Unity Progress Report – Irish Edition

By jcastro | Published: 2011-07-06

This is the Unity weekly report for 6 July. The last week the team spent some time hacking on Unity in Dublin, Ireland, which included a quick meet and greet with the local team. The main things that happened this week were mostly plumbing and GTK3 porting, which is now complete. Other than compiz modal dialogs there’s no new crazy bling this week, just boring foundationy bling and a bunch of hacking:

Unity Contributor Activity This Week

  • Oliver Sauder has fixed the application spread to only show applications on the current workspace.
  • Alexander Fougner made his first contribution to Unity by changing “Keep In Launcher” to “Keep in launcher”. Hey, it’s all about the little things.
  • Marco Biscaro has made yet another fix where clicking on an icon when spread now correctly cancels the spread. Thanks Marco.
  • Oier Mees made his very first Unity contribution (yaay!) Oier fixed the Dash search box, such that clicking inside it removes the search hint. I love attention to details.
  • Manuel Nicetto has committed yet another fix for quicklists. The fix improves keyboard navigation and resolves focus issues.
  • Andrea Azzarone also resolved issues with autohide for the launcher. The fix also helps tooltips become more robust and always end up showing on the screen

Other branches for incoming fixes are in the review queue. Thanks to all the contributors who’ve spent time making Unity better. Want to dive in? Check out the big list below and dive in!

Things going on in Oneiric

There’s plenty of stuff happening on the rest of the desktop as well. Here’s the Unity related bits, a nice bonus this week is pure Qt apps will transparently become indicators without need for whitelisting (Skype and Mumble):

  • New Unity snapshot with new Nux/Unity (and gtk3 indicator support).
    • Compiz patch was needed with the new unity dialogs
    • But this brings a lot of issues with compiz current configuration handling system (Can’t add new plugin, even when existing plugins depends on a new one, making everything segfault). Need to prioritize the gsettings backend and remove those limitations in libcompizconfig itself.
  • New Unity-2d release with some metacity patches and a lot of bug fixes.
    • Unity 2d is now at 80% accessible. Some patches post alpha2 in Qt will help removing the latest gotchas. Very active work with upstream to get that done as soon as possible.
    • Note that the half implement unity-like modal dialogs showing in metacity due to the metacity theme used in compiz will be removed (no resource for implementing the full design).
    • Still using gtk2 indicators, but good progress (merge request today in trunk) to use the unity-panel service and so, get rid of it.
  • Qt has now the sni-qt support (seeded by default, will be there after alpha2): transparent indicator fallback support. This mean no more systray for popular Qt apps like mumble, skype, it will all just work out of the box.
  • Incoming dconf support in QML (and not Qt). Will be used by unity 2d first.
  • Discussion with upstream with zeitgeist first indexing to not have blank unity places. Still need to determine if this should be integrated (as it is today) with the activity log manager managing blacklists as well, if so, if it should be added to gnome-control-center and such or just run on first login. Needs design team to be back from holidays to discuss that. Add items to alpha3.

You can check out the rest of the progress on the desktop from the desktop team’s report for the week.

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.

  • 727902 Launcher icon highlighting should not switch off as soon the cursor moves after the app spread appears
  • 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
  • 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!

 

New Forum Council Members

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-07-05

Due to current and upcoming vacancies on the Ubuntu Forum Council, we (the FC) were in need of 3 new members to make the correct number of members.

Previously, the FC was chosen from the staff team by the current FC, and then put forward to the CC to vote on whether or not to approve said members. Recently, the forums and the forum council have been undergoing various changes to allow forum members to be approved as Ubuntu Members by the FC, and ultimately, have the FC elected from these Ubuntu Forums Members. This process still has some kinks to iron out, and is the primary task that this FC will be tackling throughout the term, in order to get a solid process in place before this term is up.

I would therefore like to welcome s-fox, Artificial Intelligence and Iowan to the FC. I’m sure they’ll do a fantastic job and look forward to the obligatory cake that each new FC member has to buy for the others 😉

Originally posted here by Joe Barker on 5 July 2011

Get ready for Ubuntu Developer Week

By dholbach | Published: 2011-07-04

Ubuntu Developer Week

Get ready for Ubuntu Developer Week from Monday, 11th July to Friday, 15th July. We will have one full week of online IRC sessions which will introduce you to Ubuntu Development and hacking on Ubuntu-related projects. Sometimes these sessions will take the form of Q&A sessions, sometimes of presentations and sometimes hands-on workshops.

Here’s the links for the impatient:

A lot of developers readily agreed to give sessions, so we have a wide variety of sessions this time around:

  • Packaging-related: Intro to Ubuntu development, specific packaging sessions: Mono, Python, Java, collaboration with Debian, fixing ARM build failures.
  • Project demos: Desktop Team Q&A, hacking on Launchpad, dotdee, Upstart, nux, hacking on compiz, hacking on Ubuntu websites, Lubuntu development, project lightning talks.
  • QA-related sessions: working with apport-reported bugs, debugging the kernel, intro to LAVA, how to triage bugs.
  • hacking sessions: porting to gobject introspection, making use of Launchpad translations, app creation with QML, writing Ensemble formulas.

As you can see: there will be something for everybody and we will have a great time.

If the times should be bad for you, don’t worry – there will be logs of the sessions made available afterwards. It’s only one week left to go, so please do us a favour and tell your friends! If you always wanted to learn something new, meet great people and start helping interesting projects, now is the perfect time: UDW is for you!

LoCo Directory: Now with default team time zones!

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-07-01

While we were all at UDS in Budapest last month there was a great session about the LoCo Directory. Toward the end of the session I piped up to ask about time zones.

Time zones have always been a tricky problem for the directory, since some teams cover multiple time zones the first solution to this problem was to set a time zone per venue the team created. This worked well until when they added the Meetings functionality there was no “venue” to speak of so no time zone could be set. This meant that all “Meeting” events showed up in UTC time, which for a team like mine in California meant that not only would it not be our local time, our 7PM meetings would appear to be happening on the next day if you didn’t look carefully to notice that it was UTC. This made them very difficult for us to use, so we never did.

To solve this the team ended up creating a “Default Timezone” section to the administrative interface for the team.

Now when you create a Meeting it will default to “Team Default” but you’re also able to select any time zone. Awesome! Huge thanks to Michael Hall (mhall119) for making this a reality!

Now I may have headlined with time zones, but that’s not the only big change with the 0.3.4 release of the LoCo Directory.

When you’re logged in there is now have a “My Teams” link at the top of the directory that you can click on to quickly access upcoming events and meetings, pictures and links for your team.

Thanks to Ronnie for making this happen!

The next great change is courtesy of Chris Johnston (cjohnston). Having an event on IRC that isn’t a meeting? You can now select an “Event Channel” as a location for a virtual event that takes place in your IRC channel.

Thanks Chris!

Finally we have a contribution from Martin Owens (doctormo) which puts all venues you have used in the past at the top of list of venues to select so you don’t need to scroll through dozens of venues from all over the world to find that same venue you used for a release party last year.

Thanks Martin!

The LoCo Directory has to be one of my favorite web projects the community is working on right now, they’re a friendly team who are responsive to bug reports and always willing to help new contributors to get started.

So have questions? Comments? Bugs? Want to help out?

Check out the project launchpad page here: https://launchpad.net/loco-directory

Review status of and submit bugs here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/loco-directory

Talk to them on the Community-Web-Projects mailing list here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/community-web-projects

Or drop by #ubuntu-website on chat.freenode.net to chat to them on IRC.

Originally posted here by Elizabeth Krumbach on 30 June 2011

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.