As many of you know, Jono Bacon, along with other people, has been developing a system called Ubuntu Accomplishments, which is very cool, indeed. You earn trophies for doing different things in the community, or locally. The system even has its own daemon!

But, the problem is: We need accomplishments writers! Although writing one seems very complicated, it’s much easier than it seems. For me, it took less than 45 minutes, including a step-by-step class on how to use bzr to upload and propose for merging by Rafal Cieślak. Then, if you’re just writing it, it would be around 15-20 minutes. I started working on a “Gain an Ubuntu Member Cloak” accomplishment. Here’s what I did:

1. Write the script. When writing the script, if the accomplishment needs to be verified by checking if you’re a LP team member, you can just grab one of the scripts and modify it writing the correct team name (these are on the scripts folder, in the trunk branch). In my case, I used the motu.py script, and replaced motu bu ubuntu-irc-cloaks. Save your script with a name (name.py).
2. Write the accomplishment file. You should use one of the accomplishments that is already created, modifying it with the correct information again (these are in the accomplishments folder, in the trunk branch again). Just fill in the correct information, and you’ve done it. Remember that, as it’ll be our official accomplishments program, it should be a squeakly clean and great documentation. Save this file with the name name.accomplishment.
3. Write the test file. One more time, you can just grab this from the test files. In this you should specify two emails. The success email, is to give the tester a positive result, it means that it should be the email of an user that has already accomplished what needed, and so on with the fail email. You should save it with the name <name> (with no <>).
4. Once you’ve done that, you should upload it to a personal branch, and ask for review.

After all this process, my accomplishment got into the collection, check it out!

Remember that all your files should be named under the same name. As you can see, this is not so difficult. I hope many of you get into this fun and helpful process. You can check http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accomplishments/Creating/Guidelines for the guidelines. If you need any further help, just go to #ubuntu-accomplishments in freenode. Thanks to all of you who have already contributed, and to all of those who will contribute to us!

 

Today at some time around 3am UTC, the one millionth (1,000,000th) bug was filed in Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/edubuntu/+bug/1000000 (congrats Stéphane Graber!)

This is a huge milestone for everyone that uses and contributes to Launchpad and serves as a great witness to all the achievements, trials and challenges we’ve faced over the past 7 years. Today’s post is made up of contributions from some of the people who’ve worked with Launchpad and on developing Launchpad itself, right from the very start, up until fairly recently, like myself.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences too, so please add a comment at the end if you have a story to share.

Francis Lacoste – Launchpad Manager
“Launchpad is vast. The significant milestones reached could be quite varied. But to me, the most important ones are the one that enabled a community to use Launchpad for new activities. Thus, the first milestone was in the very earliest days, when the Ubuntu community switched from Bugzilla to Launchpad for tracking Ubuntu bugs!

“Other important milestones were when bzr and Launchpad code hosting were fast enough to host the huge Launchpad source tree itself (back in 2007). Then in 2008, when Launchpad started using Launchpad for code reviews! Other significant milestones were when MySQL joined Launchpad and bzr also in 2008. This opened the door for other big communities to join Launchpad: drizzle and then OpenStack. Finally, more recent milestones of this sort were when we introduced source package branches and Ubuntu started importing all of their packages in bzr: https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu

“Last year, we introduced derived distributions which is now being used to synchronize with Debian development version.”

Matthew Revell – Launchpad Product Manager
“There’s so much in Launchpad that it’s almost impossible to settle on a particular highlight. However, PPAs stick out as something of a game-changer. Someone once said that the cool thing about apt isn’t so much apt, but actually the software archive behind it. I love that I can trust the Ubuntu archive to give me what I need in a reliable form.

“However, PPAs have helped bring greater  diversity to Ubuntu by allowing anyone to build and publish their own packages in their own apt repository. With the addition of private PPAs and package branches, we have probably the best combination of centralised repos and software from elsewhere that I’ve seen in any operating system.”

Dave Walker (Daviey) – Engineering Manager, Ubuntu Server Infrastructure
“The real shining star is Launchpad bugs, the features and flexibility has really enabled the server team to deliver a quality product.  It’s rich API allows ease of mashups, and easy task prioritisation.”

Graham Binns – Software Engineer, Launchpad
“Probably the most significant moment for me over the time I’ve worked on Launchpad was its open-sourcing. Suddenly, this big beast that we’d worked on for years was open to outside contributions, and that was and still is incredibly exciting to me.”

Laura Czajkowski – Launchpad Support Specialist
“I think the best thing I’ve seen in a long time on launched was the set downtime and reduce downtime that happens each day.  This minimises the effect for all projects hosted on launchpad an many people never even notice it down.”

J.C.Sackett – Software Engineer, Launchpad
“When I started on launchpad, the volume of bug data was a source of constant performance problems. Our 1 millionth bug is noteworthy in that we’re handling 1 million bugs better now than we were handling 500,000 then.”

Curtis Hovey – Launchpad Squad Lead
“Launchpad’s recipes rock. They allow projects to automatically publish packages created from the latest commits to their branch. Users can test the latest fixes and features hours after a developer commits the work.”

Diogo Matsubara – QA Engineer
“Personal package archives combined with source package recipes allows any Launchpad user to easily put their software into Ubuntu and this is a pretty unique feature from Launchpad.

Tom Ellis – Premium Service Engineer
“It’s been great to see Launchpad grow and scale, a key milestone for me was seeing Launchpad move from a system that was not scaling well to one which has been a great example of continuous development and seeing the web UI improve in usability.”

 

 

(Photo by ‘bunchofpants’ on flickr, Creative Commons license)

Hey everyone, I am riding 100 miles (161 km) for Chicago’s 2012 Tour de Cure. My goal this year is to raise $1,500, because last year I was blown out of the water by the generosity of the people at my mom’s work, the KDE community, the cycling community, and a few friends. So, if 300 of you donated the minimum $5, I would make my goal Last year I had a blast doing this ride and completed it in 6.5 hours. My other goal this year is to finish it in under 6 hours.

To donate, you can click on the Support image above, or go to my Tour de Cure page. Scroll down, and on the right hand side you will see “CLICK HERE TO SPONSOR ME”, click it. I appreciate any and all help!

Donate To My Tour de Cure 2012 Ride is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

I’m finally home from UDS, it was good to run into so many friends and colleagues and work on what will become 12.10. Here’s a quick summary of my upcoming cycle.

We will definately have Charm Schools:

And here are all my blueprints:

• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-q-juju-charm-best-practices
• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-q-irc-workshops
• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-q-juju-charm-growth
• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-q-juju-charm-workflow
• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-q-juju-conferences

The TLDR on juju is basically to streamline the review process, we’re going to go just how distro does it, with a sponsorship queue and review days instead of the ad-hoc way we do it now.

The “loose” review process served us fine for 12.04 but needs to grow up a bit; you’ll see typical governance structures added as well. Lots of Charm Schools and training events, both online and at conferences, and we’ll be experimenting more with things like Google Hangouts for tutorials, etc.

I had a CR-48 Chromebook for a while, which has recently fallen in disuse. While I have never being totally convinced about Chrome OS being a polished, well designed, interface that simplifies the “always connected” user journey that Google was envisioning, I liked the concept.

Now I am reading in ArsTechnica that Chrome OS is getting a brand new look, that is … basically.. well, not new. While I am sure there are many technical advantages of a fully hardware accelerated windows managers, my issue is with the [lack of] concept.

Google has spent much energy convincing users that they do not need to have local apps, that they can do everything in the cloud and that the portal to this experience is Chrome. Having an OS which the only application that could possibly run, and at full screen, was the browser was a controversial but bold move. More over, it really hit home the user experience they were targeting.

This new UI seems to be sending the opposite message. It seems to be saying: “OK, we were wrong.. but  maybe if we make Chrome OS look more like windows you will like it better?”. Is that really the message? Well if you give me an app launcher in a desktop, I am bound to ask for local apps. If you give me off-line sync for Google apps, I am bound to ask for local apps.

I fear Google is paving the road to [windows vista] hell with good window manager intentions. I am primary an Ubuntu user, and what I like about it is that every single release over the last few years has continue to build on a design concept. Every new release is closely wrap on a consistent user message. Take as an example the HUD introduced in 12.04: it is new and different, but somehow it feels like it always belonged in Unity.

I am bought into the Ubuntu user experience, and I am excited to see what a new release will bring. If I had bought into the Chrome OS experience, I think I will be asking for a refund.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the new Chrome OS UI being available for the CR-48. Maybe I will change my mind once I get my hands on it.

A couple of photos from the Ubuntu release fest in Tampere yesterday.

People gathering up before presentations

Tieto's Markus Mannio

Again, continuing on how Ubuntu is used at Tieto

A cut to the end of presentations, Trine 2 game licenses from Frozenbyte being raffled. A great game available on Linux.

Tablets running KDE Plasma, and Ubuntu for Android being demoed.

Someone else probably has photos of my generic Ubuntu 12.04 LTS presentation (what's new, what's next), and likewise for the other presentations (Ubuntu for Android, uTouch) held. Those will be available as slides and videos later on, although do note the whole event was in the crypto-language called Finnish.

Thanks to the organizers, sponsors and everyone I met, it was a great event with nice little dinner and wine served at the end!

Summary: If you have performance problems using the JACK Audio-Connection-Kit and the fglrx ATI grpahics card driver, switching to radeon may solve them. Unity 3D and radeon can work, but leftovers of other drivers might get in the way. Also: Proprietary, binary blobs smell bad and Ubuntu’s infrastructure around those drivers is dodgey.

On Ubuntu 11.10, I switched graphics cards and thus drivers from nvidia to fglrx without much of a problem.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 and was quite pleased by how smooth that went and glad for not having to reconfigure and reinstall a bunch of stuff. As with every release so far, some issues might have disappeared, but a very noticable new one arrived: focus-follows mouse combined with auto-raise does no longer work reliably. So far I failed to identify the pattern for the cases where windows are not raised, when they should be.

After a while, I wanted to get back to music production with JACK and Ardour. My system was still configured for JACK to run in realtime mode, but I got many disconnects, often right when Ardour brought up its main window. I found out this only happened with Unity 3D, not with 2D. So it seemed like either one or the combination of Unity 3D and the fglrx driver interfered with realtime mode. A fellow #lad inhabitant knowledgeable about this realtime kernel business suspects that the 3D accleration part of the fglrx driver is not preemptable.

Where does one even report bugs about that proprietary blob? And how would one diagnose what exactly goes wrong?

Now I could use Unity 2D, but I really miss window drop-shadows, dislike the look and different notification animations for the Launcher icons and hate the fact that the Dash doesn’t react to the same shortcut I configured while using the 3D version.

Initially, I thought I would need the fglrx driver for Unity 3D, but still wanted to try switching to radeon. The Additional Drivers dialog claimed that neiter of the 2 ATI options were active, but lsmod told me otherwise. I have some Wacom-related stuff in my xorg.conf, which had to be moved out of the way, to get that thing to work. After a reboot, radeon was in use, but Unity decided to drop back to 2D. The cause: Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0". The solution was purging any trace of fglrx and nividia(!) from my system. Also, for good measure, but I suspect it’s unnecessary: sudo apt-get install —reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core; sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.

Now I have a working Unity 3D, using radeon, no disconnects or xruns galore using JACK and Ardour. Only new problem so far: shaky mouse pointer on the login screen.

Filed under: Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu

After some delay, I am continuing the posting on the third day of the Ubuntu Develop Summit for Quantal Qeutzal in Oakland, California.

Getting Home

In order to maximize my weekend before returning to work, my flight leaves at 06:00 on Saturday.  Apparently I naively expected to take the BART but I have learned that the first BART is at 06:30.

Turns out the answer is a local shuttle service (thanks Elizabeth and Charles) who will pick me up at 03:30.  I might not even go to sleep Friday night :/

QA

I learned about some remarkable things today related to available QA tools which hopefully will reduce the work load on our small team.

During a ubuntu-qa-tools session, I learned about automated ways to download and start a new image in KVM from a single command.  Rock on!

Turns out there are many other tools that will lower the threshold for new testers to easily join and help with testing..  I will certainly be  exploring these tools more. Also, during this session Gema mentioned her Plenary presentation for QA.  I look forward to learning more :)

Improving the testing tools used by Ubuntu Studio is another important aspect for our future.  By automating the basic ISO test we should be able to devote more time to deeper testing.

Learning of the available QA tools, along with the available backports tools, should really have significant impact to Ubuntu Studio starting with this cycle :)

Pictures

Last UDS I only took two pictures, this year I intend to do much, much better.  Hopefully tomorrow I start taking them.

There are a huge number of extremely cool and incredible people at UDS and I really hope to document some of this experience with a Picasa photo album.

finis

As happened last year, midweek seemed to slip out of high gear as I didn't find as many interesting sessions. But I am sure I am an outlier at UDS.

Oh, I know of one interesting session coming up on Friday; it is the a session that I will be leading for the 'Desktop Juju (see JuJu Studio section)' blueprint that was approved and scheduled.

Recently I have been talking a little about building quality and precision into Ubuntu Accomplishments. Tonight I put one of the final missing pieces in place and I thought I would share in a little more detail about some of this work. Some of you might find this useful in your own projects.

Before I get started though, I just wanted to encourage you to start playing our software and for those of you that had a crash when using certain languages with the Accomplishments Information viewer, I released a 0.1.2 update earlier that fixes this.

Automated Testing

As we continue to grow the Ubuntu Community Accomplishments collection it is going to be more and more complex to ensure all of the accomplishments are working effectively every day; we are already at 28 accomplishments and growing! What’s more, the community accomplishments scripts work by checking third-party services for data (e.g. Launchpad) to assess if you have accomplished something. These external services may change their APIs, adjust how they work, add/reduce services etc, so we need to know right away when one of our accomplishments no longer works and needs updating.

To do this I wrote a tool called battery. It works by reading in a test that is available for each accomplishment that feeds the accomplishment validation data that should succeed and also data that should not validate. As an example, for the Ubuntu Member accomplishment the data that succeeds is an existing member’s email address (such as my own) and the test for failure is an email address on Launchpad that is not a member. The original script requires the user’s email address to assess this accomplishment, so battery tests simply require the same types of information, with data that can trigger success and failure.

This approach allows us to test for three outcomes:

• That the valid email address returns exit code 0 (the script ran successfully and the user is verified as being an Ubuntu Member).
• That the invalid email address returns exit code 1 (the script ran successfully but the user is not an Ubuntu Member).
• If the script has an internal issues and returns exit code 2.

The way this works is that battery includes a customized version of the general accomplishments.daemon module that we use for the backend service. In the code I override the back-end module and load a custom module. This way the original accomplishment script does not need to be modified; instead of get_extra_information() calling the back-end daemon and gathering the user’s details, the custom module that comes with battery instead has it’s own get_extra_information() that gets returns the test data so battery can run the tests.

Originally battery only output textual results, but this would require us manually running it. As such, last night I added HTML output support. I then enabled battery to run once a day and automatically update the HTML results. You can see the output here.

There are a few important features in this report other than a list of all the accomplishment test results:

• It shows the failures: this provides a simple way for us to dive into the accomplishments and fix issues where they occur.
• It shows which tests, if any, are missing. This gives us a TODO lists for tests that we need to write.

While this was useful, it still required that we would remember to visit the web page to see the results. This could result in days passing without us noticing a failure.

Tonight I fixed this by adding email output support to battery. With it I can pass an email address as a command-line switch and battery will generate an email report of the test run. I also added battery‘s default behavior to only generate an email when there are failures or tests are missing. This prevents it generating results that don’t need action.

With this feature I have set battery to send a daily “Weather Report” to the Ubuntu Accomplishments mailing list; this means that whenever we see a weather report, something needs fixing.

One final, rather nice feature, that I also added was the ability to run battery on one specific accomplishment. This is useful for when we are reviewing contributions of new accomplishments; we ask every contributor to add one of these simple tests, and using battery we can test that the script works for validation success, validation failure, and script failure with a single command. This makes reviewing contributions much easier and faster and improves our test coverage.

Graphing

Something Mark Shuttleworth discussed at UDS was the idea of us building instrumentation into projects to help us identify ways in which we can make better decisions around how we build software. This is something I have also been thinking of for a while, and to kick the tyres on this I wanted to first track popularity and usage of Ubuntu Accomplishments before exploring other ways of learning how people contribute to communities to help us build a better community.

Just before we released version 0.1 of Ubuntu Accomplishments, I created a little script that does a scan of the validation server to generate some statistics about the number of daily new users, the daily number of new trophies issued, and the totals. Importantly, I only count users and trophies, and I am only interest in publishing anonymized data, not exposing someone’s own activity.

To do this my script scans the data and generates a CSV file with the information I am interested in. I then used the rather awesome Google Charts API to take my CSV and generate the Javascript need to display the graph. Here are some examples:

While this is not exactly instrumentation, it got me thinking about the kind of data that could be interesting to explore. As an example, we could arguably explore which types of contributions in our community are of most interest in our users, how effective our documentation and resources are, which processes are working better than others, and also some client side instrumentation that explores how people use Ubuntu Accomplishments and how they find it rewarding and empowering.

Importantly, none of this instrumentation will happen without anyone’s consent; privacy always has to be key, but I think the idea of exploring patterns and interesting views of data could be a fantastic means of building better software and communities.

Ubuntu Hour is a chance to meet up for an hour and chat with other Ubuntu users. The meeting is open to anyone interested whether they use Ubuntu or not, and everyone's welcome with no commitments or RSVPs. It's definitely a good opportunity to bring along friends who are curious about Ubuntu.

Not only is it fun to meet local Ubuntu fans, but we can also be a valuable introduction to Ubuntu for others. Wear that cool Ubuntu or Linux shirt or bring your laptop with the Ubuntu stickers, if you have them. We'll also follow the Ubuntu Code of Conduct while we're there. Easily summarized as "be excellent to each other," it means that we'll be good examples of the wonderful Ubuntu community.

The latest information, including locations and times, is always available at http://www.nhaines.com/ubuntu/hour/

Upcoming dates

• Thursday, May 17, 2012, 6pm - 7pm
• Thursday, May 31, 2012, 6pm - 7pm

Location

Panera Bread (Yelp) (Google Maps) 23592 Rockfield Blvd. Lake Forest, CA 92618

Panera Bread is a casual restaurant that has fresh bread, soups, and sandwiches and free wi-fi access. We're the group with a laptop or two and some Ubuntu logos, so please feel free to come up and say hi.

Congratulations

First off, congratulations to the Launchpad.net team for reaching bug #1000000. They’ve managed to build a huge platform that scales very well. Very few bug trackers live to that milestone and it’s amazing how they have managed to keep it snappy and also keep downtime so low by doing continuous roll-out.

1 000 000 x 67

A million bugs are a lot, but even more mind-blowing: for every bug filed in Launchpad.net, 67 iPads have been sold. Educational institutions everywhere are jumping on the iPad bandwagon, and in the Edubuntu project, we believe that the tools are quickly coming together that allows us to deliver a product that can be truly competitive with the iPad in educational environments.

We’re currently re-designing the Edubuntu website and will soon have a dedicated section to this project, but in the meantime, please join us on the edubuntu-devel mailing list and introduce yourself, or on the #edubuntu IRC channel on Freenode.

As Trever blogged yesterday, the Zeigeist team has been busy with tweaking the DB and the engine. During that process tools and benchmarks have been developed to make the tweaking and testing more interesting. Trever will be blogging about that tomorrow so make sure to check his blog.

Our end goal is  trying to scale the engine to be able to handle a few billion events just as fast as it can handle a few hundred thousand. While we are not there yet we managed to have some pretty nice stable results for the first iteration. A lot of results show more than 100% speed enhancement. In other words a lot of queries from our standard benchmarks now consume more than 50% less time to execute. Here are some graphs of our benchmarks.

Green indicates the 0.9 release

Yellow indicates the new trunk

Most notable performance enhancement is querying Zeitgeist with a specified timeframe (from data x to date y).

 

Same queries with an open timeframe also improved

 

We also have a copy of the Synapse queries benchmarked

The queries here are typical queries used to extract info from Zeitgeist. So right now the team is really happy with the initial results. For Synapse on my local DB (over a year old), all my synapse queries perform under 0.08 seconds. We still can get more out of this. The trick here was improving our indexes and our sql query generator.

Next month we will be going through another iteration.

 

 

We have uploaded a new Quantal linux kernel. The most notable changes are as follows:

* perarch and indep tools builds need separate build directories
* Prevent upgrading a non-PAE CPU

The full changelog can be seen at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.4.0-2.5

As many people know I am a fanatic when it comes to web optimization and if my blog is taking more than a second or two to load I’m freaking out because I know how important load times are to end-users and that a few milliseconds could mean loss of a potential reader or new connection.

But more importantly load times also play a major role in how search engines rank you in results because in turn they consider slow loading websites to be of lesser quality to their users and rank accordingly in their algorithms.

I have been a big fan of the folks at NetDNA which offer the service MaxCDN and recently launched CloudCache two services aimed at producing top performance when it comes to serving content on your site. Some of the top sites on the internet rely on the technology that NetDNA offers to make their websites run blazing fast 365 days of the year.

I told my followers I would give something away when I reached 2,500+ people on Google+ and I recently passed this mark as such I am going to giveaway of  Five CloudCache Basic Plans for an entire year totally free courtesy of NetDNA.

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20120515 Meeting Agenda

ARM Status

work on a Q/omap4 kernel is ongoing, but apart from that, nothing to report this week

Release Metrics and Incoming Bugs

Release metrics and incoming bug data can be reviewed at the following link:

http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kt-meeting.txt

Status: Quantal Development Kernel

a few things…
Work items are beginning to populate the blueprints. I’ll start calling
out specific work items in upcoming meetings.
We’ve rebased the Quantal kernel to upstream v3.4-rc7. We uploaded but
ran into a build failure on i386. Test builds are currently underway
and we will re-upload shortly. We also have the quantal kernel building
in precise. We are getting a PPA set up so that testing can commence.
Important upcoming dates:

• Thurs Jun 7 – Alpha 1 (~3 weeks)

Status: CVE’s

Currently we have 82 CVEs on our radar, with 5 new CVEs in the last
three weeks. See the CVE matrix for the current list:

http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/ALL-linux.html

Overall the backlog has increased slightly slightly this week:

http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/status/cve-metrics.txt

http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/CVE-linux.txt

This week sees Quantal listed for the first time, and the addition
of the armadaxp kernels for ease of tracking.

Status: Stable, Security, and Bugfix Kernel Updates – Precise/Oneiric/Natty/Lucid/Hardy

Here is the status for the main kernels, until today (May 15):

• Hardy – 2.6.24-31.101 – Testing; Single CVE
• Lucid – 2.6.32-41.89 – Testing; 5 CVEs
• Natty – 2.6.38-15.59 – Nothing this cycle
• Oneiric – 3.0.0-20.34 – Testing; 4 stable upstream releases (approx. 300 commits)
• Precise – 3.2.0-24.38 – Testing; 2 stable upstream releases (approx. 140 commits)

Current opened tracking bugs details:

http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kernel-sru-workflow.html

For SRUs, SRU report is a good source of information:

http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/sru-report.html

Future stable cadence cycles:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/ReleaseInterlock

Open Discussion or Questions? Raise your hand to be recognized

No discussion.

Tim Bell preparing to get his OpenStack on

As previously mentioned, there's a growing momentum around ops-oriented participation in the OpenStack community. DreamHost is deeply invested in DevOps, seeing how that's where we're going to be living in a few months! As Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost, recently said:

"When we're running a complex fabric of apps on over 5,000 servers across three data centers, we need a lean and nimble approach to software development and operational implementation. Without a DevOps approach, we wouldn't be able to push code into production as fast or as efficiently as we do, and our customers would not be happy! Today's developers demand up-to-the-hour security and performance updates to Internet infrastructure, so we aim to deliver just that with DevOps."

Though expressed in the context of our work, the import of DevOps that Simon's comment generally highlights is going to be increasingly important for nearly anyone running cloud services. 

In particular, I've been following the work of the intrepid folks at CERN. As such, this post is not about DreamHost; rather, it's a mad tale of OpenStack, DevOps, and averting alien invasion.

"The CERN Agile Infrastructure project aims to develop CERN's computing resources and processes to support the expanding needs of LHC physicists and the CERN organisation."

The first Beta of the upcoming PostgreSQL 9.2 was released yesterday (see announcement). Your humble maintainer has now created packages for you to test. Please give them a whirl, and report any problems/regressions that you may see to the PostgreSQL developers, so that we can have a rock solid 9.2 release.

Remember, with the postgresql-common infrastructure you can use pg_upgradecluster to create a 9.2 cluster from your existing 8.4/9.1 cluster and run them both in parallel without endangering your data.

For Debian the package is currently waiting in the NEW queue, I expect them to go into experimental in a day or two. For Ubuntu 12.04 LTS you can get packages from my usual PostgreSQL backports PPA. Note that you need at least postgresql-common version 0.130, which is available in Debian unstable and the PPA now.

I (or rather, the postgresql-common test suite) found one regression: Upgrades do not keep the current value of sequences, but reset them to their default value. I reported this upstream and will provide updated packages as soon as this is fixed.

I recently installed a DNS sever using Ubuntu 12.04.  The server should serve only my exernal domain, but should use an internal server for it's own name resolution.

Setting dns-nameservers to the correct ip in /etc/network/interfaces did not work on this host (but does on all my non-dns hosts).

After some digging, I found the cause: resolvconf always reverts to nameserver 127.0.0.1 which in turn queries the hosts in dns-nameservers.  Because my host is already a nameserver, 127.0.0.1 points to my bind instance instead of a caching daemon.

The solution I found was to put my entries in /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/head, this way they end up on top of the resolv.conf file and the real DNS server gets queried first!

The Ubuntu Developer Summit. One week, full of experiences, sessions, plenaries, social events, etc. One week where you find out what is the essence of this community. Last week I’ve had my first UDS. Believe me, this is something that entirely changes your perspective of the community. You get to know how things work, how the process of this cycle will be, and what are the projects. Most important, you get to know the people you will work this during all this entire 6-month cycle. With this post, all I want to say is thanks. Thanks to all the people who were there, making this event as great as they could. Thanks to Marianna, Claire, Claire and Michelle for organizing it, to the track leads for their work managing their tracks, to Chris Johnston and the crew for the great work we did, and to all the people that I don’t mention, but know they were very important for me in this first experience (I do not write the whole list because I would fill up the whole planet homepage). Last but not least, thanks to Mark Shuttleworth for making this awesome summits, that, apart from being a place to get work done, is a week full of emotions, that you will surely never forget.

 

EDIT on 15/May/2012: For the next UDS I go to, I promise I will sing in the karaoke!

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week I delivered a plenary on the Tuesday called Accomplishing An Awesome App Developer Platform that tells the story of how the Ubuntu app developer platform enabled me to build the Ubuntu Accomplishments system that I designed with Aq. The presentation walks through the story of how we designed the system, and how everything was available in Ubuntu to create the client, back-end daemon, validation server, and desktop integration. I think it is a good example of how Ubuntu can help app devs to create interesting ideas and apps.

I thought this might be handy to have on YouTube, so I re-recorded it today, and you can see the video below:

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

If you want to create your own application for Ubuntu, be sure to visit developer.ubuntu.com.

Meta Track?

I’m glad you asked! At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, sessions are arranged by track. There are some topics that don’t have official tracks, but you end up seeing the same people in the same kind of sessions and it ends up being a track for all practical intents and purposes. One of these “meta-tracks” that emerged at this UDS was about software packages in Ubuntu. These were discussions related to how packages are organised in Ubuntu, how they’re maintained and synced with Debian, how to get upstream software developers excited about Ubuntu and more.

These were the sessions where I could walk in and be sure to find some combination of Stefano Rivera, Allison Randal, Asheesh Laroia, Evan Broder, Iain Lane, Andrew Starr-Bochiccio, Daniel Holbach, Andrew Mitchell, Micah Gersten, Bhavani Shankar and more in there

These sessions included:

• APT Improvements
• Upstream App Developer Documentation
• App Developer events
• software-center-q-client
• Backports BoF
• Continuing Packaging Guide Improvements
• Refine our SRU process to be more agile while avoiding too many pitfalls
• App Developer external outreach
• software-center-q-server
• Promote and encourage upstream delivery in Ubuntu
• Packaging requirements for Apps in Ubuntu
• LTS backport testing in 12.04
• Phased updates of software packages
• Merging / onto /usr
• Discussions of what should get uploaded to -proposed and when
• Review of the ARB process using MyApps
• Application Review Board
• Debian Health Check
• Developer Membership Board Discussion
• MOTU BOF Session
• Transition the archive to Java 7
• Finish the archive reorg
• Advertise new apps in the Software Center
• working session result of apt-improvements
• MyApps submission experience and expectations for upstreams
• Ubuntu App Developer Site incremental improvements
• Reaching out to future Ubuntu developers
• If a crash is already fixed by an update, prompt to install it

Archive Re-organisation

I’ll jump in with the big and controversial topic. When Ubuntu was founded, Canonical and the Ubuntu community was small and could only support a subset of the Debian archives. This supported subset became known as main. Initially it was less than 1GB large, the rest of what you’d usually find in the Debian main archive became known as Universe, and a group of people, named in jest after a he-man series, became known as the Masters of the Universe (MOTU) team.

Main was maintained mostly by Canonical staff and the universe archive was maintained by Canonical staff and community members. Over time, more and more community members started to maintain packages in main. Flavours such as Edubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu were later allowed to install from universe and it was later enabled by default. In the initial LTS release, only main packages were supported long-term. These days, there are many packages in universe that are supported for the full 5 years on LTS releases. Previously, only packages in main had translations shipped for them. This is also no longer true. The lines between main and universe have become so blurred that having the separation no longer made any sense. Around the last LTS release (10.04), the topic of an archive re-organisation emerged. It was a big discussion, and when the Developer Membership Board was formed the MOTU Council was disbanded (which in my opinion was a bad idea) in part of that and also in anticipation for the archive re-organisation. Some people took that as meaning that MOTU is dead or that it would stop to exist. That is certainly not the case.

Unfortunately, the archive re-organisation became very complicated very quickly. There still needs to be a way for Canonical to identify packages that they officially support if someone wants to throw money at them for supporting it. We can’t have everything translated because the language packs would just grow too big. How would we deal with managing build-dependencies and make sure that people depend on high-quality tools and libraries? Soon after the initial archive re-organisation was started, it stalled. In my opinion this caused lots of confusion and did damage to the Ubuntu project.

Having said that, I’m glad to report that the discussion at this UDS was extremely positive and it seems like the archive re-organisation might actually be completed over the next two releases. Other benefits will include how support meta-data is stored. The tools that currently use the support fields (update-manager, ubuntu-support-status, software-center, etc) will now get the support metadata from an external file, which means that packages in Ubuntu wouldn’t need a diff with Debian’s packages anymore for support meta-data. Also, the archive layout will be simpler and easier to understand. MOTU would probably change from “Masters of the Universe” to “Masters of the Unseeded”. Packages that are seeded are packages that are provided on standard Ubuntu flavours (Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc). The rest of the archive that are unseeded would then still be maintained by a newly defined MOTU group.

It’s a big hairy issue and I’ve just touched on some of the areas, but what’s great is that progress is being made again and that people are serious about making it happen. Colin Watson has a work item to take the discussion further on the Ubuntu development mailing list. I’m positive that things will be moving forward on that front for this cycle, even if it ends up taking another cycle to iron out some of the smaller kinks.

Application Review Board

In a previous cycle, Canonical put together a process by which application developers could get their non-free, commercial applications in to the Software Center via authenticated PPA. It seemed unfair to have a process where non-free software could make it into the Ubuntu software center but free software couldn’t, so a process was formed to let apps in the software center via an extras repository. This process is overseen by the Application Review Board. I joined this board right about 6 months ago. We’ve had the usual problems that Ubuntu teams have (because, in reality the ARB is more of a team than a board, the name is a misnomer, I wish less Ubuntu teams had this issue), like lack of time, getting sporadically distracted by other work, but on top of that, we didn’t have our process quite smoothed out yet. The web interface that we used to manage apps had some huge issues (like making apps completely disappear from the interface when requesting feedback from the developer).

For the last weeks, quite a few people have worked hard to help fix the issues in the process and in the web app. There were *many* sessions at this UDS regarding upstream developers, the ARB, the MyApps web interface, etc. At times I thought that there were too many, but it was just right. A lot of issues were discussed, problems were solved, and while I felt like the ARB process was in an alpha stage during the last cycle, I think it’s more like a beta-state process now. I think we’re very close to having a process that’s smooth and easy for both the people that submit these apps, and the people who review them.

Currently the ARB has some backlog that we need to sort through, we’ll probably use that to help improve the process further and make Ubuntu a fun and welcoming platform to develop for.

We also absolutely want people to contribute their software to the right place. If a package belongs in Debian, Ubuntu, a PPA or any other archive instead, we’d like to advise the user properly. I took a work item to put together a flowchart to help people decide where to submit their app, because there’s way to many guides and howtos and someone could read the entire New Maintainers Guide and still won’t know where to submit their app

I know I’m a bit thin on the details on the sessions here, but I’ll do more blog posts on that. I just wanted to provide some background and explain that good progress is made, and that things are greatly improving with the ARB process. In the ARB, many of us are aspiring to becoming Debian Developers so that we can help sponsor packages there when it’s appropriate.

Debian Health Check

The Debian Health Check session as become a regular session at UDS. We had a bunch of DD’s in the room that could comment on the Debian-Ubuntu relationship, but we didn’t have someone who specifically represented Debian. Some of the issues I’ve mentioned previously (like the ARB) were discussed. Also the Ayatana patches from Ubuntu that are hard to get into Debian (which includes Unity).

What is nice is that we have quite a few people who started out with Ubuntu that became Debian Developers. The relationship between Debian and Ubuntu seems quite healthy and it seems that both projects gain great benefit from each other.

MOTU Birds of a Feather

The archive-reorg was discussed, and MOTUs future role was discussed in anticipation of it. There was some discussion about things that have worked well in the last few cycles that should be revitalised. MOTU needs some more announcements of what it’s doing to cause some buzz around its activities. Too few people know what MOTU does and how it does it. Evan Broder and I plan to try some experiments with Facebook ads to see what kind of people/interest they bring in MOTU

The MOTU team is also very eager to get long-term ARB apps into the archive. Having apps in universe would mean less work and restrictions than having them in extras.

As MOTU we’re very committed to it and its goals, but there needs to be some restructuring/updating of the current documentation. It might also need a new vision/mission-statement, etc. This cycle is going to be a revitalisation cycle for MOTU in whatever form it will continue to exist. We hope that many people will get excited about packaging and quality in the Ubuntu archive and help contribute to that

Getting it all down is impossible

I wish I could do a better job at this blog post, but I’m still somewhat suffering from information overload from last week, and if I try to get it perfect and get everything in there then this post will never get finished. If you have questions, feel free to give a poke on #ubuntu-motu on freenode, there’s bound to be someone who could answer questions on any of these topics if you’re willing to hang around a bit. I still haven’t even touched on Backports, APT improvements, SRU streamlining, etc, but you should be able to find most of the information from those sessions in their blueprints. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #265 for the week May 7 – 13, 2012, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Ubuntu Developer Summit for Quantal
• EA Games and Ubuntu
• Welcome New Members
• Ubuntu Stats
• LoCo News
• Launchpad News
• Ubuntu Cloud News
• Introducing Project Sputnik: Developer laptop
• Pasi Lallinaho: Brainstorm! Contribute!
• Alan Pope: Why not contribute to Ubuntu Manual
• Stuart Langridge: Ubuntu One for Nokia N9
• Jonathan Carter: Edubuntu Preliminary Plans for 12.10
• Summaries from the Ubuntu Developer Summit
• ARM arrives on servers with Calxeda’s Ubuntu demo
• Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin review
• Project Sputnik: Dell’s Ubuntu-based XPS13 laptop for developers
• Mark Shuttleworth is passionate about Canonical, patents and space
• In The Blogosphere
• In Other News
• Other Articles of Interest
• Featured Podcasts
• Upcoming Meetings and Events
• Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 11.04, 11.10 and 12.04
• And much more!

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• Elizabeth Krumbach
• Jasna Bencic
• Chris Druif
• D. Can Celasun
• mikewhatever
• Matt Rudge
• And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Liberté Linux is a secure, reliable, lightweight and easy to use Gentoo-based LiveUSB/SD/CD Linux distribution with the primary purpose of enabling anyone to communicate safely and covertly in hostile environments. Whether you are a privacy advocate, a dissident, or a sleeper agent, you are equally likely to find Liberté Linux useful as a mission-critical communication aid. Downloads and more

We have uploaded a new Quantal linux kernel. Please note the ABI Bump. The most notable changes are as follows:

* Rebase to v3.4-rc7
* Remove fsam7400 Ubuntu driver (supported upstream)
* Remove onmibook Ubuntu driver (disabled since Oneiric)
* Remove rfkill Ubuntu driver (disabled since Oneiric)
* Remove nx-emu patches (dropped non-pae support)

The full changelog can be seen at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.4.0-2.4

I just released a new update for the Ubuntu Community Accomplishments collection. This new release (0.1.1) includes the following new community accomplishments:

• Accomplishments Contributor
• Attend LoCo Team Event
• Bug Squad Member
• Ubuntu Forums Council Member
• Ubuntu Forums Staff Member
• Imported an SSH Key
• Ubuntu Beginners Team Council Member
• Ubuntu Beginners Team Member
• Bug Control Member
• Ubuntu Forums Ubuntu Member
• Launchpad Profile Mugshot is now fixed too.

Thanks to Silver Fox, Michael Hall, Matt Fischer, Rafal Cieslek, Angelo Compagnucci for contributing these additions! It is wonderful to see our community growing!

If you want to contribute accomplishments, be sure to see our guidelines, some suggestions, and how to get started!

If you are already running Ubuntu Accomplishments 0.1, you just need to do the following to get the new set:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

If you are running the daemon, kill it first with killall -9 twistd and then load Accomplishments Information from the dash.

If you are new to Ubuntu Accomplishments, be sure you have your Ubuntu One set up and running on your computer, and then follow these installation instructions.

Last week, I finally gave in and bought a new laptop. I wanted something small and lightweight, yet reasonably powerful.

I discounted the MacBook Air on a couple of counts: the increased cost and the potential for extra hassle getting Ubuntu running.

My two choices were the Dell XPS 13 and the Asus Zenbook. The Dell was my first choice: Project Sputnik, the fact Mark has just got one and its size were all in its favour.

The Asus is a good looking machine and has had good reviews. Some dislike the keyboard, but it has been okay for me. However, the Dell feels like it has more momentum amongst the kind of people I work with and the people who make Ubuntu work well on laptops.

After much thought, and a few conversations, a couple of things pushed me away from the Dell: the trackpad isn’t yet well supported in anything other than Windows and it’s a touch more expensive than the Asus.

So, after a few days with the Asus, here’s a quick run-down:

• It really is very thin, lightweight and looks great.
• The keyboard is okay; not perfect but not terrible.
• The battery life under Ubuntu is mediocre; three or four hours under light usage.
• Wifi range is a joke; seriously poor.
• Despite being advertised as supporting 5GHz wifi, it sees only 2.4GHz networks.
• The trackpad does not switch off when typing; very frustrating in use and, also, I could probably have got the Dell.
• Sound quality is very good.
• The screen resolution is good and, for my purposes, colours and contrast appear to be good.

I’ll report back when I’ve started to tackle some of these issues.

A few weeks ago I went to see this year’s show from Richard Herring, ”What is love, anyway?” at The Lights in Andover. Although Richard didn’t think the show went down very well, I enjoyed it. It was a more thought-provoking and personal show than the previous ones I’ve seen, made all the more poignant as he had just got back from his honeymoon. There were some touching moments in the show, which was devoid of much of his usual bluster. It was a refreshing change for a comedian who specialises in playing myriad different versions of himself.

The following week I got a call from the Theatre Royal in Winchester, saying that there had been a return for Stewart Lee’s show. I had tried to book a few months ago but the show had already sold out, so went on the waiting list. Some poor so-and-so wasn’t able to go, so just one week after watching Richard Herring live I was watching the other half of the erstwhile comedy duo.

I’d not visited this theatre before. It’s an impressive space, not large but very ornate. The show was great, although it’s hard to explain why. Stewart’s style is confrontational and he deliberately divides the audience. The first ten minutes consisted of a stream of uncomfortable put-downs directed at a woman in the front row, who couldn’t work out how to turn her phone off. The material must have been used before but I still can’t work out if the whole thing was a set up.

I bought the Fist of Fun Series 1 DVD set after Richard’s show and he signed it. I remembered to take it to Stewart’s show too. So after seeing Herring and Lee, I can now watch Lee and Herring whenever I want.

This is coming about two weeks later than I would have liked, so the next pre-release is likely to come in two weeks to make up. Similarly, the monthly bugfix release for Muon Suite 1.3 is two weeks late. For that, I’ll likely just skip this month and release 1.3.2 in two weeks, as there haven’t been any serious bugs that need immediate attention. (Thankfully)

Anyways, I am proud to announce the first alpha release for Muon Suite 1.4. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies. Packages for Kubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” are available in the QApt Experimental PPA. Here’s what’s new:

Muon Discover

Muon Discover is the experimental new frontend in the Muon Suite. It was written by Aleix Pol Gonzalez as part of his employment at Blue Systems, and it’s pretty nifty. You can read more about it here.The idea is to create a Muon frontend that makes finding new software super-simple, and doing so with a little bit of flair. It’s no secret, that even though the existing Muon Software Center has some “bling” here and there, the interface is somewhat spartan.

Muon Discover will eventually replace the Muon Software Center, but not just yet. Muon Discover is young, and its interface is written entirely in QML. KDE has not issued a set of comprehensive UI guidelines for QML usage on the desktop, and currently Muon Discover is using the Plasma QML components for several of the controls in its interface. While we wait for a set of guidelines, the classic Muon Software Center will remain the default application installer, allowing Muon Discover to mature in the process. The QML Desktop Components (slated for release sometime around Qt 5.1 or 5.2, or so I have heard rumored) and KDE Frameworks 5 will likely be a big part of KDE’s QML standardization, so expect Muon Discover to replace the Muon Software Center in around that time period.

Muon Software Center

With all the buzz around Muon Discover, you may think that nothing has been done with the Muon Software Center. Well, never fear, as there are several cool new features and user experience improvements that have been made for Muon Suite 1.4.

• Thanks to work done by Aleix, the Muon Software Center no longer has to reset the view back to the main page when it reloads the APT cache. This provides for a much smoother experience whilst installing multiple applications.
• A progress view has been added for displaying currently running and pending transaction.

• All Muon frontends now use the KDE proxy, if set. (Before it only used the system proxy and APT proxy settings) Priority goes: KDE proxy, APT proxy, system proxy.
• Additional pages of application reviews can be fetched now.
• A busy throbber has been added to the main page to provide feedback during launch.
• Application views can now be sorted by Name, Rating, Buzz and search relevancy.

• By popular request, non-application packages can be toggled for application views. (Though you’re still probably better off using the Muon Package Manager for package management.)

• Ratings are cached locally so they can be accessed in the absence of an internet connection.

Muon Package Manager

The Muon Package Manager has not been forgotten, either. Highlights for the 1.4 release mainly include tools for better handling Multi-Arch packages on 64-bit systems.

• By default, when a package is available for both the native and foreign CPU architectures, only the native package is shown. Installed packages of any architecture are shown. This means no more duplication of most every single package in the archive polluting the Muon package view.
• A new architecture filter has been added, allowing you to filter packages by their architecture.

• The new Debian package categories “Education” and “Introspection” have been added to Muon’s category filters.
• A package’s archive component is now displayed in the technical details tab. (E.g. universe, main for Ubuntu packages)

Muon Update Manager

• Technical package items in the “System Updates” category are now displayed by their package name, as the description is not always descriptive enough.

Changelogs

Detailed changelogs for LibQApt and Muon can be found here and here, respectively.

A few weeks ago, I pinged my peeps on #twisted asking why the banner for a custom SSH server wasn't rendering properly. After some digging around and some inconsistent results (well, consistently bad results for me), we weren't able to resolve anything, and I had to set the problem aside.

The Symptom
The first thing I had tried was subclassing Manhole from twisted.conch.manhole, overriding (and up-calling) connectionMade, writing the banner to the terminal upon successful connection. This didn't work, so I then tried overriding initializeScreen by subclassing twisted.conch.recvline.RecvLine. Also a no-go. And by "didn't work" here's what I mean:

In both Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, gnome-terminal) and Mac (OS X 10.6.8, Terminal.app), after a successful login to the Twisted SSH server, the following sequence would occur:

1. an interactive Python prompt was rendered, e.g., ":>>"
2. the banner was getting written to the terminal, and
3. the terminal screen refreshed with the prompt at the top

Discovery!
Some time last week, I put together example Twisted plugins showing what the problem was, and the circumstances under which a banner simply didn't get rendered. The idea was that I would provide some bare-bones test cases that demonstrated where the problem was occurring, post them to IRC or the Twisted mail list, and we could finally get it resolved. 'Cause, ya know, I really want my banners ...

While tweaking the second Twisted plugin example, I finally poked my head into the right method and discovered the issue. Here's what's happening:

• twisted.conch.recvline.RecvLine.connectionMade calls t.c.recvline.RecvLine.initializeScreen
• t.c.recvline.RecvLine.initializeScreen does a terminal.reset, writes the prompt, and then switches to insert mode. But this is a red herring. Since something after initializeScreen is causing the problem, we really need to be asking "who's calling connectionMade?"
• t.c.manhole_ssh.TerminalSession.openShell is what kicks it off when it calls the transportFactory (which is really TerminalSessionTransport)
• openShell takes one parameter, proto -- this is very important :-)
• openShell instantiates TerminalSessionTransport
• TerminalSessionTransport does one more thing after calling the makeConnection method on an insults.ServerProtocol instance (the one I had tried overriding without success), and as such, this is the prime suspect for what was preventing the banner from being properly displayed: it calls  chainedProtocol.terminalProtocol.terminalSize
• chainedProtocol is an insults.ServerProtocol instance, and its terminalProtocol attribute is set when ServerProtocol.connectionMade is called.
• A quick check reveals that terminalProtocol is none other than the proto parameter passed to openShell.

But what is proto? Some debugging (and the fact that of the three terminalSize methods in all of twisted, only one is an actual implementation) reveals that proto is a RecvLine instance. Reading that method uncovers the culprit in our whodunnit:  the first thing the method does is call terminal.eraseDisplay.

Bingo! (And this is what I was referring to above when I said "poked my head" ...)

Since this was called after all of my attempts to display a banner using both connectionMade and initializeScreen, there's no way my efforts would have succeeded.

Here's What You Do
How do you get around this? Easy! Subclass :-)

The class  TerminalSessionTransport in t.c.manhole_ssh is the bad boy that calls terminalSize (which calls eraseDisplay). It's the last thing that TerminalSessionTransport does in its __init__, so if we subclass it, and render our banner at the end of our __init__, we should be golden. And we are :-)

You can see an example of this here.

Not sure if this sort of thing is better off in projects that make use of Twisted, or if it would be worth while to add this feature to Twisted itself. Time (and blog comments) will tell.

Epilogue
As is evident from the screenshot above (and the link), this feature is part of the DreamSSH project. There are a handful of other nifty features/shortcuts that I have implemented in DreamSSH (plus some cool ones that are coming) and I'm using them in projects that need a custom SSH server. I released the first version of DreamSSH last night, and there's a pretty clear README on the github project page.

One of the niftier things I did last night in preparation for the release was to dig into Twisted plugins and override some behaviour there. In order to make sure that the conveniences I had provided for devs with the Makefile were available for anyone who had DreamSSH installed, I added subcommands... but if the service was already running, these would fail. How to work around that (and other Twisted plugin tidbits) are probably best saved for another post, though :-)

This week's episode talks about the start to the Quetzal cycle, mentions some brainstorm ideas the host put towards the Xubuntu team, and asks what the members of the Ohio LoCo plan to do this cycle.

Download here (MP3) (ogg), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. Although we suggest subscribing by way of a service like my.gpodder.org, you can also subscribe to the Burning Circle via FeedBurner's email tool to receive show posts in your inbox with links to episode audio.

Burning Circle Episode 70 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

After far far too long (my bad), the Ubuntu Forums has a theme that matches the Ubuntu branding.

To use the new theme, select Ubuntu from the selection box on the lower left hand corner of any forums page. I hope to see it as the default theme soon.

We will still looking at upgrading the forums to the vB4 series, which has a mobile theme that will be a great benefit to our users, plus other new features.

Thank everyone for there patience, and if you find a bug in the new theme be sure to file a bug.

When I set an alarm, my clock, now running on the computer in my pocket, is smart enough to tell me how much time will pass until the alarm is scheduled to sound. This has eliminated the old problem of sleeping past meetings before being surprised by an alarm precisely half a day after I had originally planned to wake.

The price has been having to know exactly how little I will sleep: a usually depressing fact that had previously been obscured by my difficulty doing time arithmetic in my most somnolent moments.

I3→I2→I1→SI2→SI1→VS2→VS1→VVS2→VVS1→IF→FL

The GIA diamond clarity scale, shown above, is rather opaque.

In the Ubuntu world we have some common values that are not just focused on freedom, but also in how we build Ubuntu. Values such as cadence, design, quality and precision help guide us in building the best Ubuntu that we can.

These values continued to be common themes at the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit in California. Today our culture continues to involve important integration work that is a rich and interesting challenge, but this work has also been augmented by us building assurances around Ubuntu too; assurances such as regular releases (cadence), the reliability and quality of the experience (quality), and attention to detail in both design and engineering (precision) are all examples of the strong balance of predictability and innovation that we want to bring.

These values are not limited to Ubuntu though: we want Ubuntu to be a platform where you can get the very best software experience, whether you are using Open Source or commercial applications. In a nutshell, we want to take the lessons we have been learning regarding cadence, design, quality and precision and share them with our upstreams. This is going to be a big chunk of what Michael Hall will be focusing on in the coming months.

One upstream project though that I am actively involved in in my spare time is Ubuntu Accomplishments and I wanted to share some of our plans surrounding our next 0.2 release and how these values are forming an important core of this work. Before I continue though, I just want to say a huge thank-you to everyone who has been participating in Ubuntu Accomplishments. Ever since our 0.1 release a few weeks ago we have had over 180 people start using this very early PPA and a number of people have started contributing accomplishments. Thanks to all of you!

Quality

With the expanded number of accomplishments being contributed, I started thinking last week about how we could perform better testing around these contributions as well as daily testing reports; I wanted to ensure that our project, even though we are very young and small, demonstrates a level of quality that we can be proud of. To kick this off, this weekend I wrote a small tool called battery that helps us assure quality. I created a validation test for every accomplishment and battery runs all the accomplishments and feeds them this data that will cause an accomplishment to succeed as well as fail. This serves a few valuable purposes:

• We now have better testing for new contributions and we can test both success and failure more effectively.
• We can build testing into the accomplishment submission process so that when someone contributes an accomplishment we will ask them to also submit a test file (the test file is extremely simple and just specifies data used for success and data used for failure). This should take a contributor ten seconds to put together.
• Finally, we can now run battery in an automated environment every day and have it alert us when one of the tests fails. This gives us better visibility on our accomplishments collections to ensure that we can assure quality and resolve issues quickly.

As an important part of building good design into the system, battery was designed to not require any changes to the existing accomplishments sets and require a bare minimum from our contributors who should be spending more time having fun writing accomplishments than caring about tests. I am delighted with the results.

The Road To 0.2

In addition to helping to ensure the accomplishment contribution process is simple (see our list of ideas for accomplishments and how to create them), we have been planning the 0.2 release. This will continue to focus on refinements and building a strong, reliable platform for both community and local accomplishments.

We will be focusing on the following in the 0.2 cycle:

• Local Accomplishment Support – in 0.1 we focused our efforts primarily on community accomplishments (that is, accomplishments that need to be verified). Although we have always supported local accomplishments (these are accomplishments on your computer such as installing a package for the first time or sending your first email), this local support was a little broken in 0.1. I have already landed a branch from Rafal that fixes these bugs, using GNOME Mines as the test application. We will continue to refine this support.
• Daemon and API Refinements – this won’t be visible to the user but we are planning a raft of API improvements to ensure that the back-end daemon is precise and high quality. This requires some functional changes, API naming conventions, standardizing on accomplishment IDs and other improvements.
• Growing Ubuntu Community Accomplishments – we plan on continuing to grow and expand the Ubuntu Community Accomplishments collection. We need help though, and that help could come from you! If you know a little Python and want to help our community, be sure to let me know! You can also join our IRC channel at #ubuntu-accomplishments.
• Introducing Ubuntu Desktop Accomplishments – we plan on introducing our first set of desktop accomplishments that can be used with the local accomplishments feature in the system. This will help us to start mapping out an awesome journey for how ours users use the desktop, discover things to do, and more!

It was wonderful to see the excitement and interest around Ubuntu Accomplishments at UDS, and I am excited to see where the project can take us. If you want to join us, be sure to join the mailing list and/or join us on IRC on freenode in #ubuntu-accomplishments.

Last day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Quantal! It’s always a bittersweet day, we’re all so terribly exhausted from the week but it’s also the last day for many of us to see people we only see once or twice a year. Like other days, my day started off with the Community Roundtable.

– Community Roundtable -

Started asking about UDS for first timers and what changes we can make to make it easier for them, clearer instructions about reimbursements, travel arrangements and scheduling. Then there was some discussion about using Etherpad Lite next time with chat integration rather than IRC. Quickly touched upon what kind of statistics are available for determining how many systems are out there using Ubuntu, there were several types of statistics discussed (iso downloads, updates, support resource usage) and wrapped up by taking a look at the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Operating Systems.

- Expanding the isotracker testcase management capabilities -

The session started off with a review of the current capabilities of the Ubuntu Testing Tracker, it’s used for ISO testing and links to a wiki for test cases. Reviewed some of the technical details of changes (database schema updates, where to allow modifications, test case ids). There was also some discussion about permissions, who can add test cases (including representatives from other flavors) and do other limited tasks.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

- IRC Workshops -

We have one of these during each UDS to plan out Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu App Developer Week and more IRC workshops. This session was a bit different as we discussed ways to expand this beyond the medium of IRC into other formats. There have been some experiments in the past with ustream and the like for a class on Inkscape, but now with the launch of Google Hangouts On Air for everyone we’re really excited about the possibility for making one of the workshop days into one where we use that instead. I still prefer IRC myself as it’s low-bandwidth, has searchable logs (rather than just an archived youtube video) and can be glanced at while at work, but it’s certainly not for everyone. It should be an interesting experiment this cycle.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Lightning talks, including Partimus and Accessibility installer.

- Accessibility Community Team Plans -

Reviewed some of the successes of the Precise release, including accessible strings on the indicators, ability to determine wifi signal strength and installer improvements. In this next cycle they would like to focus on improvements to Unity 3D since development of Unity 2D is very likely to be discontinued. They are seeking new contributors throughout the Accessibility project, including in testing and bug triage. I volunteered to help via Ubuntu Women and there was some brainstorming about how to get other people without disabilities can become attracted to contributing.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

- Etherpad Lite Summit integration -

In this session the proposal to use Etherpad Lite was put forward and there was a test instance running for us to to try. This new etherpad has built in chat, so it could potentially be what is projected by default in each room rather than a full screen IRC window, so you would be able to see chat in the etherpad and the etherpad too. Much of the session focused on logistics of replacement of the current Etherpad and access controls (log in to summit?). The demonstration showed that the mobile access was event quite usable on Android. We also had someone from IRC come on via Google hangout on the second screen in the room to show off what we could do since we’re not using a screen for IRC and a screen for the etherpad.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

Sessions wrapped up at 5PM and we all headed to the final wrap-up talks for the summit by the track leads. Then it was off to the “California Dreamin’ Beach Party” themed end party. In a change of pace, instead of having attendees handle entertainment they ended up bringing in an outside band to do it, The Spazmatics. It was a lot of fun, and MJ came out so I was able to introduce him to a bunch of people.

And with that, UDS was over for another 6 months! I had a really great time being a local, talked to lots of people I wouldn’t otherwise talk to. Thanks everyone!

I’ve uploaded my photos from the week here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157629702430040/

Full Circle Magazine – Ubuntu development Special Edition

The single-topic Special Editions continue with Daniel Holbach’s behind-the-scenes run-through of the Ubuntu Development Process; the collected articles parts 1 through 4

Go get it from: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ubuntu-development-special-edition/

Note: the file-size for this edition is 7.6Mb

There are many great choices in the tablet market today, with the main contenders being the iPad 3, the Asus Transformer Prime, and the Kindle Fire. Today I am going to share my experiences with an alternative that I found very fun and functional in it’s own right: The Acer Iconia A510 10.1 Inch Tablet

Linux Biased

I wanted to preface this by sharing that I am a Ubuntu Linux user, and as such there were several reasons why an Android based tablet makes more sense. Developers will find the iPad impossible to develop for unless you own a Mac. In addition, music collections are designed to work through iTunes, which besides the clumsy interface, becomes a pain if you and your family want to store music libraries on multiple computers. Apple also enforces policies which prevent common sense features like Amazon actually having a link to it’s own store in the Kindle application.

Specifications

• 10.1” HD Multi-Touch Display: (1280 x 800) resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio
• Android™ 4.0 Operating System (Ice Cream Sandwich)
• NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad Core (1.3GHz)
• 1GB DDR2 Memory
• 32GB internal storage

Usage

The default Ice Cream Sandwich load with the Acer customizations works well and is fluid. Reading books using the Kindle application works great, and I found it substantially easier to read technical books on it’s 10.1″ screen vs. the Kindle Fire’s 7″ screen. The Tegra 3 itself is a very powerful 3d graphics unit, and I was able to run Grand Theft Auto 3 on it with complete smoothness and great graphics, while still receiving Google mail and Facebook messages. I wasn’t expecting the Acer to be so powerful, and was pleasantly surprised.

Battery Life

The battery life on this tablet is what sets it apart from the pack, with between 10 and 13 hours depending on usage. I wasn’t able to find another 10.1″ tablet which could compare with this across the board.

Size

The Iconia feels nice to hold, although it is definitely thicker than many of it’s competitors. I have no problem holding it while reading a ebook etc, and the weight makes it feel more robust. Having the extra screen real estate makes a big difference for PDF documents, along with applications designed with these tablets in mind.

Other Features

The Iconia comes with built in cameras which work very well, GPS, Bluetooth and an SD card slot.

Conclusion

Acer has designed a surprisingly good tablet that can compete with any on the market today. With it’s powerful tegra 3 graphics and best in class battery, it can go with you and stay on through long trips and varied workloads. It’s a great time for Linux across the board.

Related posts:

1. Ubuntu 12.04 and the HP Envy 15

Yesterday, during the final UDS party, I had an idea to improve Ubuntu development, but I didn't know if it could be a good idea or a stupid one, so I talked to Daniel Holbach and David Planella about it and they were happy to hear about it and Daniel told me to talk about this directly to Mark (and I did it).

Let's explain the basic idea. From an UDS and the next one, it would be useful to have a development sprint where people can talk about assigned UDS blueprints, at which point they are on their tasks, if they have any problems and if they will finish them within the next UDS. Of course Canonical cannot organize another meeting, it would be very expensive, so the idea is: why don't we use Google Hangout to organize the sprint? I has a limit of 10 people, I know, but we could select (for example) 5 from the community and 5 from Canonical. There would be parallel meeting and tracks, we would use the same blueprints used during the last UDS and we would add further notes. The attendees would be able to listen and watch the stream and make questions through the available chat.

I don't want to write more details here because I don't think it's the right place (and probably it's not the moment to write a similar blog post, since I'm still in th SFO Airport), my idea is to create a wiki page to explain all the details, so everyone would be able to add more ideas and see if it's doable or not.

So, what do you think about? I think we should try, it doesn't cost anything except some hours in the week we'll organize it. I wait for your comments then.

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