We have uploaded a new Precise linux kernel. Please note the ABI bump. The most notable changes are as follows:
* Rebase to v3.3.2
* Revert seccomp_filter patches
* Switch CONFIG_GPIO_TWL4030=y back on arm[el|hf]
* Add Hyper-V modules to virtual inclusion list
The full changelog can be seen at:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.2.0-12.20
There have been several interesting conversations this past week. The two main topics of discussion were the possibility of compizconfig-settings-manager being dropped from the repositories:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1915533
And secondly, the release of HUD for testing:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1914440
The question of why the old two panel interface isn’t available any more came up again, and after a bit of discussion, an answer that was acceptable to the original poster was provided:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1914498
effenberg0x0 and I will be hosting a session during Developer Week on running a release during the testing cycle. Join us in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net on Feb 1/2012 at 18:00 UTC
I just wanted to provide a quick update on how the team is doing on our set of commitments in the 12.04 cycle. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
In terms of general team progress, this is how our burndown chart looks today:
I asked each of the guys on the team to follow up with their respective community members to start moving the needle on those work items. As such, if you committed to something in 12.04 for our team’s burndown, expect Jorge, Daniel, or David to come knocking on your door soon.
With Nick and Michael joining the team recently, their work is not reflected in this burndown – their work will appear in the 12.10 burndown.
Daniel’s core focus in this cycle is developer growth. The first step here is ensuring that our developer processes are working effectively. Over the holiday period the sponsorship queue got a little out of shape, so I asked Daniel to work with the patch pilots to get this back on track. Good progress is being made:
You can see how the queue is falling back down at the end of the graph since Daniel started hammering on this over the last few weeks. Thanks to all the patch pilots for their hard work.
Daniel has also been fixing up some metrics so we can track this work more effectively, and putting together a developer outreach team to provide a more personal level of support to get developers through the process. He will be speaking more about this in the coming weeks.
Jorge is focused on growing the Juju charming community and is making great progress. A tour of events is planned and Jorge has a hit-list of upstream projects which he is focusing on to get charms put together for. We are seeing good progress on this list and I am confident Jorge will hit his goals in this cycle.
Juju really is awesome. You should check it out.
David has been focusing on app developers in this cycle. A first chunk of work here is helping the App Review Board to get in shape. The ARB has a large queue of content to get through, so in Budapest we sat down and dissected the ARB process and made a bunch of optimizations. David has been coordinating with the team to help coordinate this work, and we are seeing progress happening.
We have recently seen three lenses get through the ARB, and David is going to be starting a regular cadence of queue reviews to keep the ball rolling. Thanks to the ARB for all your contributions.
David originally planned a Phase II set of additions to developer.ubuntu.com, but with some re-structuring from the Canonical web team, those plans have been put on hold a little. Instead d.u.c is now being put into maintenance mode and we identified a set of things that need fixing (particularly on the publishing side), and David is coordinating those changes.
The next chunk of work will be outreach to grow our app developer community. Stay tuned for more…and an up-coming competition…
Michael is the new upstream community coordinator, and will be focusing on Unity in particular as he gets started. I have asked him to first work with the Desktop Experience team to help get their community merge proposals in shape. There are a number of branches that have been sitting around for a while, and Michael is coordinating a patch pilot scheme to ensure these get reviewed regularly. We expect to see this in place over the next week.
Michael has also been performing an assessment of Mozilla’s SUMO for a potential solution for help in Ubuntu. He has put together an extensive report and a test instance to play with and he will be working with the docs team to continue assessing this as a solution. I am excited to see what work happens here.
Finally, next week we will be putting together an upstream target list for Michael to reach out to to start engaging app authors more effectively around our technology. I am excited to see this work progressing.
…oh, and one other thing: Michael is working with Didier to merge Singlet into Quickly. This should make creating Unity lenses a piece of cake. Bring it!
Finally, the latest addition to the team has been Nick Skaggs. Nick has been working with the QA around a few core pieces of work:
The former two items will take time to put in place, but the latter item should be in place in the next week. As such, you should see a regular stream of testing campaigns driven by Nick in 12.04. Be sure to keep an eye on his blog.
Of course, there are lots of other things going on, but these summarize some of the key themes.
FCM#57
Full Circle – the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community are proud to announce the release of our fifty-seventh issue.
This month:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Try Enlightenment, LibreOffice – Part 11, Backup Strategy – Part 5, Encrypted USB Stick, and Varnish Web Cache.
* Linux Lab – Mana World Server.
* Review – OpenArtist: 5th Incarnation
* I Think – SpiderOak Questionnaire.
* Closing Windows – Wireless Networking
plus: more Ubuntu Games, My Desktop (and another extra!), My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!
Google Currents edition: http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAowvZtX/full_circle_magazine_57_lite
EPUB/MOBI coming soon.
Get it while it’s hot!
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-57/
The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 12.10 release.
The next UDS takes place at The Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, California, USA from the 7th – 11th May 2012. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.
At the heart of a great UDS is a diverse group of attendees who can bring their experience and expertise to the discussions. You don’t have to be technical, or be a programmer or packager to attend – UDS is open to everyone (including non-Ubuntu folks) and free to attend. We encourage everyone with an interest in Ubuntu to attend.
For every UDS Canonical sponsors the hotel and accommodation of a set of community members to ensure they are free to contribute and bring value to the discussions. We have a limited budget so we can’t sponsor everyone, but we are always keen to have a capable and diverse group to sponsor:
If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:
Simple! I look forward to seeing your applications, and seeing many of you in Oakland!
Originally posted here by Jono Bacon on Friday, January 27, 2012.
The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 12.10 release.
The next UDS takes place at The Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, California, USA from the 7th – 11th May 2012. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.
At the heart of a great UDS is a diverse group of attendees who can bring their experience and expertise to the discussions. You don’t have to be technical, or be a programmer or packager to attend – UDS is open to everyone (including non-Ubuntu folks) and free to attend. We encourage everyone with an interest in Ubuntu to attend.
For every UDS Canonical sponsors the hotel and accommodation of a set of community members to ensure they are free to contribute and bring value to the discussions. We have a limited budget so we can’t sponsor everyone, but we are always keen to have a capable and diverse group to sponsor:
If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:
Simple! I look forward to seeing your applications, and seeing many of you in Oakland!
The juju team has locked down the local events they’re attending in 2012, if you deploy Ubuntu in the cloud then they’d love to see you at the following events:
More details about planning juju talks and events available here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/juju/2012-January/001223.html
Originally posted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by Jorge Castro on Fri Jan 27 17:29:27 UTC 2012
Next week, the European free and open source software developers will converge to Brussels for FOSDEM. We took this opportunity to apply for an OpenStack developers gathering in the Virtualization and Cloud devroom.
At 6pm on Saturday (last session of the day), in the Chavanne room, we will have a one-hour town hall meeting. If you’re an existing OpenStack contributor, a developer considering to join us, an upstream project developer, a downstream distribution packager, or just curious about OpenStack, you’re welcome to join us ! I’ll be there, Stefano Maffulli (our community manager) will be there, and several OpenStack core developers will be there.
We’ll openly discuss issues and solutions about integration with upstream projects, packaging, governance, development processes, community or release cycles. In particular, we’ll have a distribution panel where every OpenStack distribution will be able to explain how they support OpenStack and discuss what we can improve to make things better for them.
And at the end of the session we can informally continue the discussion around fine Belgian beers or their famous Carbonade !
We’re back with a new edition of the featured apps in the Ubuntu Software Centre. The theme this month is going to be gaming, and for this we’ve carefully hand-picked and brought you 3 of the coolest, slickest games now available in Ubuntu. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!
CoreBreach is an anti-gravity racing game with combat-based gameplay. Its unique graphic style, with a cell-shaded look, sets up a very futuristic atmosphere with a wide range of choices for ships, race tracks and powerful weapons.
Its intuitive controls support common types of steering wheels and game pads to enjoy the full driving experience directly from your computer.
And Yet It Moves is an award-winning physics-based platform game in which players rotate the game world at will to solve challenging puzzles. Tilting the world turns walls into floors, slides into platforms, and stacks of rocks into dangerous hazards.
Players navigate through a paper collage world created with colorful pieces of cardboard and set to distinctive music. With four different environments and unlockable modes, And Yet It Moves is a platformer that will provide gamers with endless challenges.
Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence.
Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world. Pump the ever-so-precious black gold by oil rigs, capture platforms and destroy the enemy in the sea and in the air. Be ingenious to unlock super technologies and quick to send your squads straight into the heat of the battle!
So are you a developer and would like your app to be featured in the Ubuntu Software Centre and available to millions of Ubuntu users? Well, nothing easier than that, then: head up to the Ubuntu App Developer site and get your app published in 6 easy steps ›.
We’re confident these cool games will keep you busy until the next featured apps post! 
Follow Ubuntu App Development on:
Original source: the Ubuntu App Developer Site
Social Media Icons by Paul Robert Lloyd
Now that KDE 4.8 has been released, it’s time to recap all changes you will find in Gwenview.
The main change is the addition of animations when viewing images: crossfading between images and nicer-to-use comparisons. You can learn more from this previous blog article.
This change was not nice for users of some graphic cards whose OpenGL drivers do not support what Gwenview tries to do. I decided to play it safe for now: animations in Gwenview now use software rendering by default. For better performance, you can enable OpenGL rendering in the configuration dialog.
This new version of Gwenview also comes with a lot of smaller changes, some of them caused by the limitations which were introduced by the new animation system.
4.8.1 should bring you its usual series of bug fixes, among them is generating thumbnails for all images of the current folder, not only the currently visible ones. This fix is a bit bigger than your usual .1 fixes, so if you are willing to test it, you are welcome. The code is available on Gwenview git repository, in the “gen-all-thumbnails” branch.
I hope you enjoy this new Gwenview!
If you’ve ever had to create Ubuntu or Canonical related design materials, chances are you had a look at the Brand Guidelines, which, until now, have only existed in the form of bulky PDFs. Those days are over, as we happily introduce the brand new Ubuntu Brand Guidelines site, where you can read the guidelines and download the assets necessary to create your projects.
Ubuntu Brand Guidelines homepage
You can learn more about the Ubuntu brand values and the brand assets, such as our logos, colour palette and pictograms, and how to use them. You can also consult some of our Web-specific guidelines, look at examples of design work that has been done, and download assets like the logos and pictograms.
Brand assets section on the Brand Guidelines site
This is the first iteration of the site: lots of content is being prepared and will be added later on, and we will also work on some refinements to the asset download process, as well as adding many more useful downloads, such as templates and photography.
Among the more frequently requested assets are HTML and CSS snippets and templates that can simply be copied and pasted on internal and external projects, so the designer or developer can be certain everything looks as it should. This is in the works, but it’s something that takes a little bit more time to get just right, so please bear with us.
For now, we’d be delighted to get your feedback on this first version: have you found anything particularly useful on the site? What would you like to see there that you think it’s missing? How do you think it can be improved?
We hope we enjoy the online Ubuntu Brand Guidelines!
Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn’t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years. He can also be very sarcastic (sometimes he even enjoys participating to flamewars on debian lists), and there are quite a few topics where we have long agreed to disagree. But this kind of diversity is also what makes Debian a so interesting place…
Read on to learn more about the pkg-gnome team, its plans for Wheezy, Josselin’s opinion on the GNOME 3 switch, and much more.
Raphael: Who are you?
Josselin: I am a 31 years old Linux systems engineer. I started in life with physics, which I studied at the ENS Lyon. I started a thesis on experimental and numerical models for optoelectronics, but when it became clear that research was not for me, I abandoned it and accepted a job at the CEA, which holds the largest computing center in Europe. Working on these machines has been the most awesome job ever (except for it being near Paris). After that I worked a bit on system monitoring technologies.
I am married, currently living in Lyon, and working for EDF (the French historical electricity company) on scientific workstations using Debian. EDF is using Debian on more than a thousand workstations and holds the fastest Debian supercomputer in the world (200 Tflops), which makes it another obvious place for Debian developers.
Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?
Josselin: I discovered Debian in 1999 while studying at the ENS, which is one of the biggest nests of Debian developers – while being a small place, it is producing almost one Debian developer per year on average. After wondering for a while what it could be useful for, hacking on a slink snapshot made me think that it was for, well, everything except for gaming. Later, in 2002, when I was working on optoelectronics computing codes, I started to package them for Debian in order to make them easier to install, for us as well as other labs over the world. I started the NM process, and it was going smoothly but also going to take time. However, at that moment, the frozen-bubble game went out and made quite some buzz. Since I knew a guy who knew the game’s developer, he asked me to package it. The package found 3 sponsors in a very short time and was fast-tracked into the archive at a speed that was unseen before. After which the NM process was completed very quickly.
At that time, I was a heavy WindowMaker user, but I didn’t like the direction the project was taking (actually, I wonder if there was one). GNOME was starting to become attractive, but its packaging in Debian was very ineffective, with many inconsistent packages maintained by people who didn’t ever talk to each other – some of them didn’t speak English, and some of them didn’t talk at all. Together with awesome people, among which Jordi Mallach, Gustavo Noronha Silva, JHM Dassen, Ross Burton and Sébastien Bacher, we started the GNOME team in 2003, introducing consistent packaging practices, and initiating synchronized uploads. Releasing a completely integrated GNOME 2.8 in sarge was a considerable achievement; proving (together with the Perl team) that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.
“Proving […] that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.”
Raphael: You’re one of the most active contributors of the team which is packaging GNOME for Debian. What would you suggest to a new contributor who would like to help the team?
Josselin: There are several ways to contact the team, but the recommended one has always been IRC. We hang on #debian-gnome on the OFTC network, so just come around and ask for us.¹ The real question is what you want to do in the team. Of course, most new volunteers want to help packaging the latest and greatest version of GNOME into unstable as soon as possible, but unless they already have Debian background, this is not the easiest task. Since there are already people working on this, the “big” packages are usually waiting on dependencies.
I used to direct newcomers towards bug triage, but it is a tedious task and I’m now convinced that our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with. The most useful thing to do for newcomers now is probably to find a GNOME or GNOME-related package that needs improvement or is lagging behind, and simply try to work on it. You can also come and fix the bugs you find annoying. Find a patch on the GNOME bugzilla, or cook it yourself, propose it, and if it’s worthy enough you’ll soon get commit access.
“Our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with.”
¹ At this point I feel worth mentioning that if no one answers in 10 minutes, it doesn’t mean that no one will answer in 2 hours, so please stay on the channel after asking.
Raphael: There’s been some controversy about GNOME 3 and the direction that the project is taking. What’s your personal stance on GNOME 3? And what’s the position of the pkg-gnome team?
Josselin: The controversy is not new to GNOME 3, but the large-scale changes made with it have put it more prominently. The criticism usually boils down to a few categories:
The lack of configuration options has been an ongoing criticism since GNOME 2.0 has decided to rip off most of them. Of course, when the control center was redesigned again for 3.0, there was a surge of horrified exclamations from people who missed their favorite buttons. On this topic, I fully concur with GNOME developers. The configuration option that is useful for you is not necessarily useful for someone else. Of course, sometimes developers go a bit too far, but the general direction is right. At work, we found that only a minority of users actually configure anything on their desktops: they just want something that works to launch their applications. Apple and Google have sold millions of devices by making them the simplest possible and without any configuration.
Design decisions are, on the contrary, individual decisions, and each of them, while having reasons behind it, can be questioned. I remember seeing a lot of complaints when the OK and Cancel buttons were reversed in dialog boxes, something that nobody questions anymore. GNOME Shell is full of such changes; some are easy to get accustomed with, some others just make eyebrows raise. The most obvious example is the user menu in GNOME 3.2, which contains an entry to configure your Google account, but no entry to shutdown the computer. Both decisions were taken independently, each of them with (good or bad) reasons, but the result is simply ridiculous. The default configuration in Debian will contain an extension to make it a bit better, but on the whole we don’t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.
“On the whole we don’t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.”
Point 3 is more complex. Red Hat being the company spending the most on GNOME, it is obvious that their employees work on making things work for their distribution. An example is the recurring discussions about relying on system services that are currently only implemented by systemd. Since there is a lot of (mostly unjustified) resistance against systemd in Debian, and since it won’t work on kFreeBSD anyway, someone needs to develop an alternative implementation of these services for upstart and sysvinit. Everything is in place for someone else to do the job but it has to be done, and this can be frustrating. Especially since it can also be hard to integrate changes needed for other distributions¹.
Hardware requirements are mostly a consequence of the previous criticism: there’s hardware that most distributions just don’t want to bother supporting. We’ve seen it in squeeze with the introduction of a hard dependency on PulseAudio. The Debian GNOME team (together with the Gentoo maintainers) made this dependency optional, carrying heavy patches, in order to cover the cases where it does not work. Now that it has gained more maturity, making this effort obsolete, the new tendency is to require 3D acceleration. For various reasons, it is not available to everyone². On this matter, the position of the Debian GNOME team has always been to support as much different configurations as possible with reasonable effort. Thanks to efforts from the incredible Vincent Untz, upstream supports a so-called “fallback mode”, which is the GNOME panel from 2.x with a lot of its bugs fixed. We intend to support this mode for as long as reasonably possible in Debian, possibly even after upstream ends up dropping it. However, other applications are going to require 3D because GStreamer is moving to clutter too, affecting video playback performance on non-accelerated systems³. For epiphany this is not a problem; only embedded video will be affected. But for totem, this is a major issue; because of that we will probably keep totem 3.0 in wheezy.
Finally, there is a natural human tendency to dislike change (I have it too), and it applies a lot to desktop users’ habits. Needless to say a change of such a scale as introducing GNOME Shell can trigger reactions. However, I don’t think it is reasonable, because of this resistance, to keep gnome-panel 2.x in Debian. This would be a lot of work on obsolete technology, and would prevent the upcoming removal of a lot of deprecated libraries. This time is much better spent improving gnome-panel 3.x in Debian and keeping the “fallback mode” great. One of the change that was made in Debian was to make it easier to find, being available as “GNOME Classic” directly from the login manager, instead of having to find it in an obscure configuration panel. In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it. I had never been accustomed to a new environment as quickly ever before.
“In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it.”
¹ Having seen several of my GDM patches reverted without a warning, I know we are not finished with carrying patches in Debian packages.
² Scientific workstations are a non-trivial example, since there is a measurable effect of using 3D in the window manager on heavy 3D applications.
³ On the other hand, on accelerated systems, this feature should end up improving performance a lot.
Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?
Josselin: The first goal of the GNOME team is, of course, to provide again a great desktop environment to work on. For wheezy it will probably be based on GNOME 3.4. There also needs to be some work on package management interfaces. Upstream bases everything on PackageKit, but it is not as featureful as the aptdaemon Ubuntu technology. If I have time, I would also like to improve HTTP proxy support, since currently it is based on a stack of terrible hacks.
Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on?
Josselin: Obviously I would like to make GNOME in Debian even better. That would imply working on underneath dependencies (what we now like to call plumbing) to make sure everything is working great. This would also imply working more as GNOME upstream to make it more suitable for our needs.
I would also work on large-scale improvements on the distribution, like conditional recommends which I’d love to see implemented¹, or automatic build-dependency generation. I would also work on the installer to make it better for desktops machines.
¹ The idea is to automatically install language packs, or glues between two packages when both packages are installed.
Raphael: What’s the biggest problem of Debian?
Josselin: The obvious answer is the same as the one most people you interviewed before gave: not enough members in core teams. A lot of developers join Debian to work on a small number of pet packages, and don’t necessarily want to be involved with existing teams. It is probably still not obvious enough that the primary way to start contributing to Debian is to join an existing team.
But if there is one thing that is preventing Debian from gaining more momentum now, it is a completely different one: the too short support timeframe. 3 years is really not enough for corporate users. One year to migrate from one version to another is too short, and it is not possible to skip a release. It is definitely possible to change that with reasonable effort: the long-term support after 3 years doesn’t have to cover the same perimeter as the short-term one. For example, we could upgrade the kernel to the version in the current stable release, and stop fixing all non-remote security holes. The important thing is to cover the most basic needs: companies are ready to take the risk of having less support if it allows skipping a version, but not the risk of having no support at all. And even more important is to say that you do something. Red Hat says they support a release for 10 years, but of course after 5 years the supported perimeter is extremely small.
“3 years [of support] is really not enough for corporate users.”
Long-term support will not magically fix all problems in Debian, but it will bring more corporate users into the picture. And with corporate users come paid Debian developers, who can work on critical pieces of the system. Debian was built on the synergy between individuals and companies, and in recent years – perhaps as a reaction against what happened with Ubuntu – we’ve kind of forgot the latter. A lot of individuals have joined the project, and they are actively working, for example, on shortening the release cycle, which goes against the interest of professionals. We should embrace again such users and developers, and that means adapting to the current needs of larger entities.
Raphael: You’re the maintainer of python-support, a packaging helper that was competing with python-central. Both helpers are now deprecated in favor of dh_python2. Does this mean that the situation of Python in Debian is now sane? Or are there remaining problems?
Josselin: dh_python2 (and the Python3 version, dh_python3) has a sane enough design. It fixes a lot of issues in python-central and also python-support, at the expense of somehow reduced functionality for developers. However, just like the previous tools, it merely works around design mistakes in the Python interpreter. For example it is not possible to split binary modules, pure-Python modules and byte-compiled modules in different directory trees, like Perl does – although PEP 3147 introduces a way to do so. There is still no sane and standardized way to deal with module versions. There is no difference made between the module (which is a part of language semantics) and the file containing it (an information which depends on the implementation). Developers heavily rely on introspection features and make assumptions based on the implementation, that make it impossible to work around problems with module files.
Such problems are not restricted to Python. Those who fought against Ruby gems could tell even worse stories. While introducing GObject introspection packages in Debian (they can be used in JavaScript and Python to provide modules based on GObject libraries), I was pleased to see a clear distinction between file and module, but I was again struck by the fact you are not forced to declare API versions in your Python/JS code. In all cases, there is no reliable way to detect runtime dependencies in a given Python or JavaScript file, which leaves the maintainer to declare them by hand, and of course, often be wrong about them. Add to that the fact that most errors cannot be detected before runtime. For all these reasons, and while still being fond of Python for scripts and prototyping, I’ve become really skeptical of using purely interpreted languages to write real applications. Some GNOME developers are moving away from Python and JavaScript, mostly towards Vala; I can only approve of that move and hope the same happens to other projects.
Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?
Of course there is the never-sleeping, never-stopping, Michael Biebl who can upload a whole GNOME release in a single week-end. But there are a lot of awesome people who make Debian something that simply works. I could talk about Cyril Brulebois from the X strike force, Julien Cristau from the release team, Sjoerd Simons for his sound advice and work on plumbing, Luca Falavigna who is so fast at processing NEW, to quote only a few of those I work with frequently. And of course, Jordi and Sam for their humor.
Thank you to Josselin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that you can find older interviews on http://wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.
Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook
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Good news for people with an Intel GMA500 (Poulsbo) graphics card, support is now in the mainline Linux kernel.
In the Linux 3.3-rc1 (mainline) kernel the driver has moved out of staging and re-named.
It is now located under
Device Drivers ->
Graphics support ->
DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) ->
Intel GMA5/600 KMS Framebuffer
and is now called “gma500_gfx”.
Once the kernel team with your distribution of choice makes the adjustment, the GMA500 should work “out of the box” on any Linux Distribution using kernel 3.3 or higher.
Ubuntu-BR-SC Local Community Team is proud to announce the release of your most recent project, the Ubuntu-BR-SC LoCo Team Blog. The project, that was created by Tiago Hillebrandt (the LoCo Team Leader) and Julian Fernandes (an Ubuntu-BR-SC member), intends to promote Ubuntu and opensource to Brazilian Users and Developers.
Julian Fernandes, Márcio Cordeiro, and me
Currently, the Ubuntu-BR-SC LoCo Team Blog contains twelve members who write news, tips, and tutorials in Brazilian Portuguese to support Ubuntu Brazilian Community.
Visit the blog and leave your comments!
En estos dias precisamente me llego un email anunciando la proximidad de mi finalización como Ubuntu Member… y antes de renovar me puse a pensar si era lo que queria, ya que en ese momento me asaltaron preguntas como: ¿Si estaré haciendo las cosas bien? ¿Soy verdaderamente un miembro activo? ¿Ayudo a mi comunidad? ¿Quiero tener planes para la comunidad en el futuro?
En ese momento miré el presente y visualice que en un año como Ubuntu Member habia hecho cosas muy buenas y otras podria mejorar, se puede aprender mas de la comunidad y los canales de retroalimentación estan presentes para el crecimiento, no solo personal sino de mi Comunidad Local y todas las que directa o indirectamente alcanzo a influenciar.
Así que decidi renovar, continuar con Ubuntu-Colombia, hacer el mejor trabajo en el LoCo Council… y lo que salga en el camino.
Kubuntu has packages for 4.8 bringing updates to Plasma workspaces and a load of KDE Applications.
To quote a nice user posting on kde-devel
"I upgraded to Ubuntu's Precise Alpha 1 a few days ago. After the upgrade completed, I tried out KDE 4.8 RC 2. It worked great until the final release of KDE 4.8 Final. KDE 4.8 Final is even better than the RC!"
"KDE 4.8 is rocking for me too.Using the Kubuntu PPA's on Sandy Bridge system and it's just lightning fast to do anything. "
The title may sound like a contradiction, but I assure you that it is not. You can now use private teams in social contexts in Launchpad. Private teams can collaborate with public projects and other teams if they choose to reveal the existence of the private team.
When a member places the private team in a social situation, a the member is asked to confirm that it is okay to reveal the team’s identifying information. This information is the team’s Launchpad Id used in URLs, the displayname, icon, and logo. A user can visit the private team’s Launchpad page and will only see that information. The rest of the page is not shared. Anonymous users cannot see a private team’s page because that user is not being social; logged in users can see the private team’s page
Private team page seen by a non-member
Launchpad did not permit these interactions previously because it was not clear who should know about the team. Someone has to know. If Launchpad permitted private teams to subscribe to bugs or be members of teams without anyone knowing of them, they would be unaccountable. Private teams could spy on organisation, or learn about security vulnerabilities to exploit. Launchpad will not ever permit such asocial behaviour. The resolution for social interactions was to permit other parties to know enough of the private team to make an informed decision. For example, when I choose to make a bug private, I want to know who was already seen the bug through a subscription. I may choose to unsubscribe the private team if I do not trust them.
Private teams may invite exclusive teams to be members. Exclusive teams (moderated or restricted teams) review all members so they are accountable. If a team admin trusts the admins of another team, and that team is accountable, Launchpad permits the other team to be a member. This is actually a rule that applied to all exclusive teams. private teams are always exclusive (restricted membership policy). The only nuance with private teams is when it is a member of another team; the super team may know the members of the private sub team because the super team has the right to audit all its members so that it too can be accountable.
We’re back with a new edition of the featured apps in the Ubuntu Software Centre. The theme this month is going to be gaming, and for this we’ve carefully hand-picked and brought you 3 of the coolest, slickest games now available in Ubuntu. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!
CoreBreach is an anti-gravity racing game with combat-based gameplay. Its unique graphic style, with a cell-shaded look, sets up a very futuristic atmosphere with a wide range of choices for ships, race tracks and powerful weapons.
Its intuitive controls support common types of steering wheels and game pads to enjoy the full driving experience directly from your computer.
And Yet It Moves is an award-winning physics-based platform game in which players rotate the game world at will to solve challenging puzzles. Tilting the world turns walls into floors, slides into platforms, and stacks of rocks into dangerous hazards.
Players navigate through a paper collage world created with colorful pieces of cardboard and set to distinctive music. With four different environments and unlockable modes, And Yet It Moves is a platformer that will provide gamers with endless challenges.
Oil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence.
Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world. Pump the ever-so-precious black gold by oil rigs, capture platforms and destroy the enemy in the sea and in the air. Be ingenious to unlock super technologies and quick to send your squads straight into the heat of the battle!
So are you a developer and would like your app to be featured in the Ubuntu Software Centre and available to millions of Ubuntu users? Well, nothing easier than that, then: head up to the Ubuntu App Developer site and get your app published in 6 easy steps ›.
We’re confident these cool games will keep you busy until the next featured apps post! 
Follow Ubuntu App Development on:
Warm grey is one of the neutral colours from Ubuntu and Canonical’s colour palette. It has been added to the palette for balance, being a bridge between the vibrant orange and aubergine.
The brand guidelines specify that warm grey (hex value: #AEA79F) can be used for: backgrounds, graphics, pictograms, dot patterns, charts and diagrams, and large size text.
Even though its use has been tried and tested on some of our print design materials, we are still finding the best way of applying it on the screen, with accessibility considerations in particular being something we want to get right.
Warm grey used in a brochure spread and diagrams
I made a quick example of warm grey text on white and buttons with white text on warm grey and showed it to the Ubuntu accessibility team, who promptly gave me some feedback.
Example used to showcase warm grey text on white and white text on warm grey
Here are the conclusions of this discussion, and what we will now try to follow as a rule:
Guidelines can change though. If something doesn’t evolve, or is at least reassessed at certain intervals of time, it can very easily stagnate. So we will test these conclusions and follow these simple rules for now, knowing that later on we may decide there is a better way of achieving the same results.
Suppose you install Ubuntu and select a language other than English (it’s known to happen!). This will install the general and the GNOME language packs, translated LibreOffice help, and so on. Now, install a KDE package or GIMP. You’ll notice that the new application is not translated and has no help available for your language. The next time you open the language selector from control-center it would tell you that you miss some language support and offer to install it, but this has been pretty indiscoverable, and we really can do better.
Today’s language-selector upload provides an aptdaemon plugin which automatically marks corresponding language support packages (translated help, dictionaries, spell checker modules, and translations themselves) for installation for any newly installed package, for all languages that are configured on your system.
For example, I have German and English locales on my system, and no KDE packages. Before, installing GIMP got me just that:
$ aptdcon -i gimp
The following NEW package will be installed (1):
gimp
Now it automatically installs the corresponding localized help:
$ aptdcon -i gimp
The following NEW packages will be installed (4):
gimp gimp-help-common gimp-help-de gimp-help-en
I am using aptdcon here as it points out the effect better than software-center doing all this in the background, but both use aptdaemon, so the effect will be the same.
Likewise, installing the first KDE-ish package will automatically install the KDE language packs:
$ aptdcon -i kate
The following NEW packages will be installed (71):
kate kate-data [...] kdelibs5-data [...] language-pack-kde-de language-pack-kde-en [...]
This is now possible because I rewrote the check-language-support logic from scratch; the old code was very slow, hard to read and a nightmare to maintain, and also depended on a lot of data files. The new code is very fast (figuring out all missing language support packages for all installed packages for all available locales takes 8 ms on my system), and has full test coverage.
While the check-language-support program still works (I rewrote it using the new API), it is easier and probably a lot faster to just use the new API now, e. g. in our Ubiquity installer.
Say goodbye to this 2.5 year old bug!
Huzzah, time flies when you are having fun. We are in week 15 of the release already and have 13 weeks left until release. Next week, according to the plan, we will get Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 out. As you can imagine, everybody is trying to get their current work into Precise, so it is well-represented and can be played with and tested.
With Mark Shuttleworth’s major announcement that Ubuntu’s Desktop will soon offer an additional way to interact with your applications through a more innovative and modern “HUD” or “Heads Up Display” we took the opportunity to highlight some of the blog posts covering this major development in the roadmap of Unity: PCWorld, The Register, The Inquirer.
An upload which got a lot of interest was gnome-control-center 3.2.2-2ubuntu4. OMG!Ubuntu! probably covered it first: Unity now has configuration options for you.
Developer Membership Board Meeting – Monday January 30, 2012 19:00 UTC
The Ubuntu Developer Membership Board will have its regularly schedule meeting to address general agenda items and review applications of Ubuntu developers to be granted upload rights.
Ubuntu Developer Week – January 31st – February 2nd
The Ubuntu Developer Week is an event that takes place over a period of three days which aims to educate people who are interested in Ubuntu Development while better equipping existing developers with techniques on packaging and holding sessions covering various teams and what they do. See below about more information.
If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:
Ubuntu Developer Week will start in five day, from Tuesday, 31st January to Thursday, 2nd February there will be heaps of online IRC sessions all allowing you to step behind the scenes and find out how things work. We managed to get loads of Ubuntu developers and other experits on board to explain, teach, entertain and answer your questions.
Joining in is pretty simple, use an IRC client (or web client) or just install and use lernid to connect. In one channel the session is taking place, while in a second channel discussions can happen or questions can be asked. This allows uninterrupted, action-packed sessions, where questions can be carried-forward, while discussing and having a good time with others.
If you have a look at the list of session you can see how this event is full of win. Let’s run through them real quick.
Packaging
We will kick off with two hours of introduction and getting a development environment set up, have a session about Dos and Dont’s and learn more about incorporating changes from other projects into Ubuntu. On the second day we will find out how to update packages to new versions, how to use Ubuntu Distributed Development to merge changes easily and find out how to work with Debian, Ubuntu’s most important upstream project. On the last day, we will toy around with building packages locally, find out what to bear in mind when writing changelog entries and check out automated packaging with ‘pkgme’.
Quality Assurance and fixing bugs
Beware: lots of goodness ahead! On the automated testing front there will be automated User Experience testing and an introduction to our Jenkins automated testing infrastructure. On day 2 we will learn how to use the development release in a sane manner and how to go about fixing small bugs in Unity. The last day will be full of bug fixing action, so hold tight: we will fix Desktop bugs, learn how to triage Desktop bugs, also what to do with internationalisation bugs and what the general bug life-cycle looks like.
Writing Code
We will kick off with an overview of Ubuntu’s technologies, move forward with Unity Lenses, how to write them and get more information into Unity’s dash. Day 2 brings you up to speed on how to get your app into Ubuntu, and a speaker whose birthday and getting up really early did not stop him from introducing you to HTML and CSS. On our last day you will find out more about how to write Lenses this time with Singlet, also we will have a great session about pair programming and code review in the cloud, how to make use of Ubuntu One’s U1DB and how to wrap your apps around Ubuntu One’s services.
Ubuntu projects
Ubuntu has grown dramatically, which is why you probably want to learn more about all the projects it has spawned. On our first day, our speakers will bring you up to speed on Edubuntu, our Ubuntu flavour for schools and have a session about Ubuntu TV and how it all works. Day 2 will bring you into the fold when it comes to deploying services into all kinds of scenarios using juju charms. Our last day will introduce you to the Ubuntu Documentation project, how it works and how you can help out.
Speakers from all parts of the globe put effort into this event and they will share their experience there. We look forward to seeing you there, join in or read the logs afterwards.
Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.
In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.
There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.
The keener eyed of you may have noticed:
https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com/view/Precise%20OpenStack%20Testing/
James Page has setup the jobs in the Ubuntu OpenStack QA Lab to start publishing to the public Jenkins QA instance this morning. We now have automated build testing of all core openstack components triggered from upstream trunk commits. This is followed by automated deployment (-deploy) of OpenStack in the lab with a serving of testing (-test) once its all up and running.
Credit to Adam Gandelman for the Juju charm work, deployment framework and test execution and to Chuck Short for the hugely misnamed tarball.sh script which completes the git/bzr/packaging fu to build and deploy openstack packages!
The plan is to get the upstream Tempest test suite running in the lab; at the moment we are running a more limited test script just to ensure that you can spin up and instance and see it on the network.
Just finished some hacking for implementing some unity configuration options that are blessed by the design team, as shown in this official specification.
It contains as well other ui tweaks. You can notice in particular the "Restore defaults" options that work on each tabs and restore every page's defaults.
Those options are impacting both unity and unity-2d. This gave particular challenges as their features don't align (for instance, we don't show the "set launcher icon size" for 2d) and they don't have the same kind of "launcher hide mode". Also, some configuration options have more choices in ccsm than those shown in the ui (like if you want to reveal the launcher on the bottom-left corner, or if you are using the "dodge active window" mode. We tried to be clever on the ui side and not resetting any different setting you can have set in ccsm by just launching the ui.
We also had to do some choices, like what settings to take by default (on first ui launch), when you have different settings between unity 2d and unity 3d? As there are more ui to tweak 3d than 2d, I thus decided to take the settings from 3d at startup (and then, the settings will align).
Note that the "reveal spot" doesn't work right now for Top Left corner, but this is a compiz/unity bug and not yet (but soon will be!) implemented feature in 2d.
Finally, if you are using a non unity session like the gnome-panel or gnome-shell one, you won't be impacted by those new settings. You will still gain a new "Restore defaults" option though. 
The package is currently building and will be available soon in Precise, enjoy!
I have always been impressed by the roles women have played in the history of modern society as a whole and I’m always delighted to see women involved in the advocacy of Ubuntu and FOSS (Free Open Source Software). I’m constantly trying to encourage guys I meet to have their wives, girlfriends and women relatives get involved in Ubuntu whether it be them attending a release party or coming to a global jam.
There are so many reasons to have women involved in Ubuntu and FOSS the most important being that their ability to contribute is equal to that of men and their involvement can only lead to other women seeing contributing to FOSS as more than just something guys can do.
The Ubuntu Women project plays an excellent role in the Ubuntu Community and I personally would love to see women be more involved in the Ubuntu Oregon LoCo and I’m trying wholeheartedly to make that a reality in fact at every event we hold I distribute Ubuntu Women material in the hopes women will get ahold of it and check out the Ubuntu project.
I’m sure that Ubuntu Oregon is not the only LoCo in the world that does not yet have women involved on a regular basis and I would love to learn what other LoCo’s are doing to try to engage women and get them involved in their LoCo’s and Ubuntu in general?
Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #249 for the week January 16 – 22, 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:
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
We have uploaded a new Precise linux kernel. Please note the ABI bump.
The most notable changes are as follows:
* Upstream jack detection patch set
* Add reboot_pid_ns to handle the reboot syscall
The full changelog can be seen at:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.2.0-11.19
We’re hitting the road in 2012 with talks and Charm Schools all over the US. Find us at Strata, POSSCon, the OpenStack Conference, railsconf, NodeConf, gluecon, Velocity, OSCON, RubyConf, SURGE, QCon, and LISA 12!
Check out our Event Calendar for dates!
The WordPress-plugins repository at Github is now updated and has all the plugins mentioned in the previous article. If you want to help with the development, test the plugins and send some feedback, including issues on the Github issues tracker. The next step at an unforeseeable date in the future, is uploading the plugins to the WordPress plugins directory. However, this needs testing and if at all possible, code review – I’m already waiting for feedback.
So I just turned 21years old
If you are planning to send me a gift i would prefer a notebook that atleast have i3, my netbook really suck.
Or send me a Galaxy Nexus though personally I am waiting for Galaxy S3 but free is free :*
Contact me using my email 
kthxbye
Keen KDE Software users can find Plasma and KDE Applications 4.8 updates in the backport PPA for 11.10 and compiling now in the main archive for our development release.
Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launnchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.
To update, use the Software Repository Guide to add the following repository to your software sources list:
Simply the most polished, fast, flexible, beautiful and elegant desktop, ever.
It’s everybody’s second-most favourite time of the release again. No, not the actual release, but it’s Ubuntu Developer Week!
Join us from Tuesday, 31st January 2012 to Thursday, 2nd February 2012 for three action-packed days full of tutorial and hands-on session all around Ubuntu development. We spared no efforts to bring you a very diverse set of topics and a very diverse set of speakers as well. This time we managed get speakers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa, Spain, UK and USA.
No matter if you are new to Ubuntu development or quite experienced already, we are sure going to have an interesting session for you. Here’s just an excerpt of the great things to come:
Joining in is trivial. Use normal IRC (even a web browser will do) or install Lernid and connect.
We put lots of effort into this great event. 31st January to 2nd February will be a great time and just for you. Bring your friends and your questions.
As this is generally asked very often: yes, we will keep logs of all the session if you shouldn’t be able to attend. We will make them available on the Ubuntu Developer Week page.
More info:
Tongue in cheek.
Should Ubuntu announcements seem like a comedy show? As far as HUD goes, I like the idea. I just find the idea of it replacing menus completely to be bonkers mad.
#ifdef O_ACCMODE
# define O_NOACCESS O_ACCMODE
#else
/* open a file for "no access" */
# define O_NOACCESS 3
#endif
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int fd;
struct winsize ws;
if ((fd = open("/dev/tty", O_WRONLY | O_RDWR)) < 0) {
perror("open /dev/tty failed");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
if (ioctl(fd, TIOCGWINSZ, &ws) == 0)
printf("%d x %d\n", ws.ws_row, ws.ws_col);
close(fd);
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
Today we announced the HUD that is landing in Unity. This is an awesome new feature. See Mark’s blog post, the coverage on PC Pro, and the interview with John Lea on OMG! Ubuntu!. Here is a video of the feature in action:
Can’t see it? See it here.
I wanted to point you folks at Nicholas’s blog post about how to test the HUD. You will need to be running Ubuntu 12.04 (which is still in development) to test.
We would like to encourage everyone to test so we can get this rock-solid for 12.04!
Dear Ubuntu Community,
During UDS-P, it was brought to the attention of the Community Council that blogs being syndicated to Planet Ubuntu included former Ubuntu Member blogs.
In order to update the what Planet Ubuntu aggregates to the public, the Community Council, with the help of Alan Bell, compared the Planet Ubuntu Blog list with the current Ubuntu members list, and removed the blogs belonging to those with lapsed memberships. Current Ubuntu Members whose blogs are syndicated to Planet Ubuntu were then matched with their Launchpad IDs. We also want to remind everyone that the “nick” field of the planet config is for your Launchpad ID.
If you are an Ubuntu Member, and you feel your blog has been removed from Planet Ubuntu in error simply add your blog with the updated information back to Planet Ubuntu.
If your Ubuntu Membership has lapsed accidentally and your blog has been removed from Planet Ubuntu please contact the membership boards (ubuntu-membership-boards@lists.ubuntu.com) to be readded to the Ubuntu Members team and then simply add your blog with the updated.
More information on adding your blog to Planet Ubuntu can be found at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlanetUbuntu
If you have questions or concerns please feel free to email the Ubuntu Community Council at: community-council@lists.ubuntu.com
On behalf of the Ubuntu Community Council, Milo Casagrande
Nothing new to report this week.
Release metrics and incomming bug data can be reviewed at the following link:
http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kt-meeting.txt
If your name is in the above table, please review your Alpha-2 work items. Note that Alpha-2 is next Thurs Feb 2.
| apw | hardware-p-kernel-boot | 1 work item | |||||
| hardware-p-kernel-config-review | 4 work items | ||||||
| hardware-p-kernel-delta-review | 3 work items | ||||||
| foundations-p-ipv6 | 1 work item | ||||||
| jsalisbury | other-p-bug-workflows | 1 work item | |||||
| ogasawara | hardware-p-kernel-config-review | 3 work items | |||||
| tgardner | hardware-p-kernel-delta-review | 1 work item |
no updates this week
Last week we uploaded the linux-3.2.0-10.17 Ubuntu kernel and we have
also just uploaded linux-3.2.0-10.18. With Alpha-2 next Thurs, Feb 2,
I’d ideally like to upload our final kernel for the Alpha-2 milestone by
this Friday. For any patches needing to land in Alpha-2, send them out
to the kernel-team mailing list immediately.
Important Upcoming Dates:
=== CVE Metrics ===
Currently open CVEs for each supported branch:
This week two new CVEs were added both of which were closed out.
Overall we have made some progress in closing the outstanding backlog.
| Package | Open | ||||
| linux Hardy | 17 (-3) | ||||
| linux Lucid | 12 | ||||
| linux Maverick | 11 (-2) | ||||
| linux Natty | 10 (-3) | ||||
| linux Oneiric | 9 | ||||
| linux Precise | 7 | ||||
| linux-ec2 Lucid | 12 | ||||
| linux-fsl-imx51 Lucid | 11 (-4) | ||||
| linux-mvl-dove Lucid | 9 (-2) | ||||
| linux-mvl-dove Maverick | 9 (-2) | ||||
| linux-ti-omap4 Maverick | 12 (-4) | ||||
| linux-ti-omap4 Natty | 7 (-5) | ||||
| linux-ti-omap4 Oneiric | 6 (-2) | ||||
| linux-ti-omap4 Precise | 5 (-2) | ||||
| linux-lts-backport-maverick Lucid | 11 (-2) | ||||
| linux-lts-backport-natty Lucid | 10 (-3) | ||||
| linux-lts-backport-oneiric Lucid | 9 |
Here is the status for the main kernels, until today (Jan. 24):
No open discussions.
With less than two weeks to FOSDEM taking place a weekend of talks, catching up with old friends and making new ones nearly here. Jan Claeys has created a wiki page if anyone is going, taking part, wants to meet up or help with the stall. As always it’s voluntary but having lots of people helping does spread the time so folks can go to talks or take part in the corridor discussions that tend to happen.
If you’re giving a talk why not let people know so they can attend, just add your details to the wiki, there is also a dinner on the night organised so keep an eye on the page for details. See you there, I’m taking part in a panel session on working with community contributors where I’ll be discussing locoteams.
One of the neatest parts about starting to get more application data into the open is that we can start to use it in interesting ways. I'm happy to talk about a new way that we're using the menu data: the HUD. The idea behind the HUD is that you can quickly find functionality in an application without having to know the menu structure. But how does it do it? How can you make it better?
We're using the same Dbusmenu data that is currently exported to the global menu, just remixing it for search. We are searching through the labels in the menu items which gives us already localized data straight from the application. This means that it should work for the language that the application is in. In the future we hope to use information like accessibility data as well as any tooltips that might be attached to a menuitem (though we don't show tooltips in the global menu).
Any application that works with the window menus today should also work with HUD out of the box.
To match the label we're basically using an implementation of the Levenshtein distance with a few additions. What this allows us to do is rank possible solutions in a relevancy order, and present some solutions that might occur via "fat finger" or other similar type errors. But, this also means that there is some fuzzy algorithms involved in the matching which will have to be tuned.
We expect to tune them over the next few releases, and to do that we have a set of test cases that we're using for the tuning. The problem with those test cases? They're only in the languages I speak. You probably speak in more/different/better languages than I do, please feel free to propose merges that extend this test suite so that as we continue to tune the search algorithms we don't leave any language behind.
One of the additions that we add to the distance calculation is an offset based on which entries you've used most recently. Your favorite functionality in the application. Quite simply we're storing a list of items you've used over the last thirty days and a timestamp of when you used them. This database is simple but it can be fun to look into for the curious and I wanted to talk a bit about a couple of the tools that you can use to see the data.
$ hud-list-applications
This will list all the applications that have data on them in your HUD usage database. They are identified by the path to their desktop file as determined by BAMF. You can then look at the menu items used in a specific application:
$ hud-dump-application /usr/share/applications/inkscape.desktop
This shows the individual items that you've used, and the number of times that you've used them. If you want to inspect the exact file tracking the data it is available at:
~/.cache/indicator-appmenu/hud-usage-log.sqlite
While talking about various tools to work with HUD I thought I'd also mention that you can also, just for fun, work with HUD from the command line using the command line tool:
$ hud-cli
Application designers have always had a problem figuring out how to promote specific functionality that is commonly used to the forefront, while still making the rest of the functionality easily available. The most recent ways that they've done this is with toolbars and ribbon style. You can't adjust the positioning even when you know that the particular toolbar isn't best for the user because it will mess up the user's spacial memory. HUD sidesteps this issue by providing all the options, just promoting certain ones based on usage. They're all in the same place (the HUD) but with always improving ordering.
What happens on first usage of the application? At that point we don't have any way to know what the user wants to do, we we've provide a way for the application designer to provide the most likely items for general users. Effectively, this is the HUD's version of the default toolbar setup in an application; though it automatically decays and adjusts to the user's usage pattern.
The files that control this initial bias are very simple and there is an example in the test suite. Basically they have the various menu items along with a value that describes how to preload the usage database. A '5' there would mean that 5 entries are added to the usage database for that item on the first time that application is used; one for today and each of the four days previous. In this way, as values drop off by being too old, there isn't a step function in how the item is ranked, it just slowly drops down in priority. Application designers should start to think about how they would rank the menu items in their application, and start getting these integrated into either the releases or the packages of those applications so that users have a good first experience with their application.
The code for the HUD lives in the indicator-appmenu repository. Currently it exists on a branch that needs to be reviewed before merging, but that shouldn't be for long. I expect it to get merged to trunk in the next couple of weeks.
After that the biggest change will be integration with indicator-appmenu. It was originally implemented as it's own service to make development more agile, but it clearly shares a large amount of data with the global menu and there's no reason to have two repositories in memory of the same data. It also needs to synchronize heavily with the application menu and BAMF, which is also already in indicator-appmenu. Thanks to the magic of DBus no one should notice the change in processes as the names and objects will migrate over to the new process.
As this is more of a first prototype there are also some missing features that need to be added. The first of those is to simply improve the matching. We also need to get better descriptions from application indicators, today we're using their accessibility description (you set those, right?) but that typically has too much information. Lastly, we need to integrate better with applications that expect the about-to-show signal for their menus. This includes XUL applications and some Qt ones, so it's an important feature for making the HUD usable for everyone.
Merges and bugs should be directed towards the indicator-appmenu project and also make sure you've signed the Canonical Contributor Agreement for any code contributed.
Aaron Toponce
Accessibility Team
Adam Sommer
Adnan Quaium
Ahmed Kamal
Alan Bell
Alan Pope
Alberto Milone
Alessio Treglia
Alexander Sack
Alexander Sack (old)
Alexandre Vassalotti
Amber Graner
Andi Darmawan
Andre Noel
Andrea Colangelo
Andrea Corbellini
Andrea Gasparini
Andrea Grandi
Andrea Veri
Andreas Moog
Andres Rodriguez
Andrew Pollock
Andrew SB
André Gondim
Andy Whitcroft
Ante Karamatić
Anthony Hook
Anthony Mercatante
Antonio Sánchez
Ara Pulido
Aron Xu
Artem Popov
Arthur Schiwon
Aurélien Gâteau
Ayrton Araujo
Barry Warsaw
Bazaar
Behind the Circle
Belinda Lopez
Ben Collins
Ben Donald-Wilson
Benjamin Drung
Benjamin Kerensa
Benjamin Mako Hill
Benjamin Rubin
Bilal Akhtar
Bodhi.Zazen
Brandon Holtsclaw
Brandon Perry
Brendan Donegan
Brett Alton
Brian Burger
Brian Murray
Bryan Quigley
Bryce Harrington
Canonical Design Team
Carlos Diener - emonkey
Carthik Sharma
Caspar Clemens Mierau
Cesar Sevilla
Charlene Tessier
Charles Profitt
Charlie Smotherman
Chase Douglas
Chris Coulson
Chris Gregan
Chris Johnston
Chris Woollard
Christopher Denter
Chuck Frain
Chuck Short
Clay Weber
Clint Byrum (SpamapS)
Cody Russell
Colin King
Colin Watson
Corey Burger
Costales
Cyril Lavier
Daniel Hahler
Daniel Holbach
Daniel Silverstone
Daniel T Chen
Danny Piccirillo
Dante Díaz
Darcy Casselman
Dave Morley
Dave Murphy
Dave Walker
David Farning
David Henningsson
David Mandala
David Planella
David Rubin
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