The first essays of the school year are coming due, and with the essays comes the need to outline and plan. GNU/Linux users are fortunate to have a number of outlining applications from which to choose. True, some outliners have become obsolete, and you will be lucky to get programs like GNOME-Think or the once-popular KnowIt to run on a modern distribution. But you can still choose among OpenOffice.org, TuxCards, NoteCase, Emacs, and VimOutliner for doing your planning.

What is REVU?

REVU is a website where contributors can upload new packages they’ve created for Ubuntu Developers to review and comment on them. If two Ubuntu Developers are happy with a package, it enters repositories of the current Ubuntu development version.

What are REVU Days?

REVU Days are weekly events which span over an entire day, during which Ubuntu Developers are likely to give special importance to reviewing packages from REVU. Contributors who want to get their stuff reviewed are highly encouraged to be available -and ask for reviews- on #ubuntu-motu (at irc.freenode.net) so that reviewers can easily contact them about any problems.

There haven’t been many REVU Days those last months, but they will start to happen again periodically once the development cycle for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) starts. This brings us to the following question:

What weekday will they be?

The answer to this questions depends on you; vote now on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=940783!

Ohio Linux Fest is a mere days away!

• Mackenzie Morgan will be giving a killer talk on security when using wifi!

• Dan Chen will help us navigate the mysteries of Sound

• Jono Bacon will be rocking the house with the final Keynote address!

• The gang from the Ohio LoCo team are putting together a killer booth (the Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania LoCo teams are coming as well)

and don’t forget to register

for the uber geeks, bring two forms of Government issued photo ID for keysigning

ALSO, Congrats Harald for making Core-Dev!

The wave of cheap netbooks, mini laptops, or ultra-mobile PCs has crested with the cheapest yet, the NPX-9000 from Carapelli. Though it was announced in July with great fanfare at a price of £65 (or $110), it has yet to appear on the vendor's Web site. But we got our hands on one of the first units to escape from the factory and put it through its paces. We found that you get what you pay for -- if that.

You all know "cfengine", right?

But do you know "Puppet"?

TBH, I worked with cfengine in the past, but I was always afraid of breaking something, because of the "strange" configuration syntax.

Today, I was in need of a tool which could help us to maintain our configurations for our new productive system. And now was the time to test "Puppet".

I'm not a big Ruby fan, but I have to admit, Puppet is really a cool ruby app. And it works as expected.

The only bug: Ubuntus (and obviously) Debians packages are lacking the openssl package, which puppet needs to sign or generate the pem files for the clients (LP: #279643)

Free software is a remarkable phenomenon.  It is a highly evolved form of collaboration: compared to other creative endeavors, free software developers all over the world are able to work together on a project with surprisingly little friction.  It is a grassroots political movement which has grown from small online communities to span geographical and national boundaries.  It is a multicultural social group with unique and diverse characteristics.  It has spawned a variety of self-governing organizations and successful corporations.

It is also an interesting example of a gift economy.  In general, participants in free software donate their work to the greater good, with no expectation of an exchange of value.  Some contributions are rewarded by social or professional recognition, where the author achieves standing among their peers or receives gratitude from recipients of their work.  Others indirectly evoke rewards in kind, such as where the creator of a program is rewarded by contributions from others which improve it further.  Some are works for hire, where a corporation commissions a contribution through its employees, in pursuit of its own aims.  There are other types of exchanges where I do not personally understand what motivates the contributor.

There are many recognized roles in free software, but they can be broadly classified into three types:

Developers are the heart of this economy.  They are continuously creating and improving free software technology, and publishing their source code for other developers to use and learn from.  Some developers write one program and then vanish from the community, while others contribute to many different projects over the course of decades.  Highly effective developers are celebrities in the free software community.

Users, also known as “people”, are the reason why software is written.  Their needs and wants determine which software is considered valuable.  Many of them also contribute directly to free software in one way or another, by promoting awareness, providing testing and feedback, supporting other users, writing documentation, or building communication links.  Historically, most users of free software were also its developers, but today, this is no longer true, and millions of people use free software who are not developers.

Packagers connect these two groups.  They gather up the source code produced by developers, wrap it in standardized packaging, and bundle it into collections (distributions) designed to meet the needs of users.  Users experience free software almost exclusively through a distribution.  As the free software stack has grown in size and complexity, so have distributions, and the maintenance of a modern distribution is a large-scale development project in itself: selecting appropriate software and versions, getting the lot working smoothly together, and releasing it in the form of a product which is accessible to users.  Packagers create only a small fraction of the software included in their distribution, but they define several key aspects of “what it is like” to use it.  Users most strongly associate their experience of free software with a distribution.

If free software were film, developers would be some combination of writer and crew, creating and expressing characters and a story.  Users would be viewers (including critics and fans), who receive and interpret the work.  Packagers would be the film crew, realizing the production on film so that it can be seen.

If free software were food, developers would be chefs, developing recipes and cooking.  Users would eat and critique the dishes.  Packagers would be restaurateurs, serving customers and creating an environment in which they can experience the food.

Neither of these analogies are very complete.  In particular, these analogies fail to capture the strange loops of free software.  Every developer is also a user, reliant upon of thousands of other programs which they receive in packaged form order to do their development work.  Every team of packagers develops some software in order to make their distribution work, and they use the distribution itself in order to do so.

Distributions, and the integration work that they do, are a critical part of this ecosystem.  Many of us would not be using free software today if not for the efforts of projects like Debian, whose mission is to produce a complete system out of free software created by others.  In my case, Debian provided both the means and the motivation for my contributions to free software, and later made Ubuntu possible.

Strong, productive relationships between these groups are essential to continuing the growth and development of free software.  Whichever groups you’re part of, get to know your counterparts in other groups.  Talk to the people who are packaging your software, writing the software you package, using your software or packages.  Learn about the problems they face and how you can help each other.  Don’t assume that this communication is someone else’s job: reach out and make it happen.

Corporate budget planning is an interesting science that leads you to look at the future in a quite pragmatic way. First half of 2009: where is Maemo going to be? Where is the Maemo community willing to go and meet?

The first Maemo Summit ever was a success! I was supposed to blog about that, but once I recovered there was little to add to the many testimonials, reviews, pictures, videos. So what’s next? Not another Summit yet, since we want to keep an annual periodicity.

Considering how well the Desktop Search Hackfest went, we could go for more developer gatherings with a fixed set of goals. We could gather in the middle of nowhere just for that purpose or we could also take a bigger event as a reference and extend the stay a couple of days. We could also support existing developer calls from e.g. GNOME or freedesktop.org around issues and technologies related to the Maemo platform. If you have a goal in mind let us know.

About existing venues, FOSDEM and Bossa look like good candidates to pin something around. Guademy would be also an interesting event if it gets a third edition next year. I’m not counting yet GUADEC+aKademy because hopefully they will be organized in July-August and not before. Somewhere in North America would be cool as well, considering the amount of Maemo developers there. What else…?

Image: Foot on the road… by ℓú ℓαcєr∂α (some rights reserved)

FreeBSD is a Unix-like open source operating system that can trace its ancestry back to the original Unix. It's well known and well respected in the server marketplace, but until recently FreeBSD lacked an easy-to-use desktop version. In 2005 the PC-BSD project was started to provide just that. This month PC-BSD version 7 was released. I downloaded and installed it to see how it squares up to user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu. I came away a little disappointed.

... until Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex will be released. There are only a few weeks now! Time for some marketing an a new shiny Kubuntu counter. Just insert these code lines in your website:

I've taken the JavaScript from ubuntu.com, the images are from myself and licenced under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Germany.

There are also some other counters: By Ubuntu, apachelogger or simpson-fan.

read more

FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization) aims to solve the problem of inconsistency and lack of standardization in computer software translation in a new and unique way. Initiated by Red Hat, the project is trying to give a better experience to end users of a localized desktop by resolving the issues of standardization and inconsistency.

Most free software projects produce applications for users. A minority, however, produce specifications or libraries for developers and other contributors. An example of this second type is the recently announced Manju project, whose goal is to make themes easier to create. The project's goal is to write the specifications and scripts for using scalable vector graphics (SVG) files to store widget and other theme-related information that can be used on a variety of toolkits.

There is also a motion asking the court to approve a stipulation between SCO and the class action IPO case lawyers to lift the stay, on terms (Exhibit A [PDF]) that the plaintiffs will restrict their damages, if proven, to the amount covered by insurance and will waive any claims against the bankruptcy estate. That's a practical solution, actually, under the circumstances. In fact, if I were the plaintiffs, looking at this picture as a whole, I'd consider it my best hope of getting anything, assuming the insurance company is solvent. SCO's position, financially, absent a transfusion of fairy dust, is looking grim, even to my financially unsophisticated eyes. No doubt you'll see many things I miss, but even I can see they appear to be sinking. So, does that mean Me Inc isn't lighting up the sky yet?

DIGG THIS STORY!!

I am absolutely tickled pink to announce the winners of the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

For those of you living under a rock for the last few months, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase was an initiative that we ran to showcase free culture artists in each version of Ubuntu. Each time we release a tasty new Ubuntu, we include a package full of example content (rather craftily named…example-content), and with Ubuntu being installed on so many computers around the world, it is a great opportunity to bring the Ubuntu ethos to the creative arts and showcase some free culture content.

To do this, a while back I announced the competition and we had a slew of entries. We then asked a carefully chosen panel of creative types in the Ubuntu community (Cory Kontros, Luis de Bethencourt, Luke Yelavich, Lydia Pintscher and Tony Whitmore) to pick their top three entries from each of the categories (Audio and Video) and then we sent the finalists to the Community Council to pick the winners. I am so proud to announce that the winners are:

Andrés Vidau (Audio Winner)

Download Entry

Andrew Higginson (Video WInner)

Download Entry

When we release Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, you will find both Andrés and Andrew’s submissions on the disc, exposing their work to millions of Ubuntu users. Congratulations guys!

Also, we are going to do this for every release of Ubuntu, so creative people…get those creative juices flowing ready for the Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

Everyone needs to back up their computers, but when you have machines running on different platforms and different operating systems, it can be annoying to have to learn several interfaces. Areca and plan/b are two Java-based backup solutions that can run on any platform, including Linux, Windows, and Unix. Although maintenance has been discontinued for plan/b, both apps are worth a look.

Inspirered by Peter Makholm’s lightning talk on the Open Moko i will start with the ‘conclusion’ and work my way backwards.

I got the last beer ticket!

Fullrate (who happen to be my ISP) sponsored quite a few free beers at the Open Source Days 2008. However there was not enough for everyone and I happened to get the last ticket (after the two persons in front of me had declined it). The tickets were handed out after the keynote by Daniel Klein. (Does anyone know if the keynote or the slides are available on line somewhere?)

Before the keynote I spend most of Saturday either attending lightning talks or sitting at the Ubuntu booth. Work at the booth was quite relaxed. Mostly people just stopped by for some free CDs and to tell how happy they were with Ubuntu. There weren’t really any technical questions. If that can be taken as an expression that Ubuntu just works or if we were just lucky I don’t know. I will leave it up to you to draw conclusions.

Some people from The Software Exchange (a project under the Ministry of Science, technology and Innovation) had a very cosy and inviting booth sporting a roaring fireplace (on a LCD tv), a moose head (with the nickname Elge Sander), comfortable leather chairs and a portrait of the sabdfl him self. Really was a fun setup!

Niels took more pictures that will hopefully come on line soon.

1. Plug the printer to the computer
   
2. Turn the printer on
   
3. Read the little popup saying that the printer was detected and is ready to print
   
4. Print
   

There are few things more frustrating than working on something and then being held up because you can’t get the help you need. I know this all too well: my quest for world domination has long been stalled because the sonic screwdriver help-line people never answer my emails.

With Launchpad, we’re trying something new to make sure you get the help you need. Each week day there’s a named member of the Launchpad team whose job is to answer your questions, whether in #launchpad, in Launchpad Answers, on launchpad-users or to help@launchpad.net.

This means that on top of the usual cast of Launchpad types in #launchpad, for eight or so hours each day you’ll have a named contact that you can ping for help.

You can see which person’s on duty by checking the Help Rotation page on the Launchpad help wiki and also by looking at #launchpad’s channel topic.

Let us know what you think of the new help rotation and how we can improve it.

Telephone operators photograph from Seattle Municipal Archives. Creative Commons licensed.