September 2010
20 posts
4 tags
Best $100 you can spend on a PC.
At Ohio LinuxFest I had lunch with Carl from System76 and Chase Douglas, who has been working on bringing multitouch to Ubuntu. Since we’re nerds the subject of hardware came up, and I got a glimpse of the amount of effort S76 puts into getting quality parts that are known-good Linux compatible components and some of the challenges they face. They have a budget box that boots in 6 seconds,...
3 tags
Hot udev/gio Banshee action
It’s no secret that I am a Banshee fanatic. For all my talk about web apps, there’s just no replacing Banshee for me.
It’s a beautiful thing. We’ve got a sh*t hot Ubuntu/Debian Mono team, a responsive upstream who cares about users, people like Bertrand Lorentz taking care of things like Sound Menu/MPRIS2 support, and we’ve got people like David Nielsen being the...
3 tags
Open Week, Call for Instructors
One of the coolest things we do is Ubuntu Open Week. This is a week long set of IRC tutorial sessions that we do for users. In the past they were heavily development related, but now as we have a Developer Week and Application Developer Week, we can start to use Ubuntu Open Week for something more useful to end users. And since it’s always the week after a release it’s an opportunity...
3 tags
How do we get more developers?
Did you know that stackoverflow.com offers free advertising to open source projects?
Every project can always use some more new blood. And if you don’t think that’s a good enough reason, as of this writing here is a list of 344,881 other reasons.
Ok I promise not to blog about StackExchange anymore, until tomorrow anyway.
2 tags
Test your might!
Think you’re an Ubuntu pro? Here’s are some unanswered questions sorted by vote.
PDFMod
I always do my presentations in PDF because it’s a common format. Sometimes however I want to add in a slide or remove a slide when I find out I messed something up but don’t have time to go edit the presentation and re export it.
For Maverick’s Featured Apps we now have PDFMod, for quick an easy manipulation of PDFs.
PDFMod is written by these fine people and packaged up for...
3 tags
Unity webapp help!
If anyone knows how to put webapps on my Unity launcher they would make my weekend!
2 tags
Community-related services downtime
Ok, for real this time … sorry for lying to you earlier.
Tomorrow, 17 September at 0800 UTC the following services will interrupted:
hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com
loco.ubuntu.com
mago.ubuntu.com
manpages.ubuntu.com
qa.ubuntu.com
*.qa.ubuntu.com
summit.ubuntu.com
ubiquity-feedback.ubuntu.com
And one for the linaro folks
qatracker.linaro.org
Expected downtime is 90 minutes,...
2 tags
Enjoying the new community wallpapers
One of the bummers about the wallpaper contest is that there’s so many good ones that I forget to try them all out. Besides, why should I do all that thinking work, the computer should do that. What horrible anxiety!
Now there’s a “bundle” (a little xml file basically) in Maverick that you can select, and then it’ll just rotate the new wallpapers for you...
3 tags
We do do that!
We probably need to do a better job communicating that we do offer updated drivers in the distro. Things like the linux-backport packages in Lucid for various drivers, etc.
Perhaps the installer in the future can detect funky unknown hardware and pull in the right things automatically or something instead of me having to know that there are backported wireless drivers available or something.
2 tags
Upgrades to some community-related resources
Tomorrow, 15 September at 0900 UTC the following services will interrupted:
hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com
loco.ubuntu.com
mago.ubuntu.com
manpages.ubuntu.com
qa.ubuntu.com
*.qa.ubuntu.com
summit.ubuntu.com
ubiquity-feedback.ubuntu.com
And one for the linaro folks
qatracker.linaro.org
Expected downtime is 90 minutes, but hopefully less.
3 tags
Expanding the Ubuntu Server Community
I’ve put out a call for help for server interested folks to start working with upstreams. On top of that we’ve got a new contributor on Community Team at Canonical, Ahmed Kamal, who’s grabbed the bull by the horns and helped step up to grow the server community (cloud and otherwise), along with the always amazing Dave Walker.
Now that 10.04.1 is out the door here are some of...
1 tag
3 tags
No need to complicate your life...
For some reason people always think that having seperate / and /home partitions is necessary to having a healthy Ubuntu system.
I don’t know why people keep recommending this but I am doing my best to spread the word that you don’t need to go through all that noise. If you don’t believe me you can read the recommendation from the guy that writes the installer. If you have...
2 tags
Dear broadcom,
Thank you, and welcome!
EDIT: I’ve asked if the driver might be coming to Lucid and got a response from someone on the kernel team, let’s hope for the best!
3 tags
Some progress on Daily Builds
We’ve been working with the Launchpad team to give upstream projects the ability to spin up daily builds.
It’s pretty straightforward to make a recipe, the one I use for shotwell is:
# bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 1.0+{time}
lp:shotwell
nest shotwellpackaging lp:~ubuntu-desktop/shotwell/ubuntu debian
I was on holiday for a bit, so I clicked on this expecting it not to work,...
2 tags
UDS Sponsorship application deadline
Just a reminder that the sponsorship application deadline is 8th September if you haven’t already applied! For more information please see this page: http://uds.ubuntu.com/participate/sponsorship/
(There is a bug in the summit system that is telling people that the deadline is March 26, this is incorrect!)
3 tags
DASes and Drobos
I need to plop on a few Terabytes at home.
I am looking for a Direct Attached Storage device. I already have a home server, but due to lack of space in the case and the fact that it’s doing a great job being an NFS and Samba box that I don’t need a NAS. I’d like something I can just eSATA right to my existing box.
I am about 85% sure that I need a Drobo S to fill my needs....
3 tags
Using the Ubuntu Stack Exchange
I’ve posted a screencast on how to use the Ubuntu Stack Exchange. (Ogg version)
3 tags
Help us support StackExchange sites in Gwibber
Now that the OAuth apocalypse is over and my gwibber works again I had a thought of how to integrate with more services. Wouldn’t it be neat if we stretched out to other services, like say … the new Ubuntu Stack Exchange (I suck at GIMP, but you get the idea):
Since we do multiple columns you could do your favorite tags, unanswered questions, hot questions, whatever you like. Just...
