Yesterday we released Ubuntu Touch Preview images for four devices. This is a huge milestone for Ubuntu. We always wanted Ubuntu to be everywhere and the Preview shows quite nicely how well the vision of a design family across different form factors works.

There is quite a bit of work to be done, we all know that, but it’s a giant opportunity for us, the Ubuntu community. Everybody can contribute to the effort and we can show the world how we believe software should look like.

How you can help? Easy.

• You can install the Ubuntu Touch preview images on a device and test them.
• You can help out designing and shaping the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps.
• If you are a bit more experienced with bringing software up on new devices, you can help us porting Ubuntu Touch to new devices.

Did the last point find your interest? Excellent, because we just took the wraps of our Ubuntu Touch Porting guide. This also marks the start of our Ubuntu Touch Port-a-thon. We want to get Ubuntu Touch up and running on as many devices as possible.

If you don’t mind some tinkering, maybe some kernel building, some configuration meddling and flashing your device repeatedly, you might just the person we’re looking for.

The porting guide should help you understand

• how Ubuntu Touch works internally,
• which bits are generally involved and where to find them
• how to submit patches
• how images are put together
• how to test them and
• where to find help

To get you started and into the mood, you might want to join us today, at Friday 22nd February at 15:00 UTC on http://ubuntuonair.com when two super heroes of the Ubuntu Touch project, namely Ricardo Salveti and Sergio Schvezov, are going to talk to us about the technical aspects of the phone and the tablet.

Reliable sources tell us, there’s going to be a surprise announce during the hangout as well.

This is the opportunity we always wanted. Let’s make it happen. Bring Ubuntu to the world in all its beauty.

Today the organization of UbuConLA launch the new 2013 edition website! take a look at http://www.ubuconla.org and tell us what you think!

Also we are looking for sponsors so if you know someone who wants to colaborate with this event and wants to get promoted around the whole Latinamerica try talk to them, the organization email is ubuconla2013 [AT] ubuconla [DOT] org

A special episode of "Ubuntu on Air" entitled "We're Going to Jam!" will be presented this Friday Feb 22nd 2013 at 20:00UTC. (Time conversion is here: http://ur1.ca/cvbn5 )

During this session, I will be fielding your questions about the "Ubuntu Global Jam", as well as providing tips & tricks for hosting (or being part of) a successful event. I will be joined by guests who have organized Jams and will reveal their secrets. We'll talk about ideas for Jams, including Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet.

I hope you'll watch and participate too! The session will be online at:

http://ubuntuonair.com.

Thanks and "see" you soon!

Please forward this message to anyone you feel would be interested and out to your social nets too...

Some notes on getting Storm used as a database backend for Django. Props to James Henstridge for doing the heavy lifting.

Setup virtualenv and install dependencies:

console $ virtualenv --prompt=stormy venv $ source venv/bin/activate $ pip install django storm psycopg2 pytz python-dateutil $ pip freeze > requirements.txt

Setup django skeleton

console $ django-admin.py startproject myproject $ cd myproject $ python manage.py startapp common

Edit settings.py to include the proper middleware and STORM_STORES

``` python settings.py MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (

'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware', 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware', 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware', 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware', 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware', 'storm.django.middleware.ZopeTransactionMiddleware', # Added this line # Uncomment the next line for simple clickjacking pro

)

STORM_STORES = { 'default' : "postgres://adam@localhost/testdb" } ```

Next in my app add some models

``` python common/models.py from django.db import models from storm.sqlobject import StringCol, UtcDateTimeCol, BoolCol, IntCol from storm.locals import Int from storm.expr import SQL from datetime import datetime from pytz import UTC import dateutil.parser

class Bug(models.Model):

__storm_table__ = "bug" id = Int(primary=True,) date_created = UtcDateTimeCol(notNull=True,) date_last_message = UtcDateTimeCol() date_last_updated = UtcDateTimeCol() date_made_private = UtcDateTimeCol() description = StringCol(notNull=True,) duplicate_of = IntCol() heat = IntCol() gravity = IntCol() information_type = StringCol() latest_patch_uploaded = UtcDateTimeCol() message_count = IntCol(notNull=True,) number_of_duplicates = IntCol() other_users_affected_count_with_dupes = IntCol() owner = IntCol(notNull=True,) private = BoolCol(notNull=True, default=False,) security_related = BoolCol(notNull=True, default=True,) tags = StringCol() title = StringCol(notNull=True,) users_affected_count = IntCol() users_affected_count_with_dupes = IntCol() web_link = StringCol() who_made_private = IntCol()

```

Pull the data into the view

``` python common/views.py from django.core.context_processors import csrf from django.shortcuts import render_to_response, HttpResponseRedirect from storm.django.stores import * from myproject.common.models import *

def index(request):

store = get_store('default') bug = store.find(Bug) return render_to_response("common/index.html", { 'bug' : bug })

```

Finally, edit the template to display the data

``` html templates/common/index.html {% extends 'layout.html' %}

{% block page_name %}Home{% endblock %}

{% block content %}

{% for b in bug %}
• {{ b.id }} : {{ b.title }}
{% endfor %}

{% endblock content %} ```

Things to do:

• Have get_store persisted when the application starts
• Integrate migrations with South
• Integrate with something like celery for running some background jobs

I haven't done anything major other than a few queries so time will tell how well this does when this project really gets into making use of Storm.

I had the pleasure of meeting with the folks from the Diablo Valley Linux Users Group (DVLUG) a couple weeks ago who were interested in our work with Ubuntu Women.

Some of the topics I covered were my involvement with LinuxChix, Debian Women and of course our on-going work within the Ubuntu Women project.

Info and download here: Episode 10 – Women of Ubuntu

As you might have noticed in the tablet information we've put some time and effort into imaging the next steps for the HUD. For the last few months I've been leading a team to bring that into a reality on the tablet.

Managing complexity

One of the problems facing application developers on a device like a tablet is adding functionality without making the entire interface feel cluttered. We even made the problem harder by emphasizing a content focused strategy in our SDK. Where do you put controls? There are various tools including toolbars, but none of them scale to even a moderately complex application. With the power of today's devices ever increasing, it's clear that tablet applications are going to become more complex.

We could just tell application authors not to do it. Save that complexity for your desktop UI. But that wouldn't be convergence, that'd be creating silos for you applications to live in.

By using HUD we allow applications to expose rich functionality that is available to the user via search. Users can search through the actions exposed by the application to find the functionality that they need. We combine that with historical usage and recently used items to take into account what functionality the user uses in the application. It's the rich functionality of your application, customized for the individual user.

Designed for HUD

One of the things we realized early in the HUD 2.0 efforts is that we can no longer just passively take data from applications and make things better. We needed to go beyond menu sucking to having applications actively targeting the HUD. We're building HUD functionality directly into the SDK making it easily available for application developers to add actions that are visible in the HUD.

By providing a way for applications to export both actions and their descriptions to the HUD directly we can make that interaction much richer. We can do things like get the keywords pragmatically so that they're included next to the original item definitions. This also allows us to define actions that have additional properties that can be adjusted with UI elements, we're calling these parameterized actions.

Parameterized actions provide a way for applications to create a small autogenerated UI for simple settings and items that can be quick to edit. Let's be clear, autogenerated UI's aren't the best UI's, but if done right can be attractive and effective. We aim to do it right. Hopefully your application has a primary UI that is beautiful and tailored for its specific task that is then supplemented with additional settings and actions in the HUD, parameterized actions are no different there.

Currently in the code we only have support for sliders of integer percentages. That's pretty limiting. We plan on expanding that to most of the base widgets in the toolkit.

Voice

While talking to yourself makes you seem crazy, talking to your tablet is just cool. With the HUD we realized that we had a relatively small data set, and so it would be possible to get reasonable voice recognition using the resources available in the device. That makes a great way to interact with an application, keyboards are chunky on any handheld device (but needed for when you're supposed to be paying attention to the person talking) and voice makes interacting much more fluid.

We built the voice feature around two different Open Source voice engines: Pocket Sphinx and Julius. While we started with Pocket Sphinx we weren't entirely happy with it's performance, and found Julius to start faster and provide better results. Unfortunately Julius is licensed with the 4-clause BSD license, putting it in multiverse and making it so that we can't link to it in the Ubuntu archive version of HUD. We're looking at ways to make it so that people who do want to install it from multiverse can easily use Julius, but what we'd really like is to make the Pocket Sphinx support really great. It's something we'd love help with. We're not voice experts, but some of you might be, let's make the distributable free software solution the best solution.

Enhancing Search

When we did user testing of the first version of the HUD one of the biggest problems users had was composing a search in the terms used in the applications. It turns out users search for "Send E-mail" instead of "Compose New Message". I'm sure there are even some people who want to "Clear History" but others want to "Delete" it. To help this situation we've introduced keywords that can be added as a sidecar file to legacy applications, and defined directly for libhud exported actions. These can then be searched for as well, increasing the ability of application authors to provide different ways to express the same action.

Issues

One of the issues that the HUD has in general is discoverability. How do I know that this cool new app I downloaded can do color balancing? Does every app need to run a Superbowl ad to make consumers realize their features? We've got some ideas, but come and share yours on the unity-design mailing list.

Shut up and take my app

While the source is published, we still don't have beautiful documentation and developer help out there yet. We're working on it. You're welcome to look at the source code, or just hang tight, I'll have another blog post soon.

A few days ago we announced Ubuntu for Tablets; the next piece on our wider Ubuntu convergence story. The tablet joins the Phone, TV, Ubuntu for Android, and the Desktop. See an excellent hands-on video review of the current developer build from Engadget.

Today the source and images for Ubuntu for Phones and Tablets (collectively known as Ubuntu Touch) was released.

I know there is some anticipation regarding this release and I just wanted to share a few facts to ensure we are all on the same page:

1. Both Phone and Tablet code and images are available – today we are releasing two things for both the phone and the tablet. Firstly, if you simply want to run the software on a spare device, you can install the images on your device without caring about the code. If on the other hand you want to see the code (and contribute to it) we are also making this available too so that you can build, explore, and hack on it.
2. This is unfinished and in-development software – it is important to remember that this is in-development software and as such is not finished yet. You are going to find that some features and applications are missing, and you will likely find bugs. We wanted to release the code and images early so that our community can try the software, provide feedback, and be able to join the development effort. With this goal to get the content out early we just want to ensure everyone fully understands that this is not yet a final product. I strongly recommend you only install the code/images on a spare handset/tablet and not your main phone/tablet due to the fact it is in-development code.
3. A limited set of devices are supported – the images are only available for the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10; these are the devices that our development team has been working towards. We appreciate that you may have a different phone or tablet, but unfortunately support for other devices is not currently planned. We will however be kicking off an outreach campaign soon to encourage and support our community in porting the code to other devices. Stay tuned for more!
4. A new SDK is available also – in addition to the release of the code and images we have also released a new version of the SDK which includes a number of new features, most usefully the ability to deploy a QML app to a device so you can run it!
   • Ubuntu SDK application templates and wizard
   • QML2 UI designer
   • Templates for testing framework and internationalization
   • Deploy QML applications on an Ubuntu Phone/Tablet device
   • Basic terminal (ssh, adb) connectivity tools to the device
5. Know where to find help – if you have questions or queries you should post your questions to Ask Ubuntu by clicking here.

I am sure you are now chomping at the bit to grab the images, check out the code, and get the new SDK release! Go and find all the details here.

We’re thrilled to announce yet another significant milestone in the history of the Ubuntu project. After having recently unveiled the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, today we’re publishing the full source code and images for supported devices.

For developers and enthusiasts only

While a huge amount of Engineering and Design work has been put into ensuring that the foundations for our user experience vision are in place, we want to stress that the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview is currently work in progress. We are releasing the full code at this point to align to our philosophy of transparency and open source development.

We recommend to install the Touch Developer Preview only if you are a developer or enthusiast who wants to test or contribute to the platform. It is not intended to replace production devices or the tablet or handset you use every day.

Flash your device

All that said, let’s get on to how to install Touch Developer Preview from a public image on your device.

What to expect after flashing

Not all functionality from a production device is yet available on the Touch Preview. The list of functions you can expect after installing the preview on your handset or tablet are as follows. For detailed information check the release notes.

• Shell and core applications
• Connection to the GSM network (on Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4)
• Phone calls and SMS (on Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4)
• Networking via Wifi
• Functional camera (front and back)
• Device connectivity through the Android Developer Bridge tool (adb)

Supported devices

The images we are making available today support the following devices:

• Galaxy Nexus
• Nexus 4
• Nexus 7
• Nexus 10

I’m all set, show me how to flash!

You will find the detailed instructions to flash on the Ubuntu wiki.

Install the Touch Developer Preview >

Contributing and the road ahead

These are exciting times for Ubuntu. We’re building the technology of the future, this time aiming at a whole new level of massive adoption. The Touch Developer Preview means the first fully open source mobile OS developed also in the open. True to our principles this milestone also enables our community of developers to contribute and be a key part of this exciting journey.

In terms of the next steps, today we’re making the preview images available for the Ubuntu 12.10 stable release. In the next few days we’re going to switch to Raring Ringtail, our development release, which is where development will happen on the road to our convergence story.

You’ll find the full details of how the infrastructure and the code are being published and used on the Ubuntu wiki.

Contribute to the Touch Developer Preview >

Presenting the Ubuntu SDK Alpha

But there’s more! To further celebrate the Touch Preview, we’re very proud to bring some exciting news that app developers will surely enjoy: the Ubuntu SDK Alpha release.

In fact, development of the SDK still keeps happening in the open and on a rolling release basis. But coinciding with the Touch Developer Preview, we thought that the latest release came with so much goodness, that we decided to label it in celebration.

Feature highlight: remote app deployment

Perhaps the coolest feature ever since the SDK was released: you can now deploy and execute the apps you create straight from the IDE.

Applications developed with Qt Creator can now be seamlessly and securely transferred and executed to a device just moving two fingers. Remember this shortcut: Ctrl+F12.

Inline with how easy and lightweight the process of creating a phone app is, a lot of work has been put into ensuring all complexity is hidden from the developer, yet it works solidly. Behind the scenes, SSH key pairing with the remote device works on-the-fly.

Here’s the lowdown:

1. Plug in your mobile device running Ubuntu on the USB port of your computer
2. Make sure your device is also connected to a wireless network (SSH key pairing happens over the air)
3. Start Qt Creator from the Dash, and select the new Devices tab
4. Press the Enable button to activate Developer Mode
5. Once the device is connected, you can develop your QML projects as usual (check out the new project wizard as well) and press Ctrl+F12 to install and execute your app on the remote device

Tooling updates

With Qt Creator at its heart, the set of tools app developers use on an everyday basis to author their software, have seen major improvements:

• Qt Creator has been updated to the bleeding edge version: 2.7. We expect this version to continue maturing together with the platform and the SDK.
• Ubuntu application templates and wizard are now available to easily start creating apps that run on the phone and tablets.
• The visual user interface designer in Qt Creator now works with QtQuick 2, the framework upon the Ubuntu SDK is based.

User Interface Toolkit updates

The UI Toolkit is the part of the SDK that provides the graphical components (such as buttons, text entries, and others) as building blocks that enable the basic user interaction with the underlying system. A new component, polishing and bug fixing have set the theme for this release:

• The MainView component has been added, with closer integration to the HUD and the shell. Learn how to use MainView.
• PopOver component polishing, general bug fixes and improvements

Install the Ubuntu SDK Alpha

By now we’re pretty certain you’re looking forward to installing and putting all of that development goodness to the test.

That’s an easy one, if you haven’t yet install the Ubuntu SDK.

If you already installed the SDK, just run Update Manager from the Dash and update the Ubuntu SDK package as prompted. Or alternatively, if you prefer the command line, just fire up a terminal and run ‘sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-sdk’.

And that’s pretty much it! Be sure to check out the release notes for any additional technical details too.

Let us know what you think

We’d be delighted to hear what you think and get your feedback on how you are using the SDK and ways in which it could be improved. So do get in touch with us or report a bug if you find any issues.

Time to start developing beautiful apps now!

Now if you know me from the Ubuntu Community Quality Assurance team, you would know that I exceptionally like (sorry, I LOVE) ISO Testing. So, here are some great tips for you to play with ISO testing in your 3-day Ubuntu Global Jam event.

1. Make sure you have some spare machines. Virtual machines can also be used, but if you have some machines that aren’t used for ages, please help. For example, if you have a PowerPC computer from Apple Computer, Inc., you could use it for testing. As I know the QA Team from Lubuntu really needs people testing for it (although I foresee the day soon when PowerPC will NOT be supported).

2. Make sure you have a Launchpad account. This is extremely important since you need it for access to login and report testcases to the ISO QA Tracker. You would also need it to report bugs against Ubuntu or a specific package (For example ubiquity).

3. If you think something that should happen doesn’t, please report a bug. Even if the bug turns out invalid, at least it makes you know that exists and you don’t report it again next time.

4. Make sure you come to #ubuntu-quailty on irc.freenode.net to get advice and help from the QA Team members.

So enjoy having fun ISO Testing in Ubuntu Global Jam!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

The Ubuntu Global Jam is am amazing opportunity to meet other Ubuntu supporters in your local area and sit down together and hack away on one of the many areas of Ubuntu development. However, not everyone is able to attend such an event in person, either because they live too far away from any organised events, will be on the road during the weekend, or because some disorganised cretin didn't bother thinking of organising one until the last minute. That cretin isn't me at all. Nope. I'm on the road that weekend, on business or something.

While the spirit of the Global Jam is to meet and work in person, it does't have to be that way. Over the weekend of the Jam, I'll be hanging out on Freenode IRC, specifically #ubuntu-bugs and #ubuntu-desktop, to work on the tasks that would have been done in person had I, um, that other person, the cretin, been a little more organised.
Bug triageAt the time of writing, the following numbers were pulled off of the Launchpad pages for some of Ubuntu's core apps:
PackageNew BugsConfirmed BugsIncomplete BugsRhythmbox23422544Nautilus28521660Empathy87834Firefox105481236Gedit62414LibreOffice23014375Totem58697
But bug triaging doesn't start and end with what's shipped on the CD. There are a ton of great apps in the Software Centre that need some love just as much as the core ones do. A few of my personal favourites are:

PackageNew BugsConfirmed BugsIncomplete BugsMiro25131Chromium200VLC266Calibre47190
These are just a few of my favourite apps. If you have your own favourite, then by all means hack away on the bug backlog for it. If you need help finding the Launchpad page for it, come into #ubuntu-bugs on Freenode and ask. There are lots of lovely people in there who'll be happy to help you out.

What should you do with these bugs?

• If a bug is marked as 'New', that means no-one has gotten round to looking at it yet. Why don't you have a go. New bugs need to be moved to either Invalid, Incomplete or Confirmed. Check out this article for more information on what each of these mean.
• Confirmed bugs need to be moved to Triaged, though if a long time as gone past since it was reported it may have been already fixed elsewhere, in which case it should be moved to Invalid.
• Incomplete need to be moved to either Invalid, Confirmed or Triaged.

You see all those numbers I've listed above for the 'New Bugs', 'Confirmed Bugs' and 'Incomplete Bugs'? Our goal is to reduce all of them to zero because every bug needs to be triaged. The Bug Squad has a great wiki page on what each of the statuses mean. Read it, understand it, drop into #ubuntu-bugs and help us out.PackagingThe general health of the Ubuntu Desktop is maintained by taking new releases of software from upstream and packaging it in Ubuntu. This process usually happens automatically, but in cases where the Ubuntu version has been patched, manual intervention is required.
The desktop team maintain several lists of things that need done, notably:

• A list of packages requiring manual merges
• A list of build failures reported by Jenkins
• A list of Bazaar import failures
• A list of Debs what have some sort of issue that needs resolved
• A list of merges that have unresolved conflicts

If you want to help out with packaging, there are a few resources from the Ubuntu developer website that you should read before starting:

• Getting the source
• Merging

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide is a great reference that you should keep close by you at all times. If you want to help out with this, then read through those first two resources, and make sure you know where to find the third, and hop into #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode and lend a hand. If you have any questions, then just ask them in there and someone will help you out.
You should never underestimate the impact a single person who gives just an hour or two of their time can have on the overall quality of Ubuntu, because in reality, you're not going to be the only one doing so. If 1000 people all give just an hour to bug triaging or packaging, that's 1000 hours of work going into Ubuntu, and that's freaking enormous. Dropping into IRC and picking up a couple of tasks for an hour can make a world of difference.

Anyone who is subscribed to Planet Ubuntu will undoubtedly know that I lead the One Hundred Paper Cuts project, a project to identify and fix the minor annoyances that trouble the users of Ubuntu's core apps. One of the things we need in order to sustain our work is a constant stream of new bug reports to look at, approximately 50-100 per month if we're to have enough to work on in the next cycle.


The Global Jam is coming up in just over a week, and if you decide to work on bug triaging then, or are just working on bug triaging in general, then it would be fantastic if you could forward any potential paper cuts to us. You can find out how to do that here.
But how to you know if a bug is possibly a paper cut? There are a few guidelines you can use to figure that out:

• Is it in a graphical application distributed on the Ubuntu Desktop CD?
• Is it reproducible?
• Is the average likely to user encounter it on a regular basis?
• Is it annoying?
• Does it appear easy to fix?

If is satisfies all of these point, then send it out way. If you're not sure, then send it anyway and we'll deal with it. These are guidelines more than actual rules and in the end, it all comes down to common sense. If you want to know more, or have any questions, then you can contact the team on our Launchpad mailing list.

Welcome everyone to smartboyhw’s blog!

Few introduction of myself:

I’m Howard Chan, 14 from Hong Kong.

Currently I work as an Kubuntu Ninja (which basically means packager) and tester, Ubuntu Studio QA Tester and Ubuntu QA Team (+ Ubuntu Testcase Admins Team) member.

My wiki page is at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/smartboyhw. My Launchpad profile is at https://launchpad.net/~smartboyhw

I just got approved in yesterday’s 1200 Regional Membership Board meeting, so that’s the first post here:)

Next post: Some rant….. (Sorry)

KDE Project:

• DCOP

Sony, the company who created Audio CDs which installed a rootkit on Windows computer to try to stop people copying music has pirated KDE artwork. The preferences-system.png icon from Oxygen is on their Choose your Vaio webpages (next to configure) but impressively is also on the UEFI firmware should you boot up into Assist mode. Nowhere on their website terms of use does it list the LGPL 3 licence it may be copied under (It does say "Any unauthorised use or copying of site content, or use of site content which breaches these Terms (or their spirit) may violate trade mark, copyright and other proprietary rights, and have civil and criminal consequences" although it also says "You must seek and obtain the written consent the operator of this site before creating any link to this site" so I don't give that page any legal credit.) Should KDE e.V. and Nuno's Oxygen friends start a new business model by sueing them for everything they're worth?

Oxygen icon on left. "Choose your Vaio" web page fragment on right.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s big 0.2 release, I pushed out umockdev 0.2.1 with a couple of bug fixes:

• umockdev-wrapper: Use exec to avoid keeping the shell process around and make killing the subprogram from outside work properly.
• Fix building with automake 1.12, thanks Peter Hutterer.
• Support opening several netlink sockets (i. e. udev monitors) at the same time.
• Fix building with older kernels which don’t have the EVIOCGMTSLOTS ioctl yet.

This fixes the “bind: address already in use” errors that were popping up in X.org and upower when running under umockdev, and finally gets us working packages for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (in the daily-builds PPA).

Every once in a while (which has been every year so far), Ask Ubuntu has a community moderator election, where you, the community, elect new moderators to help keep the site clean.

Yesterday, the Ask Ubuntu 2013 Moderator elections wrapped up - our 3 additional moderators are:

Luis Alvarado,

jokerdino,

And RolandiXor!

They join the existing team of moderators, who are very excited about the new group!

Congratulations to all, and keep up the good work!

Just a quick note to say we’re coming back with a brand new season of the Ubuntu UK Podcast Live on Wednesday 27th February 2013. Listen to this episode to hear the other exciting news about season 6!

Please send your comments and suggestions to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode
Leave a voicemail via phone: +44 (0) 203 298 1600, sip: podcast@sip.ubuntu-uk.org and skype: ubuntuukpodcast
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Follow us on Google Plus
Leave us some segment ideas on the Etherpad

                          

Would you like to see (or show) the Ubuntu Phone or Ubuntu Tablet in person? Come to the Ubuntu Global Jam!

The Ubuntu Global Jam happening on March 1, 2, 3 (2013) is your chance to see (or to show others) how amazing Ubuntu is on these devices.

I have received confirmation that the flashing instructions will be ready before (and in preparation for) the Jam weekend, so get ready! Do you have a "Galaxy Nexus" or a "Galaxy Nexus 4" phone? Do you have a "Nexus 7" or "Nexus 10" tablet? Bring them!

Up until now, most readers of Ubuntu Planet (and most journalists too) have only seen these devices in videos. The Ubuntu Global Jam is our chance to change that.

Be an Ubuntu Advocate. Give a great demo. (If you are planning to bring your phone or tablet to the event, please add the word "phone" or "tablet" or both to the event description at http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/global/2221/detail/ )

Be an Ubuntu supporter. Find people in your town/city that enjoy Ubuntu and spend some time with them.

Don't see an event near your city/town? You can help fix that! Please add your event to the LoCo Team Portal http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/global/2221/detail/ so the world can start seeing all the amazing things that you're doing for Ubuntu.

Thanks in advance for participating in the Ubuntu Global Jam!

KDE Project:

• DCOP

Microsoft have decreed that every new Windows 8 computer has to come with UEFI, a new firmware to replace the old 80s BIOS. They've also decreed that every new Windows 8 computer has to come with SecureBoot which means it'll only boot an operating system signed by MS. This is only for security of course, nothing to do with making it harder to make competing operating systems, oh no. So I had to hunt out a new laptop to test this on which means going to a real physical shop since no website will list which firmware a computer has it being a most uninteresting feature. My local Sony Centre found me the very last 13" cheapo Vaio laptop in the country to use as a test machine.

So what is Windows 8 like? After a morning of using it I really can't think of anything nice to say. It's just full of poor UI and broken experience.

On first bootup it asks important things like to pick a colour you like (seriously) and then for your Microsoft account so it can "authorize" you. Except after going through the first run settings it still says I need to authorise it to be able to change the wallpaper.

It asks for more details to set up McAfee anti-virus crap, I choose to skip that but an hour later I wonder why the fan is running at full speed and it turns out McAfee is using 50% CPU anyway, whatever for?

Windows 8 has two interfaces and it never can decide which is best. One is the transitional desktop but it looks blocky and ugly because the theme is designed to be similar to a tablet theme. One is the Metro tablet UI which is just blocky and ugly and for the sake of simplicity doesn't show you a lot of common UI elements like a busy cursor, so if a programme is taking ages to start up you get no feedback at all, just a blank screen.

There's an app store so I installed the first free application it offered (a London underground map) but that didn't seem to install so I gave up. An hour later I got a notification saying it had installed, why does it take an hour to install a simple application?

My router has an interesting feature where you can put a USB drive in it and share files with SMB. This works great with Kubuntu but despite SMB being Microsoft's very own protocol it can see but not access the device.

I plug in my printer on Kubuntu and 20 seconds later it's working. In Windows the same thing happens but it takes 5 minutes. What on earth is it doing for those 5 minutes?

Plug in a projector in Kubuntu Raring and the new kscreen tool does the right thing to bring up a second desktop. In Windows 8 precicely nothing happens. You have to do it manually.

The web browser is Internet Explorer and it has Bing shortcuts everywhere. This is illegal abuse of monopoly and a breach of the EU decision to require MS to offer a choice on first use. I hope somebody goes to jail. But not before they stop IE from crashing whenever I try to write a blog critising it.

Microsoft you fail.

I have the opportunity to talk about Ubuntu and competitors, so I wrote some materials for analysis.

 



You can download from wiki.ubuntulinux.jp

A few years ago I was doing research comparing how large software distributions handled shared object libraries, and studied Debian, FreeBSD, and Ubuntu. Extracting data about Debian packages was easy thanks to Peter Palfrader’s snapshot.debian.org service, which provides a machine-usable interface to Debian’s package history. FreeBSD’s data is equally accessible, albeit in a less pleasant format: their ports tree was stored in CVS until July 2012. One could easily rsync a copy of the ports tree’s CVS repository to a local machine to analyze the data. This left you with a local tree full of ,v files, each corresponding to the history of a given file with at that location. I needed to extract all kinds of data from a tree full of these files, such as what revisions contained lines matching a regex, when these revisions were checked in, any tags associated with it, etc. To make things easier, it also helped to know the line numbers of the matching lines. Hence the birth of rcsgrep.

rcsgrep is a Python script that makes use of Paul McGuire’s fabulous pyparsing library. It allows you to search a RCS file (the ,v file format used by RCS and CVS to store revision history) using a Python regex, and the output format is customizable to allow printing only certain kinds of information, such as the revision number, the line number, the matching line, the line’s author, the date it appeared, any tags associated with the line, and (useful when running over a large number of files) the file name. To make machine parsing (using AWK of course) easier, you can also specify the column separator.

For example, I entered the lines “The quick brown”, “fox jumped over”, “the lazy dog. Woof!” into the file abc, checking in the changes after each line. The invocation ./rcsgrep -s ' ' -f rlLda '.*' abc,v, with spaces for column separation, and format options r is for revision, l for line number, L for line contents, d for date, and a for author, outputs:

1.3 1 The quick brown 2013.02.20.14.24.09 ryan 1.3 2 jumped over the 2013.02.20.14.24.09 ryan 1.3 3 lazy dog. Woof! 2013.02.20.14.24.09 ryan 1.2 1 The quick brown 2013.02.20.14.23.48 ryan 1.2 2 jumped over the 2013.02.20.14.23.48 ryan 1.1 1 The quick brown 2013.02.20.14.23.25 ryan

I’m particularly proud about my grep() function in rcsfile.py, which goes through each revision, tracking additions and deletions, but only keeping the lines matching the regex in memory. In any case, rcsgrep is licensed under the ISC license and can be found on github.

Addendum: I learned after the fact that O’Reilly’s “UNIX Power Tools” offers something similar by the same name, except that it is runs several processes, such as co, grep and sed, as opposed to a single Python script.