Planet Ubuntu

Alan Pope: UDS Karmic Videos and HTML5 Goodness

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:25:31 +0000

I noticed that the videos from the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit are now online, and thought I’d have a play with the new embedded HTML5 video stuff in Firefox 3.5.

Rather than view all the videos by downloading them individually I thought I’d make a page where I can view them all sequentially.

Here is the html I threw together. Guess it will look rubbish in anything but Firefox 3.5. Of course that’s no guarantee it will look any good in Firefox 3.5. Just, y’know, you’ll see the videos

Nick Ali: UDS Karmic Plenary Videos

boredandblogging — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:25:36 +0000

Just in case you missed it, the plenary videos from UDS are now up: http://video.ubuntu.com/uds/karmic/

Jonh Wendell: GNOME Rocked at FISL

Jonh Wendell — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:15:14 +0000

Hello, folks.

This is a quick post (written in the airport, while waiting my flight to Gran Canaria) just to tell you that GNOME Brazil one more time rocked at FISL – International Free Software Forum, which took place (again, as every year) in Porto Alegre, south of Brazil.

Thanks to GNOME Foundation, I was able to attend the event, and represent GNOME there, along with many Brazilian GNOMErs. We had a booth and a communitarian event, where I, Vinicius Depizzol, Gustavo (kov) Noronha and Julio talked about the past and the future of the GNOME Desktop, as well about how to contribute with the project.

Some pictures (click for larger size and for the description):

De fisl 2009

Ah, also thanks to the GNOME Foundation I’m right now boarding to Gran Canaria, to GUADEC! This edition is special because it gets together GUADEC and Akademy (KDE) into a single conference. Looking forward to beat KDE guys in the Freefa soccer tournement!

Martin Owens: Question: File System Indexing

doctormo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:58:48 +0000

A feature I would really like on my computer is reasonable file content and meta data indexing, not such full text indexing for doing searched but field indexing for doing date/time boundaries, size indexing and other useful components that would make meta file io much faster.

But so far I’ve not been able to find a file system that has the reliability of modern ext systems with all the extra goodies that we really could do with to support our new breed of apps and data access that I’m so looking forward to.

So today’s blog post is a question for the community, what file systems have you tried? and how many of these features can you find?

Reliability
Speed
Open Specification
Full Text Index for text content
Field Indexed for all Meta Data
Tree Expandable Meta Data
Context Indexing (take content, make fields)
Progressive and/or Selective Indexing so as not to slow normal system file io
Time Based Differences for reverting to previous states
Access Logging
Obviously anything already in ext3

Jani Monoses: dumping open FF tab URLs using Javascript and shell stuff

janimo (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:42:54 +0000

The perl and python solutions presented for dumping Firefox current session URLs are not very accurate if you navigate around in the same tab using backwards and forward buttons while remaining on the same domain, as they always print the first visited URL. UPDATE: Actually the python one is as it too uses JSON :)

The JSON data in that sessionstore.js file keeps a list of URLs and an index field of the current one, and the latter is changed by the back/forward navigation.

Using Javascipt we can load that JSON object and manipulate it far more naturally that via regexps. Here's how it is done using the Mozilla JS interpreter smjs that comes in the spidermonkey-bin package. It has no file access libraries so I used this interpreter's readline along with some help from the shell (echo is needed to append a newline to the original input file, otherwise readline() choked.)

echo | cat `locate sessionstore.js | head -n 1` - | smjs -e 'eval("pig="+readline());

i=0;
for each (w in pig.windows) {
print("Window ", i++);
for each (t in w.tabs) {
print(" ", t.entries[t.index-1].url)
}
}'

I have no idea how to do code formatting in blogger, so above code is unindented. On the plus side it can be easily copy-pasted and tested :) Change the locate invocation with you hardcoded path if you want more speed.

Things will be even nicer when GJS and/or Seed are in wider use and you are able to manipulate files directly from JS :)

Lydia Pintscher: Berlin, we’ll meet again

Lydia — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:26:27 +0000

As others on PlanetKDE already wrote we had a really great time in Berlin last week. The KDE/Kubuntu/Amarok booth was well staffed with my favorite gearheads and new KDE people now to be added to the former group It was nice to meet you folks! One of the best things about this year’s Linuxtag: We finally managed to get our booths (KDE, Kubuntu, Amarok, QtSoftware and KDAB) together as close as possible No more running from one side of the exhibition to the other like in previous years \o/

Thursday was probably the busiest day for me. Ingo interviewed me about Amarok for RadioTux. (Excellent job as always, Ingo! ;-)) The recording of it is available at RadioTux. Shortly after that I had to rush off to join Alexandra in giving an introduction to community management in free software projects in our “Community Management 101″ workshop that was well received.
The other days were filled with meetings and lots of talking to visitors and other projects. It is nice to see the shift in attitude towards KDE 4 compared to Linuxtag last year. A lot of people came to our booth to let us know they use and like KDE 4 now. This really rocks! Those who were not happy with KDE 4 yet mostly had very minor problems which we fixed in a few minutes; like showing them how to add applets to their taskbar or what the places bar in Dolphin is capable of. Oh and I was surprised how many people first didn’t believe I was running a stock KDE 4.2.4 on Kubuntu on my 7′ EeePC. So once again: The tiny thing does indeed run KDE 4 Special thanks for that to the Plasma and KWin team. Plasma and KWin on the EeePC are quite an eye catcher at events like Linuxtag.

Kreuzberg surprised a small group of us on Saturday with CSD. Definitely not what I would have expected for that evening but it was awesome! And let me tell you: Marge’s outfit was great but it wasn’t the best one by far. That one goes to someone dressed as Hellboy shouting “KDE! Awesome!” after seeing Frederik’s KDE shirt. This was my second time in Kreuzberg and the second time there was a party on the streets. Rock! (Way less police than on May 1st though ;-))
Sunday and Monday Frank, Cornelius, Thorsten, Danimo, Dominik, Milian and I met at the QtSoftware office to talk about the future of KDE’s wikis. It was quite productive and results will be visible soon.

Thanks go to KDE e.V. and Amarok for funding and of course the Linuxtag team for another great event.

Oh and btw: I of course signed the FLA as well. (I think I got number 10 - nice round number.)

Everyone going to Gran Canaria: Have a nice time and lots of fun and make sure to blog/dent/tweet a lot for those left behind at home. I want to see lots of photos

Ara Pulido: I am going to Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

Ara Pulido — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:31:56 +0000

Everybody is blogging about it, so do I.

Tomorrow I will be travelling to Gran Canaria to attend the Desktop Summit.
If you're interested in testing, I will be presenting Mago on Wednesday.

I hope to see you there and meet a lot of new people!

Emma Jane Hogbin: Write Daily

emmajane — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:28:52 +0000

For nearly three weeks I've had a tab open on my browser with the intention of writing something. Today. But for nearly three weeks I just haven't managed to collect my thoughts in ways that I wanted them to be consumed. It's been a whirlwind though.

Writing Open Source - the first ever (as far as we know) Open Source Documentation conference was held in Owen Sound. It was amazing. I am biased, but it was amazing. (I'm not being redundant, it really was amazing.) I am also intensely proud of how this conference has turned into a community. Please participate, or at least follow along, on the revamped WOS site. There's a planet feed, forums and amazing intiatives including a style guide, documentation personas and a best practices guide. And when I say initiatives I mean it in the exact definition of the word: the projects are initiated and looking for your input!

(Yes, that's a bag piper and a chocolate fountain. And, yes, that's the mayor in both the photo on the left and the right. She insisted that we go up to Inglis Falls after meeting everyone and even drove us up to the falls when I tried to decline after I thought she was just being polite! Thanks, Mayor Lovell Stanners!)

With WOSCON wrapped up, I trekked out to PDX for Open Source Bridge. If you weren't there this year, you should go next year.

Stay a couple of days and explore Portland too. It's very pretty there, even when it's raining.

Back in Owen Sound I've been playing tourist in my own town (and a little bit further sometimes too).

I've also started on the food box from a local market garden and have been eating better ever since. Delicious radishes, radishes and ... more radishes were on the menu the first week. If you're ever plagued by radishes I recommend: radish curry, radish bean burger, tabouleh and roasted radish with roast chicken (they come out tasting sweet, much like garlic does). As my own garden ripens I'll need to come up with more ways of dealing with radishes.

Last night we had a wonderful Canada Day celebration at my aunt and uncle's cottage. There were fireworks and sparklers, of course.

In two weeks I'm headed to OSCON. I'll be drinking from the firehose and am taking Damian Conway's presenter workshop. I'm really looking forward to it.

Alberto Milone: X-Bus – a daemon for input devices

albertomilone — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:11 +0000

What is X-Bus?

It’s a personal project I’ve been working on (among other things) since I joined Canonical. It’s a daemon which handles input devices through the XInput protocol. In the future I hope to add support for outputs too.

What’s the purpose of X-Bus?

Its main purpose is to provide developers with a common (and simplified) way to access XInput from languages which have DBus bindings (Python, Ruby, C, C++, Java, Perl, etc.). It is not specific to any desktop environment, even though it uses C++ and QT4 (see below).

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc. applications which make use of the same backend with different frontends (as opposed to having different backends and frontends)?

Current features:

Exposes XInput (listing/setting properties, catching signals, etc.) through Dbus with a simplified API.
Stores the (per-user) current inputs configuration in an XML file and applies it at startup or when requested.
Emits signals (through Dbus) when new devices are plugged in or unplugged (so that, for example your client application can refresh its UI to reflect the new situation).
Tracks keyboard activity so as to disable your touchpad when you’re typing.

It’s an attempt to combine the features in syndaemon and xinput (the command line tool), from both of which X-Bus borrows code.

3 examples of what X-Bus can be used for:

User interfaces to configure touchpads (which is the 1st thing I would like to work on).
User interfaces to configure touchscreens whose drivers support XInput (I still need to expose the calibration functions provided by XInput though).
Automatic rotation of your touchpad (figuratively speaking) when your screen is rotated (after this is implemented).

Why QT?

Because of its DBus and XML modules and because it’s a pleasure to work with QT in general.

Example: if you add the Q_SCRIPTABLE macro to the function in the header file, this function will be made available in your DBus interface. This applies to signals too. This makes maintenance a lot easier.

In my opinion it would be overkill to use the DBus low-level API and I don’t think the glib (DBus) bindings can offer what I described in the example (feel free to prove me wrong on this). Furthermore I would have to use an external xml module to perform validation and the things that I currently do with the xml file.

Doesn’t it duplicate efforts? Why don’t you work on $INSERT_DAEMON_HERE instead?

Yes, it does (partially) but my point is: can we use $INSERT_DAEMON_HERE on KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc. ?

Furthermore, if you have a look at X-Bus’ API you’ll see that (currently) there’s very little duplication.

Where’s the code?

Source code (have a look at the examples which are written in Python)
Packages

NOTE: this is just a first release and users won’t benefit from it without a user interface (unless they want to edit the xml file manually).

Matt Zimmerman: Iberia on-line check-in doesn’t work with free software

mdz — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:06:16 +0000

Apparently, there are still some 1990s-era websites which haven’t noticed that the web is not Windows. I realized this today when attempting to check in for an Iberia flight using my Ubuntu system and Firefox.

Someone thought it would be a good idea to use JavaScript and ActiveX to check whether the user has installed Adobe Acrobat Reader. If they don’t, it displays a helpful message:

Error message from Iberia on-line check-in

…and refuses to continue. After all, if you might not have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, why bother trying to check in? I’m glad you asked. Because it’s not the only program capable of reading and printing PDF files!

You may have noticed that the message offers us some information, just in case the script got it wrong. Perhaps it tells us how to continue checking in despite having different application preferences than their developers? Unfortunately, no. Instead, it explains how to configure Windows to use Adobe Acrobat Reader as the default PDF viewer:

Helpful guidance for configuring your Windows system

I’m not the first one to discover this problem, as a quick search turned up instructions for working around the problem (Spanish, English translation) from September 2008.

Oxford Archaeology: KVM84 in the starting blocks

yann — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:15:43 +0000

Remember my post from March? Where, we're nearly there. Dustin announced a few days ago that he was expecting to push kvm84 in -updates next week. I've been beta-testing and chasing bugs on this for some time now, and I am pretty happy with this backport, and all the goodness it brings. So, a short list of features/bugfixes that I've noticed so far:

Disk speed seems a lot better:
```
yhamon@yhamon-dev:~$ time cp SunStudio12ml-solaris-sparc-200709-pkg.tar.bz2  tmp
real	0m12.528s

VS

yhamon@mirror:~$ time cp SunStudio12ml-solaris-sparc-200709-pkg.tar.bz2 tmp
real	0m20.159s
```
yhamon-dev being a VM running on a kvm84 host, and the other one on a standard kvm-62. Both hosts are similar in specs and similarly loaded. I wonder what could trigger such a significant change (cache?), but I ran this cp several times, an every time kvm84 would be significantly faster...
ACPI2 for windows guests: among other features, it means that windows guests will now be able to reboot "themselves". Until now, when triggering a reboot from a windows guest, it would just shut it down. Now that works fine, too.
Proper SMP support. In KVM-62, SMP support was quite broken, it would use a lot of CPU on the host - the network would also regularly crash with SMP guests, leaving them without connectivity. Now this seems to work correctly; I've been running SMP windows and Linux guests for a while, and it seems quite stable.

Speaking of Windows guests (believe me, I'd be happier without): I think I found a better way to install those. Instead of using virt-install like I documented a while ago , it is much easier to directly manually create the QCOW2 file:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 windows.qcow2 12G

And to create manually the XML definition file (copy it from a template - don't forget to change UUID and MAC address), and boot it directly with virsh. Here is an example of a libvirt XML file that I use.

This works fine; I had many issues before with virt-install, where the VM just wouldn't restart after the disk had been formatted.

David Rubin: Re Dumping currently loaded Firefox URLs

drubin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:26:50 +0000

bryce posted his Perl version of Dumping currently loaded Firefox URLs. I decided perl is unreadable :) and the file is json any way. ~~So with the python-json package~~ You can get some pretty readable code so I wrote a pretty simple Python version ff-pages. Usage:

python ff-pages.py /path/to/location/sessionstore.js

I am starting off with python so all comments are welcome. Update 02/06/2009: python-json isn't needed. Seems to only work with firefox3.5

Colin Watson: Python SIGPIPE handling

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:15:00 +0000

Enrico writes about creating pipelines with Python's subprocess module, and notes that you need to take care to close stdout in non-final subprocesses so that subprocesses get SIGPIPE correctly. This is correct as far as it goes (and true in any language, although there's a Python bug report requesting that subprocess be able to do this itself), but there's an additional gotcha with Python that you missed.

Python ignores SIGPIPE on startup, because it prefers to check every write and raise an IOError exception rather than taking the signal. This is all well and good for Python itself, but most Unix subprocesses don't expect to work this way. Thus, when you are creating subprocesses from Python, it is very important to set SIGPIPE back to the default action. Before I realised this was necessary, I wrote code that caused serious data loss due to a child process carrying on out of control after its parent process died!

import signal
import subprocess

def subprocess_setup():
    # Python installs a SIGPIPE handler by default. This is usually not what
    # non-Python subprocesses expect.
    signal.signal(signal.SIGPIPE, signal.SIG_DFL)

subprocess.Popen(command, preexec_fn=subprocess_setup)

I filed a patch a while back to add a restore_sigpipe option to subprocess.Popen, which would take care of this. As I say in that bug report, in a future release I think this ought to be made the default, as it's very easy to get things dangerously wrong right now.

Russell John: Microsoft Joins Twitter!

Russell — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:09:50 +0000

Microsoft finally made it to Twitter. Big shots like Google and Yahoo are already on Twitter, but it took Microsoft quite some time to decide whether they really want to join or not! (Come on, we all know that they are slow!)

Anyway I found it really interesting, and thought like to welcome them via my account @Linux. I did, and it was awesome to see that people found it hilarious! They started retweeting right away, and as I’m writing right now after an hour, people are still making fun of it.

Here they are, @Microsoft on Twitter. Give them a follow if you like to!

If you liked this post, then you also might like...

Daniel Silverstone: Dear Lazyweb…

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:45:38 +0000

I am currently stuck taking four times the suggested daily dose of two anti-histamines in order to combat my body and its reaction to plants having sex all around me.

I am taking two 10mg Loratadine tablets, and two 10mg Cetirizine Hydrochloride tablets, twice daily. This is effectively four times the recommended dose of twice as many anti-histamines as I should need.

I wasn’t this bad last year, but the year before was similar. Irritatingly, once the drugs kick in (45 minutes to an hour after taking) my runny nose, itchy/burny eyes, slight dopeyness induced by feeling crap, etc. all fade away. Yesterday I needed my second dose a mere 8 hours after the first, but I didn’t need to re-dose until this morning after that.

I guess what I’m asking is—what is the expected side-effects of taking such a high dose of antihistamines. Do any of you out there have to take such high doses, have you seen a doctor about this? All I expect a doctor to do is to either supply me more loratadine on prescription (which is of dubious value unless I get a lot given prescription charges in the UK), or to try me on a nasal spray, which tend to induce nosebleeds for me. If you’ve found other ways to cope, I’m interested. Otherwise I guess I’ll make an appointment to see the doctor in the next week or so.

David Rubin: Gmails Label Improvements Broke BetterGmail2

drubin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:23:19 +0000

Today Gmail released their improved label support. This update provided some very nice features like drag and drop emails into labels. and changing the order of your labels. This change did how ever break BetterGmail2 a Firefox add-on. The most noticeable change was the break in the "Sub Labels". Some of my labels only fit on the screen because the first bit is removed and then indented. Ie I have Mailing List/Ubuntu-za which now only displays Mailing List/Ubu which is rather annoying. The reason for this naming convention is Gmails Imap support does this.

but if you try to add subfolders in your mail client, they'll become labels that look like this: Folder/Subfolder.

I hope there will be a release patch for this soon.

Bryce Harrington: Dumping currently loaded Firefox URLs

bryce — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:22:09 +0000

Chris Cheney posed an interesting problem - how to get a listing of currently opened Firefox windows.

You can get this info from sessionstore.js in your firefox profile, but it's a jumble of javascript. I wrote a script ff-pages to display them in a more useful way.

Example usage:

$ ff-pages .mozilla/firefox/*.default/sessionstore.js

Window 0:
    http://shoutcast.net/directory/index.phtml
    http://www.radioparadise.com
    http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Plots/
    file:///var/www/X/Graphs
Window 1:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/379797
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21315
Window 2:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/360319
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/376092
Window 3:
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21756
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16702
...

Richard Johnson: Community

nixternal — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:15:45 +0000

Recently I have really gotten into cycling, not just for recreational use, but also for competitive reasons. I am definitely new to their community unlike I have been in the free software community now for more than 15 years. The one thing I noticed is that their community is exactly like ours. Everyone is very welcoming and friendly and it is easy to find a spot just for you. I have done my first 3 group rides within the past week. A group ride is where a bunch of road cyclists get together and do a nice long, fast paced, ride in a group, or what is commonly referred to as a pace line in cycling.

The first ride I went on was with what are called leg shavers. People who are about as close to Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, Alberto Contador, and others. They ride super fast and they know what they are doing. Well, I definitely didn’t fit in with this crowd but they didn’t discourage me from trying to ride with them at all. Actually some of these semi-pro to professional cyclists took some time with me to teach me the basics, something they probably learned many years ago.

The second ride I went on was with leg shavers as well with a local racing team, which I will probably join in the upcoming months. On Monday they went out for what is called a recovery ride. This type of ride is a slower paced ride with very high RPMs, or cadence in the cycling world. After racing on Saturday and Sunday, these athletes need to keep their legs, lungs, and hearts fresh, so they do a somewhat easy ride. This ride was considered a “no-drop” ride. This means that they will not let you drop off and will always help you through. Now those of you who know me, know that I am a fairly large guy. I am not obese, but I used to play football, did wrestling and martial arts, lifted weights forever. I was always into getting bigger. Well because of this, my cardio is absolute garbage. I can ride for 100 plus miles, but I can’t do it all that fast. This ride was my fastest paced ride at the distance we did to date. There was a woman who made sure I didn’t drop the entire time, her name was Sandy and I am forever in her debt as she was not only patient, but she was a ton of help teaching me the ropes.

The third ride was last night. A nice 31 mile ride that is by far the hilliest ride I have done to date. I didn’t even know we had hills like this in the Chicagoland area. I was great with rolling hills, flats, and downhills. Because I have a solid 220 plus pound body, I can easily toast a lot of people down hill that we were riding with. Now, what goes down, must come up, and my lord did it ever come up. There were 3 hills, and all of them had those scary movie names too. Devils Back, Heart Attack Hill, and I can’t remember the other. Well, those hills kicked my ass. I dropped into the lowest gears I had, and I run triples thankfully. I had dropped from doing 18 mile per hour to about 7 miles per hour, I pushed and I pushed, I saw dots, I felt sick, and my legs were on fire. To my rescue to help me up the hill and make sure I didn’t fall back, another woman cyclist. Sandy was also riding with us that night, but I told her to not fall back because of me, I know the route and I will catch up. Thankfully she listened and got a good workout. The lady who did help me was just as friendly, very motivational, and a lot of fun to ride with.

Since these 3 rides, the last 2 I have made some cool friends and already they are emailing me asking me to come out for a bike ride this weekend and a barbecue. Really cool, and this is the type of stuff I really need, the motivation and camaraderie that will help me from burning out in the open source community. There you go Jono, add cycling to your list of burnout preventors As you can see, they welcome me with open arms the same exact way the open source community has as well. Cycling and Ubuntu are so darn close in community representation that I am falling in love with both more and more every day now.

Another moral to this story, which has become somewhat of a hot topic over the past couple of years deals with women. I am here to tell you that women can be as strong and even stronger then men, in so many ways. When I say stronger, I don’t necessarily mean strength. The past 2 rides I have done has given me even more appreciation for the women in our communities. I am proud to say that I was at the brink of quitting and had women come to my rescue. For those of you out there that want to bash women and say they don’t belong, I know some on bikes that are waiting for you to mount up, and I know plenty who have their IDEs fired up ready to code you a paperbag to crawl into. So I had 2 women stick with me during my rides and help me through it, help me succeed. I had women in the open source community do the same. One of them is my good pointy stick buddy Sarah who probably helped me more than Jonathan Riddell, Brandon Holtsclaw, and Daniel T. Chen put together.

COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY!

Simos Xenitellis: guadec, gsoc l10n-el, ellak-conf

Simos Xenitellis — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:36:29 +0000

guadec

I am attending GUADEC this year, thanks to the sponsorship by the GNOME Foundation!

I am organising the GNOME Localisation BoF, which takes place on Friday, 10th July, 2009, at 17:00. I am also having a session on the GNOME translator command line tool gnome-i18n-manage-vcs on the same day at 15:00.

gsoc

A few months ago, there was a program in Greece, along the lines of the Google Summer of Code, to help Greek developers in FLOSS projects. The program was organised by EELLAK, a Greek non-profit, composed of 25 institutions of the tertiary education and research centres. As it took place during the spring, it was nicknamed Greek Spring of Code (gsoc).

Apart from developing software, the program had a localisation angle, and we applied for the localisation of GNOME 2.26 to the Greek language. In practice, this meant that we had to lift the documentation translations from 32% to 100%, complete the remaining UI translations.

We achieved the goal .

Many contributors helped in this effort; Jennie Petoumenou (also co-organiser in the effort), Marios Zindilis, Fotis Tsamis, Kostas Papadimas, Nikos Charonitakis, Sterios Prosiniklis, Giannis Katsampiris, Michalis Kotsarinis, Vasilis Kontogiannis and Socratis Vavilis.The overall task was difficult, and our team did an amazing task to complete the translations on time. Thank you all, and especially Jennie and Marios for undertaking huge chunks of the translation effort for this release.

Here are the GNOME EL 2.26 deliverables in HTML, PDF.

ellak-conf

The fourth Greek FOSS (ELLAK) conference took place in Athens on the 19-20th June 2009.

We had our annual localisation meetup!

I organised a workshop on git, with a focus on how to use when starting into software development. There was emphasis on using github.com to host and manage the development. In addition, services such as github.com allow to cooperate during the development, making programming a more social and interesting task.

Finally, there was a presentation of the Greek GNOME team efforts for the last year.

Bryce Harrington: Solutions to me-too storms

bryce — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:39:33 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about me-too storms, including how they develop and some of the problems they can cause (most notably - delaying the bug's solution).

Since this is a bad problem there's been quite a few ideas proposed.

FIXING the bugs faster would be the best thing of course. That's a whole other topic... but does deserves first mention.

Launchpad already has a solution in the form of the "This bug doesn't affect me (change)" text and link on every bug.

Presumably this is serving as a lightning rod saving us from heaps of me-too comments. And presumably the data is being stored somewhere to help developers identify highly popular bugs, but I don't know how to access that info. I would imagine if developers could filter/sort/view this data it'd give added incentive for people to use that and it would be a more effective tool.

Another issue is that the link just isn't that noticeable. I'll leave it to usability experts to work out how best to improve it, but it definitely needs a re-think so it's a bit more obvious, especially for casual launchpad visitors.

Educating bug reporters is another oft-suggested solution. I think there's some truism about documentation being the worst way to explain how software works, because no one will read it. Actually there's been reams and reams of discussion and documentation about how to write and behave on bug reports, and indeed I think this is really helpful as it can turn bad bug reporters into really good bug reporters. That said, many people are just too busy, or too lazy, or don't even know they don't know how to report bugs.

Hiding comments or otherwise emphasizing/de-emphasizing comments by various criteria has been suggested and I believe is being considered by the launchpad crew. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't end up actually consuming more time to manage than it saves. I think a lot of useful experimentation could be done on this idea using greasemonkey, as Brian Murray has done.

Splitting bug reports would be pretty cool feature, at least in theory. If we realize that John and Bob have different issues, it'd be slick to be able to push a button and have all of Bob's comments moved to its own bug report. But in practice I suspect this could result in creating more confusion by losing context. In any case, I don't think it'd help with me-too storms since most of the low value comments really aren't worth setting up a separate bug for; better to just have the people file new bugs from scratch.

Locking bug reports, is sometimes suggested by those familiar with similar functionality provided by forums software.

Minimum karma requirements to post onto other people's bugs is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've noticed (thanks to Kees Cook's lp_karma_suffix greasemonkey script) a very strong correlation that the worst me-too'ers also tend to have the lowest karma. People with the most helpful comments usually have higher karma.

So why not make use of that by requiring posters to have a certain karma level before being able to comment on someone else's bug report? From what I can tell, it needn't be high; 50 points would be enough to weed out the vast majority of the noise, but still be low enough that anyone with a legitimate interest in helping on bug reports could earn with a fairly minimal amount of work, such as helping on answers.ubuntu.com or going through the full bug process following up on their own bug reports.

Perhaps it could be set up to kick in only after there are already a few commenters, so we don't get in the way of random helpers on bugs that would otherwise be neglected. In a way, this would be akin to the "locking" idea above, but a bit more targeted.

Other thoughts?

Santiago Zarate: Liberado PostgreSQL 8.4

nospam@example.com (Santiago Zarate) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:17:00 +0000

En Español
Read in English

1 de julio, 2009 El Grupo Global de Desarrollo de PostgreSQL
ha
liberado la versión 8.4, continuando con el rápido desarrollo de la
base de datos de código abierto más avanzada del mundo. Esta versión
contiene una gran cantidad de mejoras para que la administración,
consulta y programación en PostgreSQL sea más fácil que nunca. Con las
293 funcionalidades nuevas o mejoradas en la versión 8.4, hay aún más
motivos para escoger PostgreSQL para sus futuros proyectos.

La mayoría de los cambios en PostgreSQL 8.4 son herramientas y
órdenes
de administración y monitoreo, nuevas o mejoradas. Cada usuario tiene
su funcionalidad favorita que hace su trabajo cotidiano con PostgreSQL
más fácil y productivo.

Mas información aquí:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/presskit84.html.es

Para una comparación entre las nuevas funcionalidades contra
las antiguas:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix

Para la lista mas completa de las nuevas funcionalidades y
herramientas:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/features84

Para descarga de instaladores provistos por EnterpriseDB
(incluye
instaladores Linux 32 y 64, Windows y Mac):
http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/pgdownload.do#linux-x64

Para descarga de código fuente:
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/v8.4.0/

Para visitar la pagina del grupo de usuarios de PostgreSQL de
Venezuela: grupove.org.ve
(actualmente en remodelacion/construccion)

In English

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released version
8.4, continuing the rapid development of the world's most advanced open
source database. This release contains an abundance of enhancements to
make administering, querying, and programming of PostgreSQL databases
easier than ever before. Our development team has spent 16 months
adding over two hundred improvements to all aspects of database
functionality, helping every PostgreSQL user in small or large ways.

Many of the changes in PostgreSQL 8.4 are new or improved
administration and monitoring tools and commands. Each user has their
own favorite features which will make day-to-day work with PostgreSQL
easier and more productive for them. Among the most popular
enhancements are:

Parallel Database Restore
speeding up recovery from backup up to 8 times

Per-Column Permissions
allowing more granular control of sensitive data

Per-database Collation Support
making PostgreSQL more useful in multi-lingual environments

In-place Upgrades through pg_migrator (beta)
enabling upgrades from 8.3 to 8.4 without extensive downtime

New Query Monitoring Tools
giving administrators more insight into query activity

Greatly Reduced VACUUM Overhead
through the Visibility Map

New Monitoring Tools
for current queries, query load and deadlocks

Version 8.4 also makes data analysis easier through the
advanced ANSI SQL2003 features of windowing functions, common table
expressions and recursive queries. Enhancements to stored procedures,
such as default parameters and variadic parameters, make database
server programming simpler and more compact. Of course, there are also
performance improvements included in this version.

Download version 8.4 today and start enjoying using PostgreSQL
even more!

Download PostgreSQL 8.4:
http://www.postgresql.org/download/

Release Notes:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/release-8-4.html

List of 8.4 Features:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/features84.html

Press Release:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/presskit84.html

Vincent Untz: Newsflash: Ice Cream Deathmatch!

Vincent Untz — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:04:00 +0000

Woo, Jan Schmidt just created a wiki page so people can register to the most important part of GUADEC: the Ice Cream Deathmatch (renamed to Ice Cream Eating Competition, probably because Jan doesn't feel he can win ;-)). So go ahead and register! If you want to help organize this, send us a small note — we don't know yet the date or format of this competition.

Last year, the deathmatch was crazy, with Henri being stunningly fast. And fast is actually not giving him enough credit...

Launchpad News: Launchpad privacy policy update

Matthew Revell — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:55:38 +0000

We have added a paragraph, concerning the location data on Launchpad user profile pages, to the Launchpad privacy policy’s “Submitted data” section. That section now reads:

“Launchpad users may add information about themselves via their Launchpad accounts and or their personal pages. This information may assist Launchpad in providing services to the contributor such as email notifications of changes to bugs, projects, teams, etc..

“Your Launchpad account has the option to store a location for you and to display it on your profile page. Until you set that location yourself, other registered Launchpad users can set it on your behalf. Once your location is set, you can hide it from other users.”

View the full privacy policy.

Ubuntu Packaging: Did you always wonder…

dholbach — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:46:08 +0000

… how something particular is done in the Ubuntu developers world? Or you have a question about a specific packaging problem?

No problem, there’s another great Packaging Training Session tomorrow. Come to #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net at 02nd July, 06:00 UTC and we’ll find answers to your questions together.

Also: find out what the last 15 sessions were about.

Leandro Gómez: Carlos Bueso, from the Honduras Free Software community, detained

leogg — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:33:29 +0000

Original post by Gunnar Wolf here.

I met Carlos Bueso two weeks ago, at the Central American Free Software Encounter. I am translating this mail writen by Erika Valverde (Costa Rica) explaining his situation.

Excuse me for a broken, possibly wrong English – I find more important to make this message available than to get proper wording for it. If you cannot understand something and can read Spanish, or if you wish to further distribute this text, please refer to the original mail.

Hello everybody,

I wrote this some hours ago, and am circulating it because I don’t know what else to do… I imagine all of us are in similar terms with our frustration and our willingness to do something.

Somebody answered to me with an update, and I reelaborated the note, and am reproducing it here so everybody shares it with our communities, via our blogs and whatever ways we find. We must do something, right? At least this! And I don’t know what more… Can somebody think of anything? Meanwhile, please redistribute this.

I am writing to other organizations to see what we can do.

Our friend Carlos Bueso has been detained in El Progreso. He is a communicator, acused of sedition.

This morning, our friend Carlos Bueso was detained. Carlos is a member of the Comunicación Comunitaria (COMUN) organization, as well as of the Central American Free Software community. COMUN promoves and defends laboral and human rights by advancing alternative communication means. Their offices are located in El Progreso, 250 Km north of Tegucigalpa, the national capital, in the Atlantic coast of Honduras, and 26 Km from San Pedro Sula, the country’s second city in importance.

Carlos Bueso is an 18 year old informatics technician. In COMUN, he works performing computer-related teaching and Free Software promotion. He also is an editor for the Vida Laboral magazine, and maintains the http://wwww.honduraslaboral.org website.

In the June 30 morning, Carlos took part of a demonstration in El Progreso, Yoro, against the coup perpetrated on June 28. This demonstration was repressed at 10 AM, the army shot at the air and used several tear gas bombs. Carlos was detained, as well as Marcelino Martinez, Jorge Cordon, Junior Antunez, Joel Martinez, Martha Ileana Hernandez and Jose Erazo. The complete news note is available (in Spanish) in http://honduraslaboral.org/leer.php/1878 and a video of this repression can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC4LQU_UeTs

Carlos and other people are detained in the El Progreso police cells, and will be presented to the tribunals next July 1st, accused of sedition.

The detainees have been interviewed, and they are OK, waiting to be put at the Public Prosecutor’s (Ministerio Público) authority. The Prosecutor can decide to set them free, or refer them to the Tribunals. If they are sent to the Tribunals, they will be probably sent to the local presidium for six days to be interrogated.

Send your demands to https://twitter.com/R_Micheleti

Vincent Untz: Vincent wandering in Berlin (LinuxTag 2009)

Vincent Untz — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Last week was LinuxTag, in Berlin, and I went there to help with the openSUSE booth. We had a really nice booth, where people could play with laptops, try the build service or SUSE Studio. Oh, and we enjoyed writing words with magnetic letters on a board :-)

Attendees were mostly german people, of course. So it was quite funny to start talking with people in English, and have them reply in German ;-) But after some time, I got used to German again, so I could talk a bit, or at least understand what people were saying. Yes, you might not know about it, but I'm supposed to have a good level of German. Let me stress the supposed...

Image from Adrian Schröter

This was a great opportunity to meet various people from the community. I discovered how active the people from the openSUSE Education are — quite impressive! As usual, it was good to also be able to put faces on names, and catch up with friends, or discuss various topics (login-time performance, UI design, openSUSE Conference, etc.). I definitely came back with some food for thoughts.

Sven made sure the GNOME booth was working well The stickers that GNOME-FR had printed for Solutions Linux were quite nice to have, at least I would think so ;-) At some point, Sven and I created a new lovely background for the GNOME desktop, based on Big Buck Bunny; I'm pretty sure it would make a great default background! Ah, if only I had kept a copy of it...

Among the tidbits worth mentioning, I demoed GNOME Shell to various people — mostly people from the KDE community ;-) —, and although the version I had was quite old (it was git master as of May 1st), people seemed to like it. That makes me even more confident there will be quite some positive action around GNOME Shell during the GUADEC/Desktop Summit.

Image from Adrian Schröter

All in all, this event was obviously quite some hard work for me :-)

I came back from Berlin on Sunday evening, and I'm leaving for Gran Canaria tomorrow. No need to mention that the three days between those dates were incredibly busy, if only for the part where I naively try to catch up with all mails ;-) Still, I find time to be quite excited about the Desktop Summit: it will probably be a busy week, but it'll be amazing for sure! It was also a good surprise to see people thanking the Foundation for sponsoring them to go! The travel committee did a really great job there!

See you all in Gran Canaria!

Nizar Kerkeni: Changement serveur et CMS

nizarus — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:42:35 +0000

Un billet rapide pour signaler la migration de mon blog depuis blogger -chez google- vers un autre serveur commercial avec WordPress 2.8. Depuis quelques semaines, lors de la préparation de mon dernier billet, j’étais tenté par cette idée de migration et j’ai pas pu résister encore plus, finalement … Pourquoi pas !!

La migration et le transfert des anciens billets et commentaires c’est déroulée sans gros soucis. Seul bémol, blogger et wordpress ne génèrent pas les titres des billets de la même manière donc il y a un risque de retomber dans le planet-libre sur des liens cassés vers les billets de mon blog.

Nick Barcet: Ubuntu Server Edition: Freedom for the clouds

Nicolas — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:03:07 +0000

Ubuntu is positioning itself as a true cloud OS, and seems so far to be the only Linux distribution to have done so, but too often we are being asked why and where we are going. I am not going to try to redefine what cloud means in this post, as this has been done countless times . If I just remind you that cloud can be divided in three layers: the infrastructure (IaaS), the development platform (PaaS) and the application (SaaS), I think that it should be enough to make sure we are thinking about the same thing.

So far, Ubuntu has produced three major components out of its cloud strategy: two at the infrastructure layer and one at the software layer:

Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon EC2 (IaaS)
Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud powered by Eucalyptus (IaaS)
UbuntuOne (SaaS)

Even though UbuntuOne is obviously a cloud product, and an important initiative for Canonical to deliver added functionality to its large user base, it should clearly be distinguished from the other two components, as one distinguishes the shovels from the buildings it allows to make. I'll only talk here about "shovels" (infrastructure components), and try to summarize where we are aiming with that. The Ubuntu mission is clearly to select the best components from open source, assemble and refine them, to provide the best possible user experience in order to leverage it against the biggest monopoly the software industry has ever known. In other word to provide a use-able alternative to the operating system/productivity suite that currently dominates the world. Our cloud strategy clearly inscribe itself within this mission, let me try to explain you why and how.

lire plus

Thierry Carrez: Join the Ubuntu Java Team meetings

Thierry Carrez — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:40:29 +0000

The incredible Emmet Hikory (persia) wrote last week that the new season was open for Java Team meetings.

If you are interested in the state of Java packages in Ubuntu, want to participate in Java software packaging, or are just curious, please feel free to join us on Thursdays, 0900 UTC, on Freenode’s #ubuntu-meeting channel ! Let’s shape the future of Ubuntu Java together.

Ubuntu Server blog: Server Team 20090630 meeting minutes

Thierry Carrez — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:27:35 +0000

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online with the irc logs here.

Hadoop

ttx created a draft spec document where he copied his notes on Hadoop packaging: the analysis of the dependencies that would need to be packaged and a review of the current Hadoop deb packaging by Cloudera. Anyone interested in packaging Hadoop can take the spec (and blueprint) from here to make it a reality.

Asterisk

jmdault confirmed that the target for karmic should be Asterisk 1.6, as there is not so much interest around in keeping 1.4. Upstream in particular doesn’t commit to any particular stable version. jmdault will start working on a 1.6 version of his DKMS-enabled Asterisk packaging.

ACTION: jmdault to start packaging asterisk 1.6+dkms

ubuntu-tips

nijaba created a wikipage and asked for comments about it. He reported no strong reaction against it from the community, more of an approval. The next step is to create an ubuntu-tips package, even if there aren’t many tips so far on the page, as they can be added later. ttx asked about rules on what makes an acceptable tip, and nijaba will add proposed rules to the wikipage. ttx also pointed out the need to be able to follow-up on some tips, so rules on what would make a good external reference link are also needed.

ACTION: nijaba to add rules detailing what makes a relevant tip and what’s not

Review progress made on specifications listed on the Roadmap

ttx commented that the current ServerTeam/Roadmap document is slightly out of date, so a general overhaul of that page seems to be needed. This should be discussed as a specific agenda point in the next meeting, so that everyone can prepare to the discussion.

ACTION: ttx to add Roadmap Review to next meeting agenda

As far as KarmicReleaseSchedule is concerned, please note that we passed DebianImportFreeze last week, so now syncs from Debian are subject to specific sync requests. Next milestone is Alpha3 release on July 23.

Open Discussion

alexm reported multiple recent requests about monitoring tools. zul mentioned nagios as the recommended tool, but alexm noticed that there wasn’t any mention of it in the Server Guide. sommer indicated that there is a nagios section in the Karmic Server Guide, however the only way to access it so far is to pull the bzr branch. sommer will make sure doc.ubuntu.com is updated. alexm offered to review this section contents.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, July 7th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

David Rubin: Setting Up MMS On Android

drubin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:20:20 +0000

I have had my G1 for quite some time. When I first got it I added the APN settings for basic Internet. Over the last 2 days I have received 2 mms's I kept getting "Failed to download" oops I had forgotten to set up the MMS proxy settings. How to get there; Settings -> Wireless Controls -> Mobile Networks -> Access Point Names -> (Select One or create one via Menu->Add APN) Correct APN settings: Vodacom: Name: Vodacom Internet APN: Internet Proxy: Leave blank Port: Leave blank UserName: Leave Blank MMSC: Leave Blank MMS Proxy: 196.6.128.13 (I had it as mmsc.vodacom4me.co.za but this doens't work) MMS Port: 8080 MMC: 655 MNC: 01 APN Type: Leave Blank MTN(I haven't tested these but they should work): Name: Internet APN: Internet Proxy: Leave blank Port: Leave blank UserName: Leave Blank MMSC: Leave Blank MMS Proxy: 196.11.240.241 MMS Port: 8080 MMC: 655 MNC: 01 APN Type: Leave Blank Hope this at least helps some one.

Danny Piccirillo: GMail Voice and Video Chat coming soon to Linux users

Danny Piccirillo (danny.piccirillo@gmail.com) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:04:40 +0000

Looks like GMail Voice and Video Chat will soon be available to all of us Linux users out there! From the end of this update on version 1.0.10 of the software:

Lastly, thanks to everyone who has written in asking about support for Linux. We've had to rewrite a key piece of technology, so this has taken some time. However, the results will be worth the wait.

Of course, you could just use a real IM client like Empathy to get audio and video chatting over GTalk and Jabber now.

Scott Kitterman: Let your fingers do the walking ...

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:46:30 +0000

When I was growing up, this was the advertising slogan of the "Yellow pages". This was (is) the business telephone directory put out by the local telephone company throughout the US (I have no idea how localized the term Yellow Pages is, so I explain, just in case).

Recently I had an immediate need for a horse riding helmet for one of our daughters. The need was immediate because she was leaving for camp the next day.

This is not the kind of thing I normally purchase and I've only lived in this area for a few years, so I had no idea where to go. Without giving it a lot of thought, I fired up Google Local and found a great specialty shop close to our house. I had no idea it was there because it was on the back side of a small shopping center that I didn't know had a back side.

While we were there, I had a nice chat with the owner and mentioned I'd found the store via Google and his web site. He mentioned that he gets a lot of new customers that way. He's recently decided to cancel all his "Yellow Pages" advertising. He said he views it as a waste of money. His web site is a lot less expensive and works much better. His comment about "Yellow Pages" was something like "No one uses it anymore".

This got me thinking. I have a current copy. The telephone company delivers it every year. I can't remember the last time I actually used it instead of going online.

This seems like another small industry that is just going to go away. I hadn't thought of this one before.

Martin Owens: Firefox 3.5 with SVG Animations?

doctormo — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:45:12 +0000

Well I just installed the newly released Firefox 3.5 on Jaunty from a PPA.

I mainly wanted to see if the speed improvements were real and if those speed improvements would affect my svg world map, with all it’s AJAX and animations.

It’s about 20% faster by eye, it manages a few more animation frames but not much more. I’m not sure if the animations are working or if fakeSmile javascript is kicking in, or even getting in the way. If anyone else has firefox 3.5 installed and would like to give it a test using the link above.

Update: Apparently Firefox 3.5 doesn’t have any animation, just faster javascript. Oh well.

At least it still works

Jonathan Jesse: Sharing home directory between Kubuntu and RHEL5?

Jonathan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:59:53 +0000

I’ve posted previously on setting up my laptop to dual boot between Kubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 but have run into one snag, I don’t know enough to fix. As an aside, I ran into a lot of problems with the program I needed for work running in 64-bit version, so I am working [...]

Rubén Romero: ineptitude! – Or why Firefox 3.5 does not have a Swahili translation when there is one done…

huayra — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:14:06 +0000

Firefox 3.5 has just arrived!

This should be celebration time for the Umoja Project, but it is not. And you know why? Ineptitude!

The story in short. There are 2 teams translating Firefox to Swahili (sw-TZ):

The first one is an academic group (mob) had funding and has used 4 years with no visible results.
The second one is 100% community based which did 80% of the job in a Christhmas sprint. And got finished by the middle of April.

So why is not Mozilla Firefox 3.5 shipping with a Swahili translation? Politics. The Mozilla people want to play nice with everyone instead of giving priority to the team that has actually showed results, real result!

The Swahili transaltion is not even shipping as a beta version. Simply it doesn’t exist in the public eye only as a bug which should be closed.

You know what irritates me? That the people in the community, that actually worked hard, won’t see any visible result. Do you think that is the way to motivate people?

I don’t.

Next time, please, do the right thing. Go with those that do the work, not those that “own” the translation branch and haven’t done anything for years.

At least I hope the translation hits Karmic…

My €0.02

Scott Ritchie: Branding Ubuntu

YokoZar — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:16:04 +0000

It started with a bug report that had been around since Ubuntu got started: Gnometris had a big Gnome foot logo on it, and most of our users didn’t know what that was. The suggestion was simple: replace it with a stylized Ubuntu logo, patch it in, and go on our merry way. A community member even volunteered a fantastic piece of art to go in its place. Simple, right?

Except, unfortunately, it wasn’t. You see, some people at Ubuntu are worried about derivatives: those Ubuntu-based distributions that use our code but aren’t actually Ubuntu. By putting a branded image in that derivatives have to remove, we make extra work for them.

So nothing happened. For years. We still had that ugly foot logo that had nothing to do with the game you were playing, and it was one of the first things users saw. But it wasn’t just Gnometris - it was solitaire too. Millions of hours of user time have been spent playing solitaire and staring at the ugly feet on the card backs. People would boot the Ubuntu LiveCD and feel like our games came straight out of 1995.

This bothered me. It was ugly, but even worse we were throwing away useful contributions. How much other useful stuff might we be throwing out, or even worse not making in the first place?

Enter UDS

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is a fantastic place for brainstorming ideas. You’re constantly surrounded by smart, passionate people. People who want to work with you on any and all things Ubuntu, from the moment you walk out of your hotel room for breakfast to the late hour you finally trudge off to sleep.

I think the branding-ubuntu package was my idea. I can never be sure, since I owe so much to the creative environment around me. I shouldn’t offend anyone by taking credit though; as you’ll see, my original design was stupid.

The overall idea seemed solid: put Ubuntu-branded replacement artwork, generated by the community, into a single branding-ubuntu package. Installing it would change the artwork, removing it would leave everything as before.

The original design required each branded application to have a small patch causing it to look for the branded artwork first (and prefer it.) This required modifying every program that we wanted to brand. All I had to do was dump a bunch of artwork in some folder, and then hope other people would change their applications to take advantage of it. Trivial for me, work for them - perhaps it wasn’t so stupid after all.

Community Leadership

Other than my three year old Gnometris background, I didn’t have any actual artwork to put into the package. We weren’t even installing Gnometris by default anymore. I made the package anyway. Even though it didn’t do anything, I decided to advertise and fish for community help. If I built it, perhaps they would come.

I wrote a few emails to our developer lists, rubbed a few shoulders on IRC, and reminded some of the people who mentioned it was a great idea at UDS. Importantly, I took charge, making it clear that all an artist had to do was make something nice and I’d handle including it personally.

Within a manner of days I had new, branded artwork for every game we ship. Now I had a whole lot of artwork, courtesy of MadsRH. The screenshots from a manual install were incredible - that blue foot was gone for good. All it took was a little initiative.

Unfortunately, those patches to use the branding hadn’t yet been written, and the upstream makers of Solitaire didn’t really want to do it. In retrospect this is completely understandable - it was their branding we were replacing, and it wasn’t clear to them why we weren’t just patching things on our end. Why should they care about our derivative worries?

The Real Solution

The real solution, of course, meant more work for me - but work that would actually get done. The branding package now renames existing artwork files and replaces them with symbolic links to its own (using some fancy shell scripts and the very obscure dpkg-diversions command). In short, it works elegantly.

So, now I’ve got yet another package under my stewardship. I started off just maintaining Wine five years ago, but now, in true open source fashion, I’ve been applying myself throughout the entire distro. Sometimes people refer to this as “scratching your own itches”, but in truth I don’t really play solitaire or use Wine that much. They’re not my itches - they’re the itches of millions of users. Those are real people, and that alone is reason enough for me to make things even just a tiny bit better.

Michael Lustfield: Reinstalling Ubuntu vs Vista

mtecknology — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:19:11 +0000

If you know me, you'll know I run a very trimmed down version of Ubuntu. I love the Ubuntu community and the OS. However, I do feel it's somewhat bloated. I've setup my system to be very lean.

I recently upgraded to 9.10 and then decided to drop back to stable. This involves reinstalling the base system and reinstalling all the packages. My sister complained about her system being incredibly slow. I decided to reinstall both at the same time to compare the time it takes to do them at the same time.

-----------

Backup:
Linux: dpkg --get-selections > ~/packages.list