d never really have any other way of meeting them other than possibly walking up to them and saying hi, which could also be done. But this way was more fun!
UDS Ice Skating team
UDS on Ice
UDS ice Skating night out
Accidents happen on ice!
As you may already know, next Ubuntu release, Lucid Lynx (10.04) is an LTS release.
For testers this means one important thing: upgrades should be smooth from either Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) or latest Ubuntu LTS release (8.04, Hardy Heron).
As we all know, nowadays, computer storage is very very cheap, but bandwidth is not. Later in the cycle we are going to need to test as many upgrades from Hardy and Karmic as possible. So, why not planning ahead and start downloading today Hardy and Karmic images? The unstoppable Shane Fagan has started doing so already! You rock!
Later in the cycle you will be able to easily install Hardy or Karmic in a spare machine or a virtual machine and upgrade from there. You will have part of the work done. And you can start contributing to your beloved distribution just now 
Other releases from Ubuntu derivatives can be found at:
Sorry these are coming out slower than I had hoped but there is just so much going on and meeting new people and taking part in great discussions.
Community Round Table – We possibly should have had this on the Monday in hindsight. But this was where we outlined what we’d like to cover during the week and what could be addressed in a roundtable that didn’t need a full session. Great way to lay out some ideas for the week ahead and due to free slots available, address the issues in their own time slot.
IRC Council Plans - Totally new for me and I know diddly squat about IRC Council so this was interesting for me and a lot has been set down for goals for the way forward.
Ubuntu Women – The steps forward – This was the 1st of 3 sessions and suffice to say I was rather nervous going into this session. Last May we had a round table. This time we had a plan, what we wanted to discuss and tackle the issues that have been highlighted.
I have to say for me, this was one of the highlights of UDS. We had great input and it has been videotaped and should be available soon. Amber, Liz, and Maco were all here to help drive the team forward and with the help of participants both on IRC and in the room I hope we have made a good start. The idea of a roadmap and setting down attainable goals we can achieve during this 6 month cycle really makes me happy! I’d like to thank Jono for helping us drive this session forward as he sat back and offered advice and comments on the thoughts that were being aired in the room, as did Mark Shuttleworth offer good advice on how we can achieve our goals.
Community Input in board and council elections – I was curious about this, as I’ve just been elected onto the LoCo council and wanted to know more about what happens and how we can get more community involvement. Rather interesting. Didn’t realise we have that many councils! 
Adopting an upstream – in short ” Upstream projects need “bridges” between their projects and Ubuntu. While large projects might have the resources to work with distributions, all projects need to be able to efficiently work with Ubuntu. Not all upstreams know how things work in Ubuntu and concentrate on developing their software.
It would be nice if upstream projects had “an Ubuntu person” who cared about that project and its standing in Ubuntu; this “Upstream Contact” would be responsible for facilitating workflow between that project and Ubuntu.”
I am a firm believer in laying down the tools at the end of the day and doing something different, tonight was going for a team dinner – Ubuntu Women team dinner, started off as a conversation in the channel and I said to amber it’d be nice to meet more people who may not attend community tracks during the day and have a bite to eat and chit chat! Maria was AWESOME ! and found us a lovely restaurant and we had a great turn out. So thanks to all those who came.
Recent news that Ubuntu will likely be giving up the GIMP as part of the default install are interesting, but not a huge concern to me – I already have to install Inkscape, so adding the GIMP to the huge sudo aptitude install command I run on a shiny new Ubuntu install isn’t a big deal. I’d love having both Inkscape and the GIMP by default, but there’s only so much space on a CD-ROM-sized ISO. Fair enough.
What still concerns me is F-Spot by default. Not because of Mono fearmongering – I really don’t care what language the thing is written in – but just because it’s got some very irritating behaviours compared to the older lightweight editor/viewer/photo manager I still use, gthumb.
Allow me some simple demonstrations of why gthumb is still, in many ways, superior to f-spot.
I take a fair number of photos, and as anyone knows, they add up in filesize very quickly. I shoot fair-sized JPG, not the very largest my camera could, and not RAW, and I still have 10.2GB of images in Photo – 4133 images, apparently. I´ve only owned a digital camera for about two and a half years. Someone with a longer digital history, or who shoots RAW, or who simply takes even more photos than I do, is going to easily dwarf my photo collection. My photo collection is still old enough to have pre-dated F-Spot in Ubuntu, however.
So, I want to view, manage and do light editing of this existing photo collection. Fire up F-Spot (Applications->Graphics->F-Spot Photo Manager). There is no File->Open command, and by default the “Browse” button on the toolbar does absolutely nothing… so File->Import it is. Aim this at my existing ~/Photos directory… and by default it will duplicate the entire thing, rearranging the files to it’s liking as it duplicates them!
F-Spot will also take an insanely long time trying this – I aborted the whole mess ten minutes in, with only 1434 of 4133 files “loaded” (what does that mean? they don’t need to be loaded, they already exist in ~/Photos!) and the “Import” button still greyed out…
Are you serious? All I want to do is crop one of them! Abort, abort! Fine, we’ll find an existing image through Nautilus, and choose to open that in F-Spot individually.
Nope, sorry. That gets you your image, without the insanely long Import process, but it’s in a little window called “F-Spot View” with none of the editing tools available, and no way to switch to an actual editing window…
Now let’s try the same simple procedure(s) in gthumb. Same existing photo collection, in the Ubuntu-supplied default ~/Photos, but first we’ll install gthumb with your favourite package manager. (gthumb languishes in Universe these days, so have that enabled) Now go Applications->Graphics->gThumb Image Viewer. No Import button, any images that happen to be in your ~ will show up on one pane, and a Nautilus-style folder navigation pane to the left. Rummage through your files with that pane, no need to wait for some sort of unexplained “importing”of existing files here.
Or go the other way – find an individual image through Nautilus or on your desktop, right-click, choose Open With->gThumb, and open your image. You get exactly the same window you would if you’d opened gthumb via the menu, with all the lightweight editing options you require right there.
No “importing”, no attempt to duplicate your entire photo collection, no crippled “viewer” window with no useful tools in it, and gthumb will traverse your entire directory, not just the one folder it insists on importing/duplicating everything in. Oh, and no distracting “Mono is of teh devil!!!11111” nonsense either, just for a bonus. Somebody does need to code an upload-to-Flickr plugin for gthumb, granted.
While the GIMP is being removed from Ubuntu 10.04, let’s ditch F-Spot and return to gthumb too!
Launchpad bugs for most of the above Fail-spot issues: 488566, 488574. Closely related, and older: 182862.
Related silly “Import” bugs: 412091.
There’s probably many others over on Gnome’s bugtracker, but I only searched LP’s Fail-spot bugs for now.
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
ACTION: ttx to review status of bugs 455625, 460085 and 461156 for any missing info ACTION: mathiaz to compile a list of easy merges for publication
mdz reminded that the list of blueprints is used to track plans for Lucid. The focus is now on drafting the specifications after last week discussions at UDS. Work items should also be added to the blueprint whiteboard so that a burn down chart can be generated during the cycle. Once the wiki page is written and the work items have been defined the status of the blueprint should be set to Review.
All of the blueprints should be ready for review first thing Monday morning.
Nothing was assigned to the team. Most of the bugs seemed to be SRU-related.
mathiaz asked how to handle work items that can’t be defined up-front as they depends on completion of existing work items. mdz suggested to create work items for each of the proposed changes. If some of them can be skipped, it’s easy to skip them later, but we don’t want to forget any. The most important thing is that the list is at approximately the right level of granularity, so that we make steady progress through the list. Work items need to fit into a 1-2 day chunk of work.
Only the hardy nomination list had one bug to be reviewed. The last two weeks of fixed bugs have also been reviewed for potential SRUs.
ScottK asked about the status of Spamassassin in Lucid. mathiaz replied that Daviey had been investigating the situation with upstream. He also suggested to define work items in the associated blueprint even if the drafter doesn’t plan to do the work. Documenting what needs to be done may help in getting things moved forward by other people.
kirkland to discuss a new time slot with maria.
Next meeting will be on Wednesday, December 2nd at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
Last week I attended my first Ubuntu Developer Summit! It was a pleasure to be sponsored for this trip, so thanks again to Canonical for handling travel expenses, and to LinuxForce and my boss for allowing me to take the time off to attend.
My flight came in Monday evening, grabbed a taxi and checked in to my room (very nice, on the 29th floor!). Then headed down to the bar where I was grabbed by Mackenzie Morgan and finally was able to meet Mark Shuttleworth, Laura Czajkowski, Jono Bacon, Alan Pope, Dave Walker, Mike Basinger and others over dinner. It ended up being quite a late night!
Tuesday morning I woke up bright and early to have a delicious breakfast (they feed us a lot at UDS!) and was able to finally meet Martin Owens, all decked out in his hat and suit. After breakfast the sessions started! I ended up mostly on the Community Track, so attended the Community Roundtable each morning first thing. I’m going to try to give key highlights from sessions for each day, but I’m sure I’ll miss some important things, so be sure to follow up with blueprint for more details on each of these sessions.
UDS Day 2
The Linux Terminal Server Project is a really great one and one we’ve used in the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team. One of the things the team is working that caught my interest on a LiveDVD version of LTSP on Ubuntu so an instant LTSP server could be created by popping a DVD into a networked server. Very cool.
In the first of several sessions during the week, several of us on the Ubuntu Community Council were able to sit down with a couple members of the Ubuntu IRC Council and discuss the status and future of the Ubuntu IRC community. Over 3 formal sessions, and several less formal discussions throughout the week the Councils made considerable progress in both professional and personal relations between the Councils. It’s really a testament to the value of these real life UDS meetings, being able to talk through differences and misunderstandings in the same room really gave us a clear path forward and it was a real pleasure to work with everyone involved to make progress.
– Next Steps for the Ubuntu Women Project –
I have to admit, with the major discussions surrounding Women in F/OSS this year I was nervous about this session. This first session was recorded on video (hopefully will be online soon over at http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/!) and had outstanding attendance. We had voices from several women within the project who have not been very involved with the Ubuntu Women project, and Mark Shuttleworth joined us shortly after we began to offer some viewpoints regarding project goals and team resources. I left this first session feeling refreshed and much more confident about the future of the project.
By the end of the week (we had 3 sessions in total) we had a solid Road Map for the Lucid Cycle. Huge thanks to Amber Graner, Laura Czajkowski, Mackenzie Morgan and Jono Bacon for being instrumental in planning, hosting and making these sessions a success and to everyone who joined us throughout the week to offer support, observations, encouragement and suggestions.
– Community input in board and council elections –
There are a few formal boards and councils exist within the Ubuntu project for handling major segments of the Ubuntu community so that the Community Council can balance the load some. Most of these were created approximately two years ago and we’ve started to have members expiring from the teams and have been working toward finding the best ways to restaff them. We tend to want to lean toward votes from the community in all cases we can, but sometimes the pool of members is unclear (who can vote for LoCo Council? IRC Council?). Further solid structure surrounding restaffing also needed to be discussed (What steps are required? How long should we leave open nominations, shortlisting and voting? etc). This session was the first of a few Governance sessions throughout the week.
– Decide New Bantracker Features –
The new IRC Ban/Issue tracker is going to ROCK! The current one is still functional isn’t very scalable (so the number of people who can use it is limited) and there are a lot more features that the IRC Team wants to see. This was an exciting session where a lot of ideas for the new tracker, including some ideas that could make the Appeal Process within IRC a more obvious process. Benjamin Rubin details some of the new Bantracker ideas here, as well as other things discussed during the IRC sessions.
This was a really interesting session regarding improving relations with upstream projects by “adopting” an upstream project to act as a bridge and help handle relations and tasks. It’s detailed on the Ubuntu wiki here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Upstream/Contacts. Fascinating idea, and one that has been done informally for a very long time, it’s great to see a structure and expectations document in place.
This second day was the first for me, and quite a whirlwind! We wrapped it up by having an Ubuntu Women dinner at Monica’s Aca Y Alla Restaurant. We ended up having about 23 people came out (and no one got pictures, d’oh!) and the vast majority of them were women within the project. It ended up being a really fun dinner, after which I turned in a bit early at the hotel to be ready for UDS Day 3!
UDS Day 3
– Debian Relationship Health Check –
I was very happy to attend this session on collaboration upstream with Debian and to see so much work being put into this collaboration. The projects have always been very closely linked, with a lot of folks like myself coming into Ubuntu with a history in Debian, and Ubuntu developers becoming Debian Developers to contribute directly upstream. It was great to see a concerted effort for Ubuntu folks to contribute directly to Debian and to get a review of some of the current technical things being done to track bugs and patches between the projects.
– Next Steps for the Ubuntu-NGO Team –
If there were more hours in the day, I’d totally be working hard on the Ubuntu Non-Government Organization Project. This session covered a lot of the early efforts of solidifying a path forward for this team. Results of this session are up on the blueprint, but their Software and papercuts initiatives particularly caught my interest. Maybe I can find more hours in a day…
– Release collaboration with Debian –
This was a really interesting session discussing some of the issues with software versioning between Lucid and Squeeze with particular focus on the challenges facing Python versions between the two distros. This is also the session where I learned that they’ll be going with the 2.6.32 kernel for Lucid.
– Ubuntu Americas Board Meeting –
Not actually a session, but we hosted a “live” North and South American regional approval board meeting at UDS – which means a bunch of us board members sat together in the Grand Ballroom and spoke in real life about the membership candidates coming before the board in IRC. This was a blast, and talking in real time gave us the chance to move through more candidates than usual. Results have been posted here.
– Next Steps For The Ubuntu Women Project (2nd Session) –
– IRC Council Lucid Plans (2nd session) –
These two sessions were continuations of ones discussed above. I was really pleased with how flexible the scheduling for core community projects was during this UDS, Jorge Castro and Jono Bacon did a phenomenal job with this for us.
We wrapped up the day and a whole bunch of us headed out to The Galleria mall for dinner and… ice skating! Dinner was at Five Guys, yum! And I hadn’t ice skating in years. I was bad at it the last time I did it over a decade ago and I’m still pretty bad at it. At least I didn’t fall down at all, and I did manage to skate without holding on to the railing …eventually!
Unfortunately there were a couple injuries related to ice skating, a concussion that was discovered the next day, and a fellow who ended up limping through the rest of UDS due to what he later discovered was a chipped bone (ouch!).
I’ll be posting about the rest of the week in the coming days, since returning home I’ve been pretty busy between work, MJ visiting, Thanksgiving plans, PLUG and a thousand little things I’m following up with post-UDS.
Last week, Google released ChromiumOS to the open source community at http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os. ChromiumOS is a small, optimized OS whose purpose is to make it extremely simple and easy to browse the web. Without a network connection, ChromiumOS is not very interesting. With a network connection, ChromiumOS shines. The Chromium browser is extremely fast and makes for a great web-centric browsing experience. Boot time appears quick too - about 12 seconds from hitting the power button.
Me and some other Dell folks noticed that Engadget recently got the Chrome OS running on a Vostro A860 netbook. I've been doing some timkering over the lat few days working to get our Dell Mini 10v up and running with ChromiumOS. As of late yesterday, I can report success.
I have released an USB key image file to: http://linux.dell.com/files/cto. The file name is: "ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img." It contains a functioning image of my USB key loaded with ChromiumOS. In addition, I have made a best effort attempt to get the Broadcom Wi-Fi adapter working in this image. It's definitely not perfect (read: highly experimental, untested, unstable, yada yada...) but it does appear to function.
Here are the caveats:
Speaking of which, to "reboot" the image, you have to press the "power" key on the Mini 10v - there is no "reboot/shutdown" menu option to do this.
To copy onto an USB key (8GB minimum), find another Linux machine and utilize the "dd" command to put the image onto the USB key.
Example: dd if=ChromiumOS_Mini10v_Nov25.img of=/dev/sdb
In this example, /dev/sdb is my entire USB key... use "fdisk -l" to see how your USB key is named for your particular environment. Be careful to select your USB device (again, use fdisk -l to double verify and confirm the correct device filename) and not another device...
Some additional notes for the released image:
Obviously, this image comes with absolutely no support of any kind and is to be considered highly experimental and completely unstable.
There are some good developer forums at http://www.chromium.org for more information - for the chromium-os-development forum, I've posted a summary of what I had to do to get the wifi to the current working state. Much more needs to be done, but, for now, it's a start.
Enjoy!
While at UDS a mention was made about a new policy for the Ubuntu trademark which will seek to protect the Ubuntu trade dress as well as the mark (logo and name). This change it’s hoped will protect the Ubuntu logo and style from misuse and unfortunately trademarks are one of those legal measures where if you don’t protect them, you loose them.
So, some parts of the Ubuntu OS /style/ will fall under the trademark policy.
I’m going to be keeping an eye open for our unofficial, unblessed derivatives community, because they will have to make sure of not just removing the Ubuntu trademark, but also any of the styles used, such as the white blury logo at boot or some of the other designs.
There is also a focus in design methodology to limit the amount of customisation that can be done to various new components. There is one singular vision and anyone with a different style or aesthetic ideal may not be allowed to contribute to the project. I’m going to blog about this in a few days, because the rationale is basically to keep bike shed painting to a minimum, but is going little too far.
The unintended consequence is that taken together these two facets may conflict for unofficial derivatives, forcing them to take packages out of their distribution or do a lot of work to fork the project to restyle it. It may be that the trade dress protections don’t scale all the way to gdm2 or osd-notify, I certainly hope so, but I can’t really find a good definition of what it covers.
It’s very unlikely that anything will come out of this problem, but it’s one of those interesting dialectical conflicts that I figure the rest of the community may be interested in knowing about.
Michal, I think that your complaint is caused by a misunderstanding of how package maintenance happens in Ubuntu. I’ll try to clarify it, based on what I understand (if you know better than me, don’t hesitate to comment).
The part of Canonical maintaining the distribution is organized into teams (full list here), like Kernel, Foundations, Desktop, Mobile, Server, etc. Most of those teams have mirror-teams in the community, like the Ubuntu Desktop team. Those teams take care of subsets of packages in Ubuntu, of relevance to the respective teams. (This is orthogonal to package upload rights, which are managed with the Ubuntu Core Development Team, and the Ubuntu Development Team ; there’s a proposal to change that so that package upload rights are based on the first set of teams).
However, there are some packages (probably more than 70% of the packages in Ubuntu, including main+universe) that are of no interest to any particular team. Those packages are maintained on a best-effort basis by all the Ubuntu developers (inside the loosely defined MOTU team), and focus is usually on not diverging from Debian, to make their work as easy as possible. It’s very similar to what we do in Debian with orphaned packages: sometimes, important bugs get fixed, because someone complained loudly enough or a developer ran into the bug and did a QA upload ; but usually, we don’t really do any bug triaging. Of course, there are some packages in Ubuntu that are not maintained by any “core” team, but still have someone that cares about them. They are more the exception than the rule.
So, yes, obviously, you will run into packages with lots of untriaged bugs, sometimes even with patches. And those bugs and patches are rarely being forwarded manually to Debian, simply because nobody cares about those packages in Ubuntu. In an ideal world, with infinite resources, this would not happen, of course. But realistically, this is not going to change anytime soon.
There’s a link on the PTS to the bugs of your packages in Ubuntu. The idea is to allow an easy access to the bugs reported in Ubuntu, which are likely to be also relevant to the Debian package. You should probably feel welcomed to triage the bugs against your package in ubuntu, if it makes it easier for you to monitor them.
There’s some noise in the Ubuntu bugs, of course, but more and more often, by looking at the Ubuntu bugs, I find important bugs in my Debian packages that are not even reported in Debian yet.
Reviews have begun to appear for VMware Cookbook, written by Ryan Troy with some assistance from me. The comments I am seeing have been positive.
Comments have appeared today from Meera Subbarao’s Java Blog, Learnxpress, and Amazon.com.
Share and Enjoy:
I’m making a few changes to my online interactions.
Some things, however, will NOT be changing.
Thank you for your time.
Between second and seventh grade, I went to a school that required that I wear grey corduroys. Every day. I loathed them. When I left that school, at twelve years old, I swore to myself that I would never wear a pair of corduroys again.
And I kept that vow until earlier this year when, in Germany, I came across a couple carpenters in Germany on their one-year traveling post-apprenticeship waltz. As it turns out, journeyman German carpenters wear some pretty wild bellbottom corduroys --- zimmermanhosen. Although I tried, I couldn't resist acquiring a pair at a local work clothing store.
A year and a couple more trips to Germany later, I now own several pair of zimmermanhosen and wear them nearly every day. They are tough, distinctive, and have pretty awesome double-zipper flies. And although I love them, I still feel a little conflicted every time I put them on.
So much has changed; Palm devices now use and support Linux, are cute and very, very neat (oh, and for iPhone users: among other things, the Pre can run more than one application at at time 
).
But K/Ubuntu 9.10 did away with /etc/event.d, which means that the debs thoughtfully provided by Palm to facilitate access to your Pre from your Linux box don't work as advertised. So for any Pre owners out there using K/Ubuntu 9.10 or variants, who's just updated their Palm Pre to the shiny new WebOS 1.3, and had it go wrong (like a scary message involving www.palm.com/ROM) here's how to do sort it all out the easy way[1].
First, don't go straight for the excellently cross-platform solution offered by Palm, the WebOS Doctor; you will need it though, so if you have already got it up and running, no matter.
You need to install the Palm SDK and Novacom tools, which you can get from here:
http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1585 (bottom of page)
Run the installer as directed, but ignore the errors caused by the Novacom install, which are caused by the above referenced deprecation of event.d. To get this vital element working you can just run sudo /opt/Palm/novacom/novacomd (thanks to http://zootlinux.blogspot.com/2009/11/installing-webos-sdk-in-ubuntu-910.html).
Now go for it on the WebOS Doctor 
- if you haven't already got it, go here: http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/pre/recoverytool/
See now that was not so hard. But it would have been so much easier (particularly for the non-techies) if these things were in the Partner respository. How on earth do things get into there?
[1] Where easy means "not trawling around a whole bunch of websites first"
This a post about Ubuntu Karmic Release Parties in Romania.
The wonderful people from ROSEDU have organized just before the release the third edition of their, by now well known, Ubuntu Install Fest. More info and pictures on the event page. Below is just a sneak peak.
Thanks to ArLug, just in time for release, we had a great party in Arad. Beside the usual chat and drinks this event was highly connected to the latest online social sensation having a great Upstream.TV live streaming and a presentation on Slidecast… high-tech! More info and pictures on the event page. Below is just a sneak peak.
Next in timeline was the greatest Ubuntu release party we had and all thanks to awesome boys and girls from SBLug. Kudos to all of you who make this thing happen. After the Ubuntu presentation there was also shown a nice video celebrating 5 years of Firefox. More info and pictures on the event page. Below is just a sneak peak.
We also had a great event in Târgu-Mureș, organized by Mureș-Lug and educatie.inmures.ro. The event was organized as a release party for Ubuntu Karmic but it was not all about Ubuntu. There was also a presentation about Mandriva and the Firefox anniversary video. I am very happy to see such a diverse event and a strong collaboration between local free software communities. Kudos to organizers. More info and pictures on the event page. Here is a preview.
The first alpha version of blender 2.50 (what will become blender 2.60 once final) is officially out. It is being stress-tested by their user-community and by the artists working on “Sintel” (the newest installment of the OpenMovie-series by the blender foundation).
I’m really looking forward to this new short, even more than I anticipated the last two ones. Because this time around I, or rather the martial-arts team I’m a member of (banGang), is going to help out the creative minds behind “Sintel” with fighting, acrobatics, stunts and reference footage.
I just gave an impromptu lesson on symbolic links (symlinks) and hard links, complete with ASCII art, in #ubuntu-offtopic, and Topyli commented that simple explanations of this for beginners are hard to find, so here's a summary.
The purpose of a link is to allow you to have two (or more) paths to access the same data without having the data exist on disk multiple times, thus giving convenience without sacrificing disk space. So why are there two kinds of links and how do they work?
Symlinks (ln -s REALPATH LINK) work like this:
LINK --> REALPATH --> DATA
While hard links (ln PATH1 PATH2) work like this:
PATH1 --> DATA <-- PATH2
See what's happening here? In the symlink case, your link points to another path, which points to the data. In the hard link case, two paths point to the same data directly. I think I could get a lesson on pointers in C out of this ASCII art if I wanted to. If you want a bit more background, your hard disk's filesystem contains a table of inode numbers, which is just like the Index at the back of a book. Symlinks are when you get "(see also: rubber ducky)" and hard links are when you get "Rubber ducky: 5" and "Sesame Street: 5" both showing up in the Index. Since we can have multiple filesystems mounted on one machine (for example my /home is on a separate partition), it is important to note that while a symlink can point to something located on another disk (or in a book "Further reading: Little Red Riding Hood"), a hard link only knows about data on its own filesystem (ie same partition). So, if you want to link from your hard disk to a flash drive, you need to use a symlink. This makes sense since your hard disk can't know if your flash drive rearranges things while it's plugged into another computer.
How do these show up in ls? Hard links look like normal files. For symlinks ls -l --color will show LINK -> REALPATH. If REALPATH is deleted, this will be highlighted as red text on a black background.
Speaking of deletion, how does that work? Well, if you remove LINK, REALPATH and DATA will still exist. If you remove REALPATH, DATA goes away too and LINK just points at nothing (though if you add REALPATH back, LINK will start working again, as it only goes by filename). As for hard links, DATA goes away once no more inode numbers point to it. As mentioned before, hard links point directly to the data, so this means removing all links and the original filename. So if I remove the original filename (PATH1), PATH2 will still point to DATA.
I hope that's a straightforward enough explanation of how it works.
As more attention is given to the ARM ports of Linux, I’m hoping someone (maybe me if I learn a bunch) will be able to implement some upstream kernel features that are implemented only on x86 so far:
Stack is already randomized, it should be easy to do the rest! ;)
Last week, while at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas I mentioned in one of the roundtables about how wicked-cool it would be to have a desktop client for Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu Developer Week and other online tuition events that we run.
One of the challenges we face every time we run these events is helping new community members figure out how IRC works. Ideally this should be as simple as running a program, selecting an event and connecting.
On the flight home I hacked up a little quickly app to get started on this. It is called Lernid.
This is how it works:
When you fire up Lernid it will ask you to select an event from a combo box and enter a nickname. The list of events in the combo box is actually held on the server side, which means we add new events and all Lernid clients will see them. This also means that other projects can use Lernid for their online events too. When the user hits OK it then loads up the main interface:
In the upper pane the schedule is displayed for the currently selected event, the bottom left pane shows the classroom channel and the bottom right pane shows the chat channel. The user is now all set to take part in the session.
Right now I have focused on getting a basic Lernid together, and I have created a Lernid Launchpad project and published Lernid 0.1 to my PPA.
I think there is bags of room for additional features. Some ideas include:
Hopefully Lernid can act as a starting point for the community to add new features. 
I’m glad to be able to announce the release of Kubuntu Notification Helper 0.4.85, the first beta release for the 0.5 release! We would very much appreciate testing, though I must admit we don’t have anywhere for bug reports to go yet. It should enter Ubuntu soon enough, though, so we’ll be able to track bugs there in the quite near future.
For a general overview on what Kubuntu Notification Helper is, see my previous blog post. There have been new developments since then, though, which I will touch upon in this blog post. But first, let’s get to the release stuff.
Getting it
I have packages available for both Kubuntu 9.10 and Kubuntu 10.04 at my PPA. To get them, go to the “Settings” view of KPackageKit and hit “Edit Software Sources”. Go to the “Other Software” tab and click “Add”. Paste the following into the dialog:
ppa:echidnaman/ppa
Once you close the dialog, it will offer to update your package lists. Allow it to do so, and install the kubuntu-notification-helper package.
Using it
After installing it, you have two options to start using it. You can:
Or:
It should now function just as Update Notifier KDE did, only better! (More efficient, more integrated with Plasma)
What’s new
Since my last blog, quite a bit has gone on development-wise. Primarily, Kubuntu Notification Helper now notifies of restricted package availability:
Clicking “Details” will bring up a dialog identical to the one in Kubuntu 9.04 and 9.10. With Kubuntu Notification Helper you can finally permanently ignore all restricted package notifications if you so choose. Oh, and before anybody asks, that’s the Oxywin Plasma theme, which I quite like.
On the subject of permanently ignoring things, we realized that, aside from editing configuration files, there was no way to get Kubuntu Notification Helper to watch/notify for permanently ignored things. To remedy this we added a child module to the “Notification” configuration module in System Settings:
Other than those two features, we have spent a fair amount of time making the code is as clean as it can be. We have all the features that we want for 0.5 done, so all we need now is a bunch of bug testing between now and April. Enjoy!
This is the third in my Firewall series, is in follow up to my previous 2 blogs about firewalls, and is intended to introduce GUFW, a graphical front end to UFW.
Firewall Ubuntu Desktops
Firewall Ubuntu Servers
Although the GUFW GUI may seem deceptively simple, the graphical front end is both easy to use and capable of performing the most common firewall configuration options. The graphical tool is a perfect place to start if you find ufw and iptables overwhelming.
Again the most difficult part of managing a firewall is knowing who you wish to allow or restrict (by ip address) and what service and port you need to allow (open) or deny (close). Gufw can help as many of these options are preconfigured. If you need further assistance, start with gufw, configure as much as you can, and then review the other two links.
GUFW is an option if you installed a few simple servers on your desktop (torrents for example) or if you installed a graphical desktop/ window manager (Gnome, Fluxbox, etc) to help you administrate a server.
As a side note, server side, rather then installing a GUI, some people probably use either the command line or web tools such as webmin, phpMyAdmin, etc to manage servers.
Although ufw is installed by default, gufw is not.
First, Enable the Universe repository.
Then, using any method, install gufw (apt-get shown here).
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install gufw
In Ubuntu 9.10, UFW is then located under System -> Administration -> Firewall configuration.
Simply click (check off) the “Enabled” button and select “Deny” in the “By Default” pull down menu.
The default settings are probably sufficient for the vast majority of Desktop users and, unless you are running a server, nothing further needs to be done. Simply close the GUFW window and your firewall will remain active, even if you reboot.
IMO, The most common servers used on desktops would include torrents, VNC, Samba, Apache, and SSH. If you are wanting to allow access to one or more of these servers you will need to configure GUFW as outlined below.
UFW manages NEW INBOUND connections. Gufw allows all outbound traffic (see limitations below).
Use the following options if you are running servers and you wish to allow inbound connections from other computers.
To add a rule, first click the “Add” box on the bottom left. You will get a dialog box which will allow you a number of options.
GUFW has a number of common services preconfigured. You allow a service by program name (perhaps most useful on Desktops). As you can see common servers used on desktops, such as Transmission, are included (surprise, torrents are servers).
Or by service (perhaps most useful on servers).
In the “Simple” tab you can open a specific port, by tcp, udp, or both. Simply add the port you wish to open in the box.
You may specify multiple ports, comma delineated
22,80,443
Or a range of ports with a : , so to allow bittorrent, open ports 6881 – 6999, use
6881:6999
You may use the “Advanced” tab to allow or deny traffic from a specific ip address or subnet (LAN). Keep in mind order of your rules counts, so deny first then allow.
You may blacklist an ip address by denying all traffic from that IP.
In this example, all traffic from your LAN is allowed to connect to Apache (sorry the first part of “192.168.0.0/24″ was outside the box).
Firewall rules are displayed in the main GUFW window. The rule displayed in this example allows all traffic on the LAN (192.168.0.0/24) to access Apache ( port 80/tcp) on the server (ip address 192.168.1.10).
Simply select your rule and click the “Remove” button on the bottom.
Logging is enabled by default. Under the menu, select Edit -> Preferences
Enable logging by selecting (checking off) your “Enable Gufw Logging” and “Enable ufw Logging”.
Under File -> Select the option “Log” with the magnifying glass icon
And you will see your logs. Although not displayed, any denied traffic will be logged.
You may clear the logs from this menu as well.
IMO GUFW is designed for users who wish to enable a firewall and do not feel they need to know the dirty details. As such it is simple and effective, although it does not offer all of the available options from either ufw or iptables.
You will need to user either ufw from the command line, learn iptables, or use another configuration tool if you need these options.
This is a follow up on my last post about Nicaraguan schools using Ubuntu.
Today we had a second meeting with the authorities of the Ministry of Education (MINED) and the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) in order to clarify some aspects of the project and draft a preliminary plan of action.
Guardabarranco GNU/Linux is now the official name of the project who aims to develop a Nicaraguan educational distribution.
This distribution will be based on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, making an extensive use of the official Ubuntu repositories, adding only some new educational software and adapting other to fit the Nicaraguan curriculum for primary and secondary schools.
20,000 laptops for teachers with Guardabarranco GNU/Linux pre-installed will be deployed in the first phase of this project, followed by the installation of the system in computer labs in public schools using LTSP.
As some people erroneously pointed out in my previous post, this is not a fork, it may not even classify as a derivative distribution… it’s more like an ‘Ubuntu Remix’ with some extra packages designed to fulfill the needs of the Nicaraguan school system.
We want to work as close as possible with the upstream Ubuntu developers, pushing back our patches and changes to Ubuntu whenever it’s possible.
IMHO, this is a great project, both for the Nicaraguan educational system and for Ubuntu. We’ll be able to deliver a powerful and flexible operative system ‘out of the package’ with all the applications needed for our teachers and students, and at the same time, build a core team of developers that can contribute with its code and knowledge to the Ubuntu project and community.
If you can read Spanish and want to contribute, check out the announcement and join the Ubuntu-ni mailing list.
Guardabarranco, or Turquoise browed motmot, is the name of the official bird of Nicaragua. It’s also the name of the first public school that’s using GNU/Linux exclusively in their computer labs. Our community has been giving technical support to the Guardabarranco school since 2008, and started recently a project for recycling old hardware in order to deploy computer labs with LTSP in Guardabarranco and other public schools in Nicaragua.
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Updated on November 27, 2009 09:07 PM UTC. Entries are normalised to UTC time.
