As many of you already know by now, Debian 7 is here!

I’ve been using Debian as my primary work environment for a few months now and Trisquel at home for the past year and a half or so. My advocacy work has changed as a result, and I stopped focusing on Ubuntu, while still recommending version 12.04 LTS that just works for many. There’s also Ubuntu Gnome (or is it Gnome Ubuntu) now, so there is still a good array of choices for those like me that like the GNOME 3 environment and find it productive. Oh, did I mention Cinnamon 1.8 was just released?

I am happy to announce that there is now a Debian Quebec group, and we just got our mailing list approved in the Debian project. This was not as fast an easy as in Ubuntu-land, and I took the time to fully document the process to get the mailing list going, in case others may want to do the same. It may all seem too slow or difficult, but every step of the way several people helped and I learned a lot. I took this as an opportunity to contribute to the project and at the same time I found that it may be hard for new GNU/Linux users to get started in Debian – or even for experienced ones like me, coming from Ubuntu.

That’s why after a few IRC messages I started working on a Welcome to Debian resource (and team) aimed at people that use other distributions and come to Debian for the first time. It’s still very new and incomplete, but it’s what I wished was around when I started dedicating serious time to this distribution a few months ago.

As luck would have it, Debian 7 was just around the corner, just a few days/weeks after Ubuntu 13.04 and Trisquel 6 were released. This called for an all-distributions Debian 7 release party (we’ll have two locations, Montreal and Quebec City). There will be workshops and presentations from 12:30 to 5:30 PM and then a happy hour with CLibre and Libre Planet. Check the Agenda du Libre if you’re in Montreal this week (or any time soon), perhaps we can cross paths.

;)
And just install your software from the USC.
+ Info.

The story chosen to represent the Peter Davison era of Doctor Who at the BFI’s 50th anniversary screenings was Caves of Androzani. It’s an odd choice, as it is unlike other stories being produced at the time. It’s a excellent story, an excellent script and very well directed. But it’s not fun. The few quips and jokes in the script raised only muted laughter from the audience and, apart from the two leads, every character is flawed. There are no heroes in the story and almost every character dies, an ignominious end awaiting each of them. There are no blazes of glory here. The Doctor doesn’t influence events particularly, he doesn’t right any wrongs. He just wants to cure Peri and get out of there alive. Even then, he only half manages it.

The story was introduced by Mark Gatiss. Half way through. composer Roger Limb talked about his time at the Radiophonic Workshop. By a happy coincidence, the music from Caves of Androzani has just been released on CD.

The discussion panel afterwards was lively. To say the least. After his brief appearance at last month’s screening, I hadn’t expected to see Matthew Waterhouse this month, but there he was. The BFI even showed Adric’s death scene while the panel was on the stage. There was a fair bit of good natured ribbing between Peter and Janet, and some less good natured ribbing of Matthew. But things settled down and Matthew raised some interesting points. A refreshing number of questions from the audience were directed at Graeme Harper, and a fair few people who thanked Peter for being “their Doctor”.

Afterwards a small group of podcasters gathered in the by-now-traditional car park stairwell to review the story and the panel. It will be available from The Doctor Who Podcast Facebook page very soon. You can still download our review of “Robots of Death”, the 4th Doctor BFI screening.

Pin It

One of the design goals of Unity was to have an Application-centric user experience. Components like the Launcher consolidate all of the windows into a single icon instead of a set like the GNOME 2 panel. Nothing else in Ubuntu thinks about applications in this way making it a difficult user experience to create. X11 worries about windows. DBus worries about connections. The kernel focuses on PIDs. None of these were focused on applications, just parts of applications. We created the BAMF Application Matching Framework (BAMF) to try and consolidate these, and while it has done a heroic job, its task is simply impossible. We need to push this concept lower into the stack.

First we looked at the display server and started thinking about how it could be more application centric. That effort resulted in Mir. Mir gets connections from applications and manages their associated windows together. They can have multiple windows, but they always get tracked back to the application that created them. Unity can then always associate and manage them together, as an application, without any trickery.

Application confinement also provides another piece of this puzzle. It creates a unified set of security policies for the application independent of how many submodules or processes exist for it. One cache directory, set of settings and policies follow the application around. Apparmor provides a consistent and flexible way of managing the policies along with the security that we need to keep users safe.

To start to look at the process management aspect of this I started talking to James Hunt about using Upstart, our process manager in Ubuntu. Working together we came up with a small little upstart user session job that can start and stop applications, and also track them. I've pushed the first versions of that to a test repository in Launchpad. What this script provides is the simple semantics of doing:

$ start application APP_ID=gedit $ stop application APP_ID=gedit to manage the application. Of course, the application lifecycle is also important, but Upstart provides us an guaranteed way of making sure the application stops at the end of the session.

Upstart can also help us to guarantee application uniqueness. If you try and start an application twice you get this:

$ start application APP_ID=inkscape application (inkscape) start/running, process 30878 $ start application APP_ID=inkscape start: Job is already running: application (inkscape) This way we can ensure that a single icon on the launcher associates to a set of processes, managed by the process manager itself. In the past libraries like libunique have accomplished this using DBus name registration. Which, for the most part, works. Using DBus registration relies on well behaving applications, which basically guarantee their own uniqueness. By using Upstart we can have misbehaving applications, and still guarantee their uniqueness for the Unity to show the user.

We're just getting started on getting this setup and working. The schedule isn't yet final for vUDS next week, but I imagine we'll get a session for it. Come and join in and help us define this feature if it interests you.

Next Tuesday, May 14 starts the second Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. Based on feedback, this vUDS will be three days long. Don’t forget to register for the event. A list of currently approved blueprints is available on Launchpad. If you find that one is missing, you can create your own. Keep an eye out this week for scheduling to start.

Tracks…

• App Development: Alan Pope, David Planella & Michael Hall
• Community: Daniel Holbach, Nick Skaggs & Jono Bacon
• Client: Jason Warner & Sebastien Bacher
• Server & Cloud: Dave Walker & Antonio Rosales
• Foundations: Steve Langasek

Bugs…

One of the bugs that has long effected Summit has been that a blueprint had to have a specific status. This will finally no longer effect us! If a blueprint is marked anything other than Obsolete or Superseded it will now show up on the schedule as long as it is approved by a track lead. A huge thanks to Steve Kowalik and William Grant for getting this fixed!

Another issue that seemed to confuse people is having to register attendance in Launchpad in order to be able to use the features of Summit. This is no longer the case! You are now able to register as attending in Summit without any need to visit Launchpad (a Launchpad account is still required).

If you find that you have any issues with Summit or vUDS you can contact the track leads or you can contact me. If you find any bugs in Summit, please tell us about it!

See you next week!

This post is part of a series on the people behind the ubuntu quality team.  Let me introduce you to Javier who has had a hand in many different quality activities. He hails from Mexico and enjoys taking part in many different teams within ubuntu.

1) Could you provide a bit of background about yourself?

My name is Javier Lopez, I'm a random 2x years old guy living in Mexico city.

2) How did you become invovled with the Ubuntu community?

I become involved because I believe in the Ubuntu and open source philosophy.

3) What attracted you to the quality team?

Nicholas's blog, I used to be a Daniel Holbach super fan, but since I started reading Nicholas one, Daniel has fallen one spot, I like seeing all that energy spread over the community and its never ending enthusiasm. I'll hunt you and hug you both of you guys! ¬_¬

Contributing some iso testing results4) What would you say to folks new to ubuntu and/or testing?

I'd encourage anyone to join any of the Ubuntu teams, you'll learn more about the system, will meet nice people and will help to build one of the most awesome and biggest projects around.

5) How would you describe the community and the experience of using ubuntu?

I'd say that the Ubuntu community is one of the most friendly communities I've ever meet, that feels great in addition to the nice system which comes with it.
As alpha tester, there are times where the ubuntu experience is not as great as an LTS ubuntu system, but I also enjoy seeing how the bugs reported get fixed and how the few patches I've sent get integrated.

6) What would you like to see in the future for ubuntu?

I'd like to see more loco teams awesomeness, people going crazy about it (something like a randall ross clone program), designers all over the place, companies funding more community programmers, more ubuntu woman members, an ubuntu skynet..

7) Do you have a favorite experience to share from being a part of ubuntu?

I like seeing people's face when they first meet an Ubuntu system, specially when they like it and they're not computer gangsters.

Javier enjoys playing the violin8) What is your favorite activity or interest outside of computing (including ubuntu!)?

I like going out with my friends, and learning new things, I also like talking with other foreign people and traveling around my country, specially small towns. I'm trying to setup a couple of companies, so I'll be able to spend more time enjoying life en less working in an office.

I've just finished a memoir by Roger Ebert, called Life Itself: A Memoir. This passage struck a chord.
"Kindness" covers all of my political beliefs....I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find out.We in free and open source software are making the world a better place, and making others happier; often people whom we don't know and will never meet. Roger Ebert shared his love of movies with the world, and I'll miss his voice now that he's gone.

We get to share our love with the world too.

lxc-snap: lxc container snapshot management tool

BACKGROUND

Lxc supports containers backed by overlayfs snapshots. The way this is
typically done is to create a container backed by a regular directory,
then create a new container which mounts the first container’s rootfs
as a read-only lower mount, with a new private delta directory as
its read-write upper mount. For instance, you could

sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n r0 # create a normal directory
sudo lxc-clone -B overlayfs -s r0 o1 # create overlayfs clone

The second container, o1, when started up will mount /var/lib/lxc/o1/delta0
as a writeably overlay on top of /var/lib/lxc/r0/rootfs, and use that as its
root filesystem.

From here you can clone o1 to a new container o2. This simply copies the
the overlayfs delta from o1 to o2, and you is done with

sudo lxc-clone -s o1 o2

LXC-SNAP

One of the obvious use cases of these snapshot clones is to support
incremental development of rootfs images. Make some changes, snapshot,
make some more changes, snapshot, revert…

lxc-snap is a small program using the lxc API to more easily support
this use case. You begin with a overlayfs backed container, make some
changes, snapshot, make some changes, snapshot… This is a simpler
model than manually using clone because you continue developing the same
container, o1, while the snapshots are kept away until you need them.

EXAMPLE

Create your first container

sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n base
sudo lxc-clone -s -B overlayfs base mysql

Now make initial customizations, and snapshot:

sudo lxc-snap mysql

This will create a snapshot container /var/lib/lxcsnaps/mysql_0. You can actually
start it up if you like using ‘sudo lxc-start -P /var/lib/lxcsnaps -n mysql_0′.
(However, that is not recommended, as it will cause changes in the rootfs)

Next, make some more changes. Write a comment about the changes you made in this
version,

echo “Initial definition of table doomahicky” > /tmp/comment

sudo lxc-snap -c /tmp/comment mysql

Do this a few times. Now you realize you lost something you needed. You can
see the list of containers which have snapshots using

lxc-snap -l

and the list of versions of container mysql using

lxc-snap -l mysql

Note that it shows you the time when the snapshot was created, and any comments
you logged with the snapshot. You see that what you wanted was version 2, so
recover that snapshot. You can destroy container mysql and restore version 2
to it, or (I would recommend) use a different name to restore the snapshot to.

Use a different name with:

sudo lxc-snap -r mysql_2 mysql_tmp

or destroy mysql and restore the snapshot to it using

sudo lxc-destroy -n mysql
sudo lxc-snap -r mysql_2 mysql

When you’d like to export a container, you can clone it back to a directory
backed container and tar it up:

sudo lxc-clone -B dir mysql mysql_ship
sudo tar zcf /srv/mysql_ship.tar.gz /var/lib/lxc/mysql_ship

BUILD AND INSTALL

To use lxc-snap, you currently need to be using lxc from the ubuntu-lxc
daily ppa. On an ubuntu system (12.04 or later) you can

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install lxc

lxc-snap will either become a part of thelxc-snap: lxc container snapshot management tool

BACKGROUND

Lxc supports containers backed by overlayfs snapshots. The way this is
typically done is to create a container backed by a regular directory,
then create a new container which mounts the first container’s rootfs
as a read-only lower mount, with a new private delta directory as
its read-write upper mount. For instance, you could

sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n r0 # create a normal directory
sudo lxc-clone -B overlayfs -s r0 o1 # create overlayfs clone

The second container, o1, when started up will mount /var/lib/lxc/o1/delta0
as a writeably overlay on top of /var/lib/lxc/r0/rootfs, and use that as its
root filesystem.

From here you can clone o1 to a new container o2. This simply copies the
the overlayfs delta from o1 to o2, and you is done with

sudo lxc-clone -s o1 o2

LXC-SNAP

One of the obvious use cases of these snapshot clones is to support
incremental development of rootfs images. Make some changes, snapshot,
make some more changes, snapshot, revert…

lxc-snap is a small program using the lxc API to more easily support
this use case. You begin with a overlayfs backed container, make some
changes, snapshot, make some changes, snapshot… This is a simpler
model than manually using clone because you continue developing the same
container, o1, while the snapshots are kept away until you need them.

EXAMPLE

Create your first container

sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n base
sudo lxc-clone -s -B overlayfs base mysql

Now make initial customizations, and snapshot:

sudo lxc-snap mysql

This will create a snapshot container /var/lib/lxcsnaps/mysql_0. You can actually
start it up if you like using ‘sudo lxc-start -P /var/lib/lxcsnaps -n mysql_0′.
(However, that is not recommended, as it will cause changes in the rootfs)

Next, make some more changes. Write a comment about the changes you made in this
version,

echo “Initial definition of table doomahicky” > /tmp/comment

sudo lxc-snap -c /tmp/comment mysql

Do this a few times. Now you realize you lost something you needed. You can
see the list of containers which have snapshots using

lxc-snap -l

and the list of versions of container mysql using

lxc-snap -l mysql

Note that it shows you the time when the snapshot was created, and any comments
you logged with the snapshot. You see that what you wanted was version 2, so
recover that snapshot. You can destroy container mysql and restore version 2
to it, or (I would recommend) use a different name to restore the snapshot to.

Use a different name with:

sudo lxc-snap -r mysql_2 mysql_tmp

or destroy mysql and restore the snapshot to it using

sudo lxc-destroy -n mysql
sudo lxc-snap -r mysql_2 mysql

When you’d like to export a container, you can clone it back to a directory
backed container and tar it up:

sudo lxc-clone -B dir mysql mysql_ship
sudo tar zcf /srv/mysql_ship.tar.gz /var/lib/lxc/mysql_ship

BUILD AND INSTALL

To use lxc-snap, you currently need to be using lxc from the ubuntu-lxc
daily ppa. On an ubuntu system (at least 12.04) you can

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install lxc

lxc-snap will either become a part of the lxc package, or will become a
separate package. Currently it is available at
git://github.com/hallyn/lxc-snap. Fetch it using:

git clone git://github.com/hallyn/lxc-snap

Then build lxc-snap by typing ‘make’.

cd lxc-snap
make

Install into /usr/bin by typing

sudo DESTDIR=/usr make install

or install into /home/$USER/bin by typing

mkdir /home/$USER/bin
DESTDIR=/home/$USER make installlxc-snap: lxc container snapshot management tool

BACKGROUND

Lxc supports containers backed by overlayfs snapshots. The way this is
typically done is to create a container backed by a regular directory,
then create a new container which mounts the first container’s rootfs
as a read-only lower mount, with a new private delta directory as
its read-write upper mount. For instance, you could

sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n r0 # create a normal directory
sudo lxc-clone -B overlayfs -s r0 o1 # create overlayfs clone

The second container, o1, when started up will mount /var/lib/lxc/o1/delta0
as a writeably overlay on top of /var/lib/lxc/r0/rootfs, and use that as its
root filesystem.

From here you can clone o1 to a new container o2. This simply copies the
the overlayfs delta from o1 to o2, and you is done with

sudo lxc-clone -s o1 o2

LXC-SNAP

One of the obvious use cases of these snapshot clones is to support
incremental development of rootfs images. Make some changes, snapshot,
make some more changes, snapshot, revert…

lxc-snap is a small program using the lxc API to more easily support
this use case. You begin with a overlayfs backed container, make some
changes, snapshot, make some changes, snapshot… This is a simpler
model than manually using clone because you continue developing the same
container, o1, while the snapshots are kept away until you need them.

EXAMPLE

Create your first container

sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n base
sudo lxc-clone -s -B overlayfs base mysql

Now make initial customizations, and snapshot:

sudo lxc-snap mysql

This will create a snapshot container /var/lib/lxcsnaps/mysql_0. You can actually
start it up if you like using ‘sudo lxc-start -P /var/lib/lxcsnaps -n mysql_0′.
(However, that is not recommended, as it will cause changes in the rootfs)

Next, make some more changes. Write a comment about the changes you made in this
version,

echo “Initial definition of table doomahicky” > /tmp/comment

sudo lxc-snap -c /tmp/comment mysql

Do this a few times. Now you realize you lost something you needed. You can
see the list of containers which have snapshots using

lxc-snap -l

and the list of versions of container mysql using

lxc-snap -l mysql

Note that it shows you the time when the snapshot was created, and any comments
you logged with the snapshot. You see that what you wanted was version 2, so
recover that snapshot. You can destroy container mysql and restore version 2
to it, or (I would recommend) use a different name to restore the snapshot to.

Use a different name with:

sudo lxc-snap -r mysql_2 mysql_tmp

or destroy mysql and restore the snapshot to it using

sudo lxc-destroy -n mysql
sudo lxc-snap -r mysql_2 mysql

When you’d like to export a container, you can clone it back to a directory
backed container and tar it up:

sudo lxc-clone -B dir mysql mysql_ship
sudo tar zcf /srv/mysql_ship.tar.gz /var/lib/lxc/mysql_ship

BUILD AND INSTALL

To use lxc-snap, you currently need to be using lxc from the ubuntu-lxc
daily ppa. On an ubuntu system (at least 12.04) you can

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install lxc

lxc-snap will either become a part of the lxc package, or will become a
separate package. Currently it is available at
git://github.com/hallyn/lxc-snap. Fetch it using:

git clone git://github.com/hallyn/lxc-snap

Then build lxc-snap by typing ‘make’.

cd lxc-snap
make

Install into /usr/bin by typing

sudo DESTDIR=/usr make install

or install into /home/$USER/bin by typing

mkdir /home/$USER/bin
DESTDIR=/home/$USER make install

Note that lxc-snap is in very early development. It’s usage may
change over time, and as it currently ships a copy of liblxc .h
files it needs, it may occasionally break and need to be updated
from git and rebuilt. Using a package (as soon as it becomes
available) is recommended.

Note that lxc-snap is in very early development. It’s usage may
change over time, and as it currently ships a copy of liblxc .h
files it needs, it may occasionally break and need to be updated
from git and rebuilt. Using a package (as soon as it becomes
available) is recommended.
lxc package, or will become a
separate package. Currently it is available at
git://github.com/hallyn/lxc-snap. Fetch it using:

git clone git://github.com/hallyn/lxc-snap

Then build lxc-snap by typing ‘make’.

cd lxc-snap
make

Install into /usr/bin by typing

sudo DESTDIR=/usr make install

or install into /home/$USER/bin by typing

mkdir /home/$USER/bin
DESTDIR=/home/$USER make install

Note that lxc-snap is in very early development. It’s usage may
change over time, and as it currently ships a copy of liblxc .h
files it needs, it may occasionally break and need to be updated
from git and rebuilt. Using a package (as soon as it becomes
available) is recommended.

Last week I traveled to Oakland to spend a week with my colleagues at Canonical for the Client Sprint. The aim of the sprint was to ensure the many different teams working on Ubuntu Touch at Canonical are in sync and working as efficiently as possible. This largely involves ensuring that the management teams are planning their work effectively, and that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.

To provide a little context, at Canonical we are working consistently to deliver a 1.0 Ubuntu Touch platform that is ready for October so it can then be delivered to customers for deployment on handsets in Q1/Q2 2014. This involves a wide variety of design, engineering, and service-delivery projects that currently involves 15 engineering teams, 5 design teams, and 5 services teams, totaling 150+ people. The aim of the sprint was to ensure these 150+ folks are aligned.

Now, some cynical people (who I suspect may need more hugs) think that the sprint is merely a Canonical-only UDS where we make a bunch of private decisions by explicitly excluding the community. Sorry, drama fans, this is not true. We spend our time discussing and managing Canonical staff and resources, talking about product review documents, staff assignments, hardware/IS requirements, reporting structures, stakeholder and customer requirements, and wading through endless spreadsheets to track all of this. We don’t do this at UDS as UDS is not a good event for this kind of team alignment work as we are all spread across multiple tracks (and most of our community would have little interest in these team discussions anyway), hence we have always had sprints to do this.

The sprint had a very definitive format. Every team has a defined set of responsibilities and projects and each team lead prepared a summary of their work, achievements, and blockers. As an example, one project my team has been working on is the skunkworks and core apps projects, and wider app development community growth. I gave a presentation that summarized this work and it provided an opportunity to update the wider team and identify areas in which we can work more efficiently (e.g. one outcome was opening up a more regular communication between myself and the head of the SDK team).

The good news is that things are running really well. The teams were well prepared, great progress is being made on the road to October, and any inter-team and inter-project issues that we did find were quickly and efficiently resolved. For such a large project with so many inter-connecting parts I was pleasantly surprised with just how coordinated everyone seems to be, and I want to thank the many engineering, design, and services managers and leads for their (often understated) leadership and planning. It is complex to coordinate so many moving parts when everyone works in the same office, let alone for such a widely distributed company working from home with so many different timezones.

Of course, there were many topics and projects discussed at the sprint, but there was one topic that resonated throughout the week: getting Ubuntu Touch into a form in which our community can start dog-fooding as soon as possible. In other words, right now you can download the daily Ubuntu Touch images, but you can’t really use it as your main phone; it still comes with a bunch of dummy data, some radio functions don’t work, and there is no way of saving data when you re-flash the device. In the next few months the teams agreed to expedite their work to make the Ubuntu Touch images ready so we can use them as our daily devices, thus opening more opportunities for testing, feedback, functionality edge cases, and more.

I have another sprint coming up this week (the Cloud sprint), but I have asked a number of people who joined the sprint to blog about their progress and updates. Keep your eyes peeled for more.

In the election that ended last Thursday, the Xubuntu community elected me to continue my term as the Xubuntu Project Lead. The extended term consists two releases and ends with the LTS release in April 2014.

Now it’s time to thank everybody organizing the election, cheering and voting. Thank you!

As a funny detail, I heard the election results while running a Q&A session about Xubuntu at Happy Hacking Day. After the results were announced, there was a round of applauds from the crowd. I can’t think of a better place to be when finding out – surrounded by the community.

Get Involved with Xubuntu!

I hope we can improve Xubuntu even further during the two forthcoming cycles, but I can’t do it by myself. Join our team and help us building a better operating system! To read more about contributing, head to the Get Involved section of the Xubuntu website.

Congrats and thanks to everyone,
Debian 7.0 Wheezy releasedUpdating my trusty orion5x box as we speak. No better way to spend a (jetlagged) Sunday.

Just a quick note… It’s been a while since I last updated my repository for WordPress stuff, but now I’m back with more plugins as well as fixes and new features to old ones!

Most prominently Photoslider now supports even more options. In addition I’ve started to standardize the plugins in an effort trying to use the best possible practices.

Again, all feedback and patches are welcome!

TL;DR

We can now browse our albums, artists and songs (no playlists yet) and play them

Details:

GNOME Music application development is reaching the end of phase one (out of three).

This phase consists of:

• Set basic infrastructure (done)
• Implement Grilo Querying (done) 
• Implement Albums View (done)
• Implement Songs View (done)
• Implement Artist View (done)
• Implement Playback support (done)
• Clean up and port to Glade (in progress)

If you feel like hacking along please don’t mind to help out:

• Get the code from https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-music
• Report bugs https://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=gnome-music
• Join the development on IRC #gnome-music on irc.gimp.net
• To check out our vague plan visit: https://live.gnome.org/Music

Thanks for everybody who has been helping out.

Thanks to Guillaume Quintard and the potential SoC students for posting to glade and fixing some of the UI issues. Also Vadim Rutkovsky started working on some unittests (which kicks ass).

And now to leave you with some screenshots…

 

 

Congratulations to Debian on their most recent release, Debian 7.0 ("wheezy"). Debian 7.0 has been in development for over two years and is the product of almost a thousand volunteer developers and other contributors from around the world. We wish them many more successful releases in the years to come. Congratulations!

Everybody(using a picture as wallpaper) has experinced it once. You found an awesome new  Wallpaper, but in the settings you can't find it properly (with all the info). Or you did an wallpaper and simply uploaded it. This problem is now over.

Wallpaper-tool is here.


As you can see it's a really simple app only a few fields and so.
After you have set all up you press create and you are done. For artists or people who want to upload that wallpaper. The folder you want is in ~/.kde/wallpaper/

You can get it via git clone git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/kolberg/wallpaper-tool

I hope you can enjoy it

We're working really hard to get the Ubuntu Touch images into a state where the UI is really polished, the experience rocks, and just to make it a truly amazing product that reflects the core principles of Ubuntu.

One of the aspects of this work is to get to a really good story with protocol stacks in general -- that is to say, bluetooth, WiFi, and the fun things behind connectivity on a mobile device. How can I get my files on the device? How can I copy the pictures that I've just taken back to my computer?

On the way back home from Oakland I've had quite a lot of time to reflect on what we've done so far. I've seen really cool demos of things you could get done on Touch and how things are going to look like in the near future. It makes me very proud to be part of getting Ubuntu to a large number of people through a solid Desktop system, but also stellar mobile devices support.

So, we did get bluetooth to work pretty okay so far on Touch. It seems like the current baddest issue is really just UI, but fortunately people are already hard at work fixing that, too. Keyboards can be discovered, and so can mice (I've uploaded a video to YouTube about that before). Bluetooth headsets should follow soon, but when I last tried I was running into issues with pulseaudio on the Nexus 7... If you're interested in bluetooth and know a little about BlueZ and the command line, by all means, let me know on IRC and let's get this to be really awesome.

For WiFi, we also have indicator-network in the archive, all rewritten, received tons of love, and soon to be ready to shine on both the desktop and mobile phones or tablets. Don't get me wrong, there's still a long way to go, but it feels to me like one thing we can pretty quickly ramp up to converge and essentially be the same experience no matter what form factor it is running on.

That covers WiFi -- but what about mobile data? (3G / 4G, but I rather speak of it in the most general terms) Well, that's being actively worked on as well. We're not too far off from having working 3G data  on the "officially supported" devices (Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7); and from there it seems like it may not be too much trouble for people to ramp up that support for other devices. Sure, it's complicated work because of how technical it is, but I think it's still approachable.

For mobile data, I've lately been working on teaching NetworkManager to speak to oFono; which are the two stacks we're decided, at UDS, to use to handle networking and telephony. The code itself isn't too pretty yet, but I'll add just a bit more meat to it and provide it as a test bzr branch for people to experiment with, until it's stable enough to make it into the archive altogether.

All this to mention that I'm really excited about the current progress for Touch, and although my progress on my own work items wasn't exactly stellar, I'm thrilled about what's to come. So thrilled I'll contact my cell provider to get the right SIM card size to start using Touch on a Nexus 4 as my main phone next week.

See you all at virtual UDS, looking forward to lots of constructive discussions about networking and connectivity!

Greetings from Ashtabula. My name is Mike Kellat and I am the owner of Erie Looking Productions. I am recording this on Saturday, May 4, 2013. This is for immediate release.

Stephen has received dispatch orders from the Director of the Ashtabula County Board of Elections herself this very morning. As you may or may not be aware, Stephen is thoroughly involved in local democracy by serving as a substitute precinct election official. We have a local election coming up on Tuesday and Stephen has been ordered to a new precinct to take up duty to serve the public by helping conduct the vote. Stephen first served as a poll judge during the November 2012 Presidential General Election.

Our producer continues to be away on medical leave and that is beginning its fourth week. Between that and the requirements placed upon Stephen between now and Tuesday to avoid taking positions on ballot questions which include library issues, I am suspending production of LISTen and the Burning Circle at this time. I am also factoring in the Ubuntu Developer Summit as part of this production suspension so that time is spent appropriately on that.

There shall be no episodes released on Monday, May 6th, or Monday, May 13th. Normal production releases shall resume on Monday, May 20th, which is the Victoria Day holiday in Canada.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We'll see you on the other side of this production suspension.

KDE Project:

• DCOP

The Ubuntu Developer Summit should have been this week but got cancelled in order to increase transparency. But you wouldn't want to let an expensive hotel booking go to waste so there seems to have been a meeting of Canonical engineers this week anyway just without the community. Twitter says some grumpy things. Well two can play at that game: I've been to every UDS except the Mataro Sessions back in 2004 so this week I'm down the road from Mataro with a dozen KDE and Kubuntu people to discuss what we're all working on. So far mgraesslin has shown his plans for KWin (including no small part of slagging off Mir and the instability of X in Ubuntu) and now Kevin is talking about the status of KDE Frameworks 5.

Sebas makes a good manager

Martin draws diagrams of KWin

Alex takes on the British Empire

Lunch time

KDE Project:

• DCOP

Some time ago I got a phone call saying Canonical were stepping back from their support of Kubuntu. But Free Software doesn't like to quietly disappear and I've been spending the last year getting back what went missing. Last week I had a meeting to get the last bit in place, commercial support. A nice guy called Niall from Emerge spent a lot of time and energy getting an agreement from Canonical to be able to provide the commercial support then found a company to actually provide that. So I drove down to a part of England called Huddersfield to visit the offices of With Support, a small company doing Linux support. Their office has a fresh cut wood smell coming from all the fresh cut wood. Tariq is the head man having built up the business from scratch. He started off doing Linux desktop support but has moved away from that due to lack of business, hopefully being an official Kubuntu partner will fix that.

We installed Kubuntu to take a look from a user support point of view and found a bunch of issues. The main one was krfb not working to share the desktop, this is important as a way to get access to the user's computer. We didn't look at Kiosk but he considers it important to be able to lock down KDE's settings for companies that want it, I think this should still work but it'll need testing. Muon was a lovely package manager but no good if it doesn't know about packages which if you install without a network connection is the case until the cron job runs, ug. QApt seemed to not be doing what it needs to either installing .deb packages or working with the directory share plugin to install samba. And then he had some features he thought the users would expect like new applications highlighted in the application menu.

Then we had a conference call to talk business. The important thing about this deal is all profits go to the Kubuntu Council to spend on things to help Kubuntu. We'll need to set up a Paypal account or other way to pay and a transparent way to split money between us. And it'll need putting that on the website in some suitably clear marketing talk. I'm very excited.

If you don’t know .. the one on the left …. I’ve backed it up a bit because this is one of the best metal riffs of all time, and it’s tough to appreciate both Jeff and Kerry unless you listen to them together.

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