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The World Horse Welfare international charity is trying to get at least half of the members of the European Parliament to sign a written declaration that would be a step towards eliminating the long distance transportation of horses before slaughter. You can read more about it on their website linked above.

The Open Sourcerer is running a blog post titled "Is Canonical Becoming The New Microsoft?"

The author does make some valid points regarding issues like proprietary software in Ubuntu and concerns over the views that Matt Asay holds.

I do however disagree that switching from Google to Yahoo is affecting the freedom of the distro as Google is a commercial company with a very bad track record at privacy, so Yahoo can't be worse in terms of such issues. I also disagree that it will become less free just for replacing GIMP or OOo if that choice is made. They become less free depending on the replacement they choose.

What concerns me lately is the negative views held by many close to Ubuntu and Canonical regarding Free Software, the FSF and RMS and the increasing adoption of non-free software and non-free services like Ubuntu one in the distribution.

For now, I'm still a fan and Ubuntu's model of not ever having an enterprise version and a community that are different, but things could change over time.

I’m about 100% sure that the next person to be interviewed needs no introduction – everybody will have heard of Jono at some point, whether it be from his role within the community, his activity on identi.ca & twitter, or maybe even from Lernid…Either way, I hope you enjoy this as much as I have!

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

I am Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager working at Canonical for three years now, I am 30 years young and an Englishman living in the Bay Area, California with my wife, Erica. My parents live in Northern England and I have a brother living in Northern England and another brother living in the Isle Of Man. I was born in the north of England in North Yorkshire, raised in the south in Bedfordshire and and studied at Wolverhampton University in in the Midlands, graduating with a 2:1 in Interactive Multimedia Communication, going on to become a a journalist writing for a number of Open Source magazines and websites and writing a few books. I then became an Open Source consultant for the UK government-funded OpenAdvantage before moving to Canonical to become the Ubuntu Community Manager. My hobbies include writing, recording and producing music, videogames, movies, writing, travel and relaxing with friends.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

I got interested in computers when I was a kid playing with a Commodore 64. I used to play games on it and try to write simple little programs in BASIC. Computers fascinated me, and my interest in video games (I was an epic Sega dork) got me into first learning BASIC and then learning C.

When I was 14, complete with bowl haircut, jack ups and large white socks, I went to night school to learn C and got more and more interested in the technology behind how software works, despite largely sucking at C. Shortly before I left for University my brother Simon came to stay for a few weeks and got me interested in Linux, specifically Slackware 96. Although it was ultra-technical, what really fascinated me was the concept of a global community of passionate contributors working together to build an Operating System that we could all share. I went to University and immediately formed a Linux User Group in my new home and progressively got more and more interested in Linux, starting to contribute to projects and then starting to write for magazines. I heard about Ubuntu when it was known as No Name Yet and it really captivated me: it really represented something I had been dreaming about – the fantastic technical foundation of Debian, but a different focus on integration, usability and ease of use.

3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?

My primary involvement in Ubuntu at the beginning was getting to the know the community, contributing bug reports and feedback and co-writing The Official Ubuntu Book. At the time I was spending most of my spare time knee-deep in the GNOME project and working with local Linux communities in the West Midlands, and my interest in Ubuntu grew from there.

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

I am an Ubuntu Member, and proud to be one! I contribute in a range of areas. I lead a team at Canonical that is tasked with helping to produce a rocking community to participate in and we work on a wide range of projects as part of that role. My contributions include team management, governance, software development, some translations, bug triage, raising awareness of Ubuntu and creating new initiatives to get people involved.

Outside of Ubuntu I like to develop community best practice with The Art Of Community and the annual Community Leadership Summit, do some podcasting with Shot Of Jaq and FLOSSWeekly, videocasts with At Home With Jono Bacon and Severed Fifth: Live In The Studio, record Creative Commons metal with Severed Fifth and work on some software projects such as Lernid, Acire, Python Snippets and some other projects.

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

I naturally use Ubuntu as my Operating System, both on my desktop as well as on the server that hosts my site and a range of other sites I run. I have so many fave applications – I love Empathy, OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, TomBoy, Scribus, Thunderbird, Docky, Network Manager, Gwibber, Quickly, Glade, and many more. As for least fave, I am not really sure I have a least fave – there are so many programs I haven’t got to yet.

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

Fondest memory is a kid who emailed me telling me how he walked five hours from his village in Africa to an Internet cafe to to work on Ubuntu for an hour and then walked back. He emailed me telling me it was worth the effort and that he loved Ubuntu.

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

Fairly well, I think. Basically anyone who is not an Ubuntu user gets the advocacy pitch from me about how Ubuntu would rock their world. Many have tried it, which is what I consider a win, and a bunch have switched. Some don’t, which is fine, but my first goal is to have people take a sip of Ubuntu before they drink the rest of the bottle.

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

I want to see free software, delivered via Ubuntu, become the most ubiquitous platform in the world for users and developers, available to all, respecting local languages and culture, and inspiring innovation and sharing.

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

Welcome to the Ubuntu community and welcome to the start of awesome journey in which we can all put a brick in the wall to create an incredible free software platform. I look forward to meeting you all!

[Discuss Jono’s Interview on the Forum]

Originally posted by Joe Barker here on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Twitter, identi.ca and Facebook have become an increasingly common medium in which people are communicating. While Google Wave vies to be the next generation of communication (as we waxed lyrical about on the recent Shot Of Jaq), in reality email and microblogging are unlikely to be unseated as primary methods of communication. Naturally, we want to make these methods of connecting people rock good and hard in Ubuntu.

Today Ken VanDine uploaded a new Gwibber to Lucid which adds improved reliability, multi-column views, a new theme and more. It looks like this:

I love you Ryan Paul. I cried 140 individual tears of joy.

This leads me to a simple conclusion:

Goodbye Tweetdeck. You suck considerably more than Gwibber.

No more ugly Adobe Air app. No more closed source Twitter client. No more lack of identi.ca support. No more horrible notification bubbles. Instead, sweet, native, effortless microblogging, right from my Ubuntu desktop. A veritable ass kicking at at it’s finest.

Now, this is cool in of itself, but then combine it with the ability to tweet/dent right from the Me menu:

Microblogging built in, sleek and elegant. I am stoked, and Gwibber is rocking the house. Also, if you are the opportunistically development minded, don’t forget that you can build microblogging support into your apps with Gwibber’s API too, and there will be a session on how to do this at Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week.

I recently bought a new laptop, an HP Touchsmart TM2 (official model number tm2t-1000), and I thought I’d share my experience running Ubuntu on it. I wanted to get a tablet PC with a touchscreen so I could read comic books, rather silly perhaps but when all basic functionality is met why not do something special! Incidentally, I purchased it with an Intel video card instead of the ATI one.

So about running Lucid on it - nearly everything works perfectly. I ended up having to compile a newer wacom kernel module to get the touchscreen and pen working, but I’ve reported a bug about it and hope it gets included in Lucid somehow.

The keyboard is also rather interesting as the function keys have had their primary use changed to “action” keys. So pressing F12 turns off the wireless and does not act as F12. I ended up finding a BIOS setting though where this can be changed so that F12 acts like F12 and one must Fn + F12 to turn off the wireless.

Also the touchpad has no real buttons and the right click area does not work as drawn on the touchpad. I need to press in the bottom right hand corner of the touchpad to receive the right click menu. Additionally, it is not possible to turn off the touchpad at the moment.

The wireless, VGA and HDMI out ports all work perfectly. Aside of the wacom driver, the issues I am having are rather small in my opinion and I’m really liking my new system. Aside of all the fingerprints I end up leaving on the screen!

It’s that time again folks, sign up your LoCo. “But Jorge, your LoCo isn’t on there either!” you say, well, that’s because this is the time we start to plan and looking for venues, finding out what kind of jam you want to do and start preparations for the weekend of 26-28 March.

This would also be a good time for your LoCo to find if there’s a hackerspace in your area and get involved in their development. Also, this is the first time we’re having … upgrade jams, where people can concentrate on the upgrade experience.

If you have questions I’m in #ubuntu-locoteams!

Working on some document today, it occurred to me, once again, that OpenOffice's method for designing and applying documents styling totally sucks!

Granted, this was not the first time that I cam to this conclusion but, today, I've come to realize that OpenOffice's paradigms constantly make me waste time trying to form a mental image of how every style element is suppose to relate to the other one, yet without having the full picture available within a single, easy-to-read document. Also, there is a complete lack of consistency in how style elements work. Some want to be defined in millimeters, while others want to be defined in points, while other still in number of lines. What a mess!

In short: to become remotely usable, OpenOffice needs to approach document styling via the "HTML document with a separate CSS style sheet" paradigm. In other words, I need to be able to edit styles globally, as a group and separately from the document content itself, rather than having to click my way through a multitude of dialogs, for each and every type of text elements.

To compare this with web design, there, I can focus on the actual content, formatted around semantic text elements (headers, paragraphs, block quotes, etc.) and then decide on the presentation styling as a separate global process by attaching a CSS style sheet, in which the relation between each type of text element and how it will be displayed is crystal clear, because it's handled as a unified style editing process.

I think that this is one area in which Free Software could innovate in a positive way, by distancing itself from the Redmondesque practices of Microsoft Word, from which OpenOffice borrows too much. How about having a proper Style Editor application (similar to a CSS editor), within the OpenOffice suite, while Open Writer itself would only be allowed to load the style sheets produced by it and to apply them to semantic text text elements?

I’m about 100% sure that the next person to be interviewed needs no introduction – everybody will have heard of Jono at some point, whether it be from his role within the community, his activity on identi.ca & twitter, or maybe even from Lernid…Either way, I hope you enjoy this as much as I have!

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

I am Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager working at Canonical for three years now, I am 30 years young and an Englishman living in the Bay Area, California with my wife, Erica. My parents live in Northern England and I have a brother living in Northern England and another brother living in the Isle Of Man. I was born in the north of England in North Yorkshire, raised in the south in Bedfordshire and and studied at Wolverhampton University in in the Midlands, graduating with a 2:1 in Interactive Multimedia Communication, going on to become a a journalist writing for a number of Open Source magazines and websites and writing a few books. I then became an Open Source consultant for the UK government-funded OpenAdvantage before moving to Canonical to become the Ubuntu Community Manager. My hobbies include writing, recording and producing music, videogames, movies, writing, travel and relaxing with friends.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

I got interested in computers when I was a kid playing with a Commodore 64. I used to play games on it and try to write simple little programs in BASIC. Computers fascinated me, and my interest in video games (I was an epic Sega dork) got me into first learning BASIC and then learning C.

When I was 14, complete with bowl haircut, jack ups and large white socks, I went to night school to learn C and got more and more interested in the technology behind how software works, despite largely sucking at C. Shortly before I left for University my brother Simon came to stay for a few weeks and got me interested in Linux, specifically Slackware 96. Although it was ultra-technical, what really fascinated me was the concept of a global community of passionate contributors working together to build an Operating System that we could all share. I went to University and immediately formed a Linux User Group in my new home and progressively got more and more interested in Linux, starting to contribute to projects and then starting to write for magazines. I heard about Ubuntu when it was known as No Name Yet and it really captivated me: it really represented something I had been dreaming about – the fantastic technical foundation of Debian, but a different focus on integration, usability and ease of use.

3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?

My primary involvement in Ubuntu at the beginning was getting to the know the community, contributing bug reports and feedback and co-writing The Official Ubuntu Book. At the time I was spending most of my spare time knee-deep in the GNOME project and working with local Linux communities in the West Midlands, and my interest in Ubuntu grew from there.

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

I am an Ubuntu Member, and proud to be one! I contribute in a range of areas. I lead a team at Canonical that is tasked with helping to produce a rocking community to participate in and we work on a wide range of projects as part of that role. My contributions include team management, governance, software development, some translations, bug triage, raising awareness of Ubuntu and creating new initiatives to get people involved.

Outside of Ubuntu I like to develop community best practice with The Art Of Community and the annual Community Leadership Summit, do some podcasting with Shot Of Jaq and FLOSSWeekly, videocasts with At Home With Jono Bacon and Severed Fifth: Live In The Studio, record Creative Commons metal with Severed Fifth and work on some software projects such as Lernid, Acire, Python Snippets and some other projects.

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

I naturally use Ubuntu as my Operating System, both on my desktop as well as on the server that hosts my site and a range of other sites I run. I have so many fave applications – I love Empathy, OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, TomBoy, Scribus, Thunderbird, Docky, Network Manager, Gwibber, Quickly, Glade, and many more. As for least fave, I am not really sure I have a least fave – there are so many programs I haven’t got to yet.

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

Fondest memory is a kid who emailed me telling me how he walked five hours from his village in Africa to an Internet cafe to to work on Ubuntu for an hour and then walked back. He emailed me telling me it was worth the effort and that he loved Ubuntu.

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

Fairly well, I think. Basically anyone who is not an Ubuntu user gets the advocacy pitch from me about how Ubuntu would rock their world. Many have tried it, which is what I consider a win, and a bunch have switched. Some don’t, which is fine, but my first goal is to have people take a sip of Ubuntu before they drink the rest of the bottle.

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

I want to see free software, delivered via Ubuntu, become the most ubiquitous platform in the world for users and developers, available to all, respecting local languages and culture, and inspiring innovation and sharing.

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

Welcome to the Ubuntu community and welcome to the start of awesome journey in which we can all put a brick in the wall to create an incredible free software platform. I look forward to meeting you all!

Instead of using setuid programs, the goal for the future is to use fine-grained capabilities. For example, here is /bin/ping:

$ ls -la /bin/ping
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 35680 2009-11-05 00:41 /bin/ping
$ ./ping 127.0.0.1
PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
…
$ sudo setcap CAP_NET_RAW=ep /bin/ping
$ getcap /bin/ping
/bin/ping = cap_net_raw+ep
$ ./ping 127.0.0.1
PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.041 ms
…
$ dmesg | tail -n1
[212275.772124] warning: `/bin/ping’ has both setuid-root and effective capabilities. Therefore not raising all capabilities.

The best part is that the kernel will choose the set of least privileges when both setuid and capabilities exist. Easy way to transition!

In case you missed it, Lucas has put up the slides to his talk about Debian and Ubuntu at FOSDEM. I did not attend the talk but look forward to the discussion on how people received it. When people ask me about it I usually start of with “It’s complicated.” Not because that’s an excuse, but that the relationship involves many people in many projects. This isn’t a 1:1 mapping, it’s a many:many mapping involving people all around the world. Debian as a whole is over 1,000 people, so anything involving working relationships will naturally not be a straightforward answer.

Regardless this is a good opportunity out there for me to remind Debian Developers that they can ping always us at debian@ubuntu.com for issues or snag one of us at Debconf.

Fellow Ubuntu Triagers!

This week's Bug Day target is *drum roll please* Pitivi!
* #16 New bugs need a hug
* #8 Incomplete bugs need a status check
* #8 Confirmed bugs need a review
* #1 Bug to be forwarded Upstream

Pitivi is a video editor that is being included by default in the next
version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx). So its very important that we hug some
bugs in preparation. Issues that you should look out for is older bugs
that dont effect the current version.

Bookmark it, add it to your calendars, turn over those egg-timers!
* February 11th
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20100211

Are you looking for a way to start giving some love back to your
adorable Ubuntu Project?
Did you ever wonder what Triage is? Want to learn about that?
This is a perfect time!, Everybody can help in a Bug Day!
open your IRC Client and go to #ubuntu-bugs (FreeNode)
the BugSquad will be happy to help you to start contributing!

Wanna be famous? Is easy! remember to use 5-A-day so if you do a good
work your name could be listed at the top 5-A-Day Contributors in the
Ubuntu Hall of Fame page!

We are always looking for new tasks or ideas for the Bug Days, if you
have one
add it to the Planning page
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/Planning

If you're new to all this, head to
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs

Fellow Ubuntu Triagers!

This week’s Bug Day target is *drum roll please* Pitivi!
* #16 New bugs need a hug
* #8 Incomplete bugs need a status check
* #8 Confirmed bugs need a review
* #1 Bug to be forwarded Upstream

Pitivi is a video editor that is being included by default in the next version of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx). So its very important that we hug some bugs in preparation. Issues that you should look out for is older bugs that dont effect the current version.

Bookmark it, add it to your calendars, turn over those egg-timers!
* February 11th
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20100211

Are you looking for a way to start giving some love back to your
adorable Ubuntu Project?
Did you ever wonder what Triage is? Want to learn about that?
This is a perfect time!, Everybody can help in a Bug Day!
open your IRC Client and go to #ubuntu-bugs (FreeNode)
the BugSquad will be happy to help you to start contributing!

Wanna be famous? Is easy! remember to use 5-A-day so if you do a good
work your name could be listed at the top 5-A-Day Contributors in the
Ubuntu Hall of Fame page!

We are always looking for new tasks or ideas for the Bug Days, if you have one
add it to the Planning page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/Planning

If you’re new to all this, head to

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs

Have a nice day,
Shane Fagan

[From the BugSquad]

I’ve just put the slides of my talk on Debian and Ubuntu online.

Don’t hesitate to post comments to ask for clarifications where needed (it might be difficult to understand some parts of the slides without being in the room).

Clarifications:

• In slide 15, I wrote that Ubuntu had a newer X. During the presentation, I think I said that I wasn’t sure if it was still the case. Indeed, it’s no longer the case (and hasn’t been for a long time ; Ubuntu has been mostly following Debian for X). I apparently remembered a change a long time ago that was picked by Ubuntu from the Debian X svn/git (xlibs-dev removal, I think), and that caused a number of FTBFS in Ubuntu. However, clearly, the best example of such changes made first in Ubuntu are newer GCC versions.

I was reading a section in my New Scientist last night which made me smile with the conclusions.

It was a minute interview with author of “The Art of Meditation”, Matthieu Ricard and the subject was at first the science of meditation and the studies showing greater self control, focus and compassion in people who have trained to meditate. But it’s the last part I want to quote:

At the conference in Zurich in April, will be some bold economists who can demonstrate that altruists are able to influence global markets. In the past, such studies were often refuted by sceptical financial analysts. However, someone like Ernst Fehr, the famous Swiss economist, will show that if altruists make the rules and it is in the interests of selfish people to cooperate, then society can function in a more cooperative way.

Of course we in the FLOSS community will be familiar with this kind of relationship. With altruistic people setting the rules, people like Stallman and others who sacrifice for their principles of social progress, and then those that use those altruistic rules as selfish mechanisms, people like Torvalds. (although I’m stretching that point a bit, they’re both fairly altruistic in and selfish in their own way)

Perhaps this is what makes FOSS so progressive, that it is invented by those who want to see people (not themselves) have freedom, better software, more computer power etc and it’s then the selfish people that run with it.

Your thoughts?

You might have noticed that I took a crack at designing an icon for Byobu a few months back.

While I consider myself a decent hacker, and a reasonable photographer, I'm pretty bad at vector graphics, sadly.

So I'm reaching out for your help! Have you always wanted to contribute to an open source project? Are you pretty good at vector graphics? Here's your chance ;-)

So here are the rules...

1. Submissions must be in SVG (scalable vector graphics) format. You might want to use the Inkscape package to do your drawing.
2. Images must be square in overall dimension.
   
3. Images must scale well, being recognizable as a 16x16 pixel icon, while also looking sharp at 1200x1200.
4. Submissions must be made via bzr and Launchpad. You should branch lp:byobu, add your SVG file, commit, and push to Launchpad. These commands might help.
   bzr branch lp:byobu
   cd byobu/icons
   cp /path/to/your/foo.svg .
   bzr add foo.svg
   bzr commit
   bzr push lp:~yourname/byobu/byobu-icon-contest
5. Submissions must also be contributed under the GPLv3 (same license as Byobu). You can find the GPLv3 on your Ubuntu system in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3.
6. I really like the idea behind the icon that I did (a three-panel folding screen), it's just kind of ugly ;-) You are welcome to start with that .SVG and simply improve it. Or start from scratch with a design of your own!
   
7. When you're satisfied with your submission, please use Launchpad's "Merge Proposal" feature.

You're also welcome to link to your submissions in the comments below for feedback from other readers!

Assuming we get some good submissions, I'd like to select a few finalists around Feb 25, and then a winner by March 1st. What does the winner receive? Well, besides bragging rights of having designed Byobu's logo, I'm going to print a few Byobu t-shirts with the new logo to show off my favorite free software project, and the winner will receive two of these shirts in whatever sizes he or she wants.

Good luck!

:-Dustin

Last night the launch of the new kde.org website, today the release of KDE SC 4.4.0, the past weeks have been rather busy in release-team and promo-team land. Let me just say that I’m glad that it’s finally out, that I want to say thanks to everybody involved for making this happen, and to all the users: Enjoy! :) KDE 4.4.0 is a very noticable upgrade to whatever you were running before, judging by the betas and release candidates.

Looking forward, this month has some travelling lined up for me as well. Next week, I’ll be going to Berlin to see my dear colleagues (and have them demo me Akonadi on my phone), then on to Tokamak4, the upcoming edition of the Plasma Hackfest in Nürnberg’s openSUSE offices, and after that a weekend in Düsseldorf with K for the Depeche Mode concert we had to miss last summer due to Dave Gahan’s bladder cancer.

The awesome PyMT library has just been released in version 0.4.

This is a major release that brings a ton of cool new stuff, including a new animation framework, speed & stability improvements and much more. Take a look at the release notes to see what’s new in this release.

I’m using PyMT for my thesis (see picture above) and I love it. Make sure to check the new website, too! (There’s also a new demo video in the works. I will update this posting as soon as it’s available.

One Hundred Paper Cuts for Lucid is going well. 56 paper cuts have been fixed so far. We have to fix at least 20 more paper cuts to match the number of paper cuts fixed in Karmic, a record you can help us surpass by working on closing the 26 paper cuts with bugs attached.

This week’s paper jam for Compiz settings went well, thanks to the industrious work of Sebastian Bacher during the distro sprint in Portland. The F-Spot paper jam still has some unclaimed beauties, however.

Please get involved right away if there are any paper cuts that catch your eye. You could get your patch shipped in Lucid (and upstream too, haters!).

Yesterday, the Software Testing Club, a community of software testers, released the first issue of their online magazine.

I am happy to announce that it features an article written by me. I am doubly happy. First, it is the first article that I have published in a software testing magazine; second, I am happy to see a FLOSS related article in a software testing magazine, which it is quite unusual. Formal testing seems to be a field where there is much more documentation in the proprietary software world.

PDF can be downloaded from their site. My article starts in page 32. I hope you like it.

Looking at using google apps for my home email, as I want to be able to have my home machines totally turned off from time to time.

Found this interesting gem in the sign up agreement (which I have not yet agreed to ):

11. PR. Customer agrees not to issue any public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement without Google’s prior written approval. Google may (i) include Customer’s Brand Features in presentations, marketing materials, and customer lists (which includes, without limitation, customer lists posted on Google’s web sites and screen shots of Customer’s implementation of the Service) and (ii) issue a public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement. Upon Customer’s request, Google will furnish Customer with a sample of such usage or announcement.

This is rather asymmetrical: If I agree to the sign up page, I cannot say ‘I am using google apps’, but google can say ‘Robert is using google apps’. While I can appreciate not wanting to be dissed on if something goes wrong, this is very much not open! A couple of implications: Everyone seeking support for google apps in the apps forums is probably in violation of the sign up agreement; we can assume that anyone having a terrible experience has been squelched under this agreement.

Le sigh.

Look at this lovely bag of swag:

Image courtesy of Melissa Draper.

Want to own all this goodness, including Ubuntu Backpacks, women’s t-shirts, key chains, 1 year digital subscription to Linux Pro Magazine or a 1 year print subscription Ubuntu User, and a copy of the The Art of Community by some beardy community guy?

On January 10, 2010 the Ubuntu Women Project announced an International Women’s Day Competition; an awesome effort to gather wonderful stories of how women have discovered Ubuntu. From the announcement:

Ubuntu-Women has tried in the past to find some way to celebrate this event, but as far as I can remember it has never really amounted to much other than some chattering on IRC. So let us try a bit harder for 2010!

We have all come to Ubuntu in our own special ways — every single one of us differently to the next. Yet one of the most common questions we get asked is “How can I get $woman to use Ubuntu?”.

Obviously we cannot really answer that question, but we would dearly love to have a collection of stories by women about how they discovered Ubuntu. Such a repository would allow us to demonstrate that there’s no one definitive answer, and at the same time maybe provide the gift of inspiration to women who are interested — showing them that it’s really not so unusual to be Ubuntu fans after all.

We are not expecting any particular length, but do remember that these stories should be suited to perusal at leisure and not require someone to allocate hours of their day to read. Anywhere between a few paragraphs and a OO.o Write page is ideal.

Two prizes up for grabs. One prize pack will be given to the story that the community votes is their favourite. One prize pack will be given to a randomly drawn entrant. I have been given the pleasure of drawing this entrant in a videocast, and announcing both winners to the world on March 8th. Thanks to the Ubuntu Women project for asking for to do this.

So, get your entries in to ubuntuwomen.competition at gmail.com by 23:59UTC on 22nd February 2010. Rocking!

I've been messing with finding a decent desktop backup application this weekend to run on all the family laptops. I thought backintime would do the trick, but it turned out not to work over sshfs (due to the lack of hardlink support) and doing backups to the same disk that holds the data seems like a bad idea to me.

So, today I found an article on deja-dup in my RSS feed, installed it and it's wonderful. It has a built in scheduler and supports all filesystems that gvfs does, but adds nice things like encryption for your backups and it integrates very well with Nautilus.

I can just select a file or folder and revert it to the state of any of the listed backups, which is exactly the functionality I've been looking for.

Just a shame that I didn't find it in the first hours of looking... but I am happy now :-)

On 25 february, I'm giving a workshop on Zarafa, the open source alternative to MS Exchange.
If anyone is interested in signing up (for free), they can still do so at http://www.open-future.be/zarafa-workshop

Hey all. Got board, and figured I’d throw this up. Just got done getting my machine set up nice.

Photo after the break

In Ubuntu, I uploaded an rng-tools that supports the RNG in TPM devices (my patch is waiting in Debian). This hardware is available on a bunch of systems, including several Thinkpads and the Intel Q35, Q45 and newer main boards.

While most TPM RNGs aren’t really heavy-duty hardware RNGs, they are at least a mild source of randomness. I’ll be using an entropy key eventually, but for now, the TPM can supplement my collected entropy.

/etc/default/rng-tools:

HRNGDEVICE=/dev/null
RNGDOPTIONS=”–hrng=tpm –fill-watermark=90% –feed-interval=1″

After it’s been running a bit:

Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits received from HRNG source: 6180064
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits sent to kernel pool: 6166144
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: entropy added to kernel pool: 4624608
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 successes: 309
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 failures: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: HRNG source speed: (min=5.207; avg=6.145; max=6.200)Kibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS tests speed: (min=66.925; avg=75.789; max=112.861)Mibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Lowest ready-buffers level: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Entropy starvations: 308
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Time spent starving for entropy: (min=3150263; avg=3178447.994; max=3750848)us

And now the kernel entropy pool is high:

$ echo $(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail)/$(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/poolsize)
3968/4096

It looks like we’re in for more snow this Tuesday night into Wednesday. If we get what is expected the scheduled CALug meeting with Jonathan Riddell and Justin Kirby will be postponed until Thursday at best and canceled at worst. There are several moving parts right now that need to be coordinated before the final determination is made.

So keep an eye out here, on the CALug mailing list, my identica account, the CALug identica group and/or my twitter account. Those last three will be the same message across them all so pick your favorite (Hint: The Identica site runs Free AGPL software). The CALug website will also be updated but may be a bit behind the announcements I make via my feeds.

Also don’t forget that the local KDE release party will be at Fuddruckers in Columbia, MD on Friday the 12th. With luck the snow will be gone by then!

Let me start off by saying hats off to Dell for giving us Ubuntu as an option. Any company that supports and contributes back to the community is always a good thing. With all that said I found the ordering experience to be quite frustrating.

read more

Watching a new Nena video today on VIVA, I realized that a) she's hot for her age but makes crap music and b) I really need an evil-bunny-man costume.


Naturally, that made me think of Jono's wonderful costume (not to mention the effects it had on the ladies and other random people on the street).


We should make a rule that in order to get Ubuntu membership you need to have a pic of yourself as your alter-ego.

Before I start – no, this isn’t a Star Wars post Sorry!

I currently have an iPhone, and no, I’m not ashamed to admit it, though it is a little awkward that I can’t sync it with my desktop. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I love it, I really do. But as with a lot of things, I find the Apple design of the phone a little restrictive. Sure it’s polished, and it looks sleek and sexy (to some at least), but I just can’t help feeling that I’d prefer an Android phone.

I’ve been looking, albeit briefly, at what Android phones are available on the UK market. Out of the choices, I think I’d prefer a Nexus One, though as far as I’ve seen – they’re Vodafone exclusive, and I’m on an O2 contract, so it’s a no-go. I’d love to hear from some of you guys that have Android phones, and what phones they are, because I’m definitely in the market!

As you may or may not know, Ubuntu has a “membership” available to anyone who has shown significant contributions to Ubuntu. This can be in many ways, not just developing. Being an Ubuntu Member has a few perks that come with it. One of these is that you get an @ubuntu.com email address. This address forwards to your email address which you define on in your Launchpad account. I recently received the honor of being accepted as an Ubuntu Member, and as such, now have an @ubuntu.com email address. (chrisjohnston AT ubuntu dot com)

The thing about my new email address is that I can only receive mail using it. Ubuntu doesn’t have a way for me to send mail using it. Luckily Google’s Gmail has a way for me to set up my account to where I can send mail from either my regular email address or from my @ubuntu.com email address. This is great, except.. I have an iPhone, and I quite frequently will check my email on my iPhone, which creates an issue when I want to reply to something from my @ubuntu.com email address, because the iPhone doesn’t know that Gmail is setup to allow me to send email from both my regular email address and my @ubuntu.com email address, so I either can’t respond until I get to a computer, or I have to respond using my personal email address.

Joeb454 from the Ubuntu Beginners Team and myself were discussing using our @ubuntu.com email address on mailing lists and the lack of being able to respond the the mailing list with our @ubuntu.com addresses from our iPhones. After a little bit of searching on the internet, I was able to come up with a working solution on how to send email from an @ubuntu.com email address. To do this, you are going to create a dummy POP account on your iPhone with your @ubuntu.com email address, which will login and send the email through your personal gmail account.

Here are the instructions:

Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account

Click Other

Add Mail Account

Fill out the appropriate information and click save. (Note: Put your @ubuntu.com email address in the Address field)

Select POP for the type of server.

Incoming Mail Server:
Host Name: pop.gmail.com
User Name: your @ubuntu.com email
Password: doesn’t matter.. Make something up

Outgoing Mail Server:
Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
User Name: your Gmail address (NOT your @ubuntu.com email address)
Password: Your Gmail password

Click Save

It will display an error saying POP account verification failed.

Click OK

Click Save again

Now it says This account may not be able to send or receive emails. Are you sure you want to save?

Click Save

That’s it as far as setup. Now when you open the Mail App, you will see your personal email address and your @ubuntu.com email address. The @ubuntu.com is a dummy address, and opening it will do nothing for you. Plus you will get an error.

To send mail from your @ubuntu.com email address, start a new email.

Click on your email address in the “Cc/Bcc, From:” line to expand the different fields.

Now click on your email address in the “From:” line.

Select your @ubuntu.com email address

Now fill out the rest of the email like normal and hit send. You can see that your @ubuntu.com email address is in the From line.

I hope this works well for you. Any comments or questions please feel free to post on my blog!

A bit of the summary of things since my last Blog Post - :-/


Home

To say I have been busy the last few weeks is an understatement at best. However, I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing, unless I don't stop to smell the roses in my life - my family, and they are awesome! My husband has traveled continuously for the last 5 weeks, stopping at home long enough to repack a bag, have meal with us and back out - we've missed him. My kids, they are awesome. There have been a few days I had appointments for various things and gotten home after they did, (They are teenagers so old enough to home for a few hours alone) and on those occasions, I have returned home to find they worked together to straighten up whatever it was I had missed doing that day. Gotta luv it when teenagers clean without being told - that is so awesome.

I've been spending more time with the kids after they get home from school, and after their homework has been completed taking time to laugh, watch a movie, talk about the day, play a game . I am not sure why but the kids were even more humorous than usual. I love laughing with them. Of Course they still throw in the occasional joke about "Ubuntu stole my Mom" or teasing me about "fine then I am installing " depending on the point they trying to convey it can range from other Linux distros to windows. That should be in the book of how kids of geeky Linux parents rebel. :-/

So I've been stepping away from my computer for a few hours, especially when they are home from school in the evenings and trying really hard not be on at night while they are still awake. This past weekend I took the kids out to eat, then to the mall, and to the movies. I was doing more than just smelling the roses I was attending to my garden. The fragrance is so much sweeter, when care is taken in the nurturing of them and yes they are in those teenage years so we still have some thorns that snag us everyone once in a while. We laughed, and talked about all the things that are on the calendar and they even added a few more things. In short we had fun!

We are still remodeling the house and due to the weather conditions our Kitchen installation had to be postponed a couple of weeks until the ground could dry out enough for the delivery trucks to make it up to the house without tearing up the driveway. Painting the living room, Kitchen, and dining room will get completed this week.


Events

SCaLE 8x
I have been working with the SCaLE 8x coordinators, and the CA Loco Team for the Ubucon event at SCaLE. I am giving a talk at the WIOS event at SCaLE - A Year NTEU the Ubuntu Community and the FLOSS World. I will also be giving one at the Ubucon at SCaLE - Every NTEU is someone's Guru - How to encourage the NTEU* in your organization. I'm also trying to see how many ubuntu community folks will be there and see if we can't grab a picture while there. I am looking forward to seeing the CA LoCo team members, Akkana Peck, Emma Jane Hogbin, and many many more folks in about 10 days or so.

(NTEU - Pronounced like In-To - stands for Non-Technical End User)

Southeast Linux Fest
I have also been working helping with the Southeast Linux Fest, as there will be an Ubucon there this year as well. The Call for Papers is still open so I don't know if I have been selected for the main event at SELF yet, but regardless it will be a great event and the Ubucon should rock. There will be an Ubuntu Booth at this event as well, any Ubuntu LoCo team who are planning on attending please feel free to volunteer your time to help staff the booth or help with the Ubucon. Please feel free to email suggestions for topics or submit a session for the Ubucon. Please include SELF Ubucon in the the subject line.

Atlanta Linux Fest
I have also been busy with Atlanta Linux Fest planning. There should be an announcement shortly as to the date and location of this event. The numbers from last year have pushed ALF beyond the capacity of all donated space we had. Good problem to have right. :-)

FOSSevents
I have also joined in on FOSScon, and FOSSevents discussions and planning. Though I can't claim to contribute much to these, but I am enjoying participating where I can. More on this in a separate post.

Did I mention I love event planning! :-)


Blogging

Not nearly enough. Though several posts are in some form progression I really need to polish them and get them added to both this blog , which is my personal one, and my You-in-Ubuntu blog, as there are several interviews in need of posting for my - People, Personalities, and Planners: Who's behind your FOSS events? series, Not to mention sending out questions for ongoing events. So you have events related to ubuntu, things that are happening in the community that Ubuntu Users can get involved in and contribute too - let me know let's get the word out. :-)

I enjoy blogging to, I really had know idea all the cool stuff you can find to talk about. Don't you just hate it when life interferes with all the fun stuff you like to do. (just kidding - well maybe)



Ubuntu Projects
Ubuntu Women Project
The Ubuntu Women Project is moving forward. As the team has defined that the "official " team member list will come from Launchpad. Subscribers to the mailing list and forums as well as those who are in the IRC channel are encouraged to join the LP team in order to participate in any voting issues. Also members on the Team on LP who are subscribed to the mailing list are encouraged to do so as well, this is another step ensuring communications of all current activities are disseminated to team members. Once the team defined who would vote, a condorcet vote was sent to the LP team members and a decision on the IRC channels was made. Almost all blueprint goals for the Lucid cycle have been meet and soon it will be time to look toward UDS-M.

The International Women's Day Competition will end in just a few weeks. February 22, 2010. If you are a women or know a who uses Ubuntu encourage them participate in this Competition. There's a great prize pack, sponsored by Canonical, Linux Pro Magazine and Ubuntu User Magazine also included in Jono Bacon's newest book, The Art of Community.

If you a woman in the Ubuntu Community and not a member of the Ubuntu Women Project please consider joining. There are women who's skills range from the highly technical to the just installed ubuntu and everything in between. So whether it's spring boarding into community contribution, developing a talk for an event, planning events, advice on dealing with sexism, or how to encourage women to get involved in Ubuntu and Open Source and more - the Project aims to provide an opportunity for women who want to be involved in the Ubuntu community thereby increasing the diversity in Ubuntu-Linux. Go here to learn more.




LoCo Leadership Series
At UDS-L, the idea for a LoCo Leadership Series was rolled out. It was The goal is to have Chapters 1-3 completed by UDS-M. Chapter 2 has been written now Chapters 1 and 3 need to completed. If you want to help with that email me.

USTeams
Ubuntu USTeams - New interview series targeting approved LoCo teams. These interviews will be posted on the USTeams Website, and the goal is to have the 1st one completed and ready fr March 1st. Looking for a place to help out and like to getting to know people in the community interviewing them is a great way and I already have some questions to start with if you are worried about how to start.

NC LoCo Team
Luv it - Ubuntu on a local level. The team is really working hard on becoming an approved LoCo team. There are now Ubuntu Hours in Winston Salem and a regular basis, and the folks in the Asheville area are looking at setting up regular Ubuntu Hours. Members of the LoCo team are working on building up the wnclug group as well. Right now it has an IRC channel on freenode (wnclug) and a mailing list. If you are in NC and you are interested in all things ubuntu please considering joining the team.

Ubuntu Weekly News
This is my Saturday/Sunday activity. It's fun seeing all the stories folks find to add to the newsletter and helping summarize them. The news team rocks! If you have links to articles or blog posts you would like to see included please send email to: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-news-team

Oh I am sure there is something else I've been working on but it escapes me at the moment :-) Here's to another awesome week!

I didn’t come up with this idea, but the manner in which it is being expressed is mine. The idea itself is a very old one and has been expressed many times and ways across many ages.

Censorship steals from people the opportunity to exchange error for truth, whether it is one who is being censored at the hands of the masses or the masses being censored at the hands of one. Silencing the expression of ideas necessarily prohibits any exchange of ideas in either direction. Regardless of which side may be embracing truth, censorship forbids the other from receiving it by breaking down communication. It also prohibits both sides, when wrong, from having their ideas adjusted through discourse.

Share and Enjoy:

Another year over and FOSDEM has come and gone.  It was an amazing weekend, full of interesting talks and meeting people.  With so many attendees on this subject, there are so many opinions on subjects, technology, languages and operating systems flying about it can get heated. It’s also rather entertaining!

Friday night I met up with the Freenode Staffers for dinner, I’ve only been involved in Freenode since last summer, and work on community areas, so nice to meet the folks who do a lot more work than I do.   Followed by the Friday beer event, leaves you set up for the weekend ahead of you!

Saturday morning consisted of me in the lightning talks room, nice way to ease myself into the day after the night before! I popped down to the Ubuntu booth, passing all the others and listening to what was being said, great chatterings.  I brought along some extra Karmic, Kubuntu , Server CDs and stickers as we’d some left over to give out to folks.  Nice to put the faces to the names and chat to people. Always great, even though I am woeful with names!

Popping in and out of talks, and finding people I chat to on IRC to wave hi, and grab a bite to eat with others was great.  I got to bounce ideas off others and get some feedback, which was handy. Saturday night was the Ubuntu Dinner, if there were folks going we asked them to sign up, most did.  Thanks to JanC who organised it, as to seat a large number of people is rather difficult. 18 of us went for dinner, nice to chat to people sitting down,Muharem Hrnjadovic from the Launchpad team joined us, nice for community and non community to meet up a these events. Went to the GNOME drinks meet up as it was close by, but I really needed an early night so homewards I went.

Sunday was the day I’d been looking forward to, more lightning talks, followed by Make your users happy, “cloudify” your app with desktopcouch which was interesting. Afterwards I ran to the Ubuntu Debian talk, but this was wedged packed, I got to hear the first 2 minutes before I had to leave due to the heat and over crowding.

Lucas is both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer and stated that at the beginning of the talk, followed by he had friends on both teams and the talk was being recorded, trying to lighten the humour I suspect as the room was very packed and a show of hands for Debian was rather over whelming where as when it was show of hands for Ubuntu maintaining, it was one other person.

It’s a developer conference so I must admit I found that rather saddening to be honest.  There was a distinct lack of Ubuntu developers there for what ever reason, it’s the largest OSS developer conference that I’m aware of, I could be wrong. You could see the sea of Red Fedoras and Debian kilts, BSD, Gnome, KDE and many more around the conference.  So it would seem Ubuntu should have a larger presence at it.

Afterwards I went to the short presentation from the Mozilla team on WoMoz -  Woman and Mozilla and  then chatted to some of the women involved and exchanged contact details once I explained my role in what I do.  I pointed out their ideas sounded great, and that other groups had done similar, we should pool our resources together. I was even shortly interviewed for the Mozilla team on women in open source, for those who don’t know me, I hate speaking in public on my own, in discussion groups I’m fine.  On my own, I tend to get rather embarrassed and speak even faster than normal, plus I also hate cameras and usually want to punch the person with the camera pointing it at me.

The afternoon was filled with more lightning talks, this time they were from the  Mozilla room, then finally the end talk for me was the Inside StatusNet: How Identi.ca Works.

It was a very enjoyable weekend, I’m glad I went, following the tweets/dents for #fosdem did help to highlight some of the other talks I didn’t get to, which was rather handy.  Lots of the talks were recorded for later viewing.  One tweet that caught my eye was – Debian’s conclusion about Ubuntu at FOSDEM, add that to google and you get the interesting views of the talk which features photos of slides of the presentation, and also a thread

Picked up a N900 the other day. It's really quite amazing. Best of all it's linux *and* the keyboard is big enough for my thick fingers. The design isn't as nice as the iphone though.

In Ireland we have a special relationship with software we see the goodness but politicians dont have a clue how to make sure they get delivery on the sanctioned software systems. There have been a few systems an e-voting system and PPARS(its a payroll system for the medical service) both cost a half a billion to develop and neither are being used.
This is where proprietary software failed badly so why not open source the software (for PPARS not the e-voting) and let the community fix the problem? No matter how complex the system needs to be I cant see how any company can get away with nearly €200 million and not deliver on a product.
Why not open source all failed software projects that wont see the light of day? How many games a year get cut half way through development and never get played? The answer is lots and lots of them. How about really old games (around 15-20+ years old) and open sourcing them? No one makes money on them so who is it harming? In fact we can give a new lease on life for lots of projects and I think its sad that we the community arent being considered at all. A game I would love to have a crack at porting to linux is the original Fallout game.

In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010.

The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week, but instead providing a week jam packed with awesome sessions about writing applications that scratch your itch, and predominantly focusing on Python tools and frameworks, Bazaar, Launchpad and infrastructure. The goal for the week is give attendees a head start on a given technology useful for applications.

So, I am looking for volunteers. If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop me an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will liaise with you to get it scheduled. I am also look for some showcase sessions: stories about how you put together an application, how it scratched your itch and what tools you used. Thanks to everyone who contributes to leading a session!

The week has already been added as a Lernid event and I am going to encourage session leaders to create slides for their sessions. As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page. Rocking!

[Discuss Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week on the Forum]

Originally posted by Jono Bacon here on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 6:53 am

Let’s think about this creating command:

vmbuilder kvm -c karmic.cfg \
--domain ubuntu-server.eu \
--dest /vmachines/kvm/ \
--bridge br0 \
--hostname testvm02 \
--user shermann \
--pass foobar \
--mem=256 \
--ip=<whatevr ip> \
--mask=255.255.255.0 \
--dns=<your dns server >\
--gw=<your default gw> \
--libvirt qemu:///system \
--tmpfs=-

The correspondent karmic.cfg looks like this:

[DEFAULT]
arch = i386
part = ubuntu-karmic.part
user = shermann

[ubuntu]
mirror = <your package mirror>
suite = karmic
flavour = server
addpkg = openssh-server, vim-nox

[kvm]
libvirt = qemu:///system

and the partition file looks like this:

root 5000
/boot 100
swap 1000
---
/var/log 2000
/home 1900

Thanks to the work of David Henningsson, we now have a proper Apport symptom for audio bugs. It just got updated again to set default bug titles, which include the card/codec name and the problem, so that Launchpad’s suggested duplicates should work much more reliably.

So from now on you are strongly encouraged to report sound problems with

$ ubuntu-bug audio

instead of trying to guess the package right.