Ubuntu Developer’s Summit: Conclusions

Another UDS rolls around and concludes. It was a great deal of fun and I’d like to thank Jorge Castro, Maria Randazzo and all the other great people who helped make this happen. Meeting people face to face is always a great deal better than talking online and disagreements can be worked out much more effectively.

In this next release cycle for Lucid Lynx it’s going to be an LTS (Long Term Support) so the goals were fairly conservative. Most of the interesting technical problems have either been solved or are not going to be tackled for this LTS release, so I tended to go to fewer Desktop, Foundations, Kernel or Mobile tracks than at any other UDS I’ve been to.

The focus for me was on the Community track and trying to improve our Local Communities, trying to gather together support for the Ubuntu Learning Project and funnel course material projects into the same channel. Working out what we need to do and how we need to move forwards to make it easier to contribute. I also had the chance to hash things out with Belinda from Canonical and I think we can do better in terms of presenting learning materials.

There was a lot of governance sections for the community too, I think Jono did a fantastic job of keeping these sessions together, on message and all with deliverable goals for the cycle. this is quite difficult to do given the nature of community.

The social events in the evening were fantastic as I’ve already mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, food was good and the hotel was very good. Although I was staying at a different hotel, so it’s made it hard with all the travelling to get to the main one. The reason for that was simply the expense of the main hotel rooms.

I’m fairly certain that Ubuntu Lucid will be a stable and well delivered release, I don’t yet think we’re moving the desktop up a notch and really moving ahead of the competition yet with functionality, but like I said I’d prefer this release to be stable since it must be supported by Canonical for 3 years on the desktop.

Ubuntu Ice Skating

Here at UDS we do various fun activities after the sessions have ended. People have been great for getting these events organised.

So on Tuesday we went to the local Galleria to ice skating. People, if you want to do something dangerous, don’t go shooting, go ice skating. At least 4 people were injured in some way, I sprained by ankle and shin and have been hobbling around like an Igor all week, grantbowman got himself a concussion and I forget what ailed other people.

Photo Gallery

RecordMyDesktop Cheesed Sound

On karmic the package called gtk-recordmydesktop is the perfect way to record your desktop and even record yourself, below I show a test with cheese running.

But the problem I have is that sound is so difficult to set up… well it’s not hard once you know what to do, you replace the word ‘DEFAULT’ with the word ‘pulse’ and then hand off control of input volume and mixing to the standard audio mixer settings.

I’m going to see about making sure that this issue is fixed in future so that gtk-recordmydesktop works from the second it’s installed.

Update:Daniel T Chen Has fixed the issue, big thanks to him for sorting this without me even making a bug report.

Karma Numbers are Meaningless

There is a misconception that your karma value in launchpad is somehow meaningful within the community, that the more karma that you have, the greater your trust or the better your chances in getting access to things or acquiring membership.

This simply isn’t true. The first problem is that karma in launchpad is a measure of activity on launchpad. So much of what the community does is not on launchpad and things which are not related to the Ubuntu community are counted. It’s not even a good measure of engineering talent as the more commits or translations you do the better your score.

When your looking to get membership or your looking to be trusted, people are much more aware of your recommendations as far as working with you and your significant sustained contributions. The membership board will look at your written wiki page and dig through various sources of information such as photos in your galleries, blog posts, team reports and how other people in the team know your work.

I never check Karma on launchpad, for me team membership and working with someone is much more important.

Using KVM: Testing Lucid

I’m sitting here watching the plannary talk given by Dustin Kirkland at UDS for Lucid. This next version is going to be pretty important and it’s important that we’re all going to be testing the new version before it comes out. This is just so we can increase the number of machines that milestone versions are running on and people who can report the bugs well before the release candidate for the final lucid release.

The way this is going to be done is through a project called testdrive which uses virtualisation KVM, this software allows you to run a CD and test out the new version without disrupting your current installation. It loads through KVM (kernel virtualisation) but it will also use VirtualBox if available.

Now this wont be testing you hardware drivers, but it will be testing everything else. Colours, package upgrades and even online services. It’s hoped that making things easy to use will allow more users to get involved in testing and make the next really really stable.

Will you help?

Finishing touches to Launchpad Auto

There is some final work on a new tool I’m building for making launchpad development trivially easy for everyone to get involved with development. I’d like people who follow my blog to volunteer for trying it out and bringing bugs to light, these are the requirements if you want to help out:

* Have a launchpad account already
* DO NOT have ssh keys uploaded
* Are NOT an Ubuntu Member
* Has never downloaded or uploaded bzr branches

Comment below if you are interested.

Software Center, UI Proposal as Requested

Eric Pritchett commented on my blog post about a complaint I made against the design of the Ubuntu software center, it was during my basic review of Karmic and I was basically passing on my teacher’s lament about trying to get new and old Ubuntu desktop users to use the new software center and how some of them were having trouble.

Eric correctly suggests that the next step would be to actually show a better GUI (or at least my own interpretation of one) so perhaps positive changes can be effected and it isn’t just me moaning about a feature. I’m not posting this as an official proposal, this is more of my quick mock-up of the direction I would take it if I were king.

I’d keep the program info and departments screens as they are, they look fine. The install/uninstall button would simply add the action to the apt install queue (that’s still in the pipeline guys right? so we can add/remove multiple things?).

Now that I’ve drawn that up in 20 mins, time to catch a plane to UDS where perhaps I’ll get to talk about these kinds of things.

Client Configuration Experiments

Because I’m not a very good systems administrator but a programmer, when life gives me a problem, I see opportunities to create programs. If I was a better sys-admin I would already be familiar with tools that could solve this problem. So I’m giving any competent system administrators prior warning, what you read here might make you faint. I’m very likely reinventing several wheels and possibly even fire; But it came out so well I wanted to share with everyone.

The problem at the SETC is how to manage a set of client machines such that their configurations don’t drift apart from each other. The reason why they’re likely to do this is because certain students have access to install programs and admin the machine as part of their classes. We’d obviously encourage the use of VMs or some other system, but these machines aren’t powerful enough. For the past few months we’ve been using a system of selective files made available via http which use a sync script to pull them down off the server and conk them into etc. It worked quite well for selective configurations and making sure certain configs were always the same.

This included a configuration called /etc/apt/package-sync which is used by another script (update-packages.sh) to make damn well sure the machines all have the same things installed. (basically set-selections and lots of force operators)

So this obviously isn’t very secure, or safe (no ssl on local network) or even workable for crufty configs. So to improve the situation I, Scott and Tim at our regular Wednesday advocacy event set about replacing http with nfs (it could just as easily be smb, but nfs is easier to set up for experiments). “global configuration” is a copy of all config files in /etc which we want the same on all machines, “local configuration” is any remaining config files in /etc which are specific to an individual client hostname.

The way this new system works is it mounts a network file system using automount in /mnt/etc/ which contains a copy of the global configuration and each of the local configurations for each machine, each local configuration is named for the hostname it applies to¹. Using rsync you then merge the global configuration with the client’s /etc directory using the local configuration’s contents as an exceptions list. This is so you don’t delete the hostname and various other files during the first syncing step. The second step uses rsync without the delete option to sync any changes in the local configuration (see sync-etc.sh)².

To add a new client machine to this system we simply use a bootstrapping deb package made available at the local apt repository. The kickseed configuration for the install process includes this package. The bootstrapping deb contains not only the syncing scripts but also the nfs automount configurations that point to the right server. When it does it’s sync, if the client can’t find a local configuration directory matching it’s hostname, it just assumes it’s not being managed.³

Now this did present to me an something interesting, with some simple scripting and a way to log into a special client machine with write access, I could use a desktop computer to add new things or change settings using any graphical tool or see how things would work and then commit them back to both the global or local configurations on the server. This would then propagate globals to all other machines syncing to that mount. It’s also possible to make changes specific to one machine, since the differences would all go into the local configuration for that hostname.

I’m trying to keep this post short, so I’ve tried to be brief⁴. If your interested in details or telling me where I’m going horribly wrong, please do comment at the bottom there. I love hearing from all the interlects of the community about how they solve these problems.

¹ Note that this means that changing the hostname file will redirect the client to use a different set of local configs.
² This does mean you can have a host which has different configurations and even have server side management of them.
³ Because the system is managing the configs, moving from one server to another is trivial but this makes the setup rather fragile, moving to using avahi would help strengthen the system from failure.
⁴ If it continues to work well and baring any logical falicies pointed out by commentators, I could package this up too.

Comic: City of Reality

Some comics are so good that they are compelling, the “City of Reality” is a story about a world connected tangentially to other worlds and everyone in Reality is nice, realistic, polite, supportive and understanding to one another. Now take a being who has come from one of these other worlds, he’s come to join the supers of Reality who help out and defeat any bad guys. The problem is that the city has been so crime free for so long that the job has generally fallen to kids who want a bit of an adventure.

Will they be able to cope with some new challenges? Will our new friend be able to cope with the seemingly maddening selfless attitudes of the populace? Check it out twice a month:

I love this comic, it’s very well drawn, it’s got fantastic writing and a charm I can’t quite place. The serious side is for me the mental experiment of what a world would be like if people were genuinely nice. Would it be interesting? would it be sustainable? Could one selfish person wreak the whole thing?

Like any good philosophy of social interaction, the comic discovers that being nice has a lot of advantages; but people in our world aren’t able to take advantage of them because we don’t know enough about other people to be able to trust them. So most people tend to form a “nice where possible” attitude that is a genuine attempt to be socially cohesive. It’s also true that unlike people in Reality, we are arrogant-centric and caught up in our own petty egos, trying to overcome our boundless fear of being wrong should be a major goal of any nice person.

Read it, tell me what you think!

Guide to Inkscape’s Filters

If you’ve been having a go at some of the new features of Ubuntu Karmic, and one of the programs you take advantage of is Inkscape. You’ll notice there are a whole host of filters that are now available.

To help understand some of these effects, c-quel who helped on the Ubunchu project with translations, organisation and editing, has put together a wonderful guide that shows each of the filter effects in action. Check it out: