Planet Ubuntu

One of the most popular feature requests on AOL’s AIM UserVoice forum was for AIM to have a client available through the Ubuntu Software Center and although this feature request received hundreds more votes than any other feature request it was declined recently by AIM’s Product Manager  with the following response:

As you can imagine it is quite a weak and disappointing response considering that AOL has the resources to develop a client for Ubuntu (Linux) if they so chose and even get help if they open sourced it but instead of fulfilling one of the highest voted feature requests they decided to decline.

All in all I think Pidgin does an excellent job as a all-around IM client anyways but when you have demand for a AOL produced client for Linux that exceeds demands for all other features it just seems natural to follow the desires of the masses?

All I can say is Adam and his team have failed at doing the right thing for their users which is giving them what they want.

Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com

After a relatively long hiatus, I’ve return to my blog!

My new year gift to you is……

Apps for the Masses!

A new (and free) community - driven guide reflects the new look and features present in Ubuntu 11.10:

Click here for full size.

Thanks to the always amazing David Callé who has created this lens for the Ubuntu Accomplishments system. David was also the first person to brave running the Ubuntu Accomplishments system other than me (complete with the server verification pieces). It worked!

This week I expect to have another update on Ubuntu Accomplishments. My evenings have been tied up with finishing The Art of Community but the deadline for that is tomorrow.

Stay tuned!

This week is feature freeze in Ubuntu land and the Kubuntu community have been working hard to get in as many as possible before the deadline.

Telepathy-KDE is working nicely. We're still deciding if it's better to go with the new-but-not-much-tested Telepathy-KDE or the old-but-unmaintained Kopete by default.

LightDM Plasma Theme, not likely to replace KDM yet for lack of testing but a promising way to get a login manager with all the features

Oxygen-GTK3 theme, so your GTK apps fit in with the Plasma desktop.

Calligra office suite featuring Krita the world's best painting app. Handy for updating hackergotchis. MS Office file import/export is reported to be better than LibreOffice because of the top work by KO GMBH. Not the default yet but the signs are good for fixing the "we don't have a KDE office suite by default" bug in the next year.

Rekonq 0.9 and Owncloud 3.0 are both in progress.

Plasma Active! Could a Kubuntu Active remix be around the corner? We'd be the first distro with a free software tablet UI if we can get it done.

If you want to know how my health is doing see my personal blog entry Recovery from Severe Traumatic Head Injury.

Two changes to the contact team email feature were recently released that make communication more reliable.

Non-team members now see the “Contact this team’s admins” link. Previously, non-members saw a link to contact the team owner. The owner is often one person, and some team owners delegate the running of the teams to the team admins. There are often more admins then there are owners. So the message is more  likely to reach someone who is involved in the day-to-day team management.

Team members see the “Contact this team’s members” link. Previously, members might have seen a link to contact the team, but that email when to the team email address that the team might not respond to. Many teams still use bogus email addresses to avoid emails from the days before Launchpad had great bug subscription filters. Launchpad has an anti-feature that prevents team mailing-lists from contacts all the team members. Team admins found it impossible to notify the member about issue ranging from policy changes, polls, meetings, to security issues. So members can now trust that their messages will be sent to the team members.

The feature is a convenient way to contact a user or team. Sometimes the feature is the only way you can contact a user or team that does not have a public email address. A user may use the contact user/team feature 3 times each day. The limit ensures no one can spam Launchpad users. The limit also means the feature is not a substitute for mailing lists.

So I spent the better part of an hour physically cleaning out my laptop, what a PITA. Why so long you ask? It seems these days that laptop manufacturers like to toss in 30-plus screws just to open it up, and then bury the fan, which required the removal of more screws. A common thing I notice on my laptops and other laptops out there, is how easy it is to get to the hard drive or the memory. Why can&apost the manufacturer do something like that for the fan? It shouldn&apost take me an hour to clean the fan on my laptop. It shouldn&apost take more than 2 minutes.

OK, the point of the above rant was this: LAPTOP MANUFACTURERS, LISTEN UP! YOU NEED TO MAKE IT EASY FOR US TO CLEAN OUT OUR FANS!. Our laptops shouldn&apost need to follow Nelly&aposs Hot in here, and I should have to take off all of my laptop&aposs hypothetical clothes.

I know I can&apost be the only one who cleans out their laptop fans. I know there isn&apost anyway possible I am the first to think about making it as easy to clean out the fan as it is to replace memory or a hard drive. How many of you clean out your laptop fans? How much time do you spend on it? Do you just normally blow some air into it, or you do take your laptop a part and really clean it out?

Another pain is the keyboard, though I doubt this one would be an easy fix. Right now, I remove the keyboard from the laptop, flip it upside down, and gently smack the bottom of it to get the big stuff to fall out. Then to clean out the smaller particles I use a business card or something similar (folded up piece of paper) to get in between and under the keys. This actually works pretty well, but I would recommend against it while the keyboard is still part of the laptop, as you might drive that stuff into the laptop itself. Speaking of the keyboard, that is just as easy for me to get to and remove like the memory and the hard drive. Lightly pry off the top panel, remove 3 screws, and lightly pry out the keyboard. This takes me 2 minutes to remove at most, and then I spend the next 10 minutes cleaning it out.

Anyone know of a laptop manufacturer that makes it easy to clean out the fan? Is there a such thing? Google wasn&apost my friend on that one.

Cleaning Out My Laptop – What a PITA is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20120214 Meeting Agenda

ARM Status

P/omap4: nothing new to report this week

Release Metrics and Incoming Bugs

Release metrics and incoming bug data can be reviewed at the following link:
Release Metrics.

Milestone Targeted Work Items

If your name is in the above table, please review your Beta-1 work items.

Blueprint: hardware-p-kernel-power-management

No update this week.

Status: Precise Development Kernel

We’ve recently rebased to upstream stable v3.2.6 and uploaded. Please
note that Beta Freeze is next week, Thurs Feb 23. I ideally want to
upload our final Beta-1 kernel by the end of the week, but no later than
Monday. If there are any patches which need to land, submit them now.
Important upcoming dates:

Status: CVE’s

Currently we have 73 CVEs on our radar, one new CVEs were added this week.
See the CVE matrix for the current list:
CVE Metrics

Overall the backlog is unchanged this week, though we have closed a couple
of hardy CVEs and one CVE across the board:
CVE Linux

Status: Stable, Security, and Bugfix Kernel Updates – Oneiric/Natty/Maverick/Lucid/Hardy

Here is the status for the main kernels, until today (Jan. 24):

The vote closed yesterday[0].

The results were:

The new member of the Developer Membership Board is

Barry Warsaw (~barry)

whose appointment was confirmed at the meeting yesterday.

Please join me in welcoming Barry to our team.

The Developer Membership board would like to thank Michael Bienia for his many years of service on the DMB and the MOTU council and wish him well on his future endeavours.

[0] We ended it a few hours early so that we could confirm the results during our meeting. There hadn’t been any votes in the previous few days, so hopefully the early closing didn’t affect anyone.

Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list by Stefano Rivera on Tue Feb 14 15:39:30 UTC 2012

Recently on Planet Ubuntu, Jono "challenged" us to share the music we associate with Ubuntu. I love a challenge, and Jono's my bud. (I know he'll write an Ubuntu anthem one day!)

So until then Jono, I have several great tunes that come to mind, but I want to share the one song that I think absolutely nails the spirit of what we're doing.

Why?

1) This song is difficult to pronounce, but can be mastered with practice, just like Ubuntu. (Hint: oo-boon-too)

2) This song is by a band that hails from South Africa (Johnny Clegg and Savuka, formerly Juluka) and its sound is distinctly African. Ubuntu has similar origins.

3) This song is a song about a struggle for freedom: In this case, Nelson Mandela and the struggle to end apartheid. Ubuntu is a struggle to bring freedom to a domain (computing) that has seen very little of it.

4) This song is inspiring, just like Ubuntu.

5) I have opened dozens of Ubuntu Vancouver celebrations and presentations with my own Ubuntu soundtrack, and this song is the song I play before taking the stage. So for me, when I hear the song, I remember those that were beside me, supporting me. I remember hundreds of people in Vancouver that love, use, and contribute to Ubuntu and celebrate local community together with me, in person.

Ubuntu friends, our struggle might also seem insurmountable at times (hate, negativity, unfair competition), but remember that a great vision (Mark Shuttleworth) and hard work (Ubuntu Contributor Community) trumps even the most evil construct. (Evil? Think predatory monopoly. Think indifferent. Think fruit.)

Allow me to present ASIMBONANGA.

Click to play!

http://youtu.be/KfTkD-XWOFg

Happy Valentines Day Ubuntu <3

---

This post proudly shared on Diaspora*, the social network that speaks freedom.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/1296847

During 2 months a couple of students aged between 13 and 17 have been helping to solve KDE tasks during the Google Code-In contest. As last year I did mentor a few of them, 19 to be precise. To give you a short update on how much work was done, here comes a list of their achievements:

2 Students also worked on different tasks, just in case you wonder why the numbers are different here Now 34 tasks seem little work, but the numbers behind the tasks are quite impressive:

All this work would not be possible if KDE and Amarok were not Free Software as it empowers the users and the developers alike and gives great opportunities to students to improve their skills. That is just one of the reasons I love Free Software

Yesterday, I received a disturbing phone call. Someone very close to me, call him John, might lose his job, because a slanderous, offensive email was sent with forged headers, claiming to be John. John certainly did not send the mail, and those close to John know that the tone of the mail does not seem like something John would send. The email made its way to John’s boss, human resources, IT, and other departments. The director of IT said that whoever sent the email, will get fired. Hopefully, they understand the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and all that John has to do, is cast reasonable doubt that he sent the mail. Examining the mail headers should deliver that doubt. I’ve told John that I would be willing to examine the headers, along with his IT department, to help in any way I can. Hopefully, this ends well.

I’ve never known anyone personally that this has happened to, until now. But, I’ve been cryptographically signing my email since 2004. Every single one. I have almost 10,000 emails in my Sent folder, all of which are signed. Further, I think I’ve been very clear to my friends and family, that it is their responsibility to verify the signature. Should they receive an email claiming to come from me, they should doubt the authenticity of the mail if it is not signed.

Of course, this does not prove anything about future email. I may wish to stop signing my mail at anytime. But, all I need to do is cast reasonable doubt that I sent the mail. A back history of over 7 years and 10,000 cryptographically signed emails should cast enough reasonable doubt as to the message is question, should I be placed in that situation. Along with anyone being able to forge email headers, it’s all over. Unless you can clearly, logically, and rationally prove that I sent the mail, there is enough doubt surrounding it, that I remain innocent.

I know others don’t see email the same way I do, and treat their email experience differently, such as John. And in all reality, if setting up OpenPGP or S/MIME wasn’t such a major PITA, it might be more widely used. But for the time being, all I can do is continue to lead by example. For me, the 15 minutes it took for initial setup, and having to provide a passphrase every time I wish to send an email, is peanuts compared to threats, such as this. Of course, if the organization John worked for required S/MIME on their email (I’ve worked for one such organization that made this requirement), then it would be clear that the mail was a fake.

UPDATE: Turns out that this organization has a utility to send messages to anyone in the organization. It’s not email, but some custom, proprietary application. Further, it requires no authentication. Anyone can send messages to anyone pretending to be whoever they wish.

Over recent months, I have been pondering the relevance of my Free Software involvement a lot:

More than anything, it constantly feels more and more like several important distributions and projects are moving in directions that break with the old ways far too radically, by breaking software usability rules such as "least surprise", "works out of the box", and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" either to try new approaches to addressing existing needs or simply for change's sake.

Another aspect lies in my usual motivation for packaging or adopting software: because I need it and nobody else bothered doing it. Further reflection made me ponder what, correspondingly, are my usual reasons for dropping software: because what exists already works and because everybody and their grand-mother already invented a million of ways to handle the same issue.

Which brings us to today's news.

What prompted me to hand the dictionary packages I maintained over to someone else was a combination of "no longer need it" and "it already works fine as it is."

For instance, the Estonian dictionaries haven't seen any upstream release since the initial one in 2003. While I still use Estonian daily in my online communications, the last 9 years have mostly been spent making minor changes to the dependencies and maintainer scripts, just to keep the package compliant with current Debian packaging policies and with ongoing improvements to the dictionary-common maintainer tools. This is not the sort of work that requires any knowledge of the Estonian language, so I felt that having dictionary-common developers handle those technical transitions in a clean and across-the-board way for as many dictionary packages as possible would be more productive than me trying to keep track of those changes by myself.

A similar case applies to the Latvian dictionaries. While there have been occasional upstream releases, some of which required patching the source code, maintaining the package has mostly been about tracking Debian policy changes and dictionary-common functional changes. Additionally, my interest for learning Latvian has dramatically dropped over the years, so I no longer saw any point in remaining involved in maintaining the package.

Ditto for the Russian dictionaries: occasional upstream releases, occasional patches, regular packaging upgrades to keep up with the Debian policy and with dictionary-common functionality, but no longer much of anything than a passive interest in practicing my Russian.

One of the developers behind dictionary-common, Agustin Martin Domingo, frequently helped me make sense of the changes I needed to track in the past, so he gladly accepted taking over the technical maintenance of all 3 packages. The Estonian dictionaries, while extremely skim in the breadth of vocabulary they cover, remain useful, but are essentially deprecated, as the upstream author is working on a spell checking engine similar to what Voikko does for Finnish, which is why maintaining them will be a rather easy task for Agustin. Meanwhile, Aigars Mahinovs passively remains on board for the Latvian dictionaries, while the Russian dictionaries have been adopted by Mikhail Gusarov, in both cases with Agustin assisting on technical matters.

Basically, I feel that passing the maintenance over to people whose motivation remains high is a better way to guarantee those packages' future than leaving them in my unmotivated hands and I'm glad that I found someone to keep on packaging them.

PS: happy Valentine's day to everyone!

Preface: The following post is a backup from a post first published on the Moviepilot Techblog, which is going to be replaced by the Moviepilot Labs Blog. The content is a bit outdated, as the way to go today is using MariaDB instead of OurDelta. The very content about the UserStats plugin and using it for detecting and removing unused indexes is still valid, though – and a nice way of getting rid of performance killers…

MySQL performance depends on a balanced usage of MySQL indexes. While it is easy to add an index and identify queries not using indexes via EXPLAIN during development or slow.log it is a lot harder to get rid of unused indexes. Finding and removing them might be crucial for your performance as indexes can create a remarkable cpu cycle and i/o overhead during updates to tables (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE).

The default MySQL community edition server from mysql.com or your Linux/BSD distribution (which you shouldn’t use for a lot of reasons anyway) is not yet helpfull in this regard. There are however inofficial patches for advanced statistics that provide the details needed for optimizing your list of indexes. The easiest way to get started with a patched MySQL server is using a pre-patched binary. At Moviepilot an OurDelta‘s pre-patchted MySQL 5.0 server that includes the UserStats patch is running fine for about a year now.

Let’s assume you already installed OurDelta’s MySQL 5.0, which is fairly more than adding and using an apt-source in Debian/Ubuntu or similar in rpm-based distributions. After installation the MySQL server behaves

Enable UserStats’ Enhanced Statistics

As stated on the official patch originator’s (Percona) documentation, UserStats is enabled by setting the global variable “userstat_running” to “on”. You can do this on the fly by entering your mysql command line interface and issuing “SET GLOBAL userstat_running = 1;” as shown below:

mysql> SET GLOBAL userstat_running = 1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

The UserStats counter is now running and only has a slight impact on your cpu performance. For us it’s fine to run it by default but you might enable it on an on-demand basis

Grab Statistics

The UserStats statistics can be retrieved in two ways. The simple way is using “SHOW INDEX_STATISTICS”. This will provide with an unsorted list of all indexes that have been used so far with count times.

mysql> show index_statistics;
+-------------+----------+--------------------------+---------+
|Table_schema |Table_name|Index_name                |Rows_read|
+-------------+----------+--------------------------+---------+
|de_moviepilot|broadcasts|movie_id_and_ends_at_index|  7244936|
|fr_moviepilot|place_keyw|lft_and_rgt               |    46965|
|de_moviepilot|mushes916 |index_mushes_on_user_id_an|   310538|
|de_moviepilot|mushes567 |top                       |   137855|
|de_moviepilot|mushes402 |PRIMARY                   |  3033119|
...
|pl_moviepilot|u_settings|index_user_settings_on_use|   469600|

|es_moviepilot|cinema_the|PRIMARY                   |    76805|
|de_moviepilot|list_items|PRIMARY                   |    14208|
+-------------+----------+--------------------------+---------+
10689 rows in set (0.03 sec) |de_moviepilot|answers   |answerable_id_and_answerab| 11162446|

This table is already quite useful as it gives you handy details about your indexes. As “SHOW” only processes WHERE-clauses, ignores LIKE-clauses and rejects ORDER you should rather query the virtual table in information_schema like this:

mysql> select * from information_schema.INDEX_STATISTICS\
ORDER BY Rows_read DESC LIMIT 0,10;
+-------------+----------+-------------------------+------------+
|TABLE_SCHEMA |TABLE_NAME|INDEX_NAME               |ROWS_READ   |
+-------------+----------+-------------------------+------------+










+-------------+----------+-------------------------+------------+
10 rows in set (0.02 sec) |moviepilot   |users     |type_and_id_idx          | 21950479057| |de_moviepilot|comments  |commentable_type_and_comm| 25467669528| |de_moviepilot|comments  |index_comments_on_comment| 26576184065| |de_moviepilot|plot_keywo|lft_and_rgt              | 30943317768| |de_moviepilot|neighbours|PRIMARY                  | 34403784465| |de_moviepilot|ratings   |movie_id_and_user_id_and_| 45962792087| |de_moviepilot|events    |index_events_on_parent_id| 97002618593| |de_moviepilot|ratings   |top_on_ratings           |111350089590| |de_moviepilot|ratings   |PRIMARY                  |116200730622| |de_moviepilot|images    |parent_id_and_thumbnail_o|138769917931|

You just got the list of the ten most used MyIsam/InnoDb indexes in your database. See tables TABLE_STATISTICS, CLIENT_STATISTICS and USER_STATISTICS in information_schema for further details on table, client and user stats. Feel free to check your InnoDb tables for ones with few writes that maybe should be migrated to MyIsam or heave write MyIsam tables vice versa.

Detect Unused Indexes

But our task for this post is detecting unused indexes. As you already might have noticed, INDEX_STATISTICS only shows indexes that have been used at least once. If you need a list of unused indexes, meaning indexes that have been accessed zero times, you can get them by comparing the list of available indexes and the list of used indexes on a per table base.

select disctinct(INDEX_NAME) from STATISTICS \
where INDEX_NAME != 'PRIMARY' and INDEX_SCHEMA = '${DB}' \
and table_name = '${TABLE}' and INDEX_NAME not in (select \
INDEX_NAME from index_statistics where INDEX_SCHEMA =
'${DB}' and table_name = '${TABLE}');

The variables are placeholders ${DB} and ${TABLE} for usage in shell scripts. Just replace them by a database and table name of your choice.

Putting it all together

As the query above only works on a table basis (I am sure, there are better queries for this issue), and you might want to run this on a regular basis, we wrote a little shell script called “unused_indexes.sh”, available on our snippets repo on github. The script checks all tables in all or a specific database:

$ ./unused_indexes.sh
usage: -d DATABASE (OR -a for all databases) [-f TABLENAMEFILTER]
# check all databases/tables
$ ./unused_indexes.sh -a
# check all tables in database "moviepilot"
$ ./unused_indexes.sh -d moviepilot

The output looks similar to

unused indexes in table moviepilot.stat_promo:
referrer_index mandant_index
---------------------------------------
unused indexes in table moviepilot.stat_promo_del:
c_i_m
---------------------------------------
unused indexes in table mp.comments:
comment_id meta

As we “sharded” some large tables by splitting them we’d also like to be able to exclude tables:

# check all tables in all databases not matching "%mushes%"
$ ./unused_indexes.sh -a -f mushes
# check all tables in database "moviepilot" not matching "%mushes%"
$ ./unused_indexes.sh -d moviepilot -f mushes

Pitfalls

Please keep in mind that you should enable UserStats for a period long enough to grab statistics that show an average usage of your application and database setup. Also keep in mind that you might have indexes that are only used a few times when running scheduled jobs like importers and therefore might seem to be unused but are important anyway. Also consider flushing your statistics from time to time. As your application’s behaviour changes through deployments your index usage does, too. It might be a good idea to flush UserStats after every deployment.

The current version of unused_indexes.sh ignores all indexes that have been used at least once. It might be a good idea also checking indexes that have been used fewer than n times – just use the SELECT … ORDER BY from above.

The Ubuntu Server Survey is finally ready to be published it makes for a fascinating read. It is the third survey of its kind and again it has been an overwhelming response with over 6,000 completed surveys throughout 2011 and a heartfelt thanks to all who took the time to complete the comprehensive survey.

The overwhelming impression is the widespread use of Ubuntu both geographically as you might expect with respondents from across the globe. but also in the broad range of workloads in which Ubuntu Server finds itself used. Every category from web and data servers to cloud shows up strongly albeit with a strong bias towards traditional workloads.

As we approach an LTS, again we see evidence of the popularity of the extended support releases. Given we have run this survey three times now over the past three years now we begin to see strong evidence of the switching from one LTS to the next, particularly as the deployment platform, so our user base is certainly staying with us as as we introduce new features and support them in the long term.

Virtualization and cloud are now key elements of Ubuntu use, and for the first time we see KVM overtake Xen as the preferred virtualization technology for Ubuntu users, significant as the platform was the first to make the switch to supporting KVM as the native technology. With that though, VMWare remains the most cited virtualization technology showing a healthy mixture of open source and other technologies at use in the Ubuntu user base.

The respondents consideration of cloud makes for interesting reading too. There is significant interest but the use of Ubuntu Server on bare metal remains the primary use case for most users today. There is strong recognition though of the emergence of this powerful technology and with the plans for ease of installation and orchestration in 12.04 LTS it will be interesting to see how this moves the dial in regards to uptake in the Ubuntu base. A deeper analysis  shows a bias towards larger companies (i.e. respondents with more servers) using cloud technologies which is to be expected and overwhelmingly there is recognition of the suitability of Ubuntu Cloud as a basis for those efforts.

Enjoy the full report, it would be very interesting to hear your comments.

OK, fun little meme time. Simple question:

Think about the music…the vibe…the rhythm…what it makes you feel when you listen to the song. Which ones make you think of our goals of bringing Free Software to the world with Ubuntu?

Reply using your blog, Google+, Facebook, Twitter or wherever else (use the #musicofubuntu hashtag) and lets see what music gets our Ubuntu blood flowing.

I have a few I want to present via the wonderful medium of embedded YouTube videos. What are yours?!

Queen: Don’t Stop Me Now

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Twisted Sister: We’re Not Gonna Take It

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

AC/DC: Shoot To Thrill

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Airbourne: Runnin’ Wild

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Rush: Virtuality

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Grave Digger: Rebellion (The Clans Are Marching)

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Rage Against the Machine: Renegades of Funk

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Bomfunk MC’s: Freestyler

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

Just a reminder…every Tuesday at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 4pm UTC on #ubuntu-community-team on freenode IRC.

Everyone runs through a a list of the work they have been doing over the last week and you can ask questions. Feel free to join us; everyone is welcome!

We have uploaded a new Precise linux kernel. Please note the ABI bump. The most notable changes are as follows:

* rebase to upstream stable v3.2.6
* ath9k_hw: fix a RTS/CTS timeout regression
* drm/i915: Force explicit bpp selection for intel_dp_link_required
* procfs: parse mount options
* procfs: add hidepid= and gid= mount options
* proc: fix null pointer deref in proc_pid_permission()

The full changelog can be seen at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.2.0-16.25

As part of a personal goal I’ve been spending a lot more time doing user support than I have in the past, and I’ve noticed that people are pretty much now conditioned to defend themselves when asking for help. It’s not that there isn’t a good supply of help out there, it can just be hard to find. And if you do find help sometimes it’s hard to get past people’s Usenetisms, so much so that users have become accustomed to preparing their questions for the incoming onslaught.

Here are some examples from questions I’ve seen recently.

What the user really means: “Don’t flame me because this is a stupid question and please don’t confuse me.” I’d like to think we help people who provide information so that we can help them without ridicule, and it’s nice to see answers like this that help illustrate things to people more usefully than copying and pasting commands people aren’t going understand anyways. I suspect this will always be a challenge for us though. And you’re always going to have a subset of people that think that it’s totally normal for people to have to learn vim to use their computer, but I’m not thinking of anyone in particlar (Rick Harding from Michigan).

One thing I noticed we also suck at:

This is my favorite. Our old school culture of newsgroup eliteism is so ingrained that we defend stupid software at the expense of the user experience. We expect people to search but the forum search is rate limited because it can’t handle more than a certain number of searches (what?!). And our mailing lists don’t have any search infrastructure at all! Well, this is why we have Google right? Well, when was the last time you searched for something and you got back a post from lists.ubuntu.com? Rare indeed, though you surely won’t have a problem getting back scraped content from our mailing lists with a bunch of worthless ads on the page. Would I trust information from a page like that?

Come to think of it, why are we even using mailing lists for any kind of user support? You can’t fix or edit any of the posts, it has no search mojo, so why are we wasting our time with it? (It’s 2012!)

The only user support software I see that is even trying to fix this problem is Stack Exchange, but even then, in the case where submitting duplicate content actually improves the user experience, people still always reply with “Did you try a search?”, and of course, as much as people try, it’s really hard to do search right, the internal Ask Ubuntu search still isn’t as useful as doing “foo site:askubuntu.com” in Google. Still though, at least it’s not reinforcing the same old model from newsgroups that content is immutable and never fixable.

Try this: The next time you want to reply to someone with “Have you tried a search?” I want you to open up a browser and go into privacy mode, and then do a search for those terms and then look at the quality of the results and then have a think. Maybe there’s a reason that the person is so lost in the first place. Maybe we should be thinking about ways to be smarter about the tools we’re using for support.

We are reimagining the nature of privacy in Launchpad. The goal of the disclosure feature is to introduce true private projects, and we are reconciling the contradictory implementations of privacy in bugs and branches.

We must change the UI to accommodate the a kind of privacy, and we must change some existing terms because to avoid confusion.

We currently have two checkboxes, Private and Security that create 4 combined states:

Most private bugs in Launchpad are private because they contain user data. You might think at first that something that is just private is proprietary. This is not the so. Ubuntu took advantage of defects in Launchpad’s conflation of subscription and access to address a kind of privacy we did not plan for. Most private bugs in Launchpad are owned by Ubuntu. They were created by the apport bug reporting process and may contain personal user data. These bugs cannot be made public until they are redacted or purged of user data. We reviewed a sample of private bugs that belong to public projects and discovered more than 90% were made private because they contained user data. Since project contributors cannot hide or edit bug comments, they chose to make the bug private to protect the user. Well done. Launchpad needs to clarify when something contains user data so that everyone knows that it cannot
be made public without removing the personal information.

Public and private security bugs represent two states in a workflow. The goal of every security bug is to be resolved, then made public so that users are informed. People who work on these issues do not use ”public” and “private”, they use “unembargoed” and “embargoed”.

Also, when I view something that is private, Launchpad needs to tell me why. The red privacy banner shown on Launchpad pages must tell me why something is private. Is it because the page contains user data, proprietary information, or an embargoed security issue? This informs me if the thing could become public.

When I want to change somethings visibility, I expect Launchpad to show me a choice that clearly states my options. Launchpad’s pickers currently shows me a term without an explanation, yet Launchpad’s code does contain the term’s definition. Instead of making me search help.launchpad.net (in vain), the picker must inform me. Given the risks of disclosing personal user data or proprietary information, I think an informative picker is essential. I expect to see something like this when I open the visibility picker for a bug:

Branches require a similar, if not identical way of describing their kind of information. I am not certain branches contain user data, but if one did, it would be clear that the branch should not be visible to everyone and should not be merged until the user data is removed.

Next post: We are adding a new kind of privacy called “Proprietary” which will work differently than the current forms of privacy.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #252 for the week February 6 – 12, 2012, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

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

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

I'm planning on "hiring" my younger brother to do some work for me during his Spring Break in a few months. He's 16, and has some tech skills, but his school is not very technical and so he could use more opportunities to learn from folks. I thought I'd have him do some QA and some light programming (he's a fairly new but competent pythonista). I say "hire" because I want to add some incentive to learning enough to get a summer job.

Can you think of tasks that might be good for him to do? Maybe you have an open source project that you could mentor him on, and in so doing, gain a contributor. If you can think of something that you wished you had known when you started hacking, I'd appreciate if you'd please leave me a comment.

It can be difficult to find the right AMIs on AWS sometimes. Scott Moser has some tips on how you can always find the right AMI’s for Ubuntu, but that might not be obvious to some people.

We’ve started linking directly to the cloud-images directory right from cloud.ubuntu.com, but I am interested if people prefer the AMI browser, Amazon’s built in thing, or Alestic or whatever. Leave a comment!

Public Resource republishes many court documents. Although these documents are all part of the public record and PR will not take them down because someone finds their publication uncomfortable, PR will evaluate and honor some requests to remove documents from search engine results. Public Resources does so using a robots.txt file or "robot exclusion protocol" which websites use to, among other things, tell search engine's web crawling "robots" which pages they do not want to be indexed and included in search results. Originally, the files were mostly used to keep robots from abusing server resources by walking through infinite lists of automatically generated pages or to block search engines from including user-contributed content that might include spam.

The result for Public Resource, however, is that PR is now publishing, in the form of its robots.txt, a list of all of the cases that people have successfully requested to be made less visible!

In Public Resource's case, this is is the result of a careful decision; PR makes the arrangement clear in on their website. The robots.txt home page also explains the situation saying, "the /robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you don't want robots to use,", and "don't try to use /robots.txt to hide information."

That said, I've looked at a bunch of robots.txt files on websites I have visited recently and, sadly, I've found many sites that use robots.txt as a form of weak security. This is very dangerous.

Some poorly designed robots simply ignore the robots.txt file. But one can also imagine an evil search engine that uses a web-crawler that does the opposite of what it's told and only indexes these "hidden" pages. This evil crawler might look for particular keywords or use existing search engine data to check for incoming links in order to construct a list of pages whose existence is only made public through a file meant to keep people away.

Check your own robots.txt and ask yourself what it might reveal. By advertising the existence and locations of your secrets, the act of "hiding" might make your data even less private.

A few of you may remember espeak-gui, a graphical user interface for eSpeak I did release two years ago. While I haven’t been dedicating much time to it, it’s still alive and I’m happy to announce its fourth release!

This new release introduced automatic language guessing, a feature I’ve wanted for a while, as well as spell checking (contributed by Joe Burmeister).

Version 0.3, released a year ago and which I didn’t announce here, did also introduce Undo/Redo, pausing, file history logging, a bunch of translations and some voice options. It’s sister project, python-espeak, did also get some bug fixes since its first release.

As usual, packages for both espeak-gui and python-espeak are available in my PPA, and since last month in Debian unstable. Make sure you also install libtextcat0 (version 2.2-8 or newer) to get the language identification support.

Related posts:

When I first started using Ubuntu I heard about Global Jams and was under the impression that they were for Developers, but the truth is they are for everyone that wants to contribute to the Ubuntu Community. While the community is focused around the software, contributions to the community need not be software related. I want to try and clarify what an Ubuntu Global Jam is so more people feel like they can participate and more people feel comfortable to organize an event in their area. To do this I want to divide up the possible activities of a global jam in to categories like what you find on the side of a game box.

Board games traditionally communicate about their difficulty, play time, solo compatibility and recommended number of players. This makes it easy for a potential buyer to know what they are getting. So here are my initial rating for global jam activities.

As you can see there are numerous Global Jam activities that can take place. Anyone can contribute to the community as an individual. The fantastic and exciting thing about Global Jams is that you can do so with people in your area while participating in a larger global event.

If you are interested in organizing an event in your area it is really simple to get started:

Do not worry about getting a large turnout; that will take care of itself as things grow.

For more information:

We’re coming up on the next Ubuntu Global Jam, the point in every cycle where the community gets together for a weekend of contributing to the next release of Ubuntu.  And this time we’re shaking things up a little bit.

Every cycle we help people organize their jams, and suggest the same generic topics: Bug triaging, packaging, translations, documentation, testing, etc.  This time, in addition to these topics, we will be reaching out to the various teams both in Canonical and the Community, and picking some very specific activities that will directly help them make the Precise Pangolin the best release of Ubuntu ever.

Another change this cycle is a focus on bringing all of the global jam activities together so that we can all see, in real time, the work being done by contributors around the world.  To that end, we’ve added a Global Jam Dashboard to the LoCo Teams Portal, which features an integrated webchat, updating twitter/identi.ca stream, and photo feed.  So while you are jamming locally, be sure to tweet about it using the #ubuntu hashtag, and upload photos to Flickr, Picasa or pix.ie, again using the #ubuntu hashtag.

Every year, I try to set a few hours aside to work on one of my upstream projects, pastebinit.

This is one of these projects which mostly “just works” with quite a lot of users and quite a few of them sending merge proposals and fixes in bug reports.

I’m planning on uploading pastebinit 1.3 right before Feature Freeze, either on Wednesday or early Thursday, delaying the release as much as possible to get a few last translations in.

If you speak any language other than English, please go to:
https://translations.launchpad.net/pastebinit

Any help getting this as well translated as possible would be appreciated, for Ubuntu users, you’ll have to deal with it for the next 5 years, so it’s kind of important

Now the changes, they’re pretty minimal but still will make some people happy I’m sure:

Finally merged pbget/pbput/pbputs from Dustin Kirkland, these 3 tools let you securely push and retrieve files using a pastebin. It’s using a mix of base64, tar and gpg as well as some wget and parsing to retrieve the data.
These are nice scripts to use with pastebinit, though please don’t send huge files to the pastebins, they really aren’t meant for that Removed stikked.com from the supported pastebins as it’s apparently dead. Now the new pastebins:

http://paste.drizzle.org thanks to Monty Taylor http://paste.openstack.org thanks to Soren Hansen http://paste.pocoo.org thanks to Stefano Rivera http://paste.pound-python.org thanks to well … me

paste.debian.net should now work fine with the ‘-f’ (format) option, thanks for their work on making their form pastebinit-friendly. pastebinit should now load pastebin definition files properly from multiple locations.
Starting with /usr/share/pastebin.d, then going through /etc/pastebin.d, /usr/local/etc/pastebin.d, ~/.pastebin.d and finally <wherever pastebinit is>/.pastebin.d A few other minor improvements and fixes merged by Rolf Leggewie over the last year or so, thanks again for taking care of these!

Testing of the current trunk before release would also be greatly appreciate, you can get the code with: bzr branch lp:pastebinit

Bug reports are welcome at: https://launchpad.net/pastebinit/+filebug

How do you use Ubuntu in your daily life?

I thought of capturing a few moments of how I use Ubuntu and putting it to some music. Simple right? Except if your me, then you’ll inevitably make things a bit more complicated.

For starters, somehow I thought it would be a good idea to do a clean install of Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 and create the video in that environment (ignoring all warnings of course). I wasn’t totally wrong, but my usual video editor, Cinelerra, didn’t have complete dependencies yet. However, kdenlive, which previously gave me problems, decided to work flawlessly on Precise Alpha 2!

The second hurdle was recording the desktop. The only decent recorder I have found is gtk-recordmydesktop. It works very well for the task but it only seems to output OGV format. This is a problem because most video editors don’t seem to process the output files very well and the result is black patchy things all over your video. The second problem is that whatever you record will likely be in a strange aspect ratio. I solved this buy loading the OGVs into PiTiVi (which doesn’t make black patches) and exporting as MP4 in 640×480 (should have gone larger). Then it was a matter of setting up the point-and-shoot camera to film the silly bits.

Part three was creating the music. Normally it’s a simple LMMS jingle, but to complicate things further, I decided to add lyrics (clearly I borrowed some). The problem is that I don’t sing very well and no one was around to lend a voice. But, a couple Audacity tweaks later and I came up with something that I could bear.

I had been planning to do this video like this since August of 2011. I didn’t get around to it until now. The idea seemed a lot better in my head, but some parts turned out better than expected. Who says that you can’t use an alpha release for a production machine? (Still not recommended). With the 12.04 LTS just around the corner, we can only expect things to get better.

How do you use Ubuntu? One thing that I use Ubuntu for is making videos, and now that the process has been explained a bit, here is the result:

doesn’t look good

I’ve spent my caturday hacking on a simple shared homepage platform, similar (but not quite like about.me) - it’s not going to be as commercial or full-featured, and I doubt it’ll be as polished, but it’s slowly coming along.

It should have some nice support in the end, and I’m for sure looking for collaborators. I was thinking that this could be used in f/oss communities to give their members a place to show themselves off.

I’ll admit, this was an Idea taken from Jorge’s Blog, so props over that way.

Something of an unusual Special Edition this time, it really is special in that little of this material has appeared in Full Circle Magazine before.

For this one, we’re out on a limb, running new articles, albeit on some familiar topics we’ve touched on, for example in the Q and A section of the magazine.

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/ubuntu-11-10-and-unity-special-edition/

This is also the first not overseen by our esteemed Editor, Mr Tucker. You are now at the mercy of the demented genius usually in charge (if you can call it that) of the Full Circle Podcast. Try not to be too alarmed by the random mind of the man who brought you Mallard Man and Northern Star Trek. Normal service will be resumed shortly. Enjoy.

Robin Catling

I’ve been happily using tumblr as my personal blog for quite some time, even when they were going through all their reliability problems. Before then I had hosted on Wordpress.com. Wordpress was great, but I liked that tumblr just had a simpler UI for posting. One of the great things about tumblr is I can use Markdown to write my blog posts, and I’ve found myself using markdown more and more, even in emails!

Since I’ve been shifting over to doing more cloud things I’ve been looking for an excuse to play in the cloud (both private and public). It began when I started to read more about Octopress, which is a clever way to generate a static blog. I decided that even though I was happy with hosted solutions that I’d like to do things manually for a while. Octopress was fun to set up and play with, and I liked that instead of having my blog content in a database it’s just a bunch of plain text markdown files, making backup a cinch. Then I ran into this blogpost by Jerome Bernard explaining on how to use s3cmd to just send the static files to an s3 bucket, which Amazon happily serves for you. After I set that up I modified Octopress to use the Ubuntu font and colors, as well as modify it a little bit. It’s pretty well put together and has integration for Disqus, G+, and Twitter. The final touch was adding StackAd so I could run some community advertisements.

So instead of playing with a VPS or having a t1.micro running all the time just to serve a blog, I can just dump it in S3 and be good to go. He also has a post on how to set it up with Amazon CloudFront. Of course I don’t need a CDN for my blog, but it looks like something fun to mess with on the side.

I picked up a domain while I was at it (jorgecastro.org). So am I coming full circle by moving from Tumblr and it’s nice web based interface to a bunch of text files, vim, rake, and s3cmd? It does feel fun to do things a bit more manually, but at the same time I like that I’m learning something new.

Thanks to James Gifford for his help with setting up Ruby on my Ubuntu machine, and as Aq says “Everything old is new again”.

“You have to have your photograph taken in the photobooth, so it can go in the album.” Those were the instructions from Abi and Lisa, the two lovely ladies behind Marry Me in Somerset. The website’s first birthday was this week and to celebrate they organised a tweetup at The Manor near Taunton, a splendid 13th Century Grade II* listed building.

Although quite a way from home I decided to go along and I’m so glad I did. Everyone was very welcoming and I got a fascinating history of the house from Fiona, one of the owners. I can’t wait to go back and see it in the daylight – it was a bit too dark to see the acres of formal gardens! The rooms were fantastic and each with their own character. Food was laid on by Le Frog, and there was a great deal of chatter. Normally a bit reticent in crowds of strangers, I threw myself into the occasion and met a load of awesome people as a result. A massive thank you to Abi and Lisa for organising the event, and please invite me to the next one!

And the cupcake? The good people at Cake Couture Bristol provided special “Marry Me” cupcakes for the evening. I had one in my hand when I went into the photobooth. I think I exhausted my range of facial expressions but it seemed to go down well.

Thanks to the party photo booth people for the print out.

I’m happy to announce that indicators have been ported to gnome-panel 3, thanks to Jason Conti for the patch and Ted Gould for merging it.  I’ve taken the opportunity to update gnome-panel’s default layout to include the “indicator” status menus and the show desktop button instead of the upstream clock and notification area. I for one really appreciate the Ubuntu design work on the status area and believe it is far better than the classic notification area.

The theming is still broken (see the two different gray backgrounds in the top panel) but I expect that will be fixed in the coming weeks. Patches are appreciated. And the window switcher in the bottom has barely readable light gray on dark gray. I don’t remember if that’s a new problem due to the intense GTK+ theme changes this cycle or has been there for a while. I normally run GNOME Shell or Unity and run Classic just enough to help with its packaging.

Anyway, the Classic desktop had some issues in 11.10 but I’ll be happy to recommend 12.04 for fans of the GNOME 2 style.

It’s been an interesting week in the sub-forum, there was a lot of discussion on the dropping of Dodge Windows from Unity. The thread didn’t end well, so I won’t link to it here.

There was also quite a bit of discussion about Kubuntu development being dropped by Canonical, and moving to community development like Lubntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1900025

We also have the ongoing discusion on the pae vs. non-pae kernel:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1919647

there seems to be some misunderstanding of the difference between the two separate kernels.

We are still seeing members having problems with partial upgrades:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1923208

This problem is addressed in one of the stickies here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1859240

but as usual, most of the members don’t look at the stickies, until they are pointed out to them.

As always if you have any problems or questions about running a development release, feel free to drop in and post them here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=412

While looking for something to use as a system-unique fall-back when a TPM is not available, I looked at /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_uuid (same as dmidecode‘s “System Information / UUID”), but was disappointed when, under KVM, the file was missing (and running dmidecode crashes KVM *cough*). However, after a quick check, I noticed that KVM supports the “-uuid” option to set the value of /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_uuid. Looks like libvirt supports this under capabilities / host / uuid in the XML, too.

host# kvm -uuid 12345678-ABCD-1234-ABCD-1234567890AB ...
host# ssh localhost ...
...
guest# cat /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_uuid
12345678-ABCD-1234-ABCD-1234567890AB

© 2012, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

If you met Ana, you’ll easily remember her. She has a great and pronounced Spanish accent… I’m glad that the existence of the Debian Women project helped her to join Debian because she has been doing a great job.

From KDE packaging to publicity/marketing work, her interests shifted over the years but this allowed her to stay very involved. As she explains it very well, Debian is big enough so that you can stop doing something which is no longer fun for you, and still find something new to do in another part of Debian!

Read on to learn more about Ana, the KDE team, Debian’s participation to the Google Summer of Code, and more.

Raphael: Who are you?

Ana: I’m Ana Guerrero López and I’m in my early 30s. I was born and raised in the wonderful city of Sevilla, Spain and I live in Lyon, France. I share my life with another Debian Developer and my paid work is doing Debian support and integration, so you won’t be surprised to read that Debian is a big part of my life.

Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?

Ana: Although I knew about the existence of Linux since 1997 or so, I didn’t really start using Linux until the summer 2001 when I finally got a computer on my own and an Internet link at home. In the beginning, I was using Mandrake in a dual boot with Windows and later around 2003, I happily moved to only using Debian and ditching the Windows partition. Once settled as a Debian user, I knew anybody could help improve the distribution but I hesitated to join mostly due to two reasons, my perception of Debian was the one of a very elitist and aggressive club and who wants to join this kind of cult^wproject? And even if I wanted to join, I did not know how to get started.

By the summer of 2004, the Debian Women project started, it made me seeing Debian as a more welcoming project, and I started maintaining my first packages. The following summer 2005, I attended akademy 2005 (the annual KDE conference) where I had the pleasure to meet there some of the people from the KDE team and this really made a difference for me. Christopher Martin and Adeodato Simó, with the help of other people, have started the maintenance of KDE as a team a few months before and by that time most of the KDE modules where under the maintenance umbrella of the team. This was a very good move since it allowed easily to share the KDE maintenance in a more coordinated way and also eased having non-DDs, like me at that time, to join in and help.

Raphael: You’re part of the Debian KDE team. What’s your role in the team and what are your plans for Wheezy?

Ana: Nowadays, I am not as active in the KDE team as I used to be in the past. The KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition was quite tiring and changes on the KDE side like the successive marketing renames, the shorter 6 months schedule (it used to be at least 9) or the uncoordinated KDE releases mostly burnt me out. Currently, I am mostly working in helping others to get started within the team, some small fixes here and there, and helping with the uploads: an upload of the full KDE suite to the archive requires some building power and upload bandwidth not everybody have.

For Wheezy, with the tentative freeze date in June, the plan is to try to ship the latest possible point release of the KDE 4.8 series. The first release of the series, 4.8.0 was released a couple of weeks ago and while writing these lines, the packaging work for 4.8 hasn’t started yet. The next move for the team is getting 4.7.4 in unstable, currently sitting in experimental.

Besides the KDE packages, there is some software which users perceive as KDE, such as amarok, digikam, etc., which are not part of KDE but fall under its umbrella. These other programs have their own maintainers and their updates depend greatly in the availability of them. For the KDE office suite, we have right now KOffice in the archive. KOffice got a fork some time ago named Calligra and we should replace KOffice by Calligra in the archive before the release of Wheezy. Sadly there isn’t yet a final release of Calligra to use.

My personal goal for Wheezy was to finish the removal of all the remaining packages depending on KDE 3 and Qt 3 that Squeeze still contained. The removal of the KDE 3 libraries and all the packages using them was quickly achieved after the release of Squeeze. The removal of Qt 3 soon showed that it was task harder than expected since some popular packages (sometimes not in the Debian archive, e.g. third-party scientific software) depend on it, and also Qt 3 is a requirement for LSB compatibility. Right now, Qt 3 has been orphaned for 9 months and nobody has shown any interest in adopting it.

Raphael: KDE, much like GNOME, has been forked by people who were unhappy by the direction that the project has taken since version 4 (cf Trinity). What’s your personal opinion on KDE 4.x and what’s the position of the Debian KDE team concerning this fork?

Ana: I use KDE 4 on my laptop and I think it is a solid desktop environment and platform. However I am finding it less and less attractive for me. On one side, my usage of the computer has been slightly changing and on the other side, I do not like how the new developments in KDE are evolving, things like plasmoids or activities are not attractive for me. I have switched my other 2 systems to awesome although I continue to use mainly a bunch of KDE applications: dolphin, konsole, kate, juk, kmix, etc. So you might say my desktop environment is an awesome KDE.

Regarding the Trinity project, a lot of users complained very loudly when KDE 3 got replaced by KDE 4 in testing/unstable, so I find quite laudable the decision of some users to act instead and try to continue with a forked development of KDE 3. However the Trinity team seems to be about 3 persons (funny for a project named Trinity ) while KDE 3 is big. In perspective, it does not look that big because KDE 4 is even larger, but it is still too much for such small team. In addition those developers need to maintain Qt3 that has been end-of-lifed years ago by Nokia/Trolltech¹. So my guess is that sooner or later the project will fade away.

Nobody from the KDE team is interested in Trinity and in case someone wants to package it for Debian, they would have to make a new team. For the reasons mentioned above: Qt3 maintenance and reduced upstream group, this would be a bad idea.

My advice if you do not like KDE 4 and you miss KDE 3, would be taking a look at razor-qt based on Qt4 and quite similar to KDE 3.

¹ I read they have plans to port it to Qt4, but frankly that could take some years… same it took to the KDE project for KDE 4.0.0

Raphael: You used to maintain news.debian.net, a WordPress blog dedicated to Debian, but you stopped a while ago. A few months later you started to maintain a Debian page on Google+. Why did you stop the blog and what’s your goal with the Google+ page?

Ana: I blogged about the reasons I started news.debian.net. In short, I thought Debian needed a better system to publish news, something like a blog. I first tried to suggest the idea to the press/publicity team but they weren’t interested, so I started the project alone. IMHO the blog worked quite well and I was feeling like it should be made official. I talked about this with some people but at the time I wasn’t pushing it because I had other priorities and I knew pushing it to become official would need some extra time and energy.

Stefano decided to start the discussion about making news.debian.net official (that’s moving it to a debian.org domain) in its own initiative. After the public discussion and some private exchange of emails with DSA, the situation became frustrating and I decided to close news.debian.net after the release of Squeeze.

Later, during DebConf, an officer from the press team announced they were launching a blog and I asked Stefano if he could try to have a discussion about this to see if it could still somehow fit my ideas, and maybe contributing myself, but nobody from the press team answered Stefano’s email and the blog hasn’t started yet either.

Irony that communication didn’t work when wanting to improve communication.

About the Google+ page, everyday I follow what is going in Debian and quite often I find things I want to share. I do not want to clutter my own profiles with Debian stuff or have people following me because of that, so I decided to create the Debian page when Google+ made them available. I like the fact that people can follow that without having an account in Google+ although they can not comment anonymously. I am not happy about the fact that Google+ is a closed platform but hopefully the data will become easier to export in the near future. Right now, there are some services that provides RSS feeds of Google+ pages if you want to follow the page and you are not in Google+ (or I could setup one if several people ask me).

Raphael: Last year you helped to manage Debian’s participation to the Google Summer of Code. How did it went? Is there something that you can improve for this year?

Ana: I think last year we managed to have people in Debian more aware about what the students were doing. That also helped students to get more feedback and therefore get to know more people in the project and get more integrated. Students were sending periodic public reports available to everybody interested in the status of the projects and some of them also held their own sessions in DebConf.

We still failed to start looking for mentors early enough and to give them information about how the GSoC worked and how they could have a successful project. Having good projects in Debian is harder than in other projects because the GSoC mostly promotes having students started in Open Source *coding* for a project, while Debian is more a project about integrating software and we overall do not have so many parts that has to be coded.

My personal goal for this year is to try getting the projects earlier to attract good students from the very beginning, even if that means we have less projects than in other years.

Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year?

Ana: Three things. I like improving the OS I use, I like the friends I have made while working in Debian through the years and because I have fun.

Also Debian is quite a big project, so if you become tired or burn out working in some area, you always can easily find interesting things to do somewhere else.

Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions?

Ana: Adeodato Simó, he is now in a long leave from the project, but it is one of those persons who made a difference in the project in his job in the release team some years ago. Aurélien Jarno because of his tireless work in (e)glibc and porting of several architectures.

I also have special admiration for all those people who have been very active in the project for more than 7-8 years because I know it is not always easy to combine it with real life.

Thank you to Ana for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook

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Ubuntu has always tried to attract more developers making Ubuntu even better. In doing so it’s always good to try to cover the following points:

Since Ubuntu exists we have been constantly improving bits in all these categories and I’m quite happy to say that this cycle we improved things quite a bit again.

In terms of outreach we

Our documentation has seen a lot of updates: thanks a lot to Barry Warsaw for UDD updates, Andrew Starr-Bochicchio for various fixes and Alexander Fougner for an update of the look (this is still work-in-progress). There are still a number of bugs which can be easily fixed if you don’t mind writing a bit of documentation – so jump in and help improving it even more! (Also do some work items still require help.)

Coming to the point of TODO lists: unfortunately Harvest was broken for quite a while. Thanks to our sysadmin team, I managed to get access to the server logs and identify a couple of problems and fix them. Harvest now works again and thanks to the unstoppable Andrew Starr-Bochicchio we have Fedora patches in Harvest again. Awesome! (There’s still a number of things we want to improve, so if you enjoy web development, check out our TODO list.)

Our feedback loop has become a lot tighter again: not only has the effort to keep the sponsoring queue under control continued (hey, it’s still Sponsorship Friday!), but also have Christophe Sauthier and I set up a team call the “Developer Advisory team“. The task of the team is to reach out to different groups of developers and get their feedback and help them along. One group is new contributors who just got their first contribution in, another group is developers who might be able to apply for upload rights soon. Also do we want to reach out to inactive developers and see what we can do to help. I’m very happy this team is finally up and running, because it makes our development experience a lot more social and puts us into a position where we get more valuable feedback. Christophe and I are still looking for helping hands, so let us know if you want to help.

The Developer Membership Board has been doing a good job this cycle, they have regular meetings and on top of things. Thanks a bunch for your good work.

All in all, I’m quite happy with how we are all moving forward and am thankful for all the great work everybody has put into making things better. There are still lots of things we can improve, so I was wondering if we could get a team of people together who like the idea of bringing more new developers into the fold, people who like the social aspect of Ubuntu, who like teaching, who enjoy making the whole experience more seamless and more fun. Let me know what you think and I can set up a couple of meetings so we can see what we all can do together.

In addition to all the bug lists and blueprint work items I mentioned above, here’s another idea, which David Henningson mentioned to me: wouldn’t it be great to have a script which goes through all Launchpad PPAs to identify people who have been doing great work? As all of these PPA users have mastered one of the big hurdles (packaging and getting a package to build reproducibly), wouldn’t it just be great to get in touch with them and see if they would like to maintain their work in Ubuntu?

The post already got longer than I expected and it’s a mixed bag of updates, but please leave a comment if you have any ideas about the above or would like to help.

Big hugs to everyone! Keep up the good work!