Confession: I'm a dashboard kinda guy. So, when approached to help "catalyze" the Raring Ringtail edition of the Ubuntu Global Jam, my natural instinct was to measure and to report the result.

Here's where we stand:

Note: I say "stand" rather than "stood", as there still might be Jams in March that haven't hit loco.ubuntu.com yet.

Observations?

We're back on a growth curve. Admittedly the Quantal number had me a bit worried, and I was dreading that occurring again. Thankfully, we've recovered nicely. We're not yet where I want to be, but with one more cycle and a big push, I think we'll be able to set a new Ubuntu Global Jam Record.

Thank you everyone that Jammed, and thank you to those who will soon Jam. Let's keep this momentum going!

Think big. Let's Jam the planet with Ubuntu.

The first UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) of the year has just started. It’s now an online event, held every three months, where Ubuntu developers and contributors meet and discuss future development goals.

UDS used to be a physical event, held every 6 months, just after a new release of Ubuntu. Traditionally participants is a mix of Canonical employees, sponsored participants, and volunteers. It’s free and open for anyone to attend. Usually at least the project lead of each of the official Ubuntu flavors would attend. In October I attended when it was held in Copenhagen, and the year before, in US, Scott Lavender, the project lead of Ubuntu Studio attended.

Many things are being discussed during UDS that might radically change how Ubuntu Studio, and other community Ubuntu flavors will be developed and supported in the future.

Moving Towards Rolling Release?

One of the major topics for this UDS is the discussion on whether or not Ubuntu should start using the rolling release model. The LTS(Long Term Release) will still continue, as Canonicals clients value that,  while the interim release is proposed to be dropped.

Many ideas are floating around how to make this work. So far, northing’s conclusive, but it seem sto me, reading mail lists and such, that many people want it to happen, even if this does cause quite a bit of disturbance among flavor developers, who have been planning for a release in April for the last six months.

X Window to be replaced by MIR

Many things were announced at the same time, and while the rolling release is still up for discussion, it seems that the move towards replacing the X window system with MIR is already decided. Of course, at this point nothing is for sure, since MIR still needs to be developed, and the change will not come instantly. The goal is for a full change by the release of 14.04 LTS.

This will be a huge change for the community, as it means either all of the desktop systems on Ubuntu will need to support MIR, or the current X window system will need to be fully supported by the community developerst, since Unity – the Ubuntu desktop system will not be using X, and thus, they will not be supporting it.

What will this mean for Ubuntu Studio?

Right now, we don’t really know. In many ways, Ubuntu Studio itself is quite flexible, as we do not actually depend on any specific windowing or desktop system (as long as our applications are able to run on it, though we prefer to stay with XFCE), and our main concern about the rolling release is really just will it be stable enough for users? Some of our users don’t need anything but a LTS, but that is a minority of our users. A potential rolling release will be our main release, and it needs to be good and usable.

Just a reminder that we have plenty of UDS Lightning talk slots available!

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-1303/Plenaries

Talks are five minutes and slots go on a first come, first serve basis, and are taking place tommorrow at 1700 UTC.

I just found out that PyGObject 3.7.91 as released yesterday breaks GEdit plugins. I just pushed out 3.7.91.1 to unbreak this again, sorry about that!

Many libraries build a GObject introspection repository (*.gir) these days which allows the library to be used from many scripting (Python, JavaScript, Perl, etc.) and other (e. g. Vala) languages without the need for manually writing bindings for each of those.

One issue that I hear surprisingly often is “there is zero documentation for those bindings”. Tools for building documentation out of a .gir have existed for a long time already, just far too many people seem to not know about them.

For example, to build Yelp XML documentation out of the libnotify bindings for Python:

$ g-ir-doc-tool --language=Python -o /tmp/notify-doc /usr/share/gir-1.0/Notify-0.7.gir

Then you can call yelp /tmp/notify-doc to browse the documentation. You can of course also use the standard Mallard tools to convert them to HTML for sticking them on a website:

$ cd /tmp/notify-doc $ yelp-build html .

Admittedly they are far from pretty, and there are still lots of refinements that should be done for the documentation itself (like adding language specific examples) and also for the generated result (prettification, dynamic search, and what not), but it’s certainly far from “nothign”, and a good start.

If you are interested in working on this, please show up in #introspection or discuss it on bugzilla, desktop-devel-list@, or the library specific lists/bug trackers.

I ran across an article last week about the fear of cloud lock-in being a “key concern of companies considering a cloud move“.  The article was spot on in pointing out that dependence upon some of the higher level public cloud service features hinders a user’s ability to migrate to another cloud.  There is a real risk in being locked into a public cloud service, not only due to dependence on the vendor’s services, but also the complexity and costs of trying to move your data out.  The article concludes by stating that there “aren’t easy answers to this problem“, which I think is true…but I also think by simply keeping two things in mind, a user can do a lot to mitigate the lock-in risk.

1. Choose an Independently Produced Operating System

Whatever solutions you decide to deploy, it’s absolutely critical that you choose an operating system not produced by the public cloud provider.  This recent fad of public cloud providers creating their own specific OS is just history repeating itself, where HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, and AIX are being replaced with the likes of GCEL and Amazon Linux.  Sure, the latter are Linux-based, but just like the proprietary UNIX operating systems of the past, they are developed internally, only support the infrastructure they’re designed for, and are only serviceable by the company that produces them.  Of course the attraction to using these operating systems is understandable, because the provider can offer them for “free” to users desiring a supported OS in the cloud.  They can even price services lower to customers who use their OS as an incentive and “benefit”, with the claim it allows them to provide better and faster support.   It’s a perfect solution….at first.  However, once you’ve deployed your solution to a public cloud vendor-specific OS, you have made a huge first step towards lock-in.  Sure, the provider can say their OS is based on an independently produce operating system, but that means nothing once the two have diverged due to security updates and fixes, not to mention release schedules and added features.  There’s no way the public cloud vendor OS can keep up, and they really have no incentive to, because they’ve already got you….the longer you stay on their OS, the more you will depend on their application and library versions, thus the deeper you get.  A year or two down the road, another public cloud provider pops up with better service and/or prices, but you can’t move without the risk of extended downtimes and/or loss of data, in addition to the costs of paying your IT team the overtime it will take to architect such a migration.  We’ve all been here before with proprietary UNIX and luckily Linux arrived on the scene just in time to save us.

2. Choose an Operating System with Service Orchestration Support

Most of the lock-in features provided by public clouds are simply “Services as a Service”, be it a database service,  big data/mapreduce service, or a development platform service like rails or node.  All of these services are just applications easily deployed, scaled, and connectable to existing solutions.  Of course it’s easy to understand the attraction to using these public cloud provider services, because it means no setup, no maintenance, and someone else to blame if s**t goes sideways with the given service.  However, again by accepting these services, you are also accepting a level of lock in.  By creating/adapting your solution(s) to use the load balancing, monitoring, and/or database service, you are making them less portable and thus harder/costlier for you to migrate.  I can’t blame the providers for doing this, because it makes *perfect* sense from a business perspective:

I’m providing a service that is commoditized…I can only play price wars for so long….so how can I keep my customers once that happens….services!  And what’s more, I don’t want them to easily use another cloud, so I’ll make sure my services require you to utilize my API….possibly even provide a better experience on my own OS.

Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t use these services, but you should be careful of how much of them you consume and depend on.  If you ever intend or need to migrate, you will want a solution that covers the scenario of the next cloud provider not having the same service…or the service priced at a higher rate than you can afford…or the service quality/performance not being as good.  This is where having a good service orchestration solution becomes critical, and if you don’t want to believe me…just ask folks at IBM or OASIS.  And for the record, service orchestration is not configuration management….and you can’t get their by placing a configuration management tool in the cloud.  Trying to get configuration management tools to do service orchestration is like trying to teach a child to drive a car.  Sure, it can be done pretty well in a controlled empty parking lot…on a clear day.  However, once you add unpredictable weather, pedestrians, and traffic, it gets real bad, real quick.  Why?  Because just like your typical configuration management tool, a child lacks the intelligence to react and adapt to the changing conditions in the environment.

Choose Ubuntu Server

Obviously I’m going to encourage the use of Ubuntu Server, but not just because I work for Canonical or am an Ubuntu community member, but because I actually believe it’s currently the best option around.  Canonical and Ubuntu Server community members have put countless hours and effort into ensuring Ubuntu Server runs well in the cloud, and Canonical is working extremely hard with public cloud providers to ensure our users can depend on our images and public cloud infrastructure to get the fastest, cheapest, and most efficient cloud experience possible.   There’s much more to running well in the cloud than just putting up an image and saying “go!”.   Just to name a few examples: there’s insuring all instance sizes are supported, adding in-cloud mirrors across regions and zones to ensure faster/cheaper updates, natively packaging API tools and hosting them in the archives, updating images with SRUs to avoid costly time spent updating at first boot, daily development images made available, and ensuring Juju works within the cloud to allow for service orchestration and migration to other supported public clouds.

Speaking of Juju, we’ve also invested years (not months….YEARS) into our service orchestration project, and I can promise you that no one else, right now, has anything that can come close to what it can do.  Sure, there are plenty of people talking about service orchestration…writing about service orchestration….and some might even have a prototype or beta of a service orchestration tool, but no one comes close to what we have in Juju…no one has the community engagement behind their toolset…that’s growing everyday.  I’m not saying Juju is perfect by any means, but it’s the best you’re going to find if you are really serious about doing service orchestration in the cloud or even on the metal.

Over the next 12 months, you will see Ubuntu continue to push the limits of what users can expect from their operating system when it comes to scale-out computing.  You have already seen what the power of the Ubuntu community can do with a phone and tablet….just watch what we do for the cloud.

Hello guys,

It’s been a while since the last time I updated this place, and since I took a decision that will directly affect it, I guess it’s time for this update.

As you all know by now, the idea of this blog was to write about Ubuntu, WordPress, Nginx and to improve my English, since it’s not my main language.

The Ubuntu-BR-SC blog, where I write news and tips about Ubuntu everyday

The problem is: talking about subjects that aren’t related to each other on the same place isn’t something that I really like.

I decided to create two separated projects, and each of those will have a focus. If you guys read my first post, you already know that one of those is already being worked on for sometime now.

Improving my English for the project above was one of the main objective of this blog

I can’t talk about names just yet, but I will announce them soon enough. One for Ubuntu, one for WordPress and Nginx.

As for this blog, it will be closed and will be replaced with a personal landing page. This post will stay up until tomorrow, and after that I will replace it with the landing page.

The theme I use will also be available to download soon. I will post the download link on Google Plus and Twitter.

With this cleared up, let’s talk about a third project.

Ubuntu Auctions: get cool Ubuntu items and help charity

I was talking with Mika Meskanen, leader of the user experience designers at Canonical, and a nice idea came to my mind. He offered me a rare “Ubuntu – The Human Touch” black t-shirt, from CES, and said I could keep it for me or auction it for charity.

The idea then came to my mind: why auction only this item, if I have some more Ubuntu items taking up space at my house?

When I give speeches at events, I usually go home with a bunch of items that I use only to decorate my office. They are material items that I don’t mind getting rid of, for a good cause.

So I decided the create an website called Ubuntu Auctions, where I will auction those items.

Just a logo mockup. I really need a designer.

The idea is to auction three items every three weeks, and all the money raised will go to charity. This is still an early idea, and not even the domain is bought yet, but I’m already working on it.

In the next couple weeks I will be sending e-mails and getting the interest of more people, so we can launch it as soon as possible.

What do I need right now

I have the server ready and will buy the domain as soon as possible, but I’m not a programmer or a designer, and without those two I can’t do much.

Right now I need a designer to work with me on the website’s mockups and a WordPress expert to code the whole design and implement the auction system (we could probably use an auction plugin).

If anyone wants to help with this project, or wants more information, my e-mail is julianfernandes@ubuntu.com.

I should also make it clear that I can’t pay for this work. It’s a voluntary work, just like what some of us do with Ubuntu.

And that is it folks. This blog helped me a lot, but I believe those three projects will work a lot better.

Have any opinion about all of this? Leave your feedback bellow, please :)

Related Posts

• Ubuntu-BR-SC will be at TcheLinux this Saturday
• Hello World (and Planet Ubuntu)!
• Let your Ubuntu more beautiful with those wallpapers
• Meet the top 10 must-play games for Ubuntu
• Romero, the Ubuntu-BR-SC LoCo Team’s game server

Let’s talk about the future of this blog and my projects is a post by Julian Fernandes. A good hosting is essential for any WordPress blog. You don't want your blog to be slow or down, do you? If you need help finding a good one, check out RamNode!

Today we go public with the Ubuntu graphics stack for the post X world. Since the beginning Ubuntu has relied on the X server to support the user experience and while it has worked generally well; it’s time for something new. My team is working on a big new component for this - Mir. Mir is a graphics technology that allows us to implement user experience we want for Ubuntu across all devices we support.
In many ways, Mir will be completely transparent to the user. Applications that use toolkits (e.g. Qt, GTK+) will not need to be recompiled. Unity will still look like Unity. We will support legacy X applications for the foreseeable future.
This is a big task. A lot of work has already been done and there’s a lot more to go. We’re aiming to do incremental improvements, and you can find more about this on the Wiki page and in the blueprints. You can help. From today our project is public, it’s GPL licensed and you’re welcome to use the source and propose changes.
It’s exciting times, and I hope you enjoy the results of this work!

When last week Canonical announced the usual UDS was not going to happen I was a bit shocked and disappointed: starting from the next UDS (that is going to happen tomorrow!) the event will be online only and every 3 months. During these days I've been thinking a lot about this move and I will tell you what are the pros and cons, in my opinion, followed by some final thoughts.

Pros

Having 4 UDS every year, instead of 2, is surely a better thing. I'm a big fan of Scrum methodology, so I think that iterating more often is better than iterating less. If there are any mistakes you can correct them and iterating again before releasing the final product.

Potentially more people can partecipate to the event (even the opposite is true and I will explain why). People won't need to move from home, travel, pay any expense etc... they just need a computer and a good Internet connection.

It's cheaper for everyone: I can just imagine how expensive could be for Canonical to organize a similar event. Booking a big hotel, paying travel and expenses to near one houndred of community people. People who didn't get any sponsorization had to pay all the travel expenses to attend the event.

Cons

Potentially less people can partecipate to the event. Yes, like I said before even this sentence is true and I will explain why. First of all, using Google+ there are at least three countries that will be cut out: China, Thailand and Vietnam. Google+ is not available in those countries.

Are you sure that special people will be able to follow the event? For example blind people won't be able to chat or to ask question in the chat.

Only 10 people will be able to talk. In normal UDS sessions more people could raise the hand and ask a question or interact with the track leaders. Who will choose the 10 people with audio+video streaming rights?

We will completly miss the social aspect of the UDS. If you think this was only a secondary part, please go on. I felt more committed to work and collaborate with people I met in person than with someone I've never met before.

Announcing an event, even if online, just one week before it happens. Really? Some people had already taken vacation from work, booked flights etc... not counting many people that can't take 2 days off from work just with 1 week notice period. It's also almost impossible that community members have the time to schedule a blueprint and be able to discuss about a subject.

Final thoughts

From a cutting costs point of view I really can't say anything. Organizing UDS was surely very expensive for Canonical and nobody can blame them if they decided to spend those money in a different way.

What really concerns me: is UDS still useful? My opinion is that at least since latest 2 or 3 UDS the presence of the Community was not so relevant, because I had the clear sensation that the most important decisions were made by Canonical before the UDS and then there was just some details tuning. Another proof of my thoughts is the today announcement: despite the fact that I 100% agree with Unity switching to Qt/QML (I already proposed this 2 years ago during Budapest UDS, but nobody listened to me) I completly disagree with the way the decision was made: not a single involvement or discussion with the community.

I would apreaciate more openness and honesty from Canonical. Do you want to take all the decisions? That's fine, but at least state it clearly.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #306 for the week February 25 – March 3, 2013, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Ubuntu Developer Summits Now Online and Every Three Months
• Let’s Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)
• Results from the Developer Membership Board restaffing
• Welcome New Members and Developers
• Ubuntu Stats
• Ubuntu at SCaLE11x
• Jamming? We Need Your Photos!
• UGJ, Mexico city, March 2013
• Cape Town Global Jam Raring
• Ubuntu Forums upgraded!
• Dmitrijs Ledkovs: X-Chat power-user upload
• Jono Bacon: On Moving To An Online Ubuntu Developer Summit
• Jono Bacon: XDA Developers and Ubuntu Touch
• Marcin Juszkiewicz: AArch64 port of Debian/Ubuntu is alive!
• Dmitrijs Ledkovs: Flash Nexus7 like a rock star
• Daniel Holbach: The Port-a-thon is in full swing
• Scott Kitterman: Kubuntu Council Elections 2013 – Call For Nominations
• Jose Antonio Rey: Localizing the Q&A Systems
• Ubuntu Manual: Call for contributors
• Ubuntu phone and tablet at Mobile World Congress
• In The Press
• In The Blogosphere
• Other Articles of Interest
• Featured Audio and Video
• Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
• Monthly Team Reports: January 2013
• Upcoming Meetings and Events
• Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 11.10, 12.04 and 12.10
• And much more!

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

• Elizabeth Krumbach
• Howard Chan
• Nathan Dyer
• Jim Connett
• And many others

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

In this video I extend the work from video three and write an interpreter for the parse tree we generated from the Brainfuck input.

As always, comment on the vid, or email me, to let me know if there’s something you’d like me to do in a vid.

Tomorrow we will be running our very first online Ubuntu Developer Summit. The event will take place over two days and span a range of different tracks: Community, Client, Cloud & Server, App Developers, and Foundations. We have never run an event like this before, but we have prepared extensively to deliver the best online UDS experience we can. When UDS is complete we will then review any rough edges and fix those up for the next event in May.

With this being a new event, I wanted to share some key tips about how to get participate.

For Everyone

UDS takes place on Tues 5th – Wed 6th March 2013 from 2pm UTC. Please note: the original time was 4pm UTC, but we brought the event forward by two hours.

The full event is taking place online and everyone is welcome to join, irrespective of whether you are an active contributor to the community, a partner, a business, an enthusiast, or anyone else. We will be using Google+ Hangouts On Air to stream video from the active participants in the session, and we also provide quick embedded access to IRC, note-taking, and more.

The event will kick off on Tuesday at 2pm UTC with a keynote session. There will then be two hours of sessions, then an hour of plenaries, and then another two hours of sessions. On the Wednesday we will kick off into sessions at 2pm, and have lightning talks in the normal plenary slot. Jorge Castro is taking care of the plenary talks and lightning talks; reach out to him if you want to run a lightning talk.

There are five tracks, with each (apart from Foundations) having two video streams. Each track has two track leads:

• Client – Jason Warner, Sebastien Bacher
• Server and Cloud – Antonio Rosales, Daviey Walker
• Community – Jono Bacon, Daniel Holbach
• App Developers – Alan Pope, David Planella
• Foundations – Steve Langasek

You can find all sessions listed at summit.ubuntu.com. Just visit the session you are interested in at the time of the session to view it; everything is included on the session page. You don’t need anything other than a web browser to view sessions but you will need a Google+ account to actively participate in a hangout.

For Track Leads

You should have all received an email from me about how to schedule sessions and how to start and stop the video streams.

Remember to ensure your Google+ is verified (Michael Hall should have checked this with you).

You and your co-track lead should pick one of the two tracks you have for your track and take care of setting up those streams.

Five minutes before a session (e.g. 1.55pm) is due to begin you should start the video stream and update the session in summit.ubuntu.com with the hangout and broadcast URLS. Likewise, 55 minutes into a session (e.g. 2.55pm), be sure to stop the hangout. We need to start and stop the video streams to ensure the recordings are broken up into the different hour long chunks. Required participants will automatically see a link on the session page to invite them to join a hangout – this page does not auto-reload though, so you may want to ask them to refresh the page to join.

Please keep an eye on the sessions on your track and interact with the session leaders to ensure that any required participants can be invited to the session as needed. There may be times as the session is running that people will need to be invited to join the hangout (e.g. IRC participants) – you need to be available to do this when the session leader needs you. If you are not actively participating in the session, feel free to just mute your mic and keep an eye on IRC or listen for when you are needed.

Instructions for starting and stopping the streams is at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS/Sessions.

For Session Leaders

As a session leader your responsibility is to run a quality session, and to ensure that the topic gets a good level of discussion, work is planned and distributed, and the blueprint gets updated with the agreed work items.

Some tips:

• Make sure your Internet connection and computer are working well in advance of the session. We recommend you stop any software or services that is using your net connection (e.g. switch off any downloads or other video streaming).
• The video hangouts will be started and stopped by the track leads (see above) – if you need to invite a new person to a hangout, ask the track lead to invite them.
• In your session you will have people in the hangout speaking as well as people on IRC offering their contributions too. Be mindful of the IRC contributors, and repeat comments and statements of interest from IRC.
• Think of the hangout as the inner ring of the fishbowl at a physical UDS. Unfortunately there only 10 seats on the hangout, so we need to ensure the most active participants are in the hangout. People in the hangout should be speaking and actively participating. If you have an active participant on IRC and have free seats on the hangout, be sure to invite them to the hangout. Likewise, if you see someone who is not contributing on the hangout and there is someone active on IRC, ask the hangout person to move to IRC to open up a slot to invite the IRC person and bring them into the hangout.
• At the beginning of the session, explain the goals and purpose of the session and encourage people to take notes in the embedded etherpad.
• Have the discussion in the session, and be sure to help everyone participate as much as possible. Remember, you should try to keep the most active members in the hangout.
• 10 minutes before the end of the session summarize the key decisions and log work items on the blueprint that are assigned to people. This will provide a great set of next steps to move forward with that blueprint.

For Attendees

Joining a session is easy – just look at the schedule and click on a session to view it. On each session page you can see the video stream, the embedded IRC channel, and the embedded etherpad collaborative note taking. You can also see links to the blueprint and other related content.

You don’t need anything other than a web browser to view sessions but you will need a Google+ account to actively participate in a hangout.

If you want to chat to others in general about UDS, you can also join #ubuntu-uds on freenode.

All sessions will be recorded and available on the schedule when they are completed.

Ardour is an application for recording, editing and mixing music. It is licensed under the terms of the GPL 2.

The upcoming 3.0 release seemed like a good opportunity to take another look at the logo I designed in 2006. A selection of drafts from back then, ending with the final design:

I had to ask myself: Is this logo (still) appropriate for Ardour?

The upcoming 3.0 release will be a digital audio and MIDI production application, available for Linux and Mac OS X. It is designed for frequent and prolonged use, being able to deal with huge amounts of material, complex signal pathways, precise and intense editing. Reliability, correctness and precision are of utmost importance.

The logo should take a matching stance, be sharp and have a strong presence. I think the old version does a fine job in this regard. It also happens to be well established and liked by the community (of course not by everyone). Back then I decided to use a free-form wave shape, less stylized, more realistic. Now I think a shape with even subdivisions will make the logo appear more precise.

I worked my way through variations of the curves that describe top and bottom of the wave, the number of teeth, their shape, relative height of the type and its consequences on letter spacing:

PDF of above image, in case you’d like to take a closer look.

Application icons, first column are the old ones. I reduced the number of teeth for the smaller versions, keeping them at least 1 pixel wide.

The new logo is already in use on the new website that went online about a week ago. I helped a bit with color selection, made a few suggestion and provided 3 icons:

Filed under: Ardour, Icons, Linux Audio, Logos, Planet Ubuntu

I just want to echo Tony’s appeal to help three year-old Sam who was diagnosed with high risk neuroblastoma, a particularly aggressive cancer. It has spread from the main tumor into his bones and bone marrow. That makes it a class 4 cancer, the most advanced on the scale. The long term survival rate for high risk neuroblastoma is 40%.

As Tony shares:

The good news is that Sam is responding well to chemotherapy. But Sam’s oncologist at Manchester Children’s Hospital has recommended that Sam receives immunotherapy treatment so that his own body can recognise and attack the neuroblastoma if it returns.

The most successful treatment is not available in the UK because some of the drugs are still being trialled. It costs over £250,000 in the US. Which is why Sam desperately needs your help. Carl and Christine are trying to raise the money to send Sam for treatment in the US.

If you would like to donate to help Sam, that would be brilliant. In the UK you can just text SAMS67 and the amount you’d like to donate (£1, £2 £3 £4 £5 or £10) to 70070. Alternatively you can donate on-line at the Sam Shaw Just Giving page. It’s Sam’s fourth birthday this week, so it would be a great birthday present to give him.

Also be sure to join the appeal’s Facebook page.

Your donation to Sam will have an incredible impact on his life as well as his parents, Christine and Carl, who must be having a hell of a time right now dealing with all of this. Let’s all show them that we care by helping them to cover their son’s treatment.

This week’s blog post is a bit different. It’s about Laura’s childhood friend Christine, her husband Carl and their three year old son, Sam.

In January, Sam was diagnosed with high risk neuroblastoma, a particularly aggressive cancer. It has spread from the main tumor into his bones and bone marrow. That makes it a class 4 cancer, the most advanced on the scale. The long term survival rate for high risk neuroblastoma is 40%.

The good news is that Sam is responding well to chemotherapy. But Sam’s oncologist at Manchester Children’s Hospital has recommended that Sam receives immunotherapy treatment so that his own body can recognise and attack the neuroblastoma if it returns.

The most successful treatment is not available in the UK because some of the drugs are still being trialled. It costs over £250,000 in the US. Which is why Sam desperately needs your help. Carl and Christine are trying to raise the money to send Sam for treatment in the US.

If you would like to donate to help Sam, that would be brilliant. In the UK you can just text SAMS67 and the amount you’d like to donate (£1, £2 £3 £4 £5 or £10) to 70070. Alternatively you can donate on-line at the Sam Shaw Just Giving page. It’s Sam’s fourth birthday this week, so it would be a great birthday present to give him.

If you would like to keep up-to-date with news about Sam and the appeal, please join join the Facebook group.

Thanks for reading.

Pin It

So we have come to the next logical step. I have to say I called it as soon as I seen the implementation of the phone in Qt/QML. Merging touch and Unity on the desktop was the obvious thing because now we can have pretty much the 1 interface across all platforms. And I have to complement the team who made touch, it looks exactly what I thought the future of Unity to be. So im very happy obviously that im going to be using it on my desktop in the not to distant future.

So that aside I thought id give my views about things like the good old days 2 years ago when I was blogging a lot more frequently.

Mir: sounds interesting, I read down though the plan and some made sense others didn't but I have never been a man for people talking graphics although I should probably at least understand what's going on eventually. I can see why they would go for a new system rather than bending to wayland or sticking with X which is older than I am (its from 1984 and im from 1988). The thing that jumped out at me was the focus on security which I find very interesting how they plan on making things both lightweight and secure to the extent where they aren't sacrificing one for the other. The other thing that I immediately thought about was about driver interaction and application interaction. For hardware:

With our X-integration in place, you can run Mir on your desktop machine if your system runs a GPU that supports the free driver stack. For the closed-source desktop drivers: We are in active conversations with GPU vendors to enable Mir on those drivers/GPUs, too. More to this, we are working towards a more unified driver model sitting on top of EGL.

So it looks like it doesn't work with non-free drivers yet. So hopefully they will fix that soon or hopefully the free drivers get better. Interesting side note, the free drivers run at 100fps on my system and the non free ones at 70fps its just the free drivers don't play games and have some strange artefacts on the screen sometimes which is a pain. On windows its 100fps solid so that is obviously what my card can do its just for what ever reason the non free drivers just are 30% slower exactly on Linux :-/

Rolling release model: I had pretty strong opinions about rolling release models for a while and I think they can work well if the model is right. I think the one proposed is safe but I don't think its right. How would I do it?

Well this idea is actually 2 or 3 years old and I had it written down somewhere (maybe it got lost when I switched from WP to Drupal). So what I suggest is having Ubuntu and a Ubuntu+1 or next or what ever you want to call it. Just having 1 constantly supported release of Ubuntu and a secondary testing version. So +1 would be similar to Debian unstable and testing mixed together. You push it out to +1 and test it, if it breaks fix it and rinse and repeat till you have something solid working. It can work exactly like how normal releases work currently except push when ready instead of solid point releases. So when the next version of Unity you feel is user ready push to +1 test it with the stack you want under it and push it out when it runs as expected.

This system avoids the issue that LTS releases have and that is stagnation and it means that you only have to support 1 version for enterprise and regular users who normally stick to the regular releases. The huge downside is if someone messes up it effects everyone equally but thats what the +1 is for making sure that nothing goes into mainline that shouldn't.

EDIT: I didn't read the bit regarding drivers with Mir so I changed the section where I was presuming things, so much to read and I wrote it pretty fast so forgive the mistake :)

Tags: 

• Ubuntu

Lyra, a talented artistic friend, coined the word 'hipstercrite' during a recent conversation. I couldn't help laughing at the pure genius and wordsmith-juggling skill of her creation and now want it to become part of our urban lingo:

hip·ster·crite
/ˈhipstərkrit/

Noun
1. A person who hates on so-called hipsters while actually being a hipster himself and denies it.


I secretly wait for any conversation where I can drop and share this new gem into the urban vernacular.

Apparently the word already exists in urban dictionary. Proving once again the rule that if it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist. Damn you internets full of hipstercrites, even the domain (which I wanted to buy) is gone.

This week Jono Bacon announced that Ubuntu Developer Summits will become a series of online events. Having thought about it a few days, I’m now ready to input my own opinion to the discussion.

In the announcement Jono lists openness, transparency and accessibility as the major goals of the Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS). The decision to move to an online event is supposed to improve these.

In this article I will explain why I don’t think it will, and why the new format looks just another Canonical team sprint. I’ll also cover some of my concerns over the accessibility and equality of the new format and important things I think the online events will lack, but shouldn’t. I will also discuss some of my opinions on how this changes the nature of UDS and the meaningfulness to flavors as well as how this change affects the Canonical-community relations.

Openness, transparency and accessibility

I value openness and transparency very much. However, I’m not sure if the new online format will increase them in any way. Canonical is already making many decisions that affect the community in-house, behind closed doors. Unfortunately, these decisions and their results don’t always roll out as expected.

Until now the community has had at least some voice in the discussion, or at least have been able to react to changes, if they have been discussed in UDS. It’s a pessimistic view, but I can’t see why Canonical employees would start discussing and working more closely now with the community on decisions that have already been made. Now that the event is online, it’s much easier to have more discreet, even hidden meetings about things where community input would be largely unwanted or at least ignored à la the in-house pre-UDS sessions.

While it’s evident that a physical event has limitations when it comes to accessibility, so does an online event. One of the main reasons that made the Canonical-community communication so effective in UDS was that everybody got together, in the same place and at the same time. This means everybody participating in person is (ideally) always available and 100% focused on the sessions.

Now that the event takes place online, people will not be as committed to participating a session in every slot. Even when they are participating, the session might not get their full attention, because there are more distractions when working online.

When people aren’t participating in a session, they most probably won’t be available, which means there won’t be any substitution to the off-session discussions. This is sad, because this used to be one of the most powerful features of UDS for officially recognized flavors (such as Xubuntu) and I believe for numerous other teams as well. Even if people did have these off-session discussions, they are just as useful as contacting anybody via IRC or email any time, so there’s no real benefit of the centralized time. As a matter of fact, people might be even busier than usually during the online events, making it even harder to get a hold of them.

Concerns of equality

One of my worries is the level of openness UDS can create while being an online event. There are a few issues which are raised from the community already, but I want to repeat.

The platform itself is one of the major concerns for the community: many of us aren’t comfortable using a proprietary platform. While it’s an easy choice for Canonical to deploy, it’s also a weird move from a major open source project.

Due to the technical limitations of Hangouts, there can only be 10 people who are videoconferencing at any time in a given session. While there are some similar limitations even in a physical event, I think the online event makes the thresold to join those 10 people higher for a few reasons. First, not all of us are comfortable with videoconferencing for various reasons. Some of the people in the community don’t want to be on the spotlight or are too afraid to do that with total strangers, others might not want to be streamed live.

While 10 is more slots than the amount of chairs we had for important people in UDS Raring, these slots are now assigned by the session leader to people in order of importance that they think the specific people will have on the meeting. My concern is that this might make it harder for some people to be given slots, including those that are not generally well known in the community or people who are known to strongly disagree with the session leaders. We will have to see how this works out in the forthcoming online UDS, but before it’s over, I’ll keep my reservations.

Naturally there are other ways to communicate as well, namely IRC and Etherpad. To be fair, the communication via those mediums worked well enough in UDS Raring, if the session leader simply wanted (think: remembered) to use them. Taking this into account, I don’t really think that taking the event online really makes it any more accessible for anybody. On the other hand, it still doesn’t offer a feasible alternative for taking part physically or being one of the participants in the videoconference.

As written by Jono in the announcement, Canonical wants to make the event as accessible for anybody with a decent internet connection. However, based on the facts above, the equality is ironically mostly virtual. The format change might bring accessibility and some real equality between participants, but in its entirety, I think it’s a step backwards. Those who participated in person got unbeatable benefits and even if they paid for their flights and accommodation themselves, a fair substitution to their money.

Letting the social aspect go

As I mentioned before, off-session discussions with a variety of people were one of the best features of UDS. Those who have attend UDS know that these discussions go on even after the actual conference for the day has ended. Making new contacts and having interesting and important discussions went on all the way to the last drinks of the evening. It’s silly to expect people to take this much time off of their normal schedules and try to socialize online in any way that resembles the socializing in a physical event. This feature is gone.

Losing the social aspect of UDS doesn’t only impact productivity in during the event. One of the unwanted side-effects is less and worse human relations between Canonical and community teams. Meeting people face-to-face and getting to know them behind their IRC nicks and email addresses makes communication in the future smoother. When these personal relations do not exist, cooperation will be much harder and slower in the future, including ever-so-important dispute resolution.

Ultimately, I believe these changes will lead to lower work morale and loyalty towards Canonical in the community. Whether it happens in critical parts for business from the Canonical point of view is a different story.

For many of the volunteers in the community contributing is also about fun. There aren’t many better things than seeing an old friend after a long while, chatting about something you both are passionate about and then have a drink. As mentioned, the new online format is taking lot of this fun away from the community. One of the things that I predict to happen is an influx of people to other conferences like DebConf, especially amongst those people for whom Ubuntu is only one part of their open source ecosystem. It’s impossible to foresee the actual implications for UDS and Canonical, but ultimately one participant lost is one opportunity lost.

Business before community?

As several people have said, this change along with a rolling release are probably good decisions for Canonical as a business, but not Ubuntu as a community. Making UDS an online event will not only cut quite a lot of financial slack, it also lets them focus on the things that make sense to them financially. Ultimately Canonical gets more control over which matters are discussed, which opinions are given voice and who communicates about them in their own events.

In addition to losing the social aspect and Ubuntu being the thing that made the people come together, there are possibly some caveats to Ubuntu development as well. In the worst case scenario, Canonical will lose a lot of contributors from the community, and I can’t see how this wouldn’t affect Canonical’s business too.

The last cautionary sign for the openness, transparency and equality is the lacking and too late communication about changed plans for UDS. Because of this, the first online UDS arrives too early and unexpected for the majority of the community. The fact that majority of the sessions are going to be revolve around the controversial discussion about moving to a rolling release makes the situation even less bearable for the community. The chosen way of communication backs up the vision that these changes are purely business-oriented. Unfortunately, it isn’t very fair for the community.

Furthermore, this is not the first time the communication from Canonical has been lacking. Numerous people have expressed their concerns and distrust in the past about Canonical’s way to communicate about changes in the infrastructure. So far Canonical has avoided the worst damage, but the atmosphere is starting to get tighter. It’s more likely than ever that people will part ways with Ubuntu in a way or another. If people leave now, it’s going to be really hard to do significant damage management and regain trust from the (former) community members.

Impact on flavors

Due to the various reasons mentioned before and becoming a way more Canonical and Ubuntu OS-centric, UDS is becoming borderline irrelevant and useless for flavors. From what I’ve read in the last few days, I believe this is the unanimous response from the flavor teams. This is worrisome for the flavors and the community at large because it is possible that the taken direction excludes the community from decision making that concerns its own infrastructure as well.

It is too early to say what kind of actions several flavors will take and what their position will be, not least because the uncertainty about a rolling release model and its implications. However, there is one thing that will most probably happen: since the flavors are slowly and involuntarily sliding off of UDS, it will be less and less meaningful to organize their sessions parallel to the “main” virtual UDS. Once this happens, the future of the flavors is even more full of justified fear, uncertainty and doubt. The only thing Canonical can do to reduce this effect is start communicating and discussing about the changes that affect the community truly openly.

What’s in the future for us?

The future for UDS is still partly out of sight. In the announcement Jono somewhat vaguely says that after two online events Canonical will “review the success of the next two online events” and “assess whether to continue the online format”. Whether it means Canonical will either get back to the physical format or drop UDS for good if the online format fails remains to be seen.

Until the first online event is over we can’t evaluate how the new format works. However, it is clear that Canonical needs to get the community involved in the event if they wish to keep the community close to them. To be succesful in this, Canonical needs to make sure UDS is equal to all participants. If they can truly integrate the community to the discussion during the first event they will be able to regain some trust and hope in the community to their communication. Ultimately the community can only consider the event succesgull if Canonical is able to achieve all the aforementioned goals as well as the major goals they have set for UDS.

At the end of the day, we have to remember Canonical is a business trying to make money with their product. Keeping this in mind and as an entrepreneur myself, I can empathize with many of their decisions. In my opinion the partly harsh criticism is justified though. Since Canonical has promoted Ubuntu as a community-oriented project from the beginning, it would be only fair to actually involve the community in the decision making and discussions well in advance. If they do not wish to do this, they should clearly communicate this to the community and their users.

Thanks

I would like to thank the following people for their support, numerous discussions and influence to this article: Elizabeth Krumbach, Scott Kitterman, Micah Gersten and Jussi Kekkonen. Thank you!

A guest post from Thomas Voss’ blog. Thomas is the Technical Architect (Client) at Canonical:

Some time ago, Canonical started internal discussions about our convergence strategy, clearly spelling out the distant target of shaping and developing a single computing platform and operating system that is able to power the cloud, classic desktop machines, laptops, TV sets, phones and tablets (fridges anyone?). More to this, we stated that we want a single mobile device, a bundle of portable computing power together with the respective operating system, that seamlessly adapts to different form-factors and use-cases. Or to put it a little more catchy:

Your phone is your TV, is your desktop, is your … you name it.

And yes, we were aiming for the moon. We worked hard to draft a system that would allow us to reach the moon, while at the same time catering towards our other central goal of providing a beautiful and lean user experience. It became apparent in conversations and discussions that one of the cornerstones of the future system we were designing will be the graphics stack, including the Unity shell. After much discussions about existing solutions (X & Weston), and how we could leverage them, we took a step back and distilled down our (technical) requirements for a future graphics stack:

• Tailored towards an EGL/GL(ES) world.
• Minimal assumptions regarding the underlying driver model.
• Ability to leverage existing drivers implementing the Android driver model.
• Ability to leverage existing hardware compositors.
• Efficient, in terms of memory-, CPU- and GPU-consumption/usage.
• Tightly integrated with the Unity shell, fulfilling the shell’s requirements while at the same time not dictating any sort of semantics up the stack.
• An efficient and secure input subsystem supporting demanding mobile use-cases.
• Fully tested from the ground up.
• Adaptable to future requirements.

With these priorities in mind, we revisited and carefully evaluated existing solutions again and found that neither of them satisfies our requirements. In particular, X and its driver model is way too complicated and feature-laden, resulting in a less efficient system and a driver model that is unlikely to be widely supported on mobile platforms. In the case of Weston, the lack of a clearly defined driver model as well as the lack of a rigorous development process in terms of testing driven by a set of well-defined requirements gave us doubts whether it would help us to reach the “moon”. We looked further and found Google’s SurfaceFlinger, a standalone compositor that fulfilled some but not all of our requirements. It benefits from its consistent driver model that is widely adopted and supported within the industry and it fulfills a clear set of requirements. It’s rock-solid and stable, but we did not think that it would empower us to fulfill our mission of a tightly integrated user experience that scales across form-factors. However, SurfaceFlinger was chosen as our initial solution for getting started with the overall Ubuntu Touch project, planning to replace SurfaceFlinger with Mir as soon as possible.

In summary, our evaluation of existing solutions led us to the conclusion that neither of them fits our requirements and that adjusting/adapting them would require substantial efforts, too. For this, we decided to go for our own solution, catering directly towards our goals and our vision, effectively saying: Yes, we are going to do our own display server.

The project was born and we decided to name it Mir (as in the space station), as it would be our outpost that finally enables us to reach our goal of arriving at the moon, providing a seamless and beautiful user experience spanning multiple form-factors. The team set off to work on Mir while large parts of Canonical started working on the Ubuntu Touch project (relying on SurfaceFlinger). A lot of knowledge and experience was and is transferred from the Ubuntu Touch project to the Mir team, with the work on the phone and tablet revealing more and more technical requirements and subtleties that heavily influenced the Mir architecture and implementation. Thus, one of the earliest technical decisions that has been taken by the team concerned the protocol that applications rely upon to communicate to Mir. We evaluated Wayland and compared it to the SurfaceFlinger approach, realizing that neither of them fits our needs. Wayland is a very promising and sensible attempt at standardizing the way that applications talk to a display server, however, it exposes privileged sections like the shell integration that we planned to handle differently, both for security reasons and as we wanted to decouple the way the shell works on top of the display server from the application-facing protocol. In the end, we decided to implement Mir’s core in a protocol-agnostic way, considering the communication protocol a very important part of the overall story, but not the driving one. We have chosen Google’s protocol buffers as our data and interface description language (DDL & IDL) and implemented a lean RPC layer that abstract away transport-specific details (relying on an ordinary socket by default). It is well tested and the protobuf IDL and DDL provide us with forward- as well as backward-versioning capabilities. However, the communication component of the overall system is adaptable and can be adjusted to account for future requirements and developments.

A final word on timelines: At the time of this writing, we are preparing to deploy the next version of the Unity shell tightly integrated with Mir in the not-too-distant future on the phone and the tablet. However, regarding the desktop use-case: We have integrated X, leveraging the prior XWayland work, to run on top of Mir (XMir) and started initial porting efforts for toolkits with a focus on Qt5. With our X-integration in place, you can run Mir on your desktop machine if your system runs a GPU that supports the free driver stack. For the closed-source desktop drivers: We are in active conversations with GPU vendors to enable Mir on those drivers/GPUs, too. More to this, we are working towards a more unified driver model sitting on top of EGL.

As we are moving along with the development of Mir, we will work on integrating existing toolkits with the new display stack to allow application developers a seamless transition between different form-factors and prevent them from the burden of supporting multiple different display servers. As noted before, Qt5 is our first target here, with GTK3 and XUL being in the pipeline. To support legacy X applications that cannot be adjusted to work against Mir, we will provide a translation-layer that leverages the existing XMir implementation and allows legacy X apps to use Mir transparently.

And that’s pretty much it. Thanks for reading. I hope I could give you some insight into the history of Mir, its motivation and its trajectory. If you want to dive even further into the Mir world, head over to wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec. A lot of work has already been done, but more of it lies ahead of us. So if you are curious, have questions, want to help us or simply want to get to know the team, join the Mir sessions at the upcoming virtual UDS. You might also want to read Olli’s description of the bigger picture, including our overall convergence strategy for Unity.

To the moon,

Thomas

I worked with applications, bugs and test-cases in the last day of the UGJ. In this opportunity we have a great and very productive Jam, I share with you the applications list tested:

1- Deja-dup
2- Firefox
3- File Roller
4- Gnome-Screenshot
5- Network Manager
6- Ubuntu-One

Besides, I am at the top of the testers list ( A big accomplishment for me )

Top Application testers

Remember, if you want to be part of the UGJ, you will find information about testing procedures in our wiki pages, the official wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGlobalJam

And the Ubuntu QA team wiki page for UGJ:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Cadence/Raring/Week7UbuntuGlobalJam