Ubuntu Oneiric Development Update

By dholbach | Published: 2011-06-30

Ubuntu Development Update

We are one week away from Alpha 2, so right now you can see lots of developers trying to get as many things into Ubuntu Oneiric as possible: AirPrint, theme changes and loads of other stuff. After this milestone we will have only 4 weeks left until Feature Freeze at which stage most of the features should have have landed. As always: the status overview should give you a very detailed look on how each feature is progressing.

I’m very pleased about the number and turnout of initiatives we have to allow new contributors to get involved in Ubuntu Development easily.

  • The dh_python2 porting jam was very successful. Up until now we managed to convert 44% of all the packages on the CD. There is still quite a bit to do. Here’s instructions, talk to Barry on IRC how to best help out.
  • Nigel Babu and Stefano Rivera organised a FTBFS jam to fix packages that fail to build from source. A number of packages have been fixed, but there’s still quite a few that need to get sorted out. Catch Nigel and Stefano on IRC and talk to them about it!
  • Ubuntu Developer Week is very very closed to being finalised. Put 11th to 15th July into your diary and make sure you’re there. It will be awesome!

Last week I pointed out five different bitesize bugs. I’m happy to report that two are currently under review (thanks Alexander Fougner and Ben Tucker) and two had been fixed in Oneiric already.

New Contributor

This week I talked to Alexandru Cucu from Romania, here’s what he has to say:

Alexandru Cucu

I’m close to having a bachelor’s degree in computer science but I’m not that much into software development.

I have started using Ubuntu in 2007, on a virtual machine running under MS Windows. Ubuntu was love at first sight! After a couple of weeks of working in a virtual machine, it was installed as the only OS on my machine. I was looking for free (as in “free beer”) software as my budget was very low. I had discovered more than that, it was free as in “free speech” software, most of it at a couple of clicks away, in the Ubuntu repository. Since then, I have dedicated my spare time for spreading the word about the free software movement.

The best things about Ubuntu are the freedom and the large community. It’s impossible not to find someone able to help you.

I use Ubuntu for:

  • programming (mostly Java, but there were some C, C++ and C# projects – I know .NET/Mono is not a good choice if you are into FLOSS, but I had some school projects that required it)
  • hosting web, email, file and database servers (learned many useful thing about how GNU/Linux works while configuring my first server)
  • usual stuff as web browsing, watching movies, document editing, instant messaging …

Most of my contribution to Ubuntu is inside the Romanian LoCo Team. I’m offering technical support on the Romanian web forums and I am now a moderator.

Other small contributions are:

  • translations
  • holding presentations at conferences and workshops
  • LoCo website editing
  • sending free Ubuntu stickers to users around the country
  • spreading the word about Ubuntu in other informal ways

About my contribution you wrote about, I have read your article where bug #785052 was mentioned. It just looked too simple not to fix it. I’m not familiar with the Ubuntu development process, but your tutorials guided me through the entire thing.

I plan looking for projects written in Java (since I have some experience) and contribute some more, also planning a translation of your tutorials as this might attract people interested in developing free software.

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 Weekly Newsletter Issue 222

By nhandler | Published: 2011-06-28

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is Issue #222 for the week of June 19 – 25, 2011, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

  • Call for Testing Maverick Language Pack Updates
  • Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) Development Update
  • Ubuntu Oneiric Open for Translation
  • Ubuntu Cloud Portal: Graphics Ninjas invited to help
  • Ubuntu Stats
  • LoCo News
  • LoCo Council Meeting Digest
  • Launchpad News
  • Ubuntu Certification: What components do we test?
  • Accessible Qt now in Oneiric!
  • Has Unity Knocked Ubuntu Off Its Pedestal?
  • Full Circle Magazine – Issue #50
  • Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
  • Upcoming Meetings and Events
  • Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04
  • And much more!

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

  • Elizabeth Krumbach
  • Mike Holstein
  • Tubuntu
  • Unit193
  • Nigel Babu
  • Nathan Handler
  • 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

Call for Testing Maverick Language Pack Updates

By David Planella | Published: 2011-06-24

Following the regular language pack update schedule, we’ve got new Maverick translations ready to test before release.

Remember that you don’t have to be a translator to test language packs. It’s really easy, and by contributing to testing you’ll help delivering new translations to thousands of users in your language!

Here’s how:

  1. Enable the Maverick proposed updates repository
  2. Follow the instructions for testing near the bottom of the language pack updates page
  3. Leave the feedback of your testing in the table near the top of the language pack updates page

Remember that now you can subscribe to the iCal feed to stay up to date with language pack updates and better coordinate your work.

Thank you for your help in testing translations!

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) Development Update

By dholbach | Published: 2011-06-23

Ubuntu Development Update

Oneiric development is in full swing and with Feature Freeze still 7 weeks away, most of the intrusive changes are landing in the development release as we speak. Alpha 2 will be released in two weeks which should be a great time to check out what’s currently happening. As always: the status overview might give you an idea how each feature is progressing.

Today Ubuntu maintainers are having a dh_python2 porting jam. If you know something about packaging and python already and want to help out, this is a great opportunity to get involved. If you want to be part of the initiative

Last week I pointed out five different bitesize bugs. It seems like Alexander Fougner grabbed three of them and put up merge proposals for review. Awesome!

New Old Contributor

Each week, I’ll talk to somebody who just got their fixes into Ubuntu and ask them about their experience. It’s a while since my first steps into the Ubuntu world, but this time I’ll talk about my own experience.

In 2004 I had been using Debian for a couple of years already as my exclusive computing experience and enjoyed it very much. Looking back it’s a bit hard to say why I never got involved in Debian immediately. I filed bugs when I encountered them, sometimes even had a look at the source code, but seemingly overwhelming amounts of documentation and procedures never made it feel like a realistic option. It took a little bit of time and meeting Michael Vogt for me to understand that it’s actually not impossible to get involved and contribute making Open Source even better.

Michael Vogt was working on Ubuntu at the time already and after having had lunch with him a couple of times, I had a better idea of how all the things fitted together. At the same time I was working on a project for university and found out that I needed a newer version of a library. Looking back, I think that’s the point where I knew I wanted to get involved and not only fix the issue for myself on my own machine, but for hundreds if not thousands of users.

From then on I started fixing build failures and fixed small bugs here and there. I still remember the feeling when I got positive feedback on a bug report after I fixed the issue. It was just fantastic!

The most important lesson I learned back then was to not be afraid of making mistakes or asking questions. Truth to be told, I made many mistakes and learned a lot during the time. What I love about it is that I never felt like an idiot, but that my efforts were appreciated. That’s why I think it’s important to get in touch with developers on IRC and talk about what you’re doing and where you are stuck. Often enough it’s something really simple you missed or you’ll find that somebody else is already working on the problem.

Back then the Ubuntu world was much less organised, but also much smaller. There was one mailing list and one IRC channel in the beginning, so it was a little bit easier to keep track of what’s going on. On the other hand were the tools less powerful back then and specific documentation almost non-existent. Still I’d say that it’s as easy today as it was back then to get to know really great people and make good friends, friends for life.

Everything that came afterwards, like how I was invited to my first UDS or when I was at the center of a flash hug or when Jono and I bought costumes in a sex shop, I’ll probably leave as a story for another time. 🙂

 

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. Here’s a few examples:

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.

The Unity Report – Carving away the Stone

By jcastro | Published: 2011-06-22

This is the Unity weekly report for 22 June. We’re sliding into the week before the Ubuntu Platform Rally in Dublin, Ireland, and after that we’re in Alpha-2 mode, so the team is getting a bunch of house cleaning out the way. In many ways, this should be the last super-boring Unity report as things will get more exciting from here on out, as such we continue to chip away at the rock.

Unity Contributor Activity This Week

Andrea Azzarone’s made the bottom of the launcher unfold where you left it last, which is a backlog bug from last week. Daniel van Vugt added unmount/eject/remove quicklist options for external drives in the Launcher, and lastly Marco Trevisan has proposed a bunch of miscellaneous fixes in BAMF. Other branches for incoming fixes are in the review queue.

The team also had it’s first team meeting where people made introductions and went through some reviews together to get them landed. Feel free to join us, every Wednesday at 1800UTC on #ayatana-freenode.

Things going on in Oneiric

There’s actually a ton of work going on in Oneiric. By the time you read this Unity 4.0 should be hitting the archive (if not, the day after). This includes a port to GTK3 by Gord Allott, Neil Patel, and Bilal Akhtar. Neil also reorganized the source code a bit. And application indicators have also been ported to GTK3 by Michael Terry and others.  This will be the platform that 11.10’s Unity will be built on, so it’s all been mostly boring-looking plumbing work that needed to get done. Here’s a picture of my desktop with some of the changes:

You can find this and other stuff going on in Oneiric by checking out the desktop team report.

The Big List

Here’s a list of targeted bugs that the design team has picked out as a result of user testing and feedback that would make Unity nicer to use. Here’s the full list if you want to dig in.

  • 676453 Launcher – Add ‘installing’ animation for when app is installed via drag & drop
  • 616866 Installation of apps by dragging them to the launcher
  • 750375 Dash – Cursor navigation allows the user to keep scrolling down indefinitely
  • 723866 Dash file Lens – Rename “Favourite Folders” category header to “Folders”
  • 765715 Launcher – When a app icon de-couples from the Launcher a small shadow should appear on the bottom and right sides of the icon
  • 767272 Top bar menus – there should be a very quick and subtle fade out/in effect when a user shifts from one menu to another or closes a menu

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 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!