Planet Ubuntu

Collin Pruitt: Weatherman Freaking Out Over DC Snowpocalypse

2010-02-10T01:10:58+00:00

Weatherman Freaking Out Over DC Snowpocalypse
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Jani Monoses: Help ponies and unicorns!

janimo — 2010-02-10T01:00:58+00:00

Here's a request for some armchair activism that takes about 2 minutes.

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.

Using Google App Engine and with my Web 2.0 design skills cranked up to eleven I made an app that helps a Google Account owner quickly send an email to each representative of her/his country, because asking MEPs to sign is the most effective way of making them aware of Declaration 54/2009.

http://horse-ride.appspot.com/

The usual copy pasting of email bodies and Cc: lists from .doc and .xls documents takes a bit more time and likely constitutes a too high barrier for many except those really into a certain cause. There is a time and place for opportunistic activism as well, and it is nice to have tools automating the boring parts.

The deadline is tomorrow and a few dozens of MEPs still need to sign.

Guy Van Sanden: RE: is-canonical-becoming-the-new-microsoft

2010-02-09T23:29:14+00:00

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.

The Fridge: An Interview With Jono

2010-02-09T22:49:31+00:00

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

Jono Bacon: Social From The Start

2010-02-09T22:13:49+00:00

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.

Brian Murray: Ubuntu on an HP Touchsmart tm2

2010-02-09T21:33:52+00:00

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!

Jorge Castro: Global Jam

jcastro — 2010-02-09T20:58:37+00:00

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!

Martin-Éric Racine: OpenOffice's style editing dialogs suck!

Martin-Éric — 2010-02-09T20:34:13+00:00

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?

Joe Barker: An Interview With Jono

Joe — 2010-02-09T19:48:31+00:00