Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 233

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-09-20

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #233 for the week September 12 – 18, 2011, 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
  • Daniel Bo
  • James Gifford
  • Neil Oosthuizen
  • Amber Graner
  • 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

Community Council: Nominations

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-09-15

Community Council member terms expire next month, we are going to have an election in a few weeks. All Ubuntu Members are eligible to vote.

We will announce the details of the election soon. What we want from you now is nominations.

If you know somebody in the Ubuntu community, who

  • has been an Ubuntu member for a while
  • is dedicated to the project
  • is well-respected and known for balanced views and good leadership
  • has a good overview over various aspects of the project
  • is organised and has some organisation talent

(or you know that this all applies to you), please send an email to the Community Council (community-council at lists.ubuntu.com) with the subject “[CC Nomination]” through Thursday, September 29th, 16:00 UTC. If you are nominating someone else, please confirm that the person is willing to stand for election and make note of this in the nomination email.

Originally sent to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by Elizabeth Krumbach on Thu Sep 15 16:10:12 UTC 2011

Ubuntu 11.10 Development update

By dholbach | Published: 2011-09-15

Ubuntu Development Update

We are racing towards the release of 11.10, and it’s only four weeks until we’re there. If you like partying, start organising your local release party!

This is the busiest time for Ubuntu developers and everybody’s trying to fix all the remaining bugs they run in. Some spend 24/7 trying to get packages to build again, bugs ironed out, bugs triaged, packages translated and documentation updated. It’s crazy, but it’s also good fun.

So there’s four weeks left, what’s going to happen in those weeks? Kate reminded us that Beta 2 freeze will happen today and with that the kernel and the documentation text will be frozen. Next week we’ll have a brand-new Beta 2 to get our hands on. So if you haven’t tried Oneiric yet: test Oneiric and file bugs. This is an excellent way to help out and make sure that 11.10 is in tip-top shape.

Colin Watson sent out a request for help to get the list of packages that fail to build from source under control. The good news is: in less than 72 hours we managed to get the number of failures from 661 to 401, but the bad news is, there’s still 401 packages to fix. The remaining build failures are harder to sort out, so if you have dealt with lots of compilation/linker/etc. errors, read Colin’s mail and see if you can help out.

There’s still a number of bugs on the radar for Beta 2, but most of them are assigned already, so we’re well on track. If you’re interested in any other aspect of Ubuntu Oneiric, I’d refer you to the oneiric-changes mailing list and the big picture specification status overview instead.

Events

Ubuntu App Developer Week

We covered it last week already, so here’s the complete summaries and links to logs of the best event for Ubuntu App Developers: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5. Thanks a lot for putting this together!

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 16 events listed right now, these cities are participating:

  • Asia: Bangkok (Thailand), Khon Kaen (Thailand)
  • Africa: Capetown (South Africa)
  • Australia/Oceania: Sydney (Australia)
  • Europe: Hradec Králové (Czech Republic), Dublin (Ireland), Belgrade (Serbia), Lloret de Mar (Spain), London (UK), Blackpool (UK)
  • North America: Kitchener (Canada), Toronto (Canada), Mexico (Mexico), SeaTac (USA), Lakeland (USA), Melbourne/Viera (USA)

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!

It seems like the release hectic attracts loads of new people. That’s awesome! Thanks everyone for helping out and making the world a better place! Here’s the list of folks who got involved last week: Roman Yepishev and Michael van der Kolff. Also special thanks to Christoph Schmidt-Hieber, Thomas Preud’homme and Florian Schlichting who helped getting their fixes from Debian into Ubuntu. Well done everyone!

New Contributor

I had a chat with Ben Tucker from the USA.

Ben TuckerDoing the bug fix was really thrilling, even though it was a very minor “bug”, really all I did was update a package’s description to put the contained URL as a link instead of plain text. I’ve been using Ubuntu as my only OS for around 2 years now, and finally giving back to the project and making it better was an awesome feeling.

The documentation on bug fixing was very concise on what to do, reducing it to an easy step-by-step process. Once I did push the change to Launchpad, the reviewer was very helpful and patient even though I was still very new with the whole process.
The whole experience was definitely worth the time it took to read through all the documentation and get the tools installed and running. I am now eager to do another bug fix, and I’m still hunting for a bug at my level. I do program as a hobby, but not in C, so some of the code can be a little intimidating.
As I said, I have been using Ubuntu as my sole OS for the past 2 years. I use it for school work (I’m starting high school this year) and for programming in Haskell, and for both it works great. I am hoping to do more bug fixes, and maybe even something beyond that in the future. Unity, for example, still needs a lot of work and a lot of love put into it, and I’m hoping to help with that to make it great.
One of my favorite things about the free, open source nature of projects such as Ubuntu is that if there’s something you don’t like about the OS or something that you think is missing, then you can fix it now, you don’t have to wait for some big corporation to think of it and then fix it several months later. The project has a much closer, more intimate tie to its user base and what they want from it. Getting started in Ubuntu development/bug fixing is the first step towards helping make it an even better OS than it is now.

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.

Unity Contributor Report: Ready for Beta 2 and Lenses API ready to go

By jcastro | Published: 2011-09-14

The roll up to Beta two begins as the archive starts to get more and more frozen with Beta 2 Freeze tomorrow.

We have one major announcement for the week, Neil Patel sends along that the Unity Lens API documentation is mostly ready for developer consumption and should be finished off soon. Neil has been working with David Callé, gathering feedback on how Lenses could be made easier to work with for app developers. Here’s a preview of the work:

David Calle's book lens

Not much different from what you see on 11.04 on the surface (other than the organizational bits on the right), but there was a bunch of plumbing involved in the Dash itself to make them faster and more responsive. We’re looking for people to write Unity Lenses for things they care about. Neil considers this the last major changes to the Lens API, which gives authors this cycle and next to work on Lenses without having to change them all the time to adapt to the dash.

Speaking of lenses, there are two lenses that need to be updated to use the new API, here’s our call for help:

  • Reddit Lens – This lens was started by Jason Smith to help him waste time on the internet looking at rage comics but now he’s busy working on Unity itself. He’s asking for someone to take over maintenance of this lens, it needs to be ported to the new API. Here’s the code. I will also chip in a month of Reddit Gold to the person that updates this lens.
  • Ask Ubuntu Lens – This lens by Stefano Pallazo needs the same thing as the reddit lens, porting to the new API.  Here’s the code.
  • Now that the API is done, we have a ton of community submitted ideas for lenses, I’m looking for people to start making useful lenses, so feel free to snag one and get started!
Both sets of lenses have the packaging included, but if you need help you can contact me and I’ll find a packager for you.
Unity Contributor Activity This Week
  • New contributor Brandon Schaefer had his first contribution in Unity, working on ibus support. Woo!
  • New contributor Dennis Schridde submitted a fixes to dbusmenu and libindicate.
  • Marco Trevisan finished implementing DX Indicator work for 11.10,  this was actually merged last week and he’s been working on it for a long time:
    • Indicators are now ordered based on their priority, which means that the panel can now display indicators in an order regardless of what indicator-* package they come from instead of tacked onto the end of current indicators.
  • Marco Trevisan also comes in to fix a bunch, his branch includes various fixes for the QuickList handling such as:
    • Correct hiding of quicklist items and quicklist roots (including not showing unneeded separators, see more at bug #843425).
    • Support for monitoring .desktop file changes to dynamically update the “static” quicklist generated using the launcher .desktop file
    • Some memory optimizations and fix of memory leaks
    • Fixed a bug causing unity to crash if removing launcher with an open quicklist (Bug #801413)
    • Some fixes for the PanelMenuView which should fix the menus accidentally being not hidden or the title not being faded.
  • Andrea Azzarone has merged his dnd-fixes branch, which fixes a bunch of drag and drop issues, and removed a 1px padding bug that Cimi forgot about 🙂

Other Unity Updates in Oneiric

  • New Unity release last week (was expectionnaly pushed on Friday due to an uncompatible issue with unity-2d). Latest to hopefully have a nux and unity ABI break.
    • Got a lot of bug fixes. Highlights from the week:
      • Now works on netbook screensize
      • Bring back Super + A/F/M shortcuts
      • Some behavior and rendering fixes
      • Some changes in the dash (UIFe)
      • Some speedup improvment (lazy load again of lenses) and bug fixes
    • Got an libunity ABI break as well, making rebuilding a bunch of rdepends (API change from the lens part only).
    • Also, the way lightdm and the session detect the session to launch changed (done while the user is typing his password), this brings some speedup improvment, take into account the autologin case where /tmp can’t be written. Seems no cry found on this one, so should be good!
    • This week is seeing a new unity with an UIFe (continuing the dash reshape work), and another one on the switcher.
  • Compiz:
    • New compiz uploaded on Monday with an ABI break, so rebuilding of libcompizconfig, all plugins, pythoncompizconfig and unity.
    • This new release brings some fixes (like the orange color on the grid one). This is normally a preventive ABI break before an incoming stacking issue fix which shouldn’t break the ABI.
    • UIFe for centering the workspace swicher to take into account the launcher size as well.
  • Unity-2d releases. Despite some unsynced with unity and delaying the release, we got a lot of fixes there as well: https://launchpad.net/unity-2d/+milestone/4.6. The majority is to bring unity-2d closer to unity-3d for look and feel.
  • We got Qt 4.7.4 this week as well. Lot of bug fixes for QML (and so Unity-2d) and some nice new features which will enables the unity-2d guys to experiment for the future.

The (Getting Smaller!) Big List

Here’s a list of targeted bugs that would make Unity better to use. Here’s the full list if you want to dig in.

  • 709461 – Application windows can sometimes fail to display and will mask regions of the screen.
  • 792201 – Launcher leaves focus nowhere after Alt+F1, Esc
  • 795065 – Scrolling on top of a close animation switches viewports
  • 816692 – Widget textures are loaded even though they may not be used

How to Get Involved

1. Get the Code

Follow the Step by Step Instructions and Wiki Page. This will get the code from Launchpad, set up your development environment, and getting you used to the Launchpad workflow.

2. Pick a Bug

Here’s the full list, or you can just join the team and watch them roll in and pick what you’d like.

3. Fix your bug and then get your code into Unity

Don’t worry we won’t leave you hanging, you can get a-hold of a Unity developer through many different ways:

  • Join the ~unity-community-hackers team and start digging in.
  • We now have a Weekly Meeting at 1800UTC Wednesdays on #ayatana on Freenode IRC if you feel like hanging with us and getting organized and ask questions
  • #ayatana on freenode IRC during European and American workdays. Or you can post to the mailing list if you have a question.
  • We also have weekly IRC Q+A for any developer who wants to dive in and ask a Unity developer. 7pm-8pm UTC (That’s 2pm EST) every Friday!

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 232

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-09-12

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #232 for the week September 5 – 11, 2011, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

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

  • Neil Oosthuizen
  • Amber Graner
  • Elizabeth Krumbach
  • James Gifford
  • 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