Developers do Halloween in Boston

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02

With Halloween falling during the Boston summit, it is only fitting that some of the more crazy Ubuntu people would get dressed up and party it up. Of course, an event like this must be documented:


Daniel Holbach and Jono Bacon wait for the crowd to show up for dinner


Jono enjoys a laugh while Ken Wimer searches for something


Marc Tardif gets his rollers adjusted by Rich Weideman


Rich and Jorge Castro enjoy a smoke


Francesca and Jono at dinner


Jono gets surprised by random strangers on the street


Mirco Müller demonstrates capoeira

Thanks to Ken Wimer for the pictures.

Boston Developer Summit Day 4: Rain with a slight chance of laptops

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02

Greetings from the Developers’ Summit! As was predicted, the good weather didn’t hold up with today’s light rain and clouds. Inside, the ways to make Ubuntu rock more continue across the many areas on the schedule.

Desktop roundtable

This morning’s roundtable started with a discussion of possible new changes, including the merits of a darker theme, reducing the number of icons, and some larger general principles like simplifying the UI.

Windows installer
The Windows Installer, Wubi, was targetted at 7.10, however bugs prevented it from being released. Discussion centred on how to solve specific bugs, such as with UnionFS. The installer-for-windows spec is still New and may have another session.

Better integrated Wine

Making it simple for those users stuck with Windows apps was the target here. Wine won’t be shipped in main and enabled by default due to its fast moving development and beta status. For now, the better option is to make it easy to install Wine when needed, like with the codec installation. This spec allows a lot of advantages, such as double-click to run .exe and .msi files, integration of Wine application uninstallation via the Add/Remove Software tool and autorun of Windows cds. A few technical hurdles were talked about as well, such as building Mono and Gecko for Windows to plug into wine. The better-integrated-wine spec is now in Drafting and will not have another session.

Integrating sync

Being able to sync not only devices to applications but also random bits of data to anywhere is the focus of the Conduit and OpenSync projects. Integrating not only these projects into each other but also in Ubuntu was the primary focus of discussion. Upstream author of Conduit, John Stowers, joined in the discussion and explained how Conduit was working with OpenSync and how OpenSync needed to work with newer desktop technologies like HAL. Also discussed was the division between OpenSync, Conduit, GNOME online desktop and the built-in sync in Tomboy. At the end of the discussion, it was decided to agressively track upstream development during the Hardy cycle, but it is unlikely any of this will be shipped with 8.04. The syncintegration spec is now in Drafting and will not have another session.

Improving Add/Remove Programs

The current Add/Remove Programs tool is a good one, but has some limitations in terms of linking to user reviews, screenshots and more. The idea then is to create a website for a software catalog, working on top of the Apturl work that shipped with 7.10. This site would include the links to the upstream project, Rosetta translations, etc and would also be able to host user reviews, comments, screenshots, screencasts and more. What exact platform was not decided, but things such as the Wine Appdb, an Open Source PHP app, were discussed. The discussion also veered into ways to list apps, whether we should promote Open Source applications over proprietary ones and possible ones that cost money. The add-remove-software-improvements spec is in Drafting and will not have another session.

Shipping screencasts on the CD

The Screencasts team has been creating amazing screencasts to help users with all sorts of problems, across all the varieties of Ubuntu. Getting those screencasts onto the desktop via the Help browser was the primary focus here. It turns out that you can embed a video in Yelp to be played by the Totem media player. Also discussed was the ultimate screencasts creation tool, using PiTiVi, Istanbul and Xephyr. This bit is more for an upstream project and not Ubuntu itself to carry out, however. The screencasts-in-ubuntu spec is in Drafting and will not get another spec.

Easy file sharing

Sharing files between two Ubuntu machines, or from an Ubuntu machine to a non-Ubuntu machine is currently not as easy as it could be. There are two scopes for this project: that of sharing a small group of files in a scratch group, such as at a conference or meeting, and that of sharing out a set of files more or less permanently. The former use case will eventually be covered by Telepathy and Empathy, although that is not something that can be targetted for 8.04. The latter problem, however, can be covered by making Samba easier to install and setup. This will be done by making the Shared Folders capplet install only Samba. Some technical work deeper down to integrate Samba passwords with system passwords via PAM, something that is fairly easy to do with new installs but harder with upgrades. The problem of the user needing to be root to share out a folder was discussed, although there is no easy solution to this. The easy-file-sharing is in New and may have another session.

Ryan Paul of Arstechnica, who was here earlier in the week, has posted three excellent stories, covering an overview of the summit, including pictures, Hardy theme changes and finally how the summit lays out a “strong release”.

Overall, it was yet another productive day at the summit. There was so much discussed it was, as per usual, impossible to talk about everything that was. If you wish to participate and cannot be at here, check out the participate page.

Developer Summit Day 3: The good weather continues

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-01

The Developer Summit continues to tick along on the third day. As with previous days, today started with a number of roundtables about various topics. After that, …

Community Roundtable

The community roundtable this morning focused on the problem of keeping things fun. Problems discussed included interpersonal conflicts, burnout and other sources of things that make things not-fun. Pin-the-Jono was discussed as a solution.

Forums Developing & Programming

Mike B, one of the Forums Council members, has written up an excellent piece on helping forums users when they create better packages and get them interested in becoming MOTUs. Check out his blog post

Creating an Ubuntu Mobile commuity

The Ubuntu Mobile team is looking to build a developer and user community around the upcoming devices shipping Ubuntu Mobile. There was a great deal of discussion around the successes and mistakes that Nokia had with their Maemo platform. One of the key problems mentioned was the dropping of support by Nokia for older devices. The discussion then moved to getting web presence for the project and integrating that presence with the rest of the Ubuntu project, including the Fridge, Planet, wiki and other tools. This also included places for people to host applications and code that they had written.

I apologize for the short report, but the dreaded UDS plague has laid me low and I actually need to get some sleep tonight.

Tonight is Halloween and as such, many people here at UDS dressed up in costume. Check back tomorrow to see some of the wild and wacky costumes on your favourite Ubuntu developer or user.

Developer Summit Midday break: Education

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-10-31

Here at the Developer Summit, different specs are organzed roughly into tracks. Today we will look at the Education track, covered not only Edubuntu but also the Intel Classmate PC. Rich Weidman, project leader of education, says: “The education sessions at UDS Boston are going well as everyone is keen to build further on the successful Gutsy 7.10 release that’s been very well received by our users and tech reviewers.”

The Education team has a busy schedule at UDS Boston, with three main areas of focus:

Ubuntu education release for the ClassmatePC platform

The Classmate PC, a low powered and low cost laptop, already has a 7.10 proof of concept produced by Oliver Grawert that has already been used by Intel in some limited pilots and client demonstrations. Beyond the proof of concept, the classmatepc-introduce-document spec introduces Ubuntu on the ClassmatePC for the vendors and Intel local offices. Parallel to that, a the classmatepc-planning-spec discussed which technical bits needed to be done, breaking those bits into seperate specs. Once 8.04 releases, the ClassmatePC will be a fully supported platform by Ubuntu and Intel

Management of large deployments

As most Edubuntu deployments involve at least a dozen users, the management of these users and the machines they are using is a key problem to be solved. Further work on GNOME’s Sabayon and Pessulus, designed for lockdown and profile creation for users, has been discussed in the edubuntu-profile-network-session-management spec. The issue of mass control of multiple machines via Puppet is going to be discussed later today in the edubuntu-mass-maintenance spec.

For the teachers controlling their users on Edubuntu computers, the inclusion of the italc tool, although it does require a great deal of work before it can be included by default.

Getting more contributions from our users and teachers

Getting feedback from users and teachers is a key requirement for Edubuntu and as such, something the education-getting-teacher-input spec attempts to address. There have been a few ideas tossed around, such as working with other distributions or getting funding from other organizations to carry out some research on teaching on top of the Free Software desktop.

Between getting Edubuntu ready for the ClassmatePC and supporting very large installations, the education team has a lot of ambitious goals for the 8.04 release. As with anything in Ubuntu, if you can help, don’t hesistate to jump in and give the Edubuntu team a hand. You can read them via the Getting Involved page.

Developer Summit Day 2 Report

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-10-31

Day 2 of the Developer Summit was sunny and beautiful, as many took advantage of the rooftop garden near the conference rooms. Starting the sessions today were roundtables about many topics including the community, desktop, server, and others. After these followed the usual sessions, as per today’s schedule.

Community Roundtable

The community roundtable covered around many issues but started with the issue of burnout, how to deal with it, how to look for it and what sort of resources need to be available. The possibility of a resource pack was discussed but no overall consensus was reached. Jono emphasized that part of his, Jorge and Daniel’s roles is to help deal with this sort of issue and that the door is, figuratively speaking, always open, something he later blogged about. The need to de-stress was also talked about, with discussion of some sort of gaming tournament and of course, the need to get out from behind the computer and do something real featuring on the list of potential resolutions.

Defining a roadmap for supporting LoCo teams

This spec started with a reiteration of the need for the creation of a LoCo council to approve LoCo teams. Exactly who should be on such a council is not yet decided, but it was also restated that the council will help remove the bottleneck for IRC channels, forums, websites, mailing lists and other LoCo resources. The discussion then moved to the mentoring of the AfricaTeams projects, including possible “twinning” of wealthier teams with those in less advantaged parts of the world. From there the discussion moved to the need to create an event box, although exact details were not discussed. One of the last pieces discussed was the need to create a QA information list for LoCo teams, to allow them to run testing labs and bug days and the like. The defining-loco-roadmap spec is still in New and may have another discussion session.

Rethinking the logout dialog
The logout dialog has had many critiques in the year or so since it’s introduction, mostly due to the nature of having seven options in a single menu. In order to reduce those numbers, the discussion turned to removing restart and shutdown options, making it default to always save the session at logout. However, Hibernate will not work reliably if a user dual-boots, leading to the rejection of that idea. Another idea was raised to possibly make the logout dialog the GDM screen, provided it can be made fast enough. In the end, no clear consensus was reached on these issues, however there was strong consensus that the shutdown sounds should be disabled by default. The logout-dialog spec is still New and may have another session.

Automatix and Ubuntu collaboration
Making Automatix and Ubuntu teams work better together is a topic of much discussion and today’s work covered evaluating the list of applications that are installed by Automatix, where they are and what needs to be done to get those that are not in the repositories in, if possible. Most features currently in Automatix could be turned into packages for Universe, Multiverse, or Partner.

Third Party Apt
Report provided by Scott Ritchie

ThirdPartyApt does for apt repositories what GDebI did for packages. Participants in the discussion expressed some reluctance towards making it easier to install non-Ubuntu supported packages, however there was general consensus that this is something users want. Moreover, having any sort of standard is better than the current situation, where custom install scripts avoid apt and don’t leave uninstallation metadata, handle conflicts, or allow security updates. For third parties using apt, complicated instructions like those for Wine and Google can be replaced with a single file. The third-party-apt spec is now in Drafting and will not have another session.

As per usual, a single person cannot exist in such a quantum state and as such, not all of the dozens of sessions were covered. If you are at UDS and want something you talked about covered, please come and see Corey Burger or email me.