Ubuntu 11.10 Development update

By dholbach | Published: 2011-09-30

Ubuntu Development Update

These are the days where the release team is awake for 24 hour per day. Every issue that comes up on their radar has to be evaluated and checked if it warrants re-spinning all the CD images, re-doing all the testing, or if it should go into a stable release update after the release. It’s a challenging time, but things are looking quite good. (If you ignore the problem of developers just not sleeping.)

Looking at the release schedule, there’s just two weeks left: Release candidate next week, final release the week afterwards. Time to start organising your local release party! Oh, and please help testing! We need to know about the bugs you ran into.

If you want to know exactly which bug fixes are still going in, check out (or subscribe to) oneiric-changes mailing list.

Events

Ubuntu Release Parties
We’re still looking for people who can organise Ubuntu release parties! The Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 release will get out on 13th October. Why don’t have a release party? Here’s how to organise it and here’s how to register it. There’s 22 events listed right now, these cities are participating:

  • Asia: Bangkok (Thailand), Khon Kaen (Thailand)
  • Africa: Capetown (South Africa)
  • Australia/Oceania: Brisbane (Australia), Sydney (Australia)
  • Europe: Hradec Králové (Czech Republic), Dublin (Ireland), Šiauliai (Lithuania), Podgorica (Montenegro), Belgrade (Serbia), Lloret de Mar (Spain), Blackpool (UK), London (UK), Leeds (UK)
  • North America: Kitchener (Canada), Toronto (Canada), Mexico (Mexico), SeaTac (USA), Lakeland (USA), Melbourne/Viera (USA) and Philadelphia (USA). (Also there’s the Panama team still looking for a venue.)

It’s just amazing to see how distributed the parties are and how excited folks get together to have a great time together and celebrate this great release.

Ubuntu Open Week
Not finalised yet, but it’s clear that we’re going to have Ubuntu Open Week after release, where we’ll have a very broad spectrum of talks and workshops which showcase all the areas in Ubuntu where you could get involved. Watch out for the official announcement. Leave a comment for a session that you’d like to see!

Things that still 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:

First timers!

Since last week we had two new contributors who got their first fix into Ubuntu.Big shout out to Adam Glasgall and Robert Barabas.

New Contributor

I had a chat with Michael van der Kolff from Australia.

Michael van der KolffIt was really a rather minor patch, though – I made a patch for the hylafax package that failed to build on oneiric. The world would be better off without faxes these days, but people still use them – so I can understand that it’s not the most used package in Ubuntu, and so doesn’t really merit a high level of attention. It did take about 3 months to adopt a 10 line patch to the configure script, though…

I was a sysadmin for small businesses, and still get called on to help out at times, but I resumed full-time study at the University of Wollongong. I was the primary Linux guy at a place called “A Perfect PC“. That place has mostly dried up after a couple of the main clients were bought out, and they migrated to their acquiring group’s server OS choices (Win2K3 in both cases). I’m not really a business sort of guy – and the guy whose money it was is an engineer who I have a lot of respect for, but also speaks his mind when perhaps customers would rather he didn’t.

I use Ubuntu as my primary working machine (I typed this up in Chromium on Ubuntu), and use Ubuntu on some servers (though I find Debian a better fit there, most of the time).

I still work with Kevin Loughrey, who is the MD/owner of A Perfect PC, who also uses Ubuntu as his main system, and he does keep backups religiously, as we should – he had a disk failure on his main laptop on Monday, and he was helped through it with my and another chap, Wesley Young’s, help. As a consequence, he observed that most people using PCs don’t really keep backups, and a further advantage to using Ubuntu could actually be keeping a backup script that given USB hard drives, makes a package list and hives away the home directories & /etc. It seems reasonable, and in my Copious Free Time I may write up a proposal. I suppose I really should write up such a proposal – I’ve never done anything like that before.

If there’s a demand for an interesting bit of coding, and I have time, I’m happy to help out.

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.

  • Be interactive and reach us most immediately: talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net.
  • Follow mailing lists and get involved in the discussions: ubuntu-devel-announce (announce only, low traffic), ubuntu-devel (high-level discussions), ubuntu-devel-discuss (fairly general developer discussions).
  • Stay up to date and follow the ubuntudev account on Facebook, Identi.ca or Twitter.

Ubuntu Font Family 0.80 released – with Ubuntu Mono

By akgraner | Published: 2011-09-30

Hello all,
Ubuntu Font Family version 0.80 has been released, download the .zip from:

http://font.ubuntu.com/

This is made available under the Ubuntu Font Licence 1.0, you are
expressly encourage to share, modify and remix. Source code and
licensing details can be found on the website above.

Release notes and changelogs for this 0.80 release can be found at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+milestone/0.80

This release adds five new .ttf files, the major additions being:

Ubuntu Condensed (×1)
primarily drawn by Amélie Bonet & Fernando Caro at Dalton Maag
Ubuntu Mono (×4)
primarily drawn by Amélie Bonet and engineered by Malcolm Wooden at
Dalton Maag
work-in-progress hinting work by Jason Campbell, and Vincent
Connare at Dalton Maag.

Thank you to Cody Boisclair & Júlio Reis for their contributions, to all
the testers within Ubuntu and Canonical, and finally to the whole team
at Dalton Maag for making this release happen. We hope you enjoy it!

-Paul Sladen

Ubuntu Font Family feedback welcomed (as always) to:

http://launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+filebug

Originally posted to the Ubuntu Font Mailing List by Paul Sladen on Thu Sep 29 13:23:19 UTC 2011

Ubuntu One now works on Windows!

By akgraner | Published: 2011-09-30

It’s been a long time coming but today we are thrilled to tell you that the much anticipated Ubuntu One official client for Windows is now available for download.

A question we get asked a lot is…..why an Ubuntu One Windows client?

Well there are a few reasons: The most important is we listen to our users. We have long received feedback from Ubuntu users regarding their evolving needs to manage all their content from a single, secure place across multiple platforms and devices. We’ve looked at many use cases, the most common being the Ubuntu user who is using more than one device or OS. Many people have to work in Windows or Mac environments, even if they prefer to use Ubuntu as their home desktop or OS of choice. Another case is enabling more opportunities for sharing across platforms. For example families using different operating systems in one household can use Ubuntu One as their central place to store all their music, documents, photos and share them easily with each other and friends.

Ubuntu One has a clearly defined strategy of being multi-platform, Windows is one element of that strategy. We believe in giving all users regardless of platform, access to one of the best personal cloud services available. We want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy Ubuntu One and as a consequence, want to know more about all the great benefits of using Ubuntu.

Based on all of this feedback we released our first Windows client beta back in November 2010. Since then, it’s certainly been a labour of love for the team but they have done an excellent job creating a lightweight Windows desktop app so you can use all the great features of Ubuntu One on a Windows machine. This is a major milestone for the Ubuntu One team and we’d like to say well done to Roberto, Manuel, Natalia, Alejandro, Diego, Lisette, Andrews- Junior, Joshua, Sian and everyone else who has contributed.

However, the real heroes are our loyal beta testers, so we wanted to take this opportunity to say a great big thank you to our community who have been reporting bugs and giving us feedback for twelve months. Due to this we have been able to improve the Ubuntu One Windows installer to the slick official version now available for download. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Ubuntu One for Windows is easy to use, all you have to do is:

  1. Save the installer to your computer

    Save Ubuntu One for Windows installer

  2. Double-click on the download in your web browser’s download status to launch the installer.

    Run the Ubuntu One for Windows installer

  3. Setup – If you already have an Ubuntu One account sign in with your existing account. If you are new to Ubuntu One, you will be asked to set up an Ubuntu One Free account, this also gives you 5GB of free cloud storage. On successful registration an email will be sent to you with a verification code. Copy and paste that code into the installer when prompted.

    Setup Ubuntu One for Windows

  4. Next click the “Start setup” button to select folders you want to sync to your personal cloud. You can select folders on your computer to sync with your personal cloud at any time in the application.

    Select folders to sync with Ubuntu One for Windows

  5. Ubuntu One will take care of the rest…you are now ready to get started syncing, sharing and streaming!

    Ubuntu One for Windows running

If you want any more information about Ubuntu One for Windows or in general contact us on the Ubuntu Community Forums, facebook and twitter.

The Ubuntu One team

Originally posted here on 29 September 2011.

Interview with Daniel Bray (Lupine)

By ubuntu-news-team | Published: 2011-09-29

dbray_64x64

In this interview Daniel Bray (Lupine) of the Ubuntu Florida LoCo Team explains how he was able to use Ubuntu instead of Microsoft to complete his college degree. In an era when almost all schools in the United States require that its students use either Microsoft or Mac based technical solutions, Bray finds a way to exercise his freedom of choice and use Free and Open Source software to complete his degree.

Question: Can you please tell me a little about yourself?

Daniel Bray: My name is Daniel Bray, I’m 35, I live in Rockeldge, Florida with my wife Kristyn. Currently, I’m working full time for Harris as a Systems Engineer. I’m the team lead for a great group of guys, and our primary responsibilities are taking care of Health First, Inc. (a health care provider for Brevard County).

 

Question: What school did you attend? What is your major?

Daniel Bray: UCF. B.S. in Information Systems Technology (December 2008) M.S. in Digital Forensics (in progress)

 

Question: Did you attend classes online or in a classroom setting? If both what was the ratio? Was having the option to do both important and why?

Daniel Bray: The entire B.S. degree was online, as is the M.S. degree. With my work schedule, a 24/7/365 hospital environment, attending classes online is the only option that fits into my schedule.

 

Question: How many of your classes “required” that you use Microsoft applications to complete your assignments? What were the challenges you faced being told you had to use something other than Open Source Software to complete your classes?

Daniel Bray: It’s hard to put an exact number the classes. Probably about 90% of them stated they “required” MS Office. However, after questioning the professor, they all accepted PDF format for my papers, so I just used LibreOffice to export out. Other requirements were the ability to view proprietary PowerPoint files, which again, LibreOffice took care of for me. Probably the biggest thing that jumped out at me, is that the web portal that UCF uses, to this date, still states that I’m running an unsupported OS.

 

Question: Since you chose to use Ubuntu in school what were the biggest obstacles you faced as a user and how did you over come them?

Daniel Bray: Obstacles? What are those? Ubuntu removes obstacles, it doesn’t create them. Seriously, other than some annoyances of disheartening “Supported OS” documentation (see link above), I can not recall any thing that I could label as an obstacle. True, every now and then I needed to use Wine to check out a Win only based forensic tool, but that was never too difficult to setup and get running. Other tools like VirtualBox was a must have when doing network related examinations (studying Wireshark captures). There was never really an obstacle, just a different way of doing things. I felt like it was just all part of the learning process.

 

Question: Since you graduated what field are you currently employed in? Can you tell readers the technologies you use at work? Does this differ from what you use at home if so how? Why?

Daniel Bray: I am employed in the same field I graduated in, which is Information Technology. At work we use a vast variety of technologies. I primarily stick to my Ubuntu laptop to get my day to day work done. I bring it back and forth to home, so that I can keep a familiar and efficient environment with me at all times. A lot of the development work I do, web apps, etc. all follow me wherever I go.

 

Question: Since you currently work as a Systems Engineer and developer, what applications have you developed? Are they Web based? What languages the applications written in and what tools are needed. What are some of the security challenges you faced during development?

Daniel Bray: For my work based applications, I pretty much stick to the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. However, I’ve had to tackle various tasks with scripts written in Perl, Bash, and Python. I have a pretty firm hold on what security requirements are required for the organization, so I was easily able to accommodate those needs into my web apps. For example, all web-based authentication is accomplished using a TLS secured LDAP connection. This is all seamless, and occurs in the background.

Another work related tool I use on a daily basis, pyconnmgr, is written completely in Python, and with a Glade frontend. This is a huge time saver for me, as I constantly have to SSH, SFTP, SMB, FTP into various servers throughout the day.

 

Question: What do you want other students faced with similar difficulties to understand about this process and your continued success with using Free and Open Source Software via Ubuntu as a solution.

Daniel Bray: Don’t believe anything, until you try it for yourself. Make smart, educated choices, and you will usually be happy with the results. You can always have a safety net like VirtualBox standing by, which I had to use a few times for various “network intrusion assignments”, so there really is nothing to fear. Most things are going web based, and FireFox is FireFox, so if the web app says that it supports that, then just ignore the incorrectly labeled “Required OS”.

 

Question: Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about your success story that you would like to mention now?

Daniel Bray: A success story, me? I wouldn’t go that far. Honestly, I don’t even look at using Ubuntu as being different anymore. To me, it’s just a way of life. I mean, at this point, I think it would be more difficult to start using proprietary OSes and software. And why would I want to create problems for myself. Some people tell me they “just use Windows because it’s easier”. Well, after using Ubuntu for a few years now, I have the exact same argument. I just use Ubuntu because it’s easier.

 

Many thanks to Daniel Bray and Chris Crisafulli for making this interview possible.

 

For more info on how you can participate in and contribute to Ubuntu, visit: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate.

Originally Posted here on 2011-09-27

Interview with Stuart Langridge

By ubuntu-news-team | Published: 2011-09-28

Screenshot-Ubuntu One : Home - Chromium

4125338714_a0a52d273d

In this interview with Strategic Architect for Ubuntu One, Stuart Langridge, I kick off the first of a series of articles about Ubuntu One.

Today, we’ll learn a little more about Langridge and his involvement with Ubuntu One and a brief overview along with future plans for this personal cloud service.

Naturally we can’t cover all the ends and outs of Ubuntu One in one interview, so hopefully we’ll be able to highlight one feature per article over the next few weeks. We’ll also begin to cover how the community can get involved in the process.

Amber Graner: Stuart what is your role at Canonical?

Stuart Langridge: I’m the strategic architect for Ubuntu One, and I run the Futures team. What this means is that I’m responsible for working out what Ubuntu One should do, working with partners and developers and the community to make that happen, and talking about it to people. I also run the App Developer Programme, which is a new thing to help people add the personal cloud to their applications and to bring Ubuntu One to new places.

 

Screenshot-UbuntuOne - Ubuntu Wiki - Chromium

Amber Graner: How long have you been involved with Free and Open Source Software and what made you get involved? When and how did you get involved with Ubuntu?

Stuart Langridge: At university in the mid-90s, I found myself for the first time using Unix machines (HP and Sun), and then I discovered that I could do the same things on my own machine, first with Minix, then Slackware, then Debian. I gradually grew to want the power that my machine gave me and to love the concept of open source, but also to want a machine which didn’t make me be super-technical every day just to get that; it’s nice to not have to, even if you can. At almost exactly the same time, the first release of Ubuntu came about, and I never looked back.

 

Amber Graner: As one of the lead developers for Ubuntu One can you tell readers what Ubuntu One (U1) is?

Stuart Langridge: The website’s got a good description here: Ubuntu One is the personal cloud that brings your digital life together, so you can enjoy your content, your way, wherever you are. With our suite of cloud services including storage, sync, sharing and streaming – you have immediate access to your music collection, favorite photos, videos, important documents and more, at any time and from any device.

 

Amber Graner: What do you believe the biggest advantage Ubuntu One offers end users? Why would a user want to choose U1 over dropbox, Amazon or similar services?

Stuart Langridge: Ubuntu One is a whole personal cloud. Most of the other services don’t encompass as much: file sync OR music streaming OR being integrated into your desktop OR apps that can live on desktop and web and mobile and share data, but not all of them.

 

Amber Graner: In addition storage solutions offered, tomboy note and automatic file syncing what else should users know about U1?

Stuart Langridge: The thing I personally find most useful with Ubuntu One is music streaming; I uploaded all my music into the personal cloud and now it’s all available to me to play whenever I want. I never have to "sync" my phone, plug a cable in, any of that. It’s really handy! I also publish files a lot; if I want to show someone a picture or something, I just tell Ubuntu One to publish it and that gives me a URL for it that I can send to others. Publishing’s easy — I’ve already added most of the folders with stuff that I care about (Pictures, Documents, and so forth) to U1 so that that stuff’s available everywhere to me, which has saved me on a number of occasions where I don’t have my laptop but was able to grab something from my phone or someone else’s web browser.

 

Amber Graner: How can users use Banshee and U1 to manage their music needs?

Stuart Langridge: Banshee’s got some interesting ways to organise your music; its automatic scoring gives you a way of working out what you *actually* listen to a lot, and creating playlists. It’s also where I buy music; the Ubuntu One music store being built-in to Banshee means that I’ll fairly often just buy songs on a whim, which is handy; instant gratification! I’d love to see closer integration between Banshee and U1 music streaming; at the moment they’re separate but complementary, and it’d be great if they worked closer together. This seems like a great project for someone to hack on as part of the app dev program 🙂

 

Amber Graner: What are the plans for U1 for 11.10 and how can the community help? What can non-developers do to help with U1? What do you need from developers?

Stuart Langridge: What I’d love to hear from developers is ideas and how they want to work on them. I’ve got a good understanding of the Ubuntu One APIs (and am trying to gradually document them at https://one.ubuntu.com/developer ) and I’d love to chat to people about their ideas for how they can make their apps better with Ubuntu One, or what cool apps you can build if you have syncing and data and music capabilities built in.

 

Thanks Stuart and I look forward to learning more about Ubuntu One and sharing it with the community. More information about how to get involved with Ubuntu One can be found on both the Ubuntu One website and wiki page.

Originally Posted here on 2011-09-20