Planet Ubuntu

Tiago Hillebrandt: New Ubuntu Brazilian Community Council announced

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:11:54 +0000

Ubuntu Brazilian Community is proud to announce your new Community Council:

Andre Noel: http://launchpad.net/~andrenoel
Ayrton Araújo: http://launchpad.net/~ayrton
Fábio Nogueira: http://launchpad.net/~fnogueira
Tiago Hillebrandt: http://launchpad.net/~tiagohillebrandt

It’s really a big honor for me become a part of Brazilian Council. Now I look forward to continue learning and applying great ideas to support the growth of Ubuntu Community! Thank you to all.

Jono Bacon: Canonical Community Team Meeting – 7th Feb 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:35:35 +0000

Minutes are available here.

Jonathan Riddell: KDE at FOSDEM 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:15:56 +0000

At the end of a long day here are some photos from KDE at FOSDEM 2012. Pradeepto says "3.24 AM here, am in office, those pictures made my day/night/whatever itis now".

KDE Love as Claudia sells t-shirts

Paul demos KDE Software on every form factor: mobile, tablet, desktop, Windows, cloud and server.

Corridor chat with Frank

Cross-Desktop room group photo (missing lots of people who were at other talks)

KDE dinner - had to turn away quite a lot of people who were too late to get a seat. I may be concussed but I'm still able to herd KDE cats better than anyone else did.

A business man pose from Paul

Lydia Launches the Open Advice book on which I am a contributing author

FOSDEM reminded me why I love KDE, great people and friends working on great technology.

Ubuntu Kernel Team: [Precise] linux kernel 3.2.0-15.24 uploaded (ABI Bump)

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:14:41 +0000

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

* Rebase to upstream stable v3.2.5
* Enable CONFIG_THERM_ADT746X=y
* acer-wmi: support for P key on TM8372

The full changelog can be seen at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.2.0-15.24

Harald Sitter: How Kubuntu Did Not Change

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:53:57 +0000

There appears to be some confusion regarding the meaning of yesterday’s announcement that Kubuntu 12.04 is going to be the last release Canonical is offering commercial support for.

For those who have not yet read about it, let me quickly recap the situation. Up until now Kubuntu was a Canonical supported flavor of Ubuntu. This essentially means that you can buy a support contract from Canonical to help you with your Kubuntu infrastructure. Every once in a while Canonical would stamp ‘LTS’ on a Kubuntu release to indicate that they would support this release for 3 or 5 of years to come (delivering security and major bug fixes primarily). The upcoming 12.04 will be the last release for which Canonical offers these services. As a direct consequence Jonathan Riddell, a good friend of mine and fearless leader of Kubuntu, will work on other technology during work hours.

You might have noticed that I was writing a lot about Canonical just now, and the reason for this is that the change mostly is about Canonical and not Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is and always has been a mostly community driven project. To give you an idea what mostly means in this case: out of the 25 people who notably contributed in the past year, 1 person was employed by Canonical to do so (i.e. 4% of general Kubuntu work was financed by Canonical). Please do not get me wrong though. Jonathan is a great developer and does a considerable amount of work, particularly in those areas where the community currently lacks motivation, hence some workflow revision is in order to make the ‘new’ Kubuntu equally efficient.

So what changes for real?

No commercial support from Canonical past 12.04.
Jonathan Riddell will work on non-Kubuntu stuff during work hours.
Alignment of Kubuntu with other siblings like Edubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu.
For those who care: on a technical level this means that a considerable amount of Kubuntu maintained software will be moved from the main to the universe archive.
Probably some workflow changes that are yet to be discussed.

Is this bad?
It probably is if you wanted to adopt Kubuntu in your company and were counting on a Canonical support contract. However this is probably more of Canonical’s loss than your’s. As noted earlier there is a pool of more than 25 people one could employ directly to get the same result, perhaps even better. It is certainly sad that Jonathan will not be able to continue getting payed for working on his baby though.

Is this good?
Moving to universe bares a great deal of opportunities for Kubuntu. Primarily it gives the community yet bigger control over what the distribution looks like as we do not need to get software approved to be worthy of Canonical’s support. At the same time it also reduces the policy overhead (main inclusion for those who have heared of it). The detanglement allows us to move even closer to KDE without having to worry about conflicting interests, as what is good for KDE is not necessarily what is good for Canonical.
All in all I expect Kubuntu to become more agile and continue to regularly deliver an easy to use Linux distribution featuring the latest and greatest KDE software.

There is an occasional and not very amusing urban myth that Kubuntu is a stepchild of Ubuntu based on the idea that Canonical is not giving the same amount of care to Kubuntu as other flavors of Ubuntu. It’s not true because Canonical has given much more care to Kubuntu than many other flavours. But all those who believe in this myth may now rejoice as the stepchild is moving out and going to share a flat with its much loved siblings \o/

Ubuntu Kernel Team: Kernel Team Meeting Minutes – February 7, 2012

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:30:28 +0000

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20120207 Meeting Agenda

ARM Status

UUID support: Found a way to support an initrd-less kernel using GPT, an hybrid mbr and the ROOTUUID boot parameter, kernel seems to be good already.
lp709245 (“ARM SMP scheduler performance bug”): Still bisecting latest P kernel trying to find where the fix for this issue has been embedded in the TI BSP – whenever i turn on the the corresponding upstream errata (PL310_ERRATA_769419) the kernel hangs on boot, so there must be a previous patch clashing in there. Now i’m down to a ~160 commits window.
P/omap4: Nothing new 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

Milestone Targeted Work Items

If your name is in the above table, please review your Beta-1 work items.

apw	hardware-p-kernel-boot	2 work items
	hardware-p-kernel-config-review	3 work items
	hardware-p-kernel-delta-review	2 work items
ogasawara	hardware-p-kernel-config-review	4 work items
sconklin	servercloud-p-ceph	1 work item
tgardner	hardware-p-kernel-delta-review	1 work item

Blueprint: hardware-p-kernel-power-management

Power Management:

CPU governor testing (Intel only) (will test AMD CPUs later)

http://zinc.canonical.com/~cking/power-benchmarking/cpu-governor/results.txt

Status: Precise Development Kernel

Last week we rebased to v3.2.4 and uploaded. We’ve recently rebased to v3.2.5 and plan to upload shortly. Note that Beta-1 is on the horizon with Beta Freeze approximately 2 weeks away. We’ll be prepping our Beta-1 kernel next week. If there are any patches which need to land, submit them now.
I’d like to also note that we’ve opened the Q git repo for anyone interested (git://kernel.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-q.git). At this time, it is strictly for development/testing purposes only and will not be supported until Q officially opens in the archive.
Important upcoming dates:

Thurs Feb 23 – Beta Freeze (~2 weeks)
Thurs Mar 01 – Beta 1

Status: CVE’s

Currently we have 73 CVEs on our radar, six new CVEs were added this week.
See the CVE matrix for the current list:

Overall we have pushed the backlog down by approximatly 2 CVEs this week:

We have also pushed another CVE back to security for review. This backlog
is increasing.

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

Here is the status for the main kernels, until today (Jan. 24):

Hardy – 2.6.24-30.98

Nothing new this cycle.

Lucid – 2.6.32-38.85

Proposed is frozen due to 10.04.4 prep.

Maverick – 2.6.35-32.65

Regression testing.

Natty – 2.6.38-13.55

Regression testing.

Oneiric – 3.0.0-16.27

Regression testing.

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/PrecisePangolin/ReleaseInterlock

Open Discussion or Questions? Raise your hand to be recognized

OK, Thanks everyone

Chris Johnston: Linaro Connect Q1.12 – Day 1

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:25:04 +0000

Yesterday was day one of Linaro Connect Q1.12. This was a very productive day of meeting people that I will be working with on LAVA, as well as other people throughout Linaro. I attended a couple of sessions during the morning, but I didn’t have anything noteworthy come out of them at this point. During the afternoon I worked with the Validation team in their hack session and was able to get LAVA running locally on my laptop and imported a bundle stream from Linaro’s LAVA setup.

Throughout the day I also did some work on Summit, pushing a couple of fixes and a new IRC link feature to Launchpad. While in the hacking session I met with Andy Doan and discussed the future of the Linaro Connect Android app, and we managed to get out a bug fix for it.

On day 2 I hope to do some more work with LAVA, hopefully figuring out how to play with the results that are displayed in the dashboard.

Martin Pitt: fatrace: report system wide file access events

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:53:05 +0000

Part of our efforts to reduce power consumption is to identify processes which keep waking up the disk even when the computer is idle. This already resulted in a few bug reports (and some fixes, too), but we only really just began with this.

Unfortunately there is no really good tool to trace file access events system-wide. powertop claims to, but its output is both very incomplete, and also wrong (e. g. it claims that read accesses are writes). strace gives you everything you do and don’t want to know about what’s going on, but is per-process, and attaching strace to all running and new processes is cumbersome. blktrace is system-wide, but operates at a way too low level for this task: its output has nothing to do any more with files or even inodes, just raw block numbers which are impossible to convert back to an inode and file path.

So I created a little tool called fatrace (“file access trace”, not “fat race” ) which uses fanotify, a couple of /proc lookups and some glue to provide this. By default it monitors the whole system, i. e. all mounts (except the virtual ones like /proc, tmpfs, etc.), but you can also tell it to just consider the mount of the current directory. You can write the log into a file (stdout by default), and run it for a specified number of seconds. Optional time stamps and PID filters are also provided.

$ sudo fatrace
rsyslogd(967): W /var/log/auth.log
notify-osd(2264): O /usr/share/pixmaps/weechat.xpm
compiz(2001): R device 8:2 inode 658203
[...]

It shows the process name and pid, the event type (Rread, Write, Open, or Close), and the path. Sometimes its’ not possible to determine a path (usually because it’s a temporary file which already got deleted, and I suspect mmaps as well), in that case it shows the device and inode number; such programs then need closer inspection with strace.

If you run this in gnome-terminal, there is an annoying feedback loop, as gnome-terminal causes a disk access with each output line, which then causes another output line, ad infinitum. To fix this, you can either redirect output to a file (-o /tmp/trace) or ignore the PID of gnome-terminal (-p `pidof gnome-terminal`).

So to investigate which programs are keeping your disk spinning, run something like

  $ sudo fatrace -o /tmp/trace -s 60

and then do nothing until it finishes.

My next task will be to write an integration program which calls fatrace and powertop, and creates a nice little report out of that raw data, sorted by number of accesses and process name, and all that. But it might already help some folks as it is right now.

The code lives in bzr branch lp:fatrace (web view), you can just run make and sudo ./fatrace. I also uploaded a package to Ubuntu Precise, but it still needs to go through the NEW queue. I also made a 0.1 release, so you can just grab the release tarball if you prefer. Have a look at the manpage and --help, it should be pretty self-explanatory.

Manish Sinha: Privacy and Activity Manager (Zeitgeist) Release

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:58:19 +0000

We all love privacy and we take it seriously. Most of the people whom I have met are pretty much vigilant about their data and which makes complete sense to have a tool which can you can use to fine tune your privacy settings. Till now most of our experience with Privacy Settings are related to Facebook which makes me feel like

Layman control center?

If you are a Zeitgeist user, it is pretty expected to expect a Privacy application. Yes, we have it. Today we are releasing it. The first release was a hastily assembled up together application using pygtk (gtk2) which served it’s purpose well for the time being.

Older version of Activity Log Manager

Soon it was decided in Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando that Activity Log Manager will be included in Ubuntu Precise to provide greater privacy controls to user. We improved the looks based on the design provided by the Canonical Design Team.

The interface was kept as simple as possible. This first release lacks a few things as of now and some more UI polish is pending including localization support. Both of them will land sooner.

It has been integrated in Gnome Control Panel (which works only on Ubuntu). In distributions where it cannot integrate in Control Panel, it runs as a standalone application.

Here is how it looks

Entry in GNOME Control Center

Blacklisting Applications

Files and Folder blacklisting

Activity Log Manager History tab with the Icon

The Zeitgeist Team worked on it and ported the application to gtk3 and vala in a few weeks which was a pleasure (and I finally learnt vala. Finally!)

Geeky Juice:

The release is named “Friendly Dolphin” 0.9.0 and can be downloaded from here.

This application would be made available in Ubuntu Precise soon.

If you are building it yourself and want Control Center integration, then pass –with-ccpanel to the configure script.

./configure --with-ccpanel

This would work on all the Linux distributions which derive from Ubuntu and don’t change the gnome-control-center packaging since this integration relies on a Ubuntu specific patch for control center.

Please log any bugs which you come across. To make sure that we are able to help you, please provide detailed explanation of what led to the issue. You can file your bugs here

Nathan Haines: Ubuntu Hour Lake Forest, February 9

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:54:35 +0000

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, February 9, 2012, 6pm - 7pm
Thursday, February 23, 2012, 6pm - 7pm

Location

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

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.

Dustin Kirkland: Gazzang Presents: Sh*t IT Security Guys Say

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin Kirkland) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:48:04 +0000

We had a blast at the Gazzang offices last week shooting this fun video, Sh*t IT Security Guys Say. What a great way to kick back and have a little fun on a Friday afternoon ;-)

We worked with Austin filmmaker Brandon Stephens who took some time away from work on his feature film, Enemy of the Mind, to hack on this little project. Our CEO Larry Warnock (Mr. Backdoor) called the shots and our new Marketing Director, David Tishgart (Mr. Redbull) handled the script. Also featured in the short: Ben First (Marketing, aka Mr. ), Liz Britain (Marketing, aka Ms. Slashdot), Rob Balena (Sales, aka Mr. Millennium Falcon), Sergio Pena (Mr. $*&%!#), Eddie Garcia (Engineering, aka Mr. IT), and I guess I'm Mr. Wingdings ;-)

As many of my fellow hackers, I predictably cringe when I watch a movie or a tv show and the hapless IT characters attempt to interface with a computer or discuss technology. The Matrix, The Net, Swordfish, whatever, it's all painful to hear. And funny enough, our little video is no different, and this time I actually share the blame :-) Most of our one-liners make no IT sense whatsoever. And while some of the one-liners I proposed made perfect IT/Security sense, but they just didn't play well on the screen.

In any case, for my hacker/dev/IT peeps, here's my full list of one-liners I proposed for our project:

- Right, RSA 4096 is definitely the way to go - Ubuntu or Fedora? - Did you read Bruce Schneier's post today? - Wow, check Slashdot! - Open a new terminal - Emacs or Vi? - Grab my public key - apt-get dist-upgrade - Sure, I encrypt my home directory - Hang on, I'm recompiling my kernel - PC Load letter???? The f*ck does that mean? - Yeah, I need to merge those changes - We're moving from MD5 to SHA512 hashes - Of course I've rooted my Android! - Chef or Puppet? - There's an XKCD about that :-) - Users, I swear...add it to the FAQ - Buffer overflow, uh oh... - Python or Perl? Ruby!?! -- you gotta be kidding me :-( - You don't have to forward me that email. I've already seen it. You don't use email encryption :-) - Would you sign my public key? - Fire up an instance in EC2 - My kernel oops'd - TCP or UDP? - There's not enough entropy on this friggin machine! - You haven't rooted your phone? - No open access points? I see 12 running WEP. Give me a minute... Okay, I'm in. - Where's your public key? - Drop that in a pastebin - Okay, I have it. What's your fingerprint? - Java or C++? - What do you think of Unity? - OpenStack or Eucalyptus? - Check StackExchange - Shit, not another core dump...

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it!

Cheers!
:-Dustin

Clay Weber: Kubuntus Future is still a Blue one

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:22:37 +0000

Today Jonathan Riddell announced that our favorite Linux distro will no longer have the same support that it has had for almost its entire history.

It is very sad news to hear that Kubuntu will no longer have the “Official” status it has had for many years.

But what exactly does this mean? What will the future bring for the Blue Gears?

I really don’t know yet precisely what the changes will be, that may take some time to fully flesh out. But I doubt it. The Kubuntu team is already mostly independent, run mostly with its own personality and ideals that stem from those of Ubuntu. The concept of a highly KDE-centric Linix distribution is still a vital and valid one, one that attracted me back in 2005 when my previous distro was killed off.

Kubuntu ain’t going anywhere any time soon. We already have a wonderfully friendly forum :D We have all the hard working packaging Ninjas. We have a large, broad range of users all over the world. We will still be a KDE showcase. We will still have the same set of awesome volunteers. We still have the will and means to do what we are already doing.

What will see change is the level of help from YOU, the user and developer community. Some of us will have to ante up and kick it into a higher gear. New contributors will be sought and welcomed. Things will move on, yet i do not foresee any upheavals or intense drama.

Yes, I am trying to pep up some unfortunately bad news. We have a great platform to continue working on, so we continue to work on it. It isn’t too hard to find the positive amongst all the goodness.

I do want to thank Canonical for providing Jonathan and the Kubuntu community with the resources it has for so long. KDE has benefited imo from the adoption of Kubuntu by its wide range of users, and Canonical and Ubuntu have provided the means for this occur.

Go Blue!!!!

Filed under: planetubuntu

Richard Johnson: Kubuntu Is Not Dead

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:16:30 +0000

Kubuntu is not dead, it is in fact just as alive today as it was last month. Those of you who are posting things like, “Time to jump ship” or “Kubuntu is dead“, where do you get your facts? Did you happen to read Jonathan’s blog post? Where in there does it say that Kubuntu is dead? Why jump ship? Why jump ship to another distro that is only supported by a few instead of a larger community? I don’t get your logic, and truthfully, saying things like I have read thus far, is nothing more than childish at best. The worst part is that so-called journalists are writing such things, and not just mindless or thoughtless people. I saw one site change the title of their post because they were fact checked by Jonathan in a comment.

Did you know that the 11.10 release of Kubuntu was damn near 100% a community effort? Did you know that Jonathan switched rolls during that release to work on bzr and not Kubuntu (which is something I wish more companies would do, that being allow their employees to move around to try different jobs). Did you know that pretty much every release has happened because of the volunteer community more so than Canonical?

Canonical is not stopping Kubuntu, they are stopping the funding. Stopping the funding doesn’t mean that Kubuntu is dead. If you support the idea that Kubuntu is dead because of this, then damn near every distribution that you want to jump ship to is also dead.

Jumping ship in a time like this equates to nothing more than a slap in the face of everyone who has worked their asses off to offer to you, free in every sense of the word, Kubuntu. Remember, Jonathan was the only paid Kubuntu developer, everyone else did it for free. Don’t disrespect their hard work with your flawed logic.

And if you still believe Kubuntu is dead, why don’t you hop on IRC and join #kubuntu-devel. Does that look dead to you? Just this morning I saw the volunteers working on bugs and discussing updates and fixes for 12.04. Instead of giving up so quickly, why don’t you support the community? Let the developers know you appreciate their work, let them know your issues, help mold the future of Kubuntu.

Kubuntu Is Not Dead is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Marco Ceppi: Ask Ubuntu Moderator Town Hall Chat

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:33:01 +0000

If you wish to drill the candidates about their philosophies and get to know them better before you vote in the Ask Ubuntu Moderator Elections then join us for our Town Hall chat today! The chat will take place in the Ask Ubuntu Town Hall Chatroom at 21:00 UTC. I look forward to an informative town hall with all the candidates!

Canonical Design Team: Ubuntu sound theme design

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:14:35 +0000

If you’re as keen as we are that the Ubuntu sound theme is on brand, now is your chance! We are calling for pitches for the Ubuntu sound theme!

The brief

As Ubuntu expands onto new form factors, with an increasingly definitive visual identity and brand, it is important to ensure that the theme of Ubuntu is reflected in all aspects of the experience. The auditory experience of Ubuntu must be included in this theme to maintain an immersive environment and consistency with the brand.

These values are a key component of our brand and should form the basis for the sound theme.

Reliable
Collaborative
Freedom
Precise

Our brand values : http://design.ubuntu.com/values

Objective

To define an Ubuntu soundscape that compliments look, feel and brand and produce a library of assets required for implementation. Provide a guideline for the Ubuntu soundscape that will allow for extension by internal and external stakeholders.

Project requirements

The concept for the sound theme should reflect the requirements of all form factors. Concepts should therefore be explored through signature moments in the Ubuntu soundscape; with an opportunity to refine a desktop startup sound for the 12.04 release. The emergent sound theme should then be articulated and guidelined.

The first stage of this project is the pitch – the deadline is Monday the 13th of February.

The pitch

One desktop startup sound

This will be heard when the login screen (shown above) is ready for user interaction.
The device is coming alive, awakening.

One notification

This gives us a feel for how these sounds fit in a theme.
An example notification would be a calendar event.

Participants can submit as many sample sounds as they like, however the minimum requirement is one of each.

Feedback will be given by Wednesday 15th February, and we will work with the successful participant to refine the startup sound for the 12.04 release and continue to work with them on the development of the Ubuntu soundscape.

This is an open pitch, and we encourage everyone to participate; including, hopefully, some of you sound professionals out there!

Submissions should be sent to the Unity project manager Nick Tait -nick.tait@canonical.com subject “Sound Theme” in a folder entitled “firstnamelastname.zip”

For reference, the ideal length of the startup should be around 2 – 4 seconds, ogg format, 320kbps.

Some helpful links…

Design guidelines : http://design.ubuntu.com/
The Ubuntu tour : http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/take-the-tour
Brand values : http://design.ubuntu.com/values

Chris Coulson: Why Ubuntu is not using the Firefox ESR

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:41:54 +0000

Recently, a thread has appeared on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list asking why Ubuntu (or specifically, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) is not using the Extended Support Release of Firefox by default. I’ve also been asked this a few times on IRC over the last few weeks (from people inside and outside of Canonical), so I just wanted to clarify the reasoning for this, and why I think that our choice will offer the best experience for Ubuntu users.

Arguments against the ESR

Aside from the fact that offering the Firefox ESR by default to Ubuntu users would make our good friends at Mozilla unhappy (and from my perspective, we have a pretty good relationship with them. I certainly don’t want this to change), here are some reasons why I think that shipping the Firefox ESR by default would be bad for Ubuntu users. Some of these are points from the ESR proposal, and some of them are my own thoughts.

Over time, Firefox ESR will become less secure than Firefox

The ESR proposal states that:

Mozilla will backport security bugs qualified as “Critical” and “High” to the ESR where feasible (there may be cases where a backport cannot be applied with reasonable effort, and those cases are expected to be exceptional)

This means that people running the Firefox ESR may have to wait for the next major release to receive fixes for security bugs with sg:moderate, sg:low or sg:dos severity ratings. What is worse is that ESR users may also miss out on some sg:critical or sg:high rated bugs, where it is just not feasible to backport the fix to the ESR branch.

In addition to this, Firefox ESR users will have to wait longer than regular Firefox users for proactive security improvements such as support for the iframe sandbox attribute, CA pinning, the Mixed Content Blocker or any other new security features / improvements.

Because of this, the Firefox ESR will always become less secure than the regular Firefox releases.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users have already had to wait longer than Firefox users on other platforms for new security and privacy features such as Content Security Policy, HTTP Strict Transport Security and Do Not Track. We don’t want Ubuntu to lag behind other platforms in the future.

The risk of introducing bugs is greater with Firefox ESR

There is a common misconception that when a piece of software receives only reactive security fixes, it is the safest option for users and that the risk of breakage is minimal with this approach. In reality, this isn’t exactly true. There is always risk associated with backporting any form of code change from one branch to an older branch, and this risk increases as:

The 2 branches diverge further apart, making the backport less straightforward
The amount of testing exposure decreases

Clearly, the Firefox ESR will be affected by both of these factors.

The regular Firefox releases pass through the beta channel for 6 weeks before release, where they are exposed to a large community of users who are using the beta as their day-to-day browser. And, whilst the Linux testing community is relatively small (I would like to grow this though), we mustn’t take for granted the positive effects on quality that Ubuntu users get from Firefox beta testers across all platforms. The Firefox ESR will not benefit from this type of large scale pre-release exposure.

In my opinion, bug 667087 is a perfect example of how the ESR approach can lead to the introduction of bugs (this was a regression which only affected the 3.6 branch).

It is only supported for 1-year (well, 54 weeks, to be more exact)

The Firefox ESR is supported for 54 weeks (9 regular Firefox release cycles), with a 12-week (2-cycle) overlap. This means that it would be inevitable that we would have to upgrade users to a new version of Firefox ESR every year, if we provided this by default. Instead of small incremental changes every 6 weeks, users would be faced with much larger and more obvious changes every year. We believe this is generally worse for most users.

We have been following the new Firefox release process since Ubuntu 11.04, and users seem to have adapted to it quite well. Having just upgraded Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 10, we know that this scale of update is much more painful – for users and for us.

The web is not static

All of the major browser vendors are pushing new technologies on the web, and existing standards are constantly evolving. It is important that we provide Ubuntu users with a browser which keeps up with this, as users coming from competing platforms expect. In the time since Firefox 4 (which isn’t that dissimilar to the time between 2 ESR versions), Mozilla has added support for things such as the <bdi> element, page visibility API, Mozilla’s full screen API, CSS 3D transforms, CSS font-stretch property, cross-domain textures in WebGL, Web Timing, CSS hyphenation in languages other than English, HTML5 context menus and added a bunch of other improvements to IndexedDB, WebSockets, and canvas. Web developers and Firefox users on other platforms already have access to these features.

We don’t want Ubuntu users to regularly be the last people to have access to evolving technologies on the web, and I don’t think it’s great to say to them “if you want access to the latest web technologies like users on other platforms have, you need to upgrade your entire OS in 6 months or use this unsupported PPA instead”. It wouldn’t be good for Ubuntu if the function or appearance of our users favourite websites ends up being degraded by default on our flagship product, as the web evolves faster than the browser that we are shipping.

Until recently, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users have already been missing out on major technologies such as CSS transitions (which is used in some places in Google+), WebGL and WebM (available on YouTube) whilst we have been shipping Firefox 3.6 to them. In addition to this, Google have already effectively dropped support for Firefox 3.6, as have Flickr, and we have had reports from other people saying that some online banking sites have already bumped their minimum browser requirements beyond Firefox 3.6. As the web evolves faster, this type of thing may occur more frequently in the future (the alternatives to this are that web developers give themselves a hard time when trying to adopt new technologies by having to support fallbacks for older browsers, or innovation on the web just stagnates as developers are reluctant to adopt new features).

Over time, Firefox ESR will become slower than Firefox

In the same way that Firefox ESR will become less secure than Firefox, it will also become slower and less resource efficient than regular Firefox due to initiatives such as MemShrink, Snappy and continual work on improving performance in the JS engine.

Performance and memory consumption really matter to users, and these things can affect people’s perception of Ubuntu when they compare browser performance with browsers that are shipped on other platforms.

In addition to this, we offer the latest version of Chromium alongside Firefox in the Ubuntu archive. It would be bad for Mozilla for us to offer an outdated Firefox ESR against the very latest version of Chromium, as the difference in performance between the 2 can significantly influence our users perception of the quality of Mozilla’s product. I’m not the only person who thinks this:

I think it would hurt us competitively if Fedora or Ubuntu shipped ESR, because users or journalists would compare ESR with up-to-date Chrome

Arguments in favour of the ESR

Of course, other people have some good points about why the ESR might be a positive thing. I’ll list some of the more frequent points I hear, and explain why I disagree with them.

The Ubuntu LTS is for enterprise users

This isn’t true. Whilst it is true that enterprise users tend to stick with the LTS release for the longer period of support and less frequent upgrades between OS versions, the LTS is targeted and used by all types of users.

Users who stick with the LTS want stability. Users who want the latest-and-greatest should upgrade between the regular 6-month releases

There are several things wrong with this argument:

It assumes that because a user doesn’t want to upgrade their entire OS every 6 months and because they want 3-5 years of support, that they don’t want the latest applications. I don’t want to upgrade my cell phone more than once every 2 years because it is a pain to adapt to a new device, but I certainly do want to be offered the latest apps on it for the time that it is supported.
It assumes that LTS users choose to stay on the LTS. In fact, when somebody installs the LTS, we will only offer LTS – LTS upgrades for them unless they change a setting in the Updates tab of the Software Sources settings.
It assumes that the Firefox ESR provides more stability than the regular Firefox release, and that we won’t get stability from shipping regular Firefox releases. I’ve already explained above why I don’t think this is the case.
It assumes that stability is all that is required to satisfy LTS users. The reality is a lot more complicated than this.

LTS users actually do seek out the latest software. As the maintainer of the Firefox Beta PPA and the (now retired) Firefox Stable PPA, I have some interesting download statistics for these PPA’s:

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users are consistently the second highest consumer of the Firefox Beta PPA. In fact, the number of downloads from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users is around the same as (and sometimes exceeds) the number of downloads from Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04 combined. Note that the highest consumer is always the most recent supported release.
The last upload to the Firefox Stable PPA (9.0.1, which was also uploaded to lucid-proposed) was downloaded by 3-times as many users on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as it was from users on Ubuntu 10.10.

Also, I accidentally introduced a packaging bug in to our daily builds last week which temporarily broke upgrades for daily build users on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Ubuntu 11.04. To my surprise, we got a bug report from a 10.04 user within minutes of the broken packages being published. We then got a fairly steady stream of bug reports from 10.04 users until the packages were fixed. In total, we had 7 bug reports from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users, and 1 bug report from an Ubuntu 11.04 user. Prior to this, I had always made the assumption that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS users would be the smallest consumer of Firefox daily builds, but I may have to reevaluate this view now.

Ok, it’s difficult to read too much in to this relatively small amount of data and I’m not sure how much it really proves. In any case, I think you’ll find that the LTS users aren’t quite as conservative as some people make them out to be.

The LTS should be stable, secure, supported, predictable

The regular Firefox releases are more secure than the ESR, will be just as stable (with the significantly larger audience of beta testers) and are better supported. The 6 weekly releases are also predictable.

Of course our flagship product needs to be stable, secure and supported. But, it needs to be much more than this too.

Addons break between releases

Whilst this was problematic in the early stages of the rapid release process, this isn’t as much of a problem now. Starting in Firefox 10, most addons are compatible by default (the exceptions are themes and addons with binary components). Prior to this, addon compatibility has been regularly exceeding 95% before each new Firefox release (for the top 95% of addons which were compatible with the previous Firefox version).

Soooooo…..

I hope this answers some of your questions about why Ubuntu is not shipping the Firefox ESR by default. Of course, I’m more than happy to listen to peoples concerns.

It is entirely possible that we might provide a Firefox ESR build for people who are managing large deployments of Ubuntu, although the details of this aren’t decided yet. However, this isn’t going to be the default browser for our LTS. If it existed, it would be shipped in a PPA (much like we have been doing for the Firefox Stable PPA), and we would have to be clear to users that it wouldn’t receive the same level of support we give to the regular Firefox versions.

Thank you for reading

Gerfried Fuchs: Games Screenshot Party

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:36:00 +0000

The following announce is lazily copied from Paul Wise's announce. There is only one thing I like to add: the screenshots that are submitted and collected on screenshots.debian.net are visible on the packages websites (both Debian and Ubuntu) and are also used by the software-center package, so they help people to get a first impression of the package they might want to install.

Have you ever wondered how to start getting involved in Debian/Ubuntu? Do you enjoy discovering new games and playing them? You might want to come to the games screenshot party! We hope that the party will be a fun, easy, low-commitment way to get involved.

The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing a half-day screenshots party on the weekend of 25th-26th February for creating screenshots for all the games that are available in Debian/Ubuntu.

If you are interested in attending, please add your availability to the poll linked from the announcement so that we can get some idea of attendance and when is a good time for the people who are interested.

Look forward to lots of game playing, screenshots and merry time, hope to see you all there!

/debian | permanent link | Comments: 0 |

Raphaël Hertzog: Dpkg with multiarch support available in Debian experimental

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:29:23 +0000

As I announced on debian-devel, Guillem Jover uploaded a snapshot of dpkg’s multiarch branch to experimental (version 1.16.2~wipmultiarch). Beware: There will
likely be some small “interface” changes between this version and the version that will be released later in unstable (possibly in the output of dpkg --get-selections, dpkg --list, maybe other commands).

multiarch allows you to install packages from different architectures on the same machine. This can be useful if your computer can run programs from 2 architectures (eg. x86 CPU supporting i386 and amd64), or if you often need to cross-compile software and thus need the libraries of your target architecture.

Test dpkg with multiarch support

If you want to test multiarch support in dpkg, install the package from experimental (apt-get install dpkg/experimental assuming you have experimental in your sources.list).

Then you can add a supplementary architecture to your system by doing sudo dpkg --add-architecture <arch> (e.g. i386 if you are on amd64, and vice-versa). APT will automatically pick up the new architecture and start downloading the Packages file for the new architecture (it uses dpkg --print-foreign-architectures to know about them).

From there on you can install packages from the “foreign” architectures with “apt-get install foo:<arch>“. Many packages will not be installable because some of their dependencies have not yet been updated to work with in a multiarch world (libraries must be installed in a multiarch-compliant path so as to be co-installable, and then marked “Multi-Arch: same“). Other dependencies might need to be marked “Multi-Arch: foreign“. See wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation for more HOWTO-like explanations.

Now is a good time to see if you can install the foreign packages that you could need in such a setup and to help to convert the required libraries.

You can also read Cyril Brulebois’ article which quickly shows how to hunt for the problematic packages which have not been converted to multiarch (in his sample, “ucf” is not ready. Since it’s an “Architecture: all” package which can run on any architecture, it means that it’s lacking a “Multi-Arch: foreign” field).

Report bugs

If you discover any bug in dpkg’s multiarch implementation, please report it to the Bug Tracking System (against “dpkg” with the version “1.16.2~wipmultiarch”).

If you notice important libraries or packages which are not yet multiarch ready, please open wishlist bug reports requesting the conversion and point the maintainers towards the wiki page linked above. Even better, prepare patches and submit those with your bug reports.

Again, you can follow the lead of Cyril Brulebois who filed 6 bugs!

Review the multiarch implementation

If you’re a C programmer and have some good knowledge of dpkg (or are willing to learn more of it), we would certainly benefit from more eyes reviewing the multiarch branch. If you want to discuss some design issues of the multiarch implementation in dpkg (or have questions related to your review), please get in touch via debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org.

The latest version of the branch is pu/multiarch/master in Guillem’s personal repository. I have my own version of the branch (pu/multiarch/full) which is usually a snapshot of Guillem’s branch with my own submitted fixes.

$ git clone git://git.debian.org/dpkg/dpkg.git
$ cd dpkg
$ git remote add guillem git://git.hadrons.org/git/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git
$ git remote add buxy git://git.debian.org/~hertzog/dpkg.git
$ git fetch guillem && git fetch buxy

If you followed the instructions above, the relevant branches are thus guillem/pu/multiarch/master and buxy/pu/multiarch/full. Both branches are regularly rebased on top of master where Guillem merges progressively the commits from the multi-arch branch as his review progresses.

Thank you in advance for your help bringing multiarch in shape for Debian Wheezy,

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Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Global Jam: Call For Events!

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:19:37 +0000

Ubuntu Global Jam: Call For Events!

From 2nd – 4th March 2012 we will be running the Ubuntu Global Jam. This is a global event in which we ask Ubuntu users and contributors to organize events in their local areas to meet other Ubuntu people and help contribute to Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu Global Jam is a fun event, and a great way to meet other Ubuntu and Free Software folks. It is also really easy to organize an event if there is not one near you.

To explain more, tonight I created a video explaining what the Ubuntu Global Jam is, and how to organize an event:

Can’t see it? Click here!

We are going to be encouraging you good folks to start organizing your events. You can find out more about the events here at loco.ubuntu.com and more information on the wiki.

Please feel free to ask whatever questions you like about how to organize an event in the comments here. Do let me know if you organize an event!

Mike is also working on some website updates on loco.ubuntu.com that will make the event a little more interested both before and when the event is running.

The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 251

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:46:57 +0000

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #251 for the week January 30 – February 5, 2012, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

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

Elizabeth Krumbach
Chris Druif
Vikram Dhillon
Liraz Siri
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

Philip Ballew: We are Ubuntu: My interview with Mike Holstein

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:40:06 +0000

In this post I interview Mike Holstein, a man who has helped me with many questions I have asked of him. A great person to get support from in IRC, and an awesome individual as well.

What do you do as an individual, outside of the Ubuntu community?

I am a professional musician, and technology enthusiast living in Asheville NC. I have a solo album that was created using only FOSS tools in UbuntuStudio. Check it out here. http://www.mikeholstein.info/2011/07/living-solo-bass-made-with-ubuntu.html

I have been using Linux for about 8 years on and off, and full-time for about 5 years. I am mostly rather introverted, though i like talking about technology and music.

In what areas have you helped in the Ubuntu and what does this do to better the community as a whole?

I really enjoy helping first-hand in the IRC support channels. I am particularly interested in promoting Ubuntu and UbuntuStudio, and helping new users find resources to get started. When I found the UbuntuStudio IRC channel, it was pretty empty. Now, there is a handful of users who hang there and help others. I think i am good at helping folks find information.

What makes you run Ubuntu?

For me, it’s the community. I do really like using Ubuntu and find it fits my needs in almost every way perfectly, but its the people who are working on it and working with each other to make a polished, proffesional and open project that really draws me in. The idea that i can do literally anything i want with the operating system is quite alluring. For me, that means i can do whatever i like, and my imagination is really the only limit. I read once that nothing in Linux is hiding from you, and that is so helpful.

What inspired you to join the Ubuntu community?

It’s the open and welcome vibe that everyone in the community seems to have. I find that there is a place for everyone. I find that for me, I get back what I put in. As a contributor, I am able to learn more about what is going on in the development community. That translates to me being able to better support new users as well.

Is there anything else you would like to do with Ubuntu that you have not done?

I wish I had more programming skills to contribute. Maybe I can help recruit programmers that can contribute code. I really want to help spread the word and pull new users in by sharing what I like about Ubuntu, and helping them find a place in the community. I would like for projects like UbuntuStudio to be more in the mainstream. I want to continue to push this to into the industry and help users adopt the tools.

What do you feel you have to offer and bring to the table that can help Ubuntu?

I am an audio professional, and bring plenty to the table for folks transitioning to UbuntuStudio, or getting started with audio production in Linux. I am quite handy at hands-on troubleshooting, and locating the cause of issues. I can usually talk through hardware issues, and help diagnose them. I am good at finding folks help, and sometimes I can provide that help personally. Other times I can find more appropriate avenues of support for the users.

If you know Mike or have a good story where he has helped you, please comment and share your story.

To get in contact with Mike visit his Launchpad page at https://launchpad.net/~mikeholstein

=================================================================================================

Philip Ballew Can be Contacted at philipballew@ubuntu.com

Follow Philip Ballew on twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/philipballew for up the minute happenings with Philip’s Ubuntu Adventures

Kees Cook: use of ptrace

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:48:30 +0000

As I discussed last year, Ubuntu has been restricting the use of ptrace for a few releases now. I’m excited to see Fedora starting to introduce similar restrictions, but I’m disappointed at the specific implementation:

A method for doing this already exists (Yama). Yama is not plumbed into SELinux, but I would argue that’s not needed.
The SELinux method depends, unsurprisingly, on an active SELinux policy on the system, which isn’t everyone.
It’s not possible for regular developers (not system developers) to debug their own processes.
It will break all ptrace-based crash handlers (e.g. KDE, Firefox, Chrome) or tools that depend on ptrace to do their regular job (e.g. Wine, gdb, strace, ltrace).

Blocking ptrace blocks exactly one type of attack: credential extraction from a running process. In the face of a persistent attack, ultimately, anything running as the user can be trojaned, regardless of ptrace. Blocking ptrace, however, stalls the initial attack. At the moment an attacker arrives on a system, they cannot immediately extend their reach by examining the other processes (e.g. jumping down existing SSH connections, pulling passwords out of Firefox, etc). Some sensitive processes are already protected from this kind of thing because they are not “dumpable” (due to either specifically requesting this from prctl(PR_SET_DUMPABLE, ...) or due to a uid/gid transition), but many are open for abuse.

The primary “valid” use cases for ptrace are crash handlers, debuggers, and memory analysis tools. In each case, they have a single common element: the process being ptraced knows which process should have permission to attach to it. What Linux lacked was a way to declare these relationships, which is what Yama added. The use of SELinux policy, for example, isn’t sufficient because the permissions are too wide (e.g. giving gdb the ability to ptrace anything just means the attacker has to use gdb to do the job). Right now, due to the use of Yama in Ubuntu, all the mentioned tools have the awareness of how to programmatically declare the ptrace relationships at runtime with prctl(PR_SET_PTRACER, ...). I find it disappointing that Fedora won’t be using this to their advantage when it is available and well tested.

Even ChromeOS uses Yama now. ;)

Lydia Pintscher: changes in Kubuntu

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:03:20 +0000

I’ve been running Kubuntu ever since I decided to switch to Linux on my computers. Kubuntu is what got me hooked on KDE’s software. I was on it’s council for 2 years. It has a special place in my Free Software world.

At FOSDEM I had a long chat with Jonathan. He told me that he’ll no longer be able to work full-time on Kubuntu soon. This was sad news because I know how much it means to him. For more details read his blog. While this is sad it is also good news. It clarifies Canonical’s position and gives the team behind Kubuntu more power.

I’d like to thank Canonical for sponsoring Jonathan for the past years. It was important for Kubuntu and for KDE. Kubuntu is important for KDE because a diverse distro eco-system is vital for us. Let this be a much-needed wake-up call and take it into our hands.

Hop over to #kubuntu-devel on freenode and see where you can help out for the next cycle.

Jonathan Riddell: Kubuntu Status

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:39:36 +0000

From my kubuntu-devel posting. See also Jason's posting.

Today I bring the disappointing news that Canonical will no longer be funding my work on Kubuntu after 12.04. Canonical wants to treat Kubuntu in the same way as the other community flavors such as Edubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu, and support the projects with infrastructure. This is a big challenge to Kubuntu of course and KDE as well.

The practical changes are I won't be able to work on KDE bits in my work time after 12.04 and there won't be paid support for versions after 12.04. This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it.

I have been trying for the last 7 years to create a distro to show the excellent KDE technology in its best light, and we have a lovely community now built around mostly that vision, but it has not taken over the world commercially and shows no immediate signs of doing so despite awesome successes like the world's largest Linux deployment.

The first question to answer is whether the world needs Kubuntu - a regularly released community-friendly distro with a strong KDE focus. There is no other major distro out there that matches that description but others arguably come close.

If it does then we need people to step up and take the initiative in doing the tasks that are often poorly supported by the community process. ISO testing, for example, is a long, slow, thankless task, and it is hard to get volunteers for it. We can look at ways of reducing effort from what we do such as scrapping the alternate CD or automating KDE SC packaging.

I expect to do other desktop team tasks in my work time such as Qt. I can't do much free software work in my spare time for now because of my poor health (slowly recovering I'm pleased to say).

I hope and expect Kubuntu can continue. I encourage Kubuntu devs to apply to UDS so we can have discussions on how to continue it and keep the dream alive.

Jonathan

Benjamin Kerensa: Organizing a Memorable Ubuntu Global Jam

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:26:37 +0000

With Ubuntu Global Jam events being scheduled for March this year I wanted to share my recipe for organizing memorable events. The methods I have deployed in the past and continue to use have so far been pretty effective and I’m sure as a LoCo Leader you could easily replicate the success of Ubuntu Oregon’s events by using some of these practices.

Finding the perfect time

While to most picking a date and time for an event seems like an easy thing this is something to be taken seriously because it can play a role in whether five people or thirty arrive to your event. Polling potential attendees for their availability is a recipe for success when it comes to planning a Ubuntu event and especially a Ubuntu Global Jam.

Some tools to use for find the best availability of your potential attendees:

Doodle

Finding a venue

Once you have an idea of availability you should also have a good idea of how many people are interested in attending your Ubuntu Global Jam at that point you should reach out to potential venues. When seeking a venue you need to take into consideration what kind of amenities and capacity they can offer your event. I strongly encourage reaching out to venues such as local tech companies that might let you use their offices for the event or perhaps a co-working space or even a restaurant or cafe.

Tips for venue selection:

Wireless Internet access with plenty of bandwidth is almost always a must for a Ubuntu event.
Ensure that your venue will have plenty of seating and workspaces for attendees.
If you are not having food and beverage sponsored ensure both are available for sale on-site or nearby.

Engage potential sponsors

Ubuntu LoCo’s may not always have the financial resources necessary to fund every event or initiative they hope for and as such it may be important to seek our local tech companies or even a bakery or restaurant to sponsor some of the related costs of an event. The easiest way to do this is make a list of local companies and identify their contact information and reach out to someone in management or if they have a community manager and explain your event to them and what you are seeking. In some cases a company may ask to have a sign next to some sponsored food or might ask to have someone from their IT staff available to network with your attendees and how you accommodate a sponsor is totally a decision you should make but feel free to seek guidance from the Ubuntu LoCo Council if need be.

Examples of success:

In 2011 Ubuntu Oregon sought sponsorships and received them from PuppetLabs, Eucalyptus Systems, Rackspace, Rentrak, Linux Journal, ThinkGeek, Linbit, Ubuntu User and many more.

Setup RSVP and Announce the event

Once you have a Venue, Availability and perhaps a sponsor or two the next step is registering your event on the LoCo Directory and then announcing it to your LoCo Mailing List. In your announcement e-mail I suggest including a paragraph or two describing the planned event and focus and who the key organizers are and of course where it will be held and how to use the LoCo Directory to RSVP so you have a proper headcount.

Engage, Engage and Engage some more

Now that you have announced the event the job is not close to being over. You should spend the weeks before the event continuing to engage your community about how exciting the upcoming event is going to be and getting them excited. Getting people motivated, excited and ready for the event is a big role in keeping your community engaged and helps in making your community feel close-knit.

Tips for engaging before an event:

Try and engage people who have been less active than others and encourage to step up their participation by taking part in the upcoming event and perhaps helping with the logistics of the event or using one of their talents to help make the event a success.
Everyone wants to be reminded that their contributions are valued as such it is important for us to remind people of how much they are appreciated and how their previous participation at events made the event great and how much you look forward to future participation.

Thats a wrap!

On the day of your event I suggest always being at the venue 30 minutes early but also plan to go over all the details of your event the night before in case something doesn’t line up properly. If you have taken all of the above advice and used it then your event should come together quite precisely the way you wanted it to.

Remember organizing an event isn’t hard but it does require plenty of planning and several weeks of it if not months. If you have any tips you use for event planning with your LoCo do no hesitate to share your practices in the comments below so we can all learn from each other and improve our best practices for organizing events.

Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com

Scott James Remnant: git smash

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:21:33 +0000

A common thing I end up doing while working on code is to make a series of commits, and then end up work changes in my working directory which I need to apply to an earlier revision in the history than the top-most one.

One common way to do this is to make a temporary commit with those changes, then use git rebase -i and move that commit below the one I want to amend and choose fixup to have it applied.

But that’s annoying manual work. There’s a more fun way. I have this script in my path as git-smash, it takes a revision as a single argument, e.g. git smash deadbeef:

git reset --keep "$1"
EDITOR=true git commit -a --amend
git checkout HEAD@{2}
git rebase --onto HEAD@{1} HEAD@{2}

This resets the revision history, keeping local changes, back to the given revision. Unfortunately git reset doesn’t have a mode which preserves the index so we then have to use commit -a to capture all of the local changes.

Now we use the reflog (history of revisions in the working tree) to manipulate the tree back to the previous state, first checking out the revision that was two back (before the amended commit and the reset, i.e. where we began). Then we rebase that onto the revision one back (before the checkout, i.e. the amended revision) using the revision that’s now two back (before the checkout and commit, i.e. the original revision we changed).

Mental gymnastics over, this is the same as what we were doing before, just in one handy command.

Git still sucks though.

Jono Bacon: Canonical Community Team Google+ Hangout

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:58:18 +0000

On Friday we had the first Google+ Hangout with the full Canonical Community team. To observe this important moment we all showed how happy we were:

Sponsored by Colgate.

L-R: Daniel Holbach, David Planella, Yours Truly, Jorge Castro, Michael Hall, and Nicholas Skaggs.

Google Hangouts are awesome for team meetings.

Chris Johnston: Attending Linaro Connect

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:13:03 +0000

This week I will be attending Linaro Connect Q1.12 in Redwood City, California. Infact, I’m in an American Airlines plane at 34,000 feet heading there now. In-flight WiFi is awesome!

Over the past two months Michael Hall and myself have been doing a large amount of work on The Summit Scheduler to get it ready for Connect this week including modifying more than 2,400 lines of Summit code. You can find out more about that in my previous post.

I have a few things that I want to get out of Connect. The first is that I want to get feedback on the changes to Summit, as well as figure out what other things we may need to change. The second thing that I want to do is to learn more about the Beagleboard-xM that I have and how to use it for the many different things it can be used for. The third thing that I want to do is to learn about Linaro’s LAVA.

LAVA is an automated validation suite used to run all sorts of different tests on the products that Linaro produces. The things that I would like to get out of Connect in relation to LAVA are how to setup and run LAVA, how to set it up to run tests, and how to produce results and display those results the way that I want them.

If you are at Linaro Connect, and would be willing to talk with me about Summit and the way you use it and your thoughts on the changes, please contact me and we will set aside a time to meet.

Aaron Toponce: DISCLAIMER

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:33:06 +0000

DISCLAIMER: By sending me email, you agree to the following:

I am, by definition, “the intended recipient”.
All information in the email is mine to do with as I see fit and make such financial profit, political mileage, or good joke as it lends itself to. In particular, I may quote it where I please.
I may take the contents as representing the views of your company.
This disclaimer overrides any disclaimer or statement of confidentiality that may be included on your message.

Lubuntu Blog: DEFT Linux 7

noreply@blogger.com (礁湖神癒) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:24:39 +0000

Another Linux distro updated now with Lubuntu in its core: DEFT Linux 7. This is a great recovery and forensic distro with lots of tools to aid for repairing partitions, damaged clusters, recover lost data, make network tests and configurations, etc. I can't write the whole list of apps included in this release, not enough space :) Mmm, thatartwork sounds familiar to me... :D

Paul Tagliamonte: Mapping the Ubuntu Community

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:04:15 +0000

In playing with some tools I’ve run into at $work, I’ve tried loading in some Ubuntu datasets in some fun and interesting ways.

Today, I’ve chosen to map all Ubuntu Members with a public lat/lon, sized by Karma.

The sizes relate to if the Karma is greater then:

1: 10

2: 50

3: 100

4: 500

5: 1000

6: 2000

7: 7000

8: 15000

9: 25000

10: 50000

So, without further adieu, here’re some maps!

Tony Whitmore: Ubuntu Podcast, Season 5

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:01:42 +0000

We’re going out for the Planning Curry for season five of the Ubuntu Podcast this week. Over the years, it has become a tradition for all the presenters to go out for a curry before the start of the season. It’s a time to catch up in person, as we haven’t seen much of each other since the end of the last season. But it’s also a chance to discuss any changes we want to make to the show and throw ideas for new segments around. So, if there’s anything you’d like to see in the new season, whether it’s an idea for a segment or a change to something we already do, please let us know. You can leave a comment on this blog post or get in touch using any of the methods on the show website. Thanks!

Ronnie Tucker: Another Special Edition – this time, Scribus!

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:38:02 +0000

FCM reader Brian has pulled together my Scribus tutorials from the early issues of FCM and even added updated screenshots to it. So, if you’re thinking of creating a publication of any kind, you might want to check out this special edition.

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/scribus-special-edition/

Lydia Pintscher: Open Advice

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:30:38 +0000

I have been passionate about Free Software for a long time now. My contributions have always revolved around helping people make amazing things happen and realize what they are really capable of. I’ve shown many people that small niche that just fits them perfectly and seen them grow from there and make a difference.
Along the way I’ve always come accross two problems:

“I can’t do X (usually programming), how could I ever be useful to a project”
“This is so overwhelming, I don’t even know where to start.”

I’ve done a lot of things to overcome this but it wasn’t ever enough somehow. Today I am at FOSDEM presenting a book, that will be another step towards fixing these problems. Today I am releasing Open Advice.

Open Advice is the result of the collaboration of more than 50 people from all across Free Software. It is a collection of short essays about key things the authors wished they had known when they started contributing to Free Software. It’ll give a headstart to everyone who wants to contribute. It’ll also be useful for existing contributors who want to know a bit more about other projects and areas of contribution.

The book is available as a paperback and free PDF and is licensed under CC-BY-SA.

What are you waiting for? Download the PDF version today or order a printed version.

Additional goodies: The LaTeX source is available and a bug tracker exists as well.

A year ago I started working on this project and today it is reality. If you’re at FOSDEM I’m sure you can see me bouncing around with joy

Jim Kielman: Ubuntu Forums Ubuntu +1 update for February 3/2012

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:29:31 +0000

It’s that time again. Alpha 2 was released yesterday, here is one members experience:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1919854

There have also been several threads on kernel panics with the 3.2 version:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1913073

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1896087

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1910857

My own problem was solved by removing an SD card from the card reader, but that really is only a work around. The problem looks to be solved with the next kernel release.

The classroom session effenberg0x0 and I put on at UDW went well, but we found we had to much information for the length of the session. We are in discussion about doing some sessions using the Community Learning Project.

Jani Monoses: Recent misc likes

noreply@blogger.com (janimo) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:14:19 +0000

Even though some of these tools have been around for years, I have only recently started using them.

* byobu - nicer than plain screen with good defaults, for example key binding for scrolling is like in a regular terminal.

* sbuild - nicer than pbuilder, defaults to overlay directory instead of tarball, hence fast by default, nice colors, build summary. I have heard about it for a long time, but the recent mention during Ubuntu devel week made me curious. It is friendlier now - no need for LVM snapshots. http://wiki.debian.org/mk-sbuild

* syncpackage - which now allows syncing from Debian if you have Ubuntu upload rights. No need to burden the archive team members anymore for every sync or go the roundabout way of getting from Debian and then uploading manually without changes.

* Modern Debian packaging in the form of the 3.0(quilt) source format and the new dh tools. The former allows a cleaner separation between the upstream and distro bits while the latter makes the debian/rules file much shorter and cleaner even than with CDBS, let alone with the classic debhelper way.

* Twitter Bootstrap - mostly unrelated to packaging or command line stuff, but very nice regardless. CSS+Javascript UI elements that for me at least make jQueryUI superfluous, while being promoted as 'oh, just a CSS framework and style guide, not much else'.

Stuart Langridge: It's cold outside

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

You're gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
Christina Perri — Jar of Hearts

I bet at four o'clock this morning you weren't in a police station.

Or, at least, if you were I bet you were drunk and I bet it wasn't voluntary.

After the usual Friday night poor showing from my local pub (people who follow me on twitter will be aware that the torture of watching a hundred people think they're affirming their lives by singing Mr Brightside at the top of their voices is a regular part of my balanced weekly diet), I walked home, on a cold and cloudless night. I live about ten minutes walk from town, so the walk's no hardship, except that I was dressed in shirt and no coat and it was, as mentioned, cold.

I need to be clear about this. Ten degrees below zero, Celsius, is seriously chilly when you're standing in it in shirt-sleeves. I'm sure people in actually cold places like Canada or Minneapolis or Refrigeration, North Dakota will be laughing mockingly at this point, but firstly, bugger off, secondly I bet you lot bother to put a coat on when you go out, thirdly it's not two in the morning for you, and fourthly bugger off.

Anyway, I get home and... no door key in my pocket.

You know that feeling when the Fist of Fear grabs your balls when you realise something disastrous has happened? (I don't know what the Fist grabs for women. Feel free to fill me in, or actually maybe not.) Anyway: yeah, that. I went through the usual search-all-pockets-and-then-search-them-all-again routine, just in case a mischievous cold-tolerant leprechaun hid my key from the first search and then put it back, and... no door key. Oh dear.

I'll tell you this; the walk back to the pub again seems a much longer trek. Nowhere near as long as the second return to the house without my key, though, after it turned out no-one had handed it in. And now, what the hell to do, eh? I'm not prescient enough to hide a key in the garden, especially since that's a damned good way to come home one night and find no television where a television used to be, so... locksmith? Do they have 24-hour locksmiths? I can't be the first moron to have done this.

If you're bored today, I have a suggestion for you. Go and find a dude who claims to be a 24-hour locksmith and punch him in his stupid lying face.

Incidentally, how in Jah's name did anyone manage in this situation five years ago without a smartphone, huh?

Not that the internet helps when no-one frigging answers their supposedly-24-hour phone. Also, it turns out that about four of the local 24-hour locksmith companies are actually the same company, who did answer their phone, agreed to send someone, and then after an hour of me standing in the freezing bloody freezing cold confessed that they didn't actually have anyone to send.

It's now half three in the morning, and the shivering is starting to get on my nerves, and I can't get into my house without destroying something like a double-glazed plate glass window which will cost me hundreds of pounds to fix and my hands are shaking enough that I can barely light a cigarette, let alone throw a brick through a door that probably wouldn't break anyway, and I'd like to avoid the police showing up since I have no way of proving that I actually live here except for being able to describe where all the broken bits of skirting-board are, and everywhere is closed and the doors are all locked and it's really spectacularly bone-shudderingly mightily arse-clenchingly ridiculously psychopathically cold, and what to do? I tried sleeping in the shed. Now, cold is not like wind. Being inside a thin empty wooden building does not protect you from it. I was shivering like a jackhammer on a bouncy castle and it was becoming clear, even in my not-very-operational brain state, that lying on the floor at minus ten with only a shirt on could quite possibly lead to me actually freezing to death for real.

Well, if the police came, either I'd get into the house or they'd arrest me, and being arrested would at least make me warm, and right now I'd cut my right hand off if Pol Pot showed up as long as he brought a pair of gloves and some soup.

And then, through the frozen and frosty neurons came the sparkling thought that the police station would be open, wouldn't it?

I actually felt warmer just at the thought. Not much warmer, though.

Anyway, that's how I came to be sitting in the cop shop voluntarily at four am. One lovely copper even made me a cup of tea after I poured out my tale of woe in one long sentence, breaking only for my teeth to chatter together like I was trying to bite through the world.

Police stations: while I appreciate that you're generally there to deal with miscreants and so on, it wouldn't kill you to get rid of two screwed-to-the-ground plastic chairs and put in, say, a chaise longue. After switching my phone to airplane mode I managed to eke out enough battery life that I could sit and read while huddled up against the radiator for five hours until nine o'clock this morning, whereupon I went and fetched the spare key from my estate agent after the longest and coldest and most sleepless night I have ever experienced.

So, tips, for surviving a similar situation.

Have a spare key. Note: I do not have a spare key hidden in my garden, burglars, so don't go looking for it. I do not know how to have a spare key somewhere where you can get at it but thieves cannot; suggestions welcomed.
Have a girlfriend so that there's someone to let you back in.
Next time you see a policeman, be nice to him.

I think I might have a nap now.

Brandon Perry: What browsers support @import in their CSS?

noreply@blogger.com (Brandon Perry) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:07:47 +0000

I prefer the following CSS:

<html>
<body>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
        @import url(/css/style.css);
      </style>
</head>
</body>
</html>

But not all browsers support @import. I wanted to see exactly which ones didn't so I used browsershots.org with a simple test.

Here are the results: http://browsershots.org/http://volatileminds.net/import_test.html

Black means it supports it. White means it doesn't.

Ubuntu Kernel Team: [Precise] linux kernel 3.2.0-14.23 uploaded (ABI Bump)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:05:49 +0000

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

* Rebase to upstream stable v3.2.3 and essentially v3.2.4

The full changelog can be seen at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.2.0-14.23

Lubuntu Blog: LxScreenshot

noreply@blogger.com (礁湖神癒) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:14:00 +0000

A new great tool ready for using with our beloved Lubuntu: LxScreenshot! This is another brilliant creation from the Stefano, the same author of LxFind. You can imagine what's its purpose, creating screen captures with ease and a simple interface, with timing capture (in seconds) and the option to choose the folder to save it on. You can install this tool just by looking for it with