July 2010
11 posts
3 tags
Application Menu Status for 7 July
Hi everyone, Another week, another release of the new menu for UNE. This week indicator-appmenu did not have any releases, as the bugs reported have been in appmenu-gtk. Cody Russell has released 0.1.1 of appmenu-gtk, which is in Maverick and currently building for the Lucid PPA. Here are the highlights: - Bullets should now appear as bullets instead of checkmarks - Fix errors in GIMP Full...
Jul 9th
3 tags
Papercutter Profile: Marcus Carlson
Getting patches upstream and fixes out to users continues to be an area that we’re continuing to focus on. (See Operation Cleansweep) However there are plenty of people out there rocking things whom you might have never heard of doing the right thing day in and day out. Like Marcus Carlson: Marcus has been working on the 100 Papercuts project on a piece of software called Nautilus, which...
Jul 8th
6 notes
2 tags
On roads, ways, and packaging.
Matt posted his thoughts on how the model of packaging software in OSS can change to adapt to new user needs. LWN also picked this up. Some of the comments are heading down into details, so I thought I would explain from a more general perspective on how I see the packaging landscape instead of talking about tools. I don’t think it’s about tools, it’s about the mindset. To me...
Jul 8th
10 notes
Application Menu status update for 2 July
The march of regular releases continues with yet another indicator-appmenu and appmenu-gtk release, as seen in Maverick and the Lucid PPA.   Overall: We’re now on by default for UNE in Maverick. (Thanks didrocks and seb128!) Adding a new utility to make a mock application After you use the dump tool you can now use mockjsonapp to create a test app with the dump data. This makes it much...
Jul 2nd
June 2010
22 posts
3 tags
Daily Builds for Upstream Projects
Over the next few weeks the folks on the Launchpad team will be landing various bits for Daily Builds in Launchpad. I thought I’d talk about this feature because it can be a very useful tool for software projects. So first of all, why? We want to enable you to get the latest build out to testers as soon as possible. Need someone to confirm that you’ve finally caught that regression?...
Jun 29th
2 tags
New Laptop, an Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T
I wanted a netbook to test UNE, but I also wanted something with a bit more oomph than an atom, so I got the 11.6 inch 1830T. This is a notebook in a netbook’s body! (i3-330UM processor) However it’s also much pricier than a netbook.  Someone already had excellent documentation on the wiki on the older 1810TZ, so I have adapted this page for the 1830T and will be documenting my...
Jun 28th
2 notes
5 tags
Cleansweep Updates
Here are the stats for the last week’s worth of patch review, as part of Operation Cleansweep: Total bugs with patches: 2243 (-27) Reviewed patches: 321 (+11) —- Bugs with ‘patch-needswork’: 82 (+2) Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-upstream’: 123 (+4) Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-debian’: 38 (+5) Bugs with ‘indicator-application’: 43 (-1) ...
Jun 28th
1 note
2 tags
Puppet cost me my best friend...
My best friend moved to California this week to work for a large company who is deploying tons of Puppet. It’s a tremendous opportunity for him. He was working on Puppet for a while at a place and I spent a relatively long time complaining to him that he should just get involved in the project instead of just keeping his home grown stuff around (since in the long run that’s also more...
Jun 26th
6 notes
2 tags
Debian Derivatives Front Desk
In case you missed Nigel’s post to -devel the Debian project is firing up a “Derivatives Frontdesk”. This is a place where developer and contributors of Debian-based derivatives can work together, so if you’re a contributor who has always wanted to learn how to work better with Debian, then this is the place for you. You’ll also find us on #debian-ubuntu....
Jun 25th
2 notes
4 tags
Application Menu Status for 25 June
Not to be outdone by the (excellent) work of the other Unity folks, Ted and Cody have released indicator-appmenu 0.0.7 and appmenu-gtk 0.0.8 which are now in Maverick and the Lucid PPA. Overall: We’re getting close to including the menu by default in Unity (right now you have to explicitly install it). There’s a few issues left to iron out, basically submenus and some still-partial...
Jun 25th
1 note
2 tags
Adopt an Upstream: Victor Vargas
We’ve been banging on about adopting upstream packages as a great way to take care of a certain class of bugs with Launchpad.  Victor Vargas (aka Kamusin) has been working on multiple packages on the GNOME side, he recently adopted the rhythmbox package and he’s doing great work so far, doing Triage work on the Ubuntu side and also reporting those bugs to the Upstream Bug Tracker...
Jun 25th
2 notes
3 tags
Some of my friends are crazy (a guide)
I don’t have many friends, so here’s my guide. And no, I don’t mean the hippies, I mean your other friends: Multitasking on your phone wasn’t important, until today-ish (or maybe in the last few months). Depends, ask them if they have the one that is all futuristic looking, or the one that looks from 1975. If the phone is square, then you’re wrong. Copy and paste,...
Jun 25th
2 tags
googlecl searching contacts for mutt
Here’s the magical command for those of you like me who just scrape by on mutt: set query_command = “google contacts list —title ‘(?i).*%s’” Thanks to Rick Harding for the help.
Jun 24th
2 notes
2 tags
Acer Timeline owners ...
I’ve been mulling moving to a smaller form-factor laptop, something more netbook-y. I’ve been eyeballing the Aspire Timeline 1830T. Does anyone with a current 1810T or 1810TZ care to comment on how it’s running with Ubuntu? I found this thread on a notebook forum, and the tips on the help site look helpful. Any information on real-world battery performance would be useful! ...
Jun 23rd
3 notes
4 tags
FOSSCON @ RIT
I got to spend the weekend at FOSSCON, hosted at RIT in Rochester, New York. First of all, Rochester is a great town, we had a good time checking out the sights (like the Erie Canal and the zoo.) I learned more about OpenHatch, the OpenCourseware Consortium, more about Open Streetmap, I gave a talk on how to find good linux help on the internets, and was also given a chance to do a lightning talk...
Jun 22nd
1 note
3 tags
OpenHatch way awesomer than the last time you...
I’m at FOSSCON in a workshop listening to Asheesh Laroia work with two volunteers about how to make your first contributions to an open source project. He’s built (along with others) a tool called OpenHatch. It’s basically designed to connect people who want to work on stuff with projects. I’m a big fan of the “I want to help” button, and it’s ability to...
Jun 19th
3 tags
Application Menu Status for June 18
Just in case you missed it, since I’m posting on ayatana-dev now, here is the latest status report for progress on the application menu for UNE 10.10. 
Jun 19th
1 note
3 tags
Operation Cleansweep making progress... (updated)
As you may know, a crack team of volunteers from around the internet have been making a concerted effort to go through patches found on Launchpad, clean them up, and integrate them. We call this Operation Cleansweep. As of this writing Ubuntu contributors working on Cleansweep have sent around 225 patches (FIX: that’s 225 bugs, 135 of which contained patches that were forwarded, 77 need...
Jun 16th
2 tags
Application Menu goings on ...
As you may or may not know, we’re working on a global application menu for the Netbook Edition of Maverick. Here’s the latest update from Friday, as well as some new updates on bugs. So far it’s coming along, once we crack those three big bugs this week we should be in fine shape for Alpha 2, thanks to the hard work of Cody Russell and Ted Gould. I’d also like to...
Jun 14th
5 tags
New Unity release ready for testing ...
Just a reminder that the new interface for the Ubuntu Netbook Edition released .2 yesterday, and we’re looking for more testing and feedback! Here are the instructions with the PPA you need for Lucid (it’s in Maverick too). Remember to file bugs as you see em!
Jun 11th
1 note