In May 2008 the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was reported on Italian national television (link to my blog entry). Fabio Marzocca of the Ubuntu-it community was interviewed.

Yesterday a further report was broadcast about the release of Ubuntu 9.10. This time Flavia Weisghizzi was interviewed about the new release, and did a great job: thanks Flavia!

You can watch the YouTube recording here.

One interesting thing about the report is how heavily they focus on the Koala as the mascot of the release. Ubuntu generally takes the view that its release mascots are used only during the development phase, and that the final version when released should be referred to by its version number (Ubuntu 9.10, in this case). However the way that the programme focused on the image of the Koala demonstrates that people will find it easy to associate with such mascots.

Day 4 of Open Week proved to be INFORMATIVE, INSTRUCTIVE, ILLUMINATING and INCLUSIVE.


As Ubuntu Open Week is wrapping up and with only one day left, there is already evidence throughout the community of people applying there new found, or improved knowledge and skills. Whether it is people working on wiki's for the next membership meetings, LoCo teams becoming energized as renewed excitement and enthusiasm spreads throughout each team. Or maybe it's just that more people are now aware of some new point of entry of project that they can share with others when explaining here are some things anyone can help with and more.

Let's see what was covered on Day 4 and if you missed how you can get the information -

To kick the day off MOTU's, Daniel Holbach and James Westby, gave a 2 back to back sessions on Getting Started in Ubuntu Development followed by How to fix bugs in Ubuntu. In the first session Daniel and James discussed getting your development environment set up so development can begin and some best practices surrounding that. In the follow on session they dive into real life activity and they even fix a few bugs. New to development or want to get started on it - these sessions are for you.

Kurt von Finck and Jussi Schultink both Members of the Ubuntu IRC Ops Team, lead a session on Basics of and Behavior in Ubuntu IRC channels. The session was divided into 2 parts 3 parts if you count questions. Jussi discussed what IRC is and how it works and some tips for those who are new to IRC. Kurt then discussed how the Ubuntu channels operate and netiquette in those channels and where to go for help if you need it. Then they both tackled the questions. New to IRC or or maybe you just need to know where to get more information on Ubuntu IRC channels. This session is perfect for you.

Dustin Kirland, of the Canonical Server team the jumped in to talk about the KVM and Virt-Manager in his session. In his session Dustin discusses, Virtualization in Ubuntu specifically, using something called KVM. Dustin explains what this is, and how to make sure your CPU supports Virtualization Technology. This technology seems one of the hot topics right now to find out more about it and it's implementation take a look at these logs.

Following Dustin was Stéphane Graber (LTSP developer and Ubuntu liaison with Revolution Linux) with Welcome to the new Edubuntu. In this session Stéphane discusses what Edubuntu is, it's history. He also discusses the short, middle, and long term goals of the project. If Education for Children of all ages preschool to university, interests you and you like the idea of pairing that with Ubuntu check out these logs.

Wrapping up Day 4 was Elizabeth Krumbach, Ubuntu Community Council Member and Debian and Ubuntu systems maintainer with a Philadelphia based company and Mackenzie Morgan, Ubuntu Member, and Test Engineer for a Virgina based Consulting Firm. Elizabeth and Mackenzie presented back to back sessions on Women in Open Source. Elizabeth in her Women In Open Source - Issues session identified those issues. Mackenzie in her Women In Open Source - Encouragement session discussed the encouragement and inclusion part of the involvement process. If you want to know how to be more inclusive, by getting not only women but more people in general involved, or you want to understand the issues better take a look at these sessions.

What's on the horizon for day 5, for Ubuntu Open Week - well let's take a look:

1500 - Xubuntu - Lots of Kittens and Mice - knome and charlie-tca

1600 - How to run Ubuntu+1 - Jorge Castro

1700 - Ask Mark - sabdfl

1800 - Kernel QA - The Life Cycle of a Kernel Bug - Leann Ogasawara

1900 - Resolving Bug One - BethLynn Eicher

2000 - Introduction to the Ubuntu Documentation Project - Matthew East

2100 - Introducing the Telepathy Stack - Ken Vandine

2200 - Feedback and Ideas for next time - Jorge Castro



If you want to know more about the session leaders check out the booklet. Do you want to see the line up for Friday, or maybe just some more information about Ubuntu Open Week then check out the wiki. Hope you see you all in the IRC channels on Freenode where Ubuntu Open Week is taking place: #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat. What are you waiting for 1 more days of Open Week left, don't miss out on all the great sessions, all the fun starts 1500 UTC - plan to be there! :-D!

So… I gave it a try… and I liked it. The last few weeks I was programming (after a long time) for a project of one of my classes. Since I wanted to learn python for a while, I decided to do my project in Python. At first, it was just going to be a command line application, but… after giving it a second thought, I decided to provide a GUI too using pygtk.

So, since there I saw lots of post about quickly, I decided to give quickly a try too… and it is awesome! I really like it.

Anyways, my app is a simple app that’s allowing me to learn python. It enciphers a text file using a public key, and then it hides the message in an image. I’m making use of python-gnupginterface and python-stepic for this. As you can see, it sounds like a simple app, and it really is… I’ll publish it when I’m done.

Btw… give a try to quickly, you are gonna like it. Thanks rickspencer and didrocks for this awesome tool.

The Ubuntu Georgia LoCo and ALE will be holding an Ubuntu 9.10 install fest at ITT-Tech Atlanta.

When:
Saturday, November 21st, 2009, 9am-5pm

Where:
ITT Tech
1745 Phoenix Blvd # 100
Atlanta, GA
(Map)
Enter the ITT Tech building at the north end, front doors on the east side are kept locked on the weekends.

I finally got rid of the last theme I had and installed something that, as per my conventions, looks quite professional. This is a modified version of the CreativePress wordpress theme, which offers a range of nice eyecandy effects using jQuery. Setting up the theme was quite a tedious job — removing my feeds from the planets (sounds ironic), doing the whole theme changes, and software upgrade and all that without access to db (why? well, our college university filter blocks it under category “hacking sites”….).

Anyway, of all the features, I can brag about:

1. The preview slider: I can set the slider to take up posts from a fixed category, “featured posts” in my case. Once I attach a “custom field” called ‘preview’, the slider picks up the image and scales it accordingly to use it as a thumbnail.
2. A nice homepage: It gives me a nice homepage. Hence now, I have completely removed the “blog” subdomain from my server and I am left with only one wordpress install in contrast to the two independent installs on different domains.
3. Wordpress 2.8.5: Just upgraded from 2.7 to 2.8.5, and I hope that things get a bit more stable now :p Apparently 2.8.5 has some much needed security fixes, which IMHO was worth the pain incurred from upgrading.

Honestly, I did have a bunch of points in my mind, but I can’t remember what they were

Anyway, I’m just happy that this went well. If you decide to give the theme a shot, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I am.

Nice picture from my friend, he is Ubuntu activist who works at Air Putih Foundation. Original picture can be found at here http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30419133&op=1&o=global&view=global&subj=555223280&id=1143679906

As ajax quite elegantly summed up, due to a series of catastrophic power failures at PSU, where fd.o is hosted, we were down for a good chunk of yesterday. Despite the machines having redundant power supplies, being connected to separate power rails in the rack, which were hooked up to independent, UPS-backed, power supplies, we still (like a good chunk of Portland, and certainly everyone in the PSU machine room) lost our power.

As far as we can tell, when annarchy.fd.o (websites, people.fd.o, cgit, anongit, et al) came back up, power was again interrupted while the ext3 journal was being replayed. When it came up the n'th time, fsck dumped almost the entire filesystem in lost+found, then started saying increasingly unhappy things about the state of the filesystem on its second pass. In the end, we just went with mkfs, and now we have a brand new and shiny filesystem.

It's worth pointing out that even if this was another filesystem, such as /srv, which hosts all project data, we would've been fine, as they're all backed up. But, unfortunately for some, we made a decision a while ago to not back /home up, and didn't advertise that as widely as we should have. So, if you had stuff in annarchy:/home, it's now gone, and I hope you have backups.

Sorry about that. On the upside, I got to see PSU's new and really very nice machine room this morning, thanks to XDC being about 250m away from the PSU machine room, and fd.o is otherwise running fine. We've been talking this week about replacing our ageing hardware, which would also allow for more redundancy as well as better performance from those machines. But we still have no plans to back up /home, so if you put stuff there, please, please keep your own backups (or make sure the Wayback Machine knows about it).

X.Org 7.5 will be releasing fairly soon -- within the month. Check the updated schedule for more details.

This (quite long) post is about the LXC (Linux containers), an example of its usage on Karmic is provided after the introduction to contextualization.

Most of you are probably already familiar with "usual" virtualization as kvm/virtualbox/vmware/... These are now extremely fast ways to do "full" virtualization of an OS on a host running either the same OS or a completely different one.
In Ubuntu, the most widely used is probably KVM used with libvirt and virt-manager as frontend.

At Revolution Linux, we have literately hundreds of virtual machines for each of our customers and we noticed that they are all Ubuntu virtual machines running on Ubuntu hosts. Then, running them in a "full" virtualization environment adds unneeded overhead and makes resource assignment quite difficult (you can't easily change the CPU/RAM/DISK/NIC of a running virtual machine).

So, what we are currently doing is using contextualization instead of regular virtualization.
Contextualization can (in a much simpler way) be seen as improved chroots, these "chroots" are called containers and work just like a regular virtual machine, inside them you have your own network interface, can apply disk/cpu/ram quotas and start/stop/suspend as many of them as you want.
All the quotas and restrictions can be changed on the fly without needing any restart, because it's technically just a set of process running on the host, not a single process as with virtualization.
It also means that you can list/kill or execute a process in any of these containers, directly from the host (a container obviously can't access another's processes).

The technology we have been using for more then a year now has been OpenVZ (open source implementation of Virtuozo) which basically is a huge patchset on top of the Linux kernel and only exists in Ubuntu hardy (8.04 LTS).

What I've been looking at more recently and hope to have working correctly in Lucid (10.04 LTS) is LXC. LXC is basically the same as OpenVZ except that it's in the upstream kernel and uses already existing kernel features such as "cgroups" for example.
LXC is also supported by libvirt although it's not working in Karmic, that will let users play with it just like any other virtualization technology using their existing scripts and interfaces.

Here's a quick howto to make it work on Karmic with an Ubuntu 8.04 amd64 container (I've had issues making Karmic to work in a container):

• Install LXC from my PPA (upstream snapshot) : https://launchpad.net/~stgraber/+archive/ppa/+packages
• Create /var/lib/lxc/: mkdir -p /var/lib/lxc/
• Get http://www.stgraber.org/download/lxc-ubuntu-8.04-amd64.tar.gz (Hardy amd64 image)
• Uncompress it in /var/lib/lxc/ (will create an ubuntu directory containing a configuration file and a root directory)
• Mount cgroups somewhere: sudo mkdir /dev/cgroup && mount -t cgroup none /dev/cgroup
• Create a bridge with: sudo addbr br0
• Set an IP on the bridge: ifconfig br0 192.168.2.1 (VE will be 192.168.2.2 by default)
• Start the VE: lxc-start -d -n ubuntu
• Enter the VE: "lxc-console -n ubuntu" or "ssh root@192.168.2.2" (root password is "password")

The VE (virtual environment) configuration file is in: /var/lib/lxc/ubuntu/config

Additional information can be found on:

• libvirt-lxc code
• upstram lxc code
• libvirt-lxc
• Introduction to LXC by IBM

Also, I plan to have a session about it at UDS-Lucid in Dallas
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So I don't tweet because I'm not ready to hand my data and autonomy over to Twitter. Luckily -- or unluckily perhaps -- that hasn't kept me off the microblogging wagon. I "dent" semi-regularly over at freedom-friendly identi.ca.

I've found that microblogging is a great public outlet where one can talk about all those otherwise little meaningless things that we all do in our daily lives. High on my list of meaningless little actions, however, is microblogging itself! But can you microblog about your microblogging -- i.e. can you "metamicroblog" (or "metadent", or "metatweet")? I created a new account, metamako that over the last month or so, has been proving that you sure can!

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is one of the most surprisingly successful projects I've ever had the privilege of working on. On my first day working for the company that would become Canonical, I talked with Mark Shuttleworth about some ideas for community governance. Partially in reaction to some harsh behavior in other free software projects we'd worked on, Mark and I agreed that some sort of explicit standard for behavior in Ubuntu would be a good thing. Over lunch of what was my literally first day working on Ubuntu, I wrote a draft of code of conduct that was essentially the version that Ubuntu has used until today. Shuttleworth made a series of modification to my draft but I don't think either of us took it too seriously. We figured it would be easy to update it later.

Over time, that code has become a central piece of the Ubuntu community. Every new Ubuntu member cryptographically signs the code. When conversation in any Ubuntu forums, channels, or lists becomes disrespectful, users almost instinctively remind each other of the code. Through this process, the code has become a sort of constitution of our community and a widely enforced standard. People treat the code as a reflection of what "ubuntu" --- both the concept and our project --- stands for.

Over time, the original code has spawned a Leadership Code of Conduct (which I also worked to draft), and has been modified and employed by scores of free software projects and by many projects that have nothing to do with free software at all. This is all wonderful, but a side effect has been that updating the code has become a more a difficult process that we originally imagined.

Despite it success, the code remains a text written in an afternoon in Mark's flat. At times, this fact shows. For example, the code contains some off-hand humor that now seems a little akward and the text was a bit too developer centric at points. And there was a lot that, quite simply, we would have done better if we had realized that the code would be so important. So this summer, Daniel Holbach and I spent another afternoon in Berlin discussing and crafting a new version of the code along with a detailed rationale document that describes all the things we'd changed and why.

We believe that what we've created is fully in the spirit of the original code. We've made efforts to minimize the delta in terms of text as possible. Daniel and I realize that changing the code out from under our community is a dangerous game, and we've make exceptional efforts to make sure that the new code doesn't say anything substantively different than the old code --- but that it does say it better.

So I'm thrilled that, after being posted since early June and after incorporating a series of revisions with members of the Ubuntu Community Council, the new draft was approved at a council meeting earlier today.

Of course, we are continuing to think about how we might improve the text going forward. One important goal we've thrown around, for example, is the creation of a code that is no longer Ubuntu specific and that can be employed by a wide range of different groups and different free and open source software projects.

this weekend my latest artistic project, architexture, will be displayed in caam (the museum of modern art of the canary islands), as part of a audiovisual exhibition.

the video was created using free software: processing, gstreamer and blender in a ubuntu studio machine. the visual element is the core of the project and the audio was created by a musician inspired by snippets I sent him of how the video would be. like the workflow of a music video but backwards.

so if you are around close to the museum and want to check the creative potential of free software drop in. I will upload the piece to the net next week (caam museum has release exclusivity).



flyer full size: outside inside

laura czajkowski has been running a meme about how we name our machines. like a lot of people I use popculture/fictional names for my machines, but since I'm such a geek and a devoted Lost fan, all my machines are names from the Lost universe.

so if you havent watched the show... spoiler alert! stop reading this and get a copy of Lost's pilot/premiere

dharma: is my main server at work, named after the dharma initiative (d.epartment of h.euristics a.nd r.esearch on m.aterial a.pplications) since all machines interact with this central one, it is always running in the background with a lot of work and I use it for personal research and testing applications

jacob: media center, inspired by the 'clockwork orange' scene in episode 'not in portland' of season 3. one of the video clips in room 23 showed a slide with the words "god loves you just as he loved jacob", a clear signal jacob would appear as in important character. looking back, i should change the name of that machine to 'room23'.

cerberus: laptop. because cerberus, aka the monster, is always on the move. it also seams to crash and give errors without warnining (like cerberus' attacks), which feels like it has a life of its own and it's the machine with the tighest security.

desmond: open solaris desktop at work. because I use the snapshot and rollbacks of the zfs filesystem, _a lot_, so it seams that it's conscience can travel through time like desmond's. it also has been rock solid hardware and it is the own I spent more time on... it is my constant.

and more... echo, locke and charlie. ok I accept it, the last one is not really a personal computer but an ipod, and it does play 'good vibrations'.

As some of you may know, the new version of Conky will include built-in support for weather.

In this blog post, I'm going to talk about how to use this info to make an image for the current weather to be displayed to your desktop:

With weather enabled (use --enable-weather-metar or --enable-weather-xoap during the configuration step), you can get cloud cover and weather status by using the ${weather uri locid cloud_cover} and ${weather uri locid weather} directives. Lets concentrate for the time being on the weather metar data from the NWS (this will apply also to the weather info from weather.com but I plan to introduce upstream a new icon directive that will make it even easier for that).

The possible return values for cloud_cover are:

• clear
• partly cloudy
• cloudy
• overcast
• towering cumulus
• cumulonimbus

Those for weather are:

• drizzle
• rain
• hail
• soft hail
• snow
• snow grains
• fog
• haze
• smoke
• mist
• dust
• sand
• funnel cloud tornado
• dust/sand
• squall
• sand storm
• dust storm

The first thing to do is to find icons for those various weather states. There are plenty of good and free icons to be found on the internet, alternatively, if you register to the www.weather.com service you will get a complete set that matches their weather states.

You don't need an icon for each and every state, you can obviously collect various states together, like a snow icon for snow and snow grains, a rain icon for drizzle, rain, hail and soft hail, an overcast icon for overcast, towering cumulus and cumulonimbus etc.

Save the icons in a directory of your choice, and name them in accordance with the state they represent.
To retrieve the weather status we use a lua function. This lua function takes as input the icao of the station we want data for, evaluates the weather directives and construct the name of the icon we want to display in accordance to a set of rules. In the simple example I'm going to show, it is just using the cloud_cover returned as the icon name. Since this can also be a null string, we need to add an icon to cover for this case.

function conky_show_icon(icao)
	 local type
	 type = conky_parse("${weather 
	      http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/ "
	      .. icao .. " cloud_cover}")
	 if type ~= "" then 
	    type = "${image /home/cesare/icons/" .. type .. ".png -p 0,30 -f 1800}"
	 else
	    type = "${image /home/cesare/icons/null.png -p 0,30 -f 1800}"
	 end
	 return type
end

Save this lua script in your root directory as weather_icons.lua.
We are almost set, all we need now is to add the following to our configuration file:

lua_load ~/weather_icons.lua
TEXT
${lua_parse conky_show_icon LIRA}

Substitude LIRA with your icao of choice and voilá! Hopefully a sunny face will show up on your desktop too.

A great feature is in the pipeline for the next release of Conky.

Not happy to have included built-in lua support, Brenden and co. have now included bindings for Cairo and Imlib2 as well.

This will allow us to use the whole Cairo API within Conky!

The following code snippet (inspired by cairographics.org) will show the concept. Save the following lua code into your home directory (lets call it cairo.lua):

-- Conky Lua scripting example
--
require 'cairo'
do
	function conky_round_rect(cr, x0, y0, w, h, r)
		 if (w == 0) or (h == 0) then return end
		 local x1 = x0 + w
		 local y1 = y0 + h
		 if w/2  r then
    		    if h/2  r then
		        cairo_move_to  (cr, x0, (y0 + y1)/2)
			cairo_curve_to (cr, x0 ,y0, x0, y0, (x0 + x1)/2, y0)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y0, x1, y0, x1, (y0 + y1)/2)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y1, x1, y1, (x1 + x0)/2, y1)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x0, y1, x0, y1, x0, (y0 + y1)/2)
		    else
			cairo_move_to  (cr, x0, y0 + r)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x0 ,y0, x0, y0, (x0 + x1)/2, y0)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y0, x1, y0, x1, y0 + r)
        		cairo_line_to (cr, x1 , y1 - r)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y1, x1, y1, (x1 + x0)/2, y1)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x0, y1, x0, y1, x0, y1- r)
		    end
		 else
		    if h/2  r then
        		cairo_move_to  (cr, x0, (y0 + y1)/2)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x0 , y0, x0 , y0, x0 + r, y0)
        		cairo_line_to (cr, x1 - r, y0)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y0, x1, y0, x1, (y0 + y1)/2)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y1, x1, y1, x1 - r, y1)
        		cairo_line_to (cr, x0 + r, y1)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x0, y1, x0, y1, x0, (y0 + y1)/2)
		    else
			cairo_move_to  (cr, x0, y0 + r)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x0 , y0, x0 , y0, x0 + r, y0)
        		cairo_line_to (cr, x1 - r, y0)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y0, x1, y0, x1, y0 + r)
        		cairo_line_to (cr, x1 , y1 - r)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x1, y1, x1, y1, x1 - r, y1)
        		cairo_line_to (cr, x0 + r, y1)
        		cairo_curve_to (cr, x0, y1, x0, y1, x0, y1- r)
		   end
		 end
		 cairo_close_path (cr)
	end

	function conky_cairo_test()
		if conky_window == nil then return end
		local w = conky_window.width
		local h = conky_window.height
		local cs = cairo_xlib_surface_create(conky_window.display,
		      conky_window.drawable, conky_window.visual, w, h)
		cr = cairo_create(cs)

		conky_round_rect(cr, 0.7825*w, 0.0675*h, 0.1*w, 0.1*h, 0.04*w)
		local pat = cairo_pattern_create_linear (0.0, 0.065*h,
		      0.0, 0.165*h)
		cairo_pattern_add_color_stop_rgba (pat, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1.0)
		cairo_pattern_add_color_stop_rgba (pat, 1, 0.6, 0.6, 0.6, 0.5)
		cairo_set_source (cr, pat)
		cairo_fill_preserve (cr)
		cairo_pattern_destroy (pat)
		cairo_set_source_rgba (cr, 0.5, 0, 0, 0.5)
		cairo_set_line_width (cr, 10.0)
		cairo_stroke (cr)
	end
end

Now save the following code into a .conkyrc.cairo file, again into your home directory:

lua_load ~/cairo.lua
lua_draw_hook_pre cairo_test
TEXT
${color orange}SYSTEM ${hr 2}$color
$nodename $sysname $kernel on $machine


${alignc}${color red}${time %a %d %b}
${alignc}${time %H:%M}

Fire up conky with:

conky -d -f "Radio Space" -c .conkyrc.cairo

and you should see this on your desktop:

So, start cranking up your conky and show the world the best desktop!

 

First View of the Clutter Netbook application

The view of your default directories, which are normally found under Places

Some magic graphics, enabled desktop effects, gnome-terminal with transparent background

Everything is running on an Acer Aspire One, Upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04

The New York State Team will be holding their Release Party / Event this weekend on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at the Waterloo Holiday Inn. The Event will be from 1-3 pm and feature two talks on FOSS as well as a few computers running Ubuntu 9.10. System 76 will be furnishing one of the demo computers. Following the Event they will be a party to celebrate and install Ubuntu.

I have also coordinated with pleia2 who is attending our event from the Pennsylvania Loco. A few members are meeting for drinks with her at the Clarence Hotel in Seneca Falls on Saturday evening around eight.

There has been a little bit o’chatter on the tubes recently regarding quality and our recent release, Ubuntu 9.10. There we were on Thursday, champagne in hand, kicking a new release out the door and while I have seen countless reports of happy users with effortless upgrades and hardware and software working better than ever before, there are of course some reports of things going less-well, some broken upgrades and unexpected quirks.

Those of us involved in the Ubuntu project, like anyone involved in any kind of endeavour, are emotionally invested in our work. When we hear of problems, it hurts us, and it is tempting to get a little defensive and find fault in those who criticise. Well, I don’t want to denigrate the experiences of our users who face problems: if something goes wrong, that user’s experience is genuinely marred. Irrespective of whether the fault was in our package, with hardware, with networking, in the upstream version of the software or elsewhere, that user had a bad experience, and we need to come together as a project to help prevent these problems from occurring again.

What I am conscious to do though is to put things in a little bit of perspective. It is tempting to believe that the sky is falling when we see patterns of negative outcomes: that is the way human beings are wired up. This concern can be further confounded when journalists write articles that look at a portion of the picture; a news-wire always makes things look more worrying than they really are. Then again, that’s what journos do: they look for patterns and they report on them. Hell, I used to be a journo, and that is what I was expected to do with the publications that I wrote for.

In the interests of keeping things in perspective, I just wanted to remind us all of some of the things going on in the background that I think are worth remembering. Take these for what they are, but I think they go a long way in helping to understand the picture before us.

Firstly, criticism is a sign of success. Ubuntu is arguably the most popular Linux distribution in the world, and has been growing every year since it started. This release of Ubuntu outdid each previous version in terms of how much data we shifted on release day. “With enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” is one of the foundational attributes of Open Source and therefore it is not entirely surprising that when we kicked out a new release of the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution, there were more eyeballs, more hardware, more networks, more devices, more configurations, more expectations and therefore more opportunities for things to go awry inside these attributes. If we then combine this with the natural inclination for human beings to communicate complaints as opposed to share praise, it is also not entirely surprising that we see these patterns before us, and that journalists report on said patterns.

Around the time we set the Karmic Koala loose, many comparisons were made to Windows 7. Of course, Windows 7 has generated an incredible amount of press, and the mere fact that we are being compared to the most dominant Operating System in the world is something that I consider an achievement. 11 years ago when I joined the Linux journey, it took 2 weeks to get the bloody thing installed, there was barely any device support, you needed a degree in rocket science and integration was something that happened to other people. Microsoft never stood still and we needed to catch up, but today we are direct competitors. This is a tremendous testament to the upstream community and the Ubuntu community for building an integrated system.

There is one key difference between our quality story and Microsoft’s though: we are transparent. You can download all of the source code that comprises Ubuntu, you can see all of our bugs, you can see all our patches, and because the software is free, you can download it freely and try it out, if only for shits and giggles. With a transparent development and quality assurance process, a culture of openness and transparency develops and we are all frank and honest about defects. Speaking as one dot on the Internet, I work for Canonical, a company directly invested in Ubuntu, and I feel comfortable reporting public bugs and defects in Ubuntu and I feel comfortable talking about what rocks it and what ails it: it is part of the Open Source culture in which we all exist. I love this attribute of free software: we are not afraid to talk about problems, and due to the open nature of our environment, the opportunity exists for success.

Fundamentally, if someone experiences problems with software, we need to resolve those problems. The global Ubuntu family is proud of all that we have achieved so far on this journey and we are firmly committed to the road ahead. Karmic was a ballsy release: we shipped some adventurous new technology and in the short six-month cycle that we are committed to, we tried to ship the most exciting, feature-full and compelling release that we could. It is this exact reason that attracted me to Ubuntu back in 2004: it was a project that was unafraid of pushing the envelope. The difference is that now we have millions of people who are judging our work, many of which have stories that we will never hear.

We have a tremendous opportunity to embrace these challenges. With our Ubuntu Developer Summit coming up in a few weeks, and with us focusing on a Long Term Support (LTS) release that is underlined by stability and enterprise-grade maintenance and support, we have an opportunity to really indulge in stability, QA and testing. As ever, this is a story in which we can all play a part and I welcome you all to join us.

Thanks to my friends over at ZDNet for allowing me to post another guest article on their Between The Lines column. This time I have written an article discussing the importance of a productive, pleasant and pleasurable community that rewards great work and celebrates the exchange of both agreeable and challenging opinions, ideas and views, and how intolerance can risk and undermine that community.

Go and read Not Tolerating The Intolerant.

Group Photo, originally uploaded by warthog9.

Leo and I went to California for the GSoC mentor summit to talk to lots of other mentors and admins about Summer of Code and whatever else was on our mind. In short: absolutely awesome and definitely worth the travel (which included lots of hours in airplanes and airports for me including an unplanned 6 hour stay in Salt Lake City – thank you very much border control).

The energy you get when you put that many geeks together is amazing. And at the same time it is quite different from conferences where you only have one project present like Akademy. It shows you that people working on competing projects are actually pretty cool people when sitting in a hot-tub with them *g*. (If course I knew that one before but it feels good to be reassured about it.) It shows you a lot of white spots on your personal open source map. Any idea what the Boost community looks like? Any idea how huge the Apache Software Foundation is? Now I do. It has definitely been interesting for me to see how different communities are managing their day-to-day business and especially GSoC. And the most surprising thing for me: Even pretty dysfunctional communities can release decent software I also learned that you can indeed have a session on minorities in free software and actually get useful results everyone can apply in their communities instead of getting derailed and discussing colors of random bike sheds. (They should all be blue and have pink doors of course.)

Check out the session notes (not 100% complete at the time of this post but hopefully soon), the one thing people learned at the summit and pics.

Thanks a lot to Google and everyone who attended the summit for making this happen. It has been 2 intense days and a great experience.

After the summit I stayed another 2 days with Alejandro to check out the area. Thanks so much for offering a place to crash. We went to San Francisco – what a great city – and met up with Gary and blauzahl who were great hosts. (Sorry I wasn’t more talkative that night folks but the previous days really drained my energy.) And it again showed me one of the best things about our community: No matter where I go on this world, friends are never far. I uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr page.

I’ll definitely have to return – not just for the massage chairs and hot-tub.

Thanks a lot to everyone that came to Skills Matter tonight for my presentation. I have really appreciated the quality of your questions and hope that my answers were satisfying.

read more

I’m leaving for Texas, USA soon. Me being a German living in - guess - Germany, causes the need to apply for the US “Visa Waiver Program” using https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov (thanks again to Otto for reminding me *g*) these days. While clicking through and filling out the forms of the electronic variant of that “green sheet of paper” (the one you used to have to fill out on the plane prior to landing on US soil) I was greeted by this notice…

It’s almost 2010! Have the people, who implemented that web-interface, ever heard of Unicode or do they expect international travelers to not use anything but ASCII to supply their (usually non-english) names, which carry the high probability with them to not use ASCII characters only? For me it’s just the ü in my surname. I wonder what people with funkier names do, when they have to diverge from the correct name-spelling to something this ESTA-system accepts. Once they succeed there, I bet they have a hard time trying to convince the staff at customs, that they are really themselves, because the spelling of their name on the passport doesn’t even remotely match the spelling in the visa-waiver-form.

I once almost wasn’t let aboard a plane in Germany, because the travel-agency booked my flight on “Mueller”, but my passport says “Müller”. Is all that the legacy-fault of Cobol?

Thanks to everyone who help bring a few issues to my attention. Namely, the fact that the ubuntu-rescue-remix-tools metapackage included a dependency that could not be resolved and that the iso image would not work properly when using GRUB2 to boot it. The iso image still worked fine with the regular USB creator, though.

To install the ubuntu-rescue-remix metapackage on any Ubuntu system (including live USB systems), add the following software source:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

Then authenticate this software source by runing the following command:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys BDFD6D77

Then, install the "ubuntu-rescue-remix-tools" package.

This can be done on a live USB Ubuntu desktop. So you can have a full data recovery toolkit on top of your regular Ubuntu graphical interface (GUI). That's because if you create your USB live system with persistent data, you can install packages and they will still be there the next time you boot the USB drive.

Step 1, create a live USB system:

Insert a USB drive with enough space to hold the Ubuntu Desktop iso (700 MG) plus persistent data - I use a 4 Gig USB stick, but you can get away with a 1 gig stick.

Start the USB Creator (System - Administration - USB Startup Disk Creator)

Browse your filesystem for the iso image of the Ubuntu desktop. Pick the "stored in reserved extra space" option and move the slider to use as much extra space as you want. Make it go.

Screenshot-Make USB Startup Disk

Setp 2, boot into your live USB system:

Once you are at the Ubuntu desktop in your live USB, select System - Administration - Software Sources and enable the four software channels (Main, Universe, Restricted and Multiverse) You don't need the Source Code channel.

Screenshot-Software Sources

Next click the Other Software tab and add this line:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/arzajac/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

Screenshot-Untitled Window

You will need to reload your list of available packages:

Screenshot-Untitled Window-1

Next, open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys BDFD6D77

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-rescue-remix-tools

Screenshot-ubuntu@ubuntu: ~

And the packages are being installed to the persistent data on your USB drive.

Screenshot-ubuntu@ubuntu: ~-1

Now every time you reboot into your Live USB system, the ubuntu-rescue-remix tools will be there for you.

GRUB2:

For details on how to boot the Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix live iso using Grub2, see this forum discussion

Thanks again for everyone's help.

One week after the official release, the Tunisian LoCo received the Karmic Koala LoCo pack. This CD will be distributed during FOSS events where our LoCo will be present.

 I just read Jordans article about "The Myth of the Bad Ubuntu Release", and I thought to myself, everytime the same crap.

Let's start to play a bit MythBusters:

1. MS Windows is rock solid!
   Oh well, let me tell you a story, which happend to me two days ago. I had the task to fetch some logfiles from two Windows 2003 Webedition servers. When I connected via rdesktop to those machines and checked the size of those logfiles, I thought to myself: "Hell, 4GB over to an rdesktop share takes too much time, I'll zip them and download then". Selected the files, added to the zip, said maximum compression and go. 4GB textfile zipping took about 15 minutes, on a dual intel Xeon machine. Well, after 2 minutes, rdesktop just threw me out from the machine, because Windows thought, I wouldn't do anything on this machine. Well, reconnected, after 2 more minutes the same. "Rock Solid is something else" I would say. SSH Sessions to all my Unix Boxes and especially to Linux Boxes never threw me out from the system, when compressing files. Even with an IO load higher then the Mount Everest. Result of this: Server broke, application crashed.
   I could write about more "Windows Rock Solidness", and I know when my colleague is reading that story now, he will laugh about it, because he always tells me, that "\sh + Windows == Bad Karma == Crash ==> #fail"
2. Linux Kernel X which is used in Distro Y doesn't support my hardware Z anymore, I hate Linux.
   Right, even a Linux Kernel needs to clean up old cruft at sometime. "But But But...Windows". Hey, *tock tock*, Windows neither supports a Smart Array Raid Controller out of the box, nor some standard SATA and ATA controllers of Desktops Machines. You rely on drivers sold by the manufacturer. And even then, take as an example ATI, they would remove support for older cards over time. Yeah, that sucks, but it's true. Why should the Linux Kernel behave different? 
3. Linux Distro Y does have a boot time of 10 minutes on my Cyrix 486! Way too long! I hate you!
   Honestly, that's true. Running DOS 5 + Windows 3.0 does boot a lot faster, well DOS does boot faster, Windows 3.0 is just a simple application. Windows XP, Vista or 7 wouldn't even run on such a machine anymore, you should be lucky, Linux does.
4. Linux Distro U. copies Windows every time more and more. I just hate you more!
   Oh well, but this is actually what you wanted, isn't it? In the past, you just screamed at Linux, because it's soooo difficult to work with. Now, at least one Desktop Distro Dictator was thinking about you, user, and changed the behaviour from "difficult" to "brainless". Right, for old distro farts that is extreme. I hate you, Linux Distro U.
5. My DVD can't be read by Linux!
   Yes, again, this is true. But do you know why? Because MS pays a lot of license fees to the Media Industry to support this. You get your stupid Linux Kernel and Linux Distro for free, I repeat, You don't pay anything for it, so why should something given away for free pay a license fee, that you can watch DVD?
   Instead of complaining here, complain to the Media Industry, that they don't give you the right to play your legally bought property anywhere you want, or, if you would like to pay for a Linux Distro, pay for it, I think especially Company C. would be glad to fork Ubuntu and give you what you want for some hundred bucks (for the license fee).
6. Linux Distro is too complicated!
   Right, that's true....for you. You know, between your shoulders there is something like a head, and inside your head, there is something called "Brain". This device named "Brain" is the "CPU + FlashROM" of your body. You read, you learn, your brain will save those things. Even Windows user do have such a device, but somehow they forget to use it. My thought on this is: Windows is too colourful, and your brain can't focus on the important things. You should be the boss of your OS, but do you really, I mean really, know what your Windows OS does exactly do under the hood? Right, you don't know it, you don't even care about it, you just want to use it, you just want to consume.
   But Linux was never invented for being a consumable. Linux Distro R. isn't a consumable OS too, but Linux Distro U. is going to be a consumable. In no time, you don't need to use your device "Brain" anymore, because then, Linux Distro U. is so colourful, so mouse compatible, so easy, that you forget that it's really a complicated piece of software.
   So this myth is really true. Linux Distro R. and U. are too complicated, please fix this.
7. You are so mean to me, you suck!
   Yes, true, and why shouldn't I be mean to you? You complain, you consume, you don't do anything for making all this more easy. I don't consume, I don't complain when something breaks, because I try to use my "Brain" device and try to workaround those things. You do it on Windows, too. If something breaks, you reboot your Windows, and I look into the source. Your fix is nofix, my fix is "a fix" or a "bugreport" to someone who could possibly fix this problem.
8. I hate you!
   Ok, I hate myself, too. No Deal. But you know, if you are not satisfied with all this Linux Crap, why do you actually use it? You don't have the money to buy Windows? Why don't you copy it from your neighbor then? Oh that's not legal, right. So you just use a Linux Distro because it doesn't cost anything? No? Ah, your friend in school told you, that Linux Distro is much cooler then Windows...did he tell you, that a Linux Distro is complicated? That a Linux Distro consists of many many many different opensource software packages, which are always buggy? No? Hate your school mate then, not me.
    

Comments only via Twitter: @shermann or via Identi.ca: @ubuntuworker

It used to be that to get your own column in a broadsheet, you needed to add some value. Expertise, skill in interpreting social and political developments, or a distinguished history as a journalist were rewarded with a bit more space in the paper. There, you could spin out a longer-form piece analysing burning issues in a little more depth, or you could even act as an advocate for things that weren’t on the public’s radar.

As the newspaper business model heads south, though, we’ve been subjected to the rise of what we might christen the “trollumnist” — the writer who simply “trolls” in a multichannel, multimedia environment.

 — “If I Make You Angry Enough, Maybe You’ll Keep Reading” by Jason Wilson in New Matilda

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to the opinion pages of flailing newspaper websites or soap opera US cable television opinion shows… consider the newer, online, journalism-lite outfits which employ trollumnists to crank up page views and ad impressions.

It’s a terrifying media strategy: Find a niche — perhaps even an entire community, with all the politics and tragedy, highs and lows that entails — choose some regular targets for fæces-flinging, troll the living fuck out of them, and reap the blood money reward.

I’m sure my friends in various tech and politics communities will find this word instantly useful. A wonderful addition to the vocabulary for those fighting the good fight against fear, uncertainty, doubt, lies and bile.

What is the shortest path from zero to millions of dollars with little to no effort?

The Internet of course.

As a follow-up and the next in a short series and what seems to be a developing theme, I plan on exposing the Money making methods for what they really are, scams.

read more

Day 3 of open week was INTERESTING, INSIGHTFUL, INSTRUCTIONAL and INTENSE. The day moved along quickly as the sessions showcased the dedication that the community has to the Ubuntu project. Today's sessions were also hovering at or near the 300 people for most of the day. There have been several people who this was either their 1st time participating or their 1st time leading/facilitating sessions. Hats of to those who have participated so far and those who we will see Thursday and Friday.

Here's a rundown of today's sessions just in case you might have missed them. If you missed a session please find the time to go back through the logs as there is some great information stored in there.

John Johansen, Canonical Kernel Team Member, kicked off open week in his session about AppArmor. Answering questions from, "What is AppArmor?" , "What is the future of AppArmor?" and even "Why would the "normal" user care about AppArmor" and much much more.

Next up was Jono Bacon with a Leadership Workshop. Jono in his open remarks tells us the goal of this session: "the goal of this session is to share some advice and tips for becoming an effective leader in a community - if you are the leader of a community team, this session should be useful to you". So if you are interested in becoming or already in a leadership position then definitely grab take a look at the log for this session.

Following the leadership workshop was DKcross with his Making Screencasts session. DKcross did a awesome job of defining screencasts. Then walked the participants through how to make and edit a screencast using "Recordmydesktop". Screencasts and screenshots are very different, I found out. So if want to know a little more about or maybe need an introduction to making screencasts this session is a must for you.

David Planella then stepped into the classroom and his session - First steps in translating Ubuntu. David reminds the participants of a key part of the Ubuntu philosophy that "every computer user should be able to use their software in the language of their choice." David explains the basic requirements to being about to work on translations then dives into how you get started.


Kubuntu Netbook Edition session was on tap next and Scott Kitterman along with , Marco Martin, and Artur de Souza talk about the combination of KDE, Kubuntu and netbooks. Scott et all talk about hoe the development of Kubuntu Netbook edition, what the plan for the future, and how people can get involved. Kubuntu and netbooks is a match made in heaven for you the check out this session.

Intro to GIMP by Akkana Peck was up next. Though all the sessions of the day were great and well attended, I was anxiously awaiting the start of this session. GIMP and I have this love/hate thing going on, well we did until this class. Akkana introduced the participants to the awesomeness of GIMP giving resources and instruction on how to improve that skills. If you want to know more about GIMP then this session is for you.

Murat Güneş, gave a session on Giving Useful Feedback. In this session, Murat covered good practices in providing feedback to developers, in bug triagers, and to designers and other areas that are Ubuntu specific.For this session Murat kept the feedback discussion and best practice centered on bug reporting, development and design discourse. If you file bugs and want to see what information to or not to include in a bug report or if you do QA testing then take a look at this session. Very informative.

The day concluded with Nathan Handler's overview of the Ubuntu Membership process. Nathan explains "Ubuntu Membership is a way that the Ubuntu community recognizes people who have made substantial and sustained contributions to Ubuntu". He then talks about pro's to membership and the process for Ubuntu Membership. If you are wanting to know more about this process and are wanting to become and Ubuntu Member then this is your session.

1500 - Getting Started in Ubuntu Development - James Westby and Daniel Holbach

1600 - How to Fix Bugs - James Westby and Daniel Holbach cont.

1700 - Basics of and Behavior in Ubuntu IRC channels - Kurt von Finck and Jussi Schultink

1800 - KVM and Virt-Manager - Dustin Kirkland

1900 -Welcome to the new Edubuntu - Stéphane Graber

2000 - WIOS - Issues - Elizabeth Krumbach

2100 - WIOS - Encouragement - Mackenzie Morgan

2200 - TBD

If you want to know more about the session leaders check out the booklet. Do you want to see the line up for Thursday and Friday, or maybe just some more information about Ubuntu Open Week then check out the wiki. Hope you see you all in the IRC channels on Freenode where Ubuntu Open Week is taking place: #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat. What are you waiting for 3 more days of Open Week left, don't miss out on all the great sessions, all the fun starts 1500 UTC - plan to be there! :-D!

Following in the steps of nhandler here...

Ubuntu Open Week Day 2 proved to be as EXCITING, ENCOURAGING, and EDUCATIONAL as Day 1. At every hour the number of participants in #ubuntu-classroom was hovering at or above 300 people. AWESOME turnout out.

Today the sessions included some great topics and lively discussion surrounding each of the well attended sessions. There were some AMAZING questions, which always makes for GREAT sessions!

If you missed the sessions today, then you might be wondering what you missed. Well keep reading the line-up today was:

Ubuntu Moblin Remix (UMR)- Bill Filler and Paul Liu - gave a well attended session all about the ends and outs of UMR. Answering things like "What is Moblin" and and more specifically "What is UMR in Karmic". The session was based on the Ubuntu Moblin Remix Wiki for Open Week.

Writing A Book - Emma Jane Hogbin - gave a great talk what it takes to write a book. This session is based on her own experience in writing the book, Front End Drupal. In this sessions emmajane walked the participants through 3 main topics
* So you think you want to write a book?
* Distribution
* my Tookit
"So if you think you want to write a book?" Check out this session it might be just want you need to say "yes, I think I can!"

Getting People involved in your LoCo Team - Jono Bacon - Always a heavily attended session as more and more LoCo Team members want to know how to get more people involved with their LoCo team or how they can motivate the members they already have. Jono gives ways to send out the invite in a whole host of ways as well as making sure the team is always on the path of forward progression.

Byobu - Dustin Kirkland - I have to admit when I saw this session I was like "how the heck do you pronouce that?" and I don't think I was the only one as one of the 1st links Dustin gave was that very answer. He then went on to explain what Byobu is and how it works. If Screen-Profiles as it was called in Jaunty is your thing, then you should enjoy Dustin's session on Byobu

ISO Tracker Testing - Ara Pulido - Since February I was wondering how can a person help test and be part of the development process. If you, like me were wondering the same thing then Ara's session is for you. Wanna help test the development images for each release? Ara's sessions walks you through what you need to do to get started. Maybe you are a seasoned Ubuntu User and want to know where you can help on the project - ISO Tracker Testing is another area to join in on.

Learning Project - Elizabeth Krumbach - In this session Elizabeth goes into yet another budding area of the community - the Ubuntu Community Learning Project (UCLP). Elizabeth goes into detail on this grassroots-community driven educational tool. She explains the goal of UCLP project , what formats they are using to build the classes, what some of the classes are, who the classes are geared toward, and how you help.

Writing Secure Code - Kees Cook - In his session, Kees, gives a quick overview on ways to try to keep software more secure when you're writing it. Kees gives the general best practice reviews and starts out by answering "Where do I start?" Kees adapted this session from a talk he gave at Oregon State University. Kees defines what he means by "security" and gives links, offers discussion, and examples of "Writing Secure Code" Do you write code? Check out Kees session.

Getting KDE 4 Ready for LTS - Jonathan Riddell - Jonathan in his session talks about Kubuntu, KDE 4 and who to get this ready for April when the next LTS Release (Ubuntu 10.4, Lucid Lynx) happens. He explains what KDE 4 and Kubuntu has to offer and explains how you can help get Kubuntu/KDE4 ready for the next release.

1500 - AppArmor - John Johansen

1600 - Leadership Workshop - Jono Bacon

1700 - Making Screencast - DKcross

1800 - First steps in translating Ubuntu - David Planella

1900 - Kubuntu Netbook Edition - Scott Kitterman

2000 - Intro to GIMP - akk

2100 - Giving Useful Feedback - Murat Güneş

2200 - Ubuntu Membership - Nathan Handler

If you want to know more about the session leaders check out the booklet. Do you want to see the line up for Thursday and Friday, or maybe just some more information about Ubuntu Open Week then check out the wiki. Hope you see you all in the IRC channels on Freenode where Ubuntu Open Week is taking place: #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat. What are you waiting for 3 more days of Open Week left, don't miss out on all the great sessions, all the fun starts 1500 UTC - plan to be there! :-D!

… so… I wrote my first particle-system ever. It does not look photorealistic - by far not *g* - but implementing something like that is great fun! You see a cluster of 5000 particles in the screencasts below. Right now I’ve two emitters (a “singularity” one and a rectangle one) with a gravity force-field being applied to the particles. WASD/Quake-like camera-navigation I implemented too, so one can “walk around”. From here numerous things could be added: wind, general turbulence, attraction-/repulsion-forces between particles, collision-detection with obstacles… the visualization could be improved with motion-blur, lighting, shadows etc. Rendering- and simulation-loop are coupled and run at 60 Hz. Screencasts were recorded with 30 Hz.

(click to play back, ogv/theora, ~85 MBytes, right click to save to disk)




(click to play back, ogv/theora, ~60 MBytes, right click to save to disk)