Ubuntu Cloud Day India

Ubuntu Cloud Day will be the largest event in Bangalore in 2012 that focuses on getting developers productive on Ubuntu Cloud, a platform that is growing in popularity every day. Ubuntu Cloud Day is sponsored by Intel.

With keynote speeches from various members of the Canonical team, as well as hands-on technical sessions it is designed to deliver a great way for any developer to rapidly get up-to-speed on Ubuntu Cloud.

When: April 4, 2012
Where: Bangalore India
More details : http://ubuntucloudday.in

Originally written by Prakash Advani to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list on Mon Mar 26 13:14:16 UTC 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

Development Update

We are only five weeks away from the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Next week we expect the Beta 2 release to go out and afterwards only important fixes will go in. 26th April will be the day when we all can celebrate our hard work and enjoy this fine piece of work which will be supported for five years on the desktop and on the server.

If you haven’t yet upgraded to 12.04 you might want to consider this and test the hell out of it.

For everyone who wants to get their hands dirty and fix bugs, you might want to consider if your bug in question is important enough to be fixed in this release or if it better waits until 12.10. The next release is still going under the code name of ‘Q’, although we all hope our favourite cosmonaut announces the new name soon.

Here is a list of task which might interesting to investigate over the next days. Feel free to jump in and help out (instructions and documentation are linked to below)

  • investigate if the new version of fsprotect should go into 12.04
  • investigate if a new version of phpladpadmin should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of stopmotion should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of ffmpeg-php should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of guile-gnome-platform should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if the new version of heroes should go into 12.04
  • investigate if a new version of icecc should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if the new version of insighttoolkit should go into 12.04
  • investigate if a new version of jifty should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of libloader should be imported from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of libmail-imapclient-perl should be imported from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of lsb-pkgchk3 should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of net-applet should be imported from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of ossim should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of parcimonie should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of qtiplot should be merged from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of scidavis should be imported from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of sdlbasic should be imported from Debian
  • investigate if a new version of sisu-ioc should be merged from Debian

If you are new to the docs and everything, consider joining our User testing effort (give feedback, get help).

Letting developers speak for themselves

Events

Late today the release managers will announce Beta 2 Freeze.

Release Parties
The LoCo community is ramping up efforts to get more release parties up and running around the globe and 12 events have already been added to the LoCo Team Portal. On their list are: Palestine Territory, Australia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Switzerland, Canada and USA. If you can’t find your city or country in the list, check out our instructions for adding your own party.

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

  • Also did John Lea from the Ubuntu Design team talk to us and mentioned that there are bugs up for grabs, where the design has been decided on and the implementation might need YOUR help. If you want to help improve Ubuntu’s UI, have a look at these!

First timers!

We have three folks who managed to squeeze their first fixes into Ubuntu last week: JC Hulce synced apt-build from Debian, Aditya Vaidya fixed a bug in a manpage of vorbis-tools and Lars Duesing fixed a race condition in aiccu. Good work everyone!

Rohan Garg received upload rights to Kubuntu! Congratulations! Also on our list of applicants are: Adam Gandelman (server + MOTU), Bjoern Michaelsen (LibreOffice) and Kilian Krause (MOTU). Good luck and all the best to the three of you!

Spotlight/Interview

This week we reached out to Ubuntu Developer and Ubuntu Desktop Team Member Martin Pitt for a interview.

Martin PittBenjamin Kerensa: What do you generally work on?
Martin Pitt: These days, mostly on improving pygobject and making libraries introspectable, and then GNOME/desktop related bug fixing all over the place. I have also done a fair share of work on power usage reduction in Precise, as well as some foundational work in PackageKit/aptdaemon for an upstream friendly way of installing missing language support and driver packages.

Benjamin Kerensa: Do you still remember how you got involved in open source?
Martin Pitt: That was during school, around ’96 or ’97. Our school got a new computer lab, and with it we set up a Linux (SuSE 5.0, as far as I remember) box to do the ISDN connection handling and routing and some other network services. A friend of mine was working on this, and the other day I sat on that machine and played around with it a bit. I was quite fascinated about real 32 bit support (so far I was only used to that clunky 16 bit programming under DOS), real multitasking, and the utter stability that Linux desktops provided back then, and really astonished when I learned about this “free as in freedom/beer” thing. So I took that SuSE box home with me, spent a week reading the manual and setup, and have fallen in love. From then on I booted back to DOS only for playing games, and were otherwise taking Linux apart.

It still took until 2001 before I got my first patch accepted into Debian, and shortly after I became a Debian developer.

Benjamin Kerensa: What do you like most about the new release?
Martin Pitt: That we finally got serious about quality. The automated Jenkins tests, the acceptance criteria, and most importantly the changed mindset of “never break precise” and taking much more time for bug fixing really changed things for the better. It shows, both for myself in daily use, as well as that we seem to have had at least one magnitude more precise users, even in early alpha-2 times.

Benjamin Kerensa: What do you like most about Ubuntu development?
Martin Pitt: The generally friendly and focused spirit in the community, and that both Canonical employees and volunteer contributors have the same rights, privileges, and processes to follow. I’m aware that we don’t always do this 100%, but at least from my perspective it generally works.

Get Involved

  1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
  2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
  3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

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.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 257

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #257 for the week March 12 – 18, 2012, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

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

  • Elizabeth Krumbach
  • Jose Antonio Rey
  • Charles Profitt
  • Nathan Dyer
  • Matt Rudge
  • And many others

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

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

Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

Development Update

42 days until Ubuntu 12.04, the sixteenth Ubuntu release and fourth LTS will be released. This makes six weeks in which the following things are going to happen: one week until Beta 2 Freeze and docs will be frozen, two weeks until Beta 2 gets out, three weeks until the kernel is frozen, four weeks until we hit Final Freeze and it will be hard to squeeze fixes in.

You can probably imagine what this means: the time is now. Never was a better time to fix bugs and make millions of Ubuntu users happy.

Letting developers speak for themselves

Some interesting bits which were discussed last week.

Events

LibreOffice hackfest
Björn Michaelsen let us know that there will be a local even in Hamburg, Germany which will be all about hacking on LibreOffice. If you are in the city on the 14th and 15th April 2012, make sure you turn up!

Ubuntu Developer Hangouts
Daniel Holbach blogged about his experience with Google+ Hangouts where people interested in Ubuntu Development could turn up, ask questions and get involved. He posted more dates for this week.

Ubuntu Release Parties
If you are planning a release party, make sure you note it down on its LoCo Team Portal page: a LTS release wants to be properly celebrated!

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

  • Also did John Lea from the Ubuntu Design team talk to us and mentioned that there are bugs up for grabs, where the design has been decided on and the implementation might need YOUR help. If you want to help improve Ubuntu’s UI, have a look at these!

 

First timers!

Two new contributors got their fix into Ubuntu: Thibaud Ecarot fixed a bug in icedtea and Tao Zhu synced a new version of highlight to Ubuntu.

We have an interesting week coming up: Björn Michaelsen is applying for upload rights for LibreOffice and Adam Gandelman applies for MOTU and Ubuntu Server upload rights! Also Kilian Krause is going to apply for MOTU membership. Good luck Adam, Björn and Kilian!

Also this week Marcin Juszkiewicz joined the MOTU team! Congratulations!

Spotlight: Putting the Ubuntu Development process to the test

Many engineering teams in the Ubuntu world have made extensive use of User Testing in the last years. This is an important reality check for everyone defining the experience of users. Do my assumptions still hold true? What do users expect? Are there use-cases we never considered? Which steps confuse our users?

The Ubuntu developers, so everyone who builds Ubuntu, integrates pieces to work nicely with each other, maintains packages and produces the distribution we all love, everyone is interested in this kind of feedback.

User testing of the Ubuntu Development process has, if it happened, always been ad-hoc and isolated. This is the reason why we want to look into this again and figure out which parts of the work-flows need to be improved.

Have you thought about contributing to Ubuntu Development before? Did you like the thought of helping improve the distribution millions of users love? If you did, you might be interested in this User Testing initiative. You will only have to read our documentation and send your feedback toubuntudev at holba dot ch. We in turn will make sure your feedback is put up for discussion and fixed eventually. Also will we will help you on your way if you should get stuck.

This initiative is not to be confused with mentoring. We are not going to do your homework for you or package your app.

What you need to do? Simple:

This is an experiment we will do until the release of Ubuntu 12.04 (April 26th). This should give us food for thought for the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit and depending on the success of the initiative, we will continue it.

 

Get Involved

  1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
  2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
  3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

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.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.