Today I got an email from Gnome that its been two years for me being a Gnome member and If I want to continue being a Gnome member I should re-apply. Its great that they are expiring my membership since I have not been active in the Gnome community for a long time.

In the Ubuntu world it seems that there is no rule of membership expiring. I don’t think the Ubuntu membership should be a lifetime thing(Currently you can renew your own membership just by opening a Launchpad page). It should expire so that we see a little cleanup in the Ubuntu members team for those who are not active in the community.

Thoughts ?

We looked at Debian bugs that needed to be added to the release or not, as the case may be. Thank you Stefano for organizing,  mentoring and driving the coffee machine. Thanks to everyone who donated a couple of hours to make ubuntu better. Thanks codebridge for having us.

So.., today was our UGJ.., and we’re reporting back =), I think we couldn’t get a better place to jam, the guys of the vision cafe got us to one of the Santa Anna personal rooms (thank you!, your service is one of the best!), Mexico downtown is full of colonial buildings and this one was not the exception. We jammed for ~4 hours, which we used to ping the problems we had reported previously, looked at translations, art, talked about the strategies to keep improving the Ubuntu-mx team and ate lots of pizza, I love to see this energy at the keyboard, we even went online:

Hey, I know we may seem some kind quiet but we where focusing on our topic list (those white papers we keep looking at): http://tinyurl.com/points-lst, we also took some pictures:

Click to view slideshow.

How was yours? =)

Almost five months ago, I switched to a standing desk. I am in love.

Yes, it is absolutely sane to be in love with a desk.

We made a standing desk out of processed trees. The result is modest, but I’m happy with it! Dads are great.

The idea with a standing desk is your body stays more active while you are at your desk, so you can read those health warnings about sitting all day with a sense of superiority. And we all like to feel superior. But I didn’t switch to a standing desk because of articles pointing out that everything is killing us. When I started, I had a few reasons of my own! When I sit, I end up sitting wrong within minutes, and over time that can be terrible for my posture. This is a problem, because my choice of obsession (and profession) means I am doomed to a lot of fooling around with computers. For a long time, I assumed that doom required equal amounts of sitting. During my little internship at the David Suzuki Foundation, one of my awesome coworkers was thrilled with her standing desk, so that finally got the wheels turning for me.

Meanwhile, I was noticing that I never really solve much while I’m sitting at a desk. My brain works a lot better when I’m at least moving. The problem is my work environment wasn’t really made for moving around. There was a giant, allegedly comfortable chair in the way, all in the name of enhancing the computer. I say “allegedly comfortable” because this is one of the other neat things: I was thinking about getting an actually comfortable chair, then I realized I could change my desk, instead. Boom! Hundreds of dollars in savings (maybe).

I started off looking at different articles around the web for inspiration. Jorge Castro wrote a blog post about his own adventure building a standing desk on top of a metal frame, and Priceonomics has a nice article with different ways of putting together a standing desk from Ikea stuff. I momentarily entertained the idea of buying from Geekdesk, but, besides the price, I decided I would prefer to jump in head first with something that is not adjustable to sitting. If I make it easy to go back, I probably will.

So, I was looking at different bits of Ikea furniture that I could somehow jam together into something coherent, and soon enough my dad talked me out of all that. Instead, we (mostly he) built a new desk frame from scratch! This way we could get something at the right height from the start. After all, you don’t want to stand at an uncomfortable desk, and unlike sitting on a fancy chair, you can’t really adjust your standing height. There’s a sort of general guideline that the desk should be at a height where you can look straight ahead with your elbows at a 90° angle, and we ended up with something pretty close to that for me.

As might be expected, it looks slightly more flattering from the top.

As well as the desk, I have collected some standing desk paraphernalia. After about two weeks I got a new, cheap office chair that adjusts almost as high as the desk. I haven’t used the chair as much as I expected — I can remember maybe eight specific occasions — but it is great for those long sessions of Crusader Kings 2. (Its height even resembles a throne, and it terrifies me. As it turns out, I would make a terrible king). Just last month I got a brand new anti-fatigue mat, which is under my rug in the photo. Mine is an Imprint Comfort Mat. It’s aimed at home kitchens, so it has a durable surface and some sort of memory foam cushioning. It feels a lot like wearing a good pair of shoes. I got on fine without it for the months before, but I can see why that extra stress on the feet could make a big difference for some people, and I’m glad I have something for them now.

Speaking of gadgets, I quickly began to appreciate long cables. My headphones have an unusually long cord, and that used to bother me, but now that I’m a few feet higher and I like to wander away from my desk, the extra length is indispensable. Cables have been a problem in other spots, though. Many of them, like my video cable, are only just long enough. As it is, I can’t do much to hide them from view. They just reach to the top in the quickest possible way, which of course involves a giant knot. I really should hunt for some new cables, but at this stage it seems almost insurmountable. It makes me wish I had chosen differently every time I thought “I don’t need a longer cable — it just needs to reach around my desk.” So, uh, there’s my helpful advice.

Not actually the view out my window, but at least it’s a different colour palette.

My favourite thing with this standing desk is what it means for taking a break. Sitting down almost feels like a worthwhile, and entirely justified, change of pace, which is very refreshing. I still have my perpetually unfinished home-made “take a break” app running, and I have an easier time prying myself away from my computer when a micro break or a rest break comes along. I’m always one step closer to it, after all. Also, I think I’m biting my nails less! Weird, but exciting.

As for the standing part, it definitely took time to adjust. For the first few weeks, I had a weird habit of standing completely still at my desk. I guess that’s because I was so used to sitting still at my desk, but my feet didn’t thank me for it. Since then, as I have become used to the idea, I am prone to stretch and move around more, so my feet aren’t being pressured in one way for the whole time. At this point, I definitely find it easier to walk around and look out a window when I’m pondering something. I haven’t decided if that really helps me to think, but at least it seems healthier. The bottom line is I feel more free when I’m doing computer stuff, and that’s really cool.

So, add me to the crazy standing desk fan club, please! I don’t think I will be going back.

Are you Jamming this weekend? Take photos!

Post your Jam photos to your favourite photo sharing service (Pictag: ubuntu) and also to Planet Ubuntu. Show the world the wonderfully awesome project that is Ubuntu.

Thank you!

--

Someone famous once said that "If there are no photos, the event never happened." Hint: Might be Jorge Castro.

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-creator of UNIX operating system, had been curating some old DECtapes, and he offered some of the artifacts. Unfortunately existing tapes lack interesting things like earliest Unix OS source, but some indicative fossils have been prepared for exhibition.

"As described in the C History paper, 1972-73 were the truly formative years in the development of the C language: this is when the transition from typeless B to weakly typed C took place, mediated by the (Neanderthal?) NB language, of which no source seems to survive. It was also the period in which Unix was rewritten in C.

In looking over this material, I have mixed emotions; so much of this stuff is immature and not well-done, and there is an element of embarrassment about displaying it. But at the same time it does capture two moments in a period of creativeness and may have some historical interest.

Two tapes are present here; the first is labeled "last1120c", the second "prestruct-c". I know from distant memory what these names mean: the first is a saved copy of the compiler preserved just as we were abandoning the PDP-11/20, which did not have multiply or divide instructions, but instead a separate, optional unit that did these operations (and also shifts) by storing the operands into memory locations. [...]

"prestruct-c" is a copy of the compiler just before I started changing it to use structures itself.

It's a bit hard to get really accurate dates for these compilers, except that they are certainly 1972-73. There are date bits on the tape image, but they suffer from a possible off-by-a-year error because we changed epochs more than once during this era, and also because the files may have been copied or fiddled after they were the source for the compiler in contemporaneous use.

The earlier compiler does not know about structures at all: the string "struct" does not appear anywhere. The second tape has a compiler that does implement structures in a way that begins to approach their current meaning. Their declaration syntax seems to use () instead of {}, but . and -> for specifying members of a structure itself and members of a pointed-to structure are both there."

mortdeus, from Hacker News, has mirrored these files into a github repo where you can view these files.

Read more at Dennis Ritchie's original article.

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (78.31 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian packaging

I wanted to update publican to the latest upstream release but I stopped after a few hours of work during which I filed two bugs that a modicum of testing should have caught before release. So I decided to wait for the next minor release.

I uploaded python-django 1.4.4 and 1.4.5, new upstream maintenance and security releases which thus went into wheezy. I also prepared a stable update of Django (1.2.3-3+squeeze5) which required me to backport the last 2 sets of security patches.

I uploaded a new revision of wordpress to fix a problem with TinyMCE (#700289) and to update/add many translation files (#697208).

Bug reporting and misc fixes

Live-build issue. I experienced some intermittent failures when building HDD live images with live-build on armel. Daniel Baumann directed me to the problematic piece of code (the “oversizing” of the image size was not enough) so I committed a small fix by increasing the oversizing factor to 6%.

Live-config issue. I also reported another issue that I diagnosed in live-config (#701788), namely that the script which setups sudo was failing when the default user is root.

git-buildpackage issue. I filed #700411 after noticing that git-import-orig imported the debian directory provided by upstream. Those directories are not used with “3.0 (quilt)” source package and their presence in the upstream branch is thus harmful: any change to the upstream debian directory will result in conflicts when you merge a new upstream release in your packaging branch.

rubygems integration. Later I had to package a bunch of ruby applications that were using Bundler and I wanted to reuse as many packaged ruby modules that I could. But for this, those modules had to provide the required rubygems meta-information. I filed #700419 to request those on rake-compiler and with the help of Cédric Boutillier (and others on #debian-ruby), we identified a bunch of ruby modules which could get those with a simple recompilation. I filed bin-nmu requests in #700605.

Misc bugs. simple-cdd offers to select profiles to install but I noticed that the associated debconf template was not translated (#700915). The startup scripts (provided by initscripts) in charge of activating the swap are supposed to handle a “noswap” kernel command line option to disable swap. In #701301, I reported that the option was not working correctly if “quiet” was present first in the command line due to spurious “break” statements.

Debian France

Administrative work. We were late for some legal procedures so I wrote the report of the last general assembly and sent it to the “Tribunal d’instance of Sarreguemines” to record the changes in the administrative board. I also completed the “special register” of the association, it’s a notebook that is legally required and that must document any important change in the governance structure of the association (new members of the board, headquarters change, new bylaws, etc.).

Galette developments. Debian France is funding a few enhancements to the Galette free software that we’re using to manage the association. I am in touch with the Galette developer to answer his questions and ensure that his work will meet our needs.

Librement

I have been looking for talented developers who have a genuine interest in my Librement project. I want to fund the initial development of the project but I don’t have the means to fund it entirely. So I really wanted to find developers who would find an interest beside the money that I would pay.

I got in touch with the team of developers from Scopyleft and they look like very good candidates. But they’re heavy users of the Scrum development method and asked me to play the role of “product owner”. So I started to describe the project with “user stories” (i.e. “create the backlog” in the Scrum jargon), you can have a look at them here on trello.com. If you’re interested by the topic of free software funding, feel free to review and to send me your comments.

My goal is clearly to have a “minimal viable product” with the first iteration(s) that I fund and then use the platform itself to fund further developments of the project.

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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As folks know, I’ve been hacking on Firehose. I’ve been debating doing some work to modify / extend / replace DACA, and I could use some help writing new wrappers around static check code, so, who wants to hack?

Any UI folks? I could use a UI to view Firehose data, something spiffy and colorful.

Hackers? Send in some wrappers for your favorite static checking code. Send in pull requests or email me with a pointer to the repo :)

Hack on, folks!

I’ve downloaded all isos that I shall need this weekend: Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu (of course!). By different reasons I only could work last night but it isn’t matter, last night was Lubuntu Testing night! \o/

I’ve tested Lubuntu (amd64 – normal and alternate versions) And for my big surprise, Lubuntu isos worked too perfect I hope this day will be more productive and I can work on testing applications and Ubuntu testing as well.

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

If you use LVM with Wheezy on a solid-state drive, you really want to install the latest lvm2 update (i.e. 2.02.95-6, which contains the changes of -5). Otherwise, if you set issue_discards=1 in /etc/lvm/lvm.conf, you will experience severe data loss when using pvmove. Happened to me twice, once I didn't care (chroot data being lost), the second time (today) I did. Not fun, especially when the backup of the data was scheduled for the same day.

One has to wonder why it takes three months for a bug that trashes data to reach testing. (Obviously I know the answer, but they're not particularly good reasons.) Other distributions, like Ubuntu, were much quicker to notice and incorporate that fix. And in the case of the named distribution not because they auto-synced it from unstable. If somebody notices such a grave bug, please yell at people to get the fix out there to our users. Thanks.

I have posted part two of the Haskell based calculator project.

Enjoy, subscribe, send me ideas.

Over the past few days I have been analysing various issues and also doing some background research, so I have been collecting some rather large sets of data to process.   Normally I filter, re-format and process the data using a bunch of simple tools such as awk, tr, cut, sort, uniq and grep to get the data into some form where it can be plotted using gnuplot. 

The UNIX philosophy of piping together a bunch of tools to produce the final output normally works fine, however, graphing the data with gnuplot always ends up with me digging around in the online gnuplot documentation or reading old gnuplot files to remind myself exactly how to plot the data just the way I want.   This is fine for occasions where I gather lots of identical logs and want to compare results from multiple tests, the investment in time to automate this with gnuplot is well worth the hassle.   However, some times I just have a handful of samples and want to plot a graph and then quickly re-jig the data and perhaps calculate some statistical information such a trend lines.  In this case, I fall back to shoving the samples into LibreOffice Calc and slamming out some quick graphs.

This makes me choke a bit.  Using LibreOffice Calc starts to make me feel like I'm an accountant rather than a software engineer.  However, once I have swallowed my pride I have come to the conclusion that one has to be pragmatic and use the right tool for the job.  To turn around small amounts of data quickly, LibreOffice Calc does seem to be quite useful.   For processing huge datasets and automated graph plotting, gnuplot does the trick (as long as I can remember how to use it).   I am a command line junkie and really don't like using GUI based power tools, but there does seem to be a place where I can mix the two quite happily.

The idea really is that Ubuntu’s rolling release (alpha/betas) shouldn’t become a seperate product from Ubuntu’s LTS industry targets. Instead if we think about the platform as a whole, we should be able to put together both LTS and RR versions of Ubuntu into a single package. It would then be possible to do some really interesting things, like using one ubuntu install to repair or analyse the other.

I’d also like to see most applications removed from universe since it’s pretty obvious that the Debian model for packages is failing and we need to rethink how we deal with applications. The best model would be to be decisive and scrap apps from universe and move them to their own PPAs or a dedicated app-store model where FOSS apps might even be able to earn some money as they would finally be in a similar position to the propritary Canonical apps.

I understand these ideas are bold, but I wanted to give my thoughts on how best to close the loose ends. What are you solutions? colmment below.

This year marked the 3rd Southern California Linux Expo I’ve attended, and once again it didn’t disappoint. The first year I gave a talk at the Ubucon and helped with the booth over the weekend, last year I gave a talk at Ubucon, one at the conference itself and then ran the Ubuntu booth, an exhausting combination that I swore I wouldn’t repeat. This year I scaled back to just a talk at Ubucon and providing some of the materials for the Ubuntu booth.

Ubucon this year was run by Richard Gaskin of Fourth World Systems. I was contacted a couple months ago and signed up to do an Ubuntu in the Cloud talk (slides here) where I covered some of the options for running Ubuntu “in the cloud” and introduced folks to DevStack as an easy mechanism for trying out and beginning to learn about OpenStack. Unfortunately I was struggling my way through a nasty cold all weekend so it wasn’t the optimal situation for giving a talk, but the audience was great.

Due to my cold, I ended up just camping out at Ubucon all day instead of exploring other tracks and was witness to a full day of standing room only sessions. Talks included David Rodriguez on using Ubuntu in an continuous integration enterprise environment, Aviv Meraro on hardware compatibility, Philip Ballew on finding help in Ubuntu and Richard Gaskin talking about the soon to be open sourced Live Code language and development environment. The day wrapped up with a presentation by Jono Bacon of the Ubuntu Phone.

Friday night a few of us headed down to the expo hall to begin setting up the Ubuntu booth, after which I grabbed some take-out from the hotel deli and headed up to my room to get some rest.

Saturday was the first full day of the expo hall and SCaLE proper talks. I’m really happy with how the booth came out this year, and System76 was kind enough to offer some systems for us to run as demo machines. The Ubuntu logo + California candy dishes got a number of laughs, kudos to Eric P. Scott for his cleverness there.

The team also lucked out in having Nathan Haines join the booth volunteers, along with his phone running Ubuntu! It was a great opportunity for visitors to the booth to finally get hands on with the phone, that’s also how I had my chance.

In all, a great weekend for Ubuntu at SCaLE! Huge thanks to all the booth volunteers who kept things staffed all weekend.

Google Pixel: The Perfect Linux Laptop?

When I ordered the Chromebook Pixel, I was confident I would not like it. $1299 for a laptop that is only a browser? For $1299 I can get a full Retina Pro running OSX, Windows 8, better battery life, more storage, more ram etc. The following post is the story of how my perspective changed, and how I use this machine as a power user / developer.

The Competition

The first though most people have with the Pixel is, why not a Macbook Retina 13 refurb, or the Samsung Chromebook.

FeaturePixelMacbook Retina 13Samsung Chromebook Screen2560x1700 12.85”2560x1600 13.3”1366x768 11.6” QualityIPSIPSTN TouchYesNoNo Local Storage32GB128GB16GB Cloud Storage1TB5GB100GB Processori5 1.8GHzi5 2.5GHzExynos 5 1.7GHz Ram4GB8GB2GB Battery Life5 hours7 hours6.3 hours Price$1299$1499$250 What Sets the Pixel Apart?

What the table above doesn’t account for are the qualitative features which make all of the difference. The build quality is fantastic, and the Pixel feels very tough. The Aluminum used in the Pixel feels stronger and more durable than the Macbook, and feels like it is less prone to denting. The screen is extremely bright, and even when plugged in I only use it at 70% brightness, and when on the go I turn it down to nearly minimum. Even with the brightness set so low, it is easier on the eyes and more readable than the TN panels common in most laptops.

The keyboard feels subjectively better than the Macbook Pro. It is an absolute joy to type on, and the touchpad is also flawless. Plugging in adapters to the Mini-Displayport “just works” with external monitors, and having a browser open with GTalk etc while a terminal on the other is great.

Chrome OS itself really gets out of your way. Out of the box I only installed the secure shell app, and I was able to do 50% of the Linux development I wanted to. No tweaking, driver downloading etc, out of the box I had a very fast browser, multi-monitor support, retina level text, music and cloud file storage.

The next question to answer was how do I do heavier development? Chrome actually has a great remote desktop feature built in, so I was able to connect to my much more powerful Ubuntu workstation, and run Eclipse there. It worked well over my local network, although there are even better solutions if you don’t enjoy the slight latency for screen refreshes and window dragging.

Enter Crouton

Crouton provides a way to install Ubuntu and run it without rebooting from Chrome OS. This means if I run Crouton and simply press CTRL-ALT-Refresh I am instantly in my XFCE full Ubuntu 12.04.2 environment, and I can run any X86 programs I desire. I was able to use SSH XForwarding to also connect to my desktop, and it was also fast and fluid. I was able to load vim, git, gcc etc, however I actually like just using regular Chrome OS and a SSH session where possible, so I can switch between locations with ease. You can download Crouton from Github.

Battery Life

Most reviews highlight that battery life is less than four hours, but skip over how low you can set the brightness on this laptop. 60% brightness on the Pixel is brighter than a lot of laptops at 100%, and the screen is extremely clear and readible. I was able to get 6 hours of battery life without issue, and this will improve as Chrome OS seamlessly updates itself.

Unscalable?

CNet wrote up a headline grabbing blurb, so I wanted to clarify screen scaling. As the owner of a Macbook Pro Retina 13, I never use screen scaling. The performance is horrible, frames are dropped, and it doesn’t make sense for developers. We generally work in text, so using the native resolutions and adjusting font sizes means we can manage the scaling easily. Sure, window borders etc are not resized, but in all of the applications I use, my biggest windows are full of text. Even if I do Windows development, I have C# / XAML windows open nearly fullscreen in VS. Scaling on Retina is, from my humble perspective, for those who don’t understand they can just decrease their font size and have great performance and readiblity.

Operating System

What is the most fascinating part of the Pixel is that I absolutely love Chrome OS. A few downsides of OS X you don’t find clearly articulated:

• OS X got in my way a lot
• Spinning beachballs
• Safari rendering huge white blocks
• Memory usage - you really do need 8GB to load iTunes, iPhotos and Safari
• Had to install Ubuntu to get a full ‘real’ stack
• Every time I had to install gcc-42 from brew dupes and have multiple compilers
• Compiling ruby with rvm sometimes compiled with LLVM, sometimes didn’t, depending on the day and release
• Everything costs more. Want to live the iLife? Many albums priced at $4.99 elsewhere can be > $15 on iTunes
• The filesystem ‘feels’ slower, especially in rails. When I ran rake etc, these commands all took noticibly longer than my Ubuntu installs
• 128GB is actually too small if you don’t live in the cloud, and was a constant battle

Conclusion

The Pixel is a winner for Linux power users. We get a Linux based OS out of the box that auto updates, is secure, requires no tweaking, and just lets us get to work. We can easily switch to full Ubuntu, and back with just simple keystrokes. SSH support is fantastic, and works with tmux etc (unlike so many SSH emulators on the Windows 8 store). The built in applications make photo editing, listening to music, youtube, gmail, and even games just a click away. If I had to purchase it again, I would order the LTE model as I intend to take this everywhere with me.

Yesterday I uploaded a video which is part one of a series covering parsing in Haskell in the form of a project to build a calculator.

In the future we’ll also look at making parse trees and perhaps interpreting a simple imperative language too. Excitement!

A couple years ago, I wrote about how you can create a graphical representation of your OpenPGP Web of Trust. It’s funny how I’ve been keeping mine up-to-date for these past couple years as I attend keysigning parties, without really thinking about what it looks like. Well, I recently returned from the SCaLE 11x conference, which had a PGP keysigning party. So, I’ve been keeping the graph up-to-date as new signatures would come in. Then it hit me: am I graphing ONLY the signatures on my key, or all the signatures in my public keyring, or something somewhere in between? It seemed to be the latter, so I decided to do something about it.

The following script assumes you have the signing-party, graphviz and imagemagick packages installed. It grabs only the signatures on your OpenPGP key, downloads any keys that have signed your key that you may not have downloaded, places them in their own public keyring, then uses that information to graph your Web of Trust. Here’s the script:

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#!/bin/bash
# Replace $KEY with your own KEYID
KEY="22EEE0488086060F"
echo "Getting initial list of signatures..."
gpg --with-colons --fast-list-mode --list-sigs $KEY | awk -F ':' '$1 ~ /sig|rev/ {print $5}' | sort -u > ${KEY}.ids
echo "Refreshing your keyring..."
gpg --recv-keys $(cat ${KEY}.ids) > /dev/null 2>&1
echo "Creating public keyring..."
gpg --export $(cat ${KEY}.ids) > ${KEY}.gpg
echo "Creating dot file..."
gpg --keyring ./${KEY}.gpg --no-default-keyring --list-sigs | sig2dot > ${KEY}.dot 2> ${KEY}.err
echo "Creating PostScript document..."
neato -Tps ${KEY}.dot > ${KEY}.ps
echo "Creating graphic..."
convert ${KEY}.ps ${KEY}.gif
echo "Finished."

It may take some time to download and refresh your keyring, and it may take some time generating the .dot file. Don’t be surprised if it takes 5-10 minutes, or so. However, when it finishes, you should end up with something like what is below (it’s obvious when you’ve attended keysigning parties by the clusters of strength in your web):

Click for a larger version

There will be Linaro Connect Asia next week. Which means: I am going to Hong Kong today. 21-22 hours trip like usual. This time through Helsinki ;)

But recently I started to count and got quite long list of Linaro events I attended so far:

• 2010.05 UDS/M – Brussels, Belgium
• 2010.07 Ubuntu/Linaro sprint in Prague, Czech Republic
• 2010.10 UDS/N – Orlando, FL, USA
• 2011.01 Ubuntu/Linaro sprint in Dallas, TX, USA
• 2011.05 LC + UDS/O – Budapest, Hungary
• 2011.07 Ubuntu/Linaro sprint in Dublin, Ireland
• 2011.10 LC + UDS/P – Orlando, FL, USA
• 2012.02 LC – Redwood City, CA, USA
• 2012.05 LC – Hong Kong, China
• 2012.11 LC + UDS/R – Copenhagen, Denmark

The “Linaro Connect” name is quite young and I do not remember which event got this name first. There will be three of them this year: Asia, Europe, US. But when and where? Do not ask me cause so far it was not announced yet.

So if any of my readers will be in Hong Kong next week — please say hi. And there will be Chromebook hacking session on Tuesday at 15:00 in Fountain 1 room (but please check schedule/ask me if not changed).

Related content:

1. Trips in 2011
2. Events in 2012 which I will attend

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I am going to Hong Kong was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

“Steam”, “Ubuntu TV”, “Ubuntu Phone”, “Ubuntu Tablet”, “Ubuntu for Android”.

12 months ago these keywords were merely ideas, possibilities that were seemingly unclear. Skip forward to today and we have a totally different perspective. Steam is on Ubuntu. Developer previews have been released for the phone and tablet. Unity is mature on the desktop. Fast, functional, easy-to-use and visually appealing.

With the increased use of Google+ Hangouts, ala Ubuntu OnAir, I think it’s certainly worth trying to use the technology to host more frequent sprints and community-wide discussion.

Unfortunately, for the dubbed UDS-1303, the sessions are being held between 1am-7am local time. In effect, I’ll be able to participate (read: watch) the summaries and lightning talk sessions.

Hopefully the next UDS-(1305?) will be scattered along different time zones.

I've just read through Rick Spencer's argument for rolling releases in the Ubuntu Devel mailing list but I'm frankly less convinced than I was before.

Let's get one thing clear: The VP of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical, Rick Spencer writes a mean proposal. Honestly. I deal with more than a fair amount of marketing copy-writing and I can tell you it's a great pitch. It's completely decided in its stance and it uses emotive and empowering power-words like converge, velocity and agility. You'll find nothing but the finest propaganda here.

Anyway, here's my interpretation — a paraquote, if you will — of Rick's whole argument:

We spend too much time supporting old, haggered software that no users actually want, and not enough on shiny new things.

We frustrate people by being up to six months behind the curve, we end up rushing new features and integrations because of the arbitrary time limit and we already rock at getting things right first time with Daily Quality... so why not move to a rolling release?

It's better for users, maintainers and the rest of us if we all just use one codebase for everything (including phones and all that). That will give us the time to improve things at a faster and more stable rate.

Again, that is just my interpretation. You can read the full post and make your own. I have some reservations based on what the post suggests to be true and some of the "remedies" for those problems also seem to carry risks and downsides. Here are my key problems with a rolling system:

Newer is not always better.

The biggest elephant in the room. Newer can mean fixes and features but it often means new bugs, freshly lapsing documentation and a new wave of angry users when their things just stop working.

A culture of constant-updates may also rely on waiting for the next upstream version instead of getting stuck in and fixing otherwise low hanging fruit.

Users can already upgrade any parts they want.

The relevant teams make sure that the latest graphics packages and wifi drivers are available and backported and for everything else PPAs have revolutionised the upgrade system.

If you want the latest version of PHP, Chrome or KDE, you just install a PPA and you accept the risk. If it doesn't work you can just ppa-purge it out of the system and you're back to solid, stable ground.

Rolling means a constantly moving target.

Developers don't know what they're building for. Users barely know what they're running on. Triagers need to work five times as hard to track down which version of which software a bug is coming from. What happens to bugs after the new release comes out? How on earth do you plan a multi-month project (eg: migrating Upstart to Systemd) when you have no way to freeze and force everything else to fit around you?

And what about the "stable ABI" we've been honking on about to app developers and ISVs?

It's hard enough for open-source developers to keep up but now you've got a bunch of closed source stuff sailing on this ship. This is only possible because we promised we'd remain a solid platform and be respectful with system changes.

The successful marketing of this feature (along with other things coming into alignment) mean gaming on Linux is right in the process of taking off. And you want to shoot it down with ABI instability? Awesome. Call off the year of the Linux Desktop!

The argument that ISVs only care about LTS is the funniest thing I've read all day. ISVs are paid to care about what their customers whine about. Take gamers as a market example. If developers don't support Ubuntu-NG, most of their market has just evaporated. You can't think about Ubuntu as a B2B software platform. The future is going to be full of B2C and I2C sales and if you can't support the developers, they're not going to support your platform.

Converge is a lie. There is no convergence yet.

Ubuntu Touch is possibly the least unified Ubuntu in the family. Different kernel. Different display server. Different interface. Different interface toolkit. Different application API. You can't jolly on about being from the same codebase when it's completely different stuff.

I'm sure this will change in the future but until desktop Unity runs on QML, offering similar API hooks to applications, I'm not even going to entertain the idea that there's convergence. It's a nice hopeful word but it has no relation to Ubuntu at the moment.

Daily Quality is good enough? Release quality still isn't good enough!

I deal with Joe the average user on a daily basis. They've downloaded Ubuntu and it doesn't work. Or they've upgraded and their sound doesn't work. Or they can't get a graphical environment. Or the wifi doesn't work. This is the staple of question on Ask Ubuntu. We'll get a few hundred of these every week without fail.

Joe still occasionally has a really bad time with Ubuntu because Joe wasn't there when Ubuntu was in its 6-month development phase. Joe could have downloaded the testing ISO or upgraded but they didn't so when the big upgrade finally happened on release day, they ran into a hardware-specific bug in the Kernel or X.

A rolling release is going to create a few thousand Joes every upgrade and will turn Ask Ubuntu and Launchpad into cesspits of poorly updated bug reports. Thanks.

We urgently need to look at improving how users handle their own hardware issues because the current models are unhelpful to developers and painful for both the users and the support team. Building new tools to automatically fix issues should be the focus.

So, back to your question, why now?

Ubuntu has proven itself. I don't agree with everything that's happened technically or in the community to date but the Ubuntu ecosystem appears to be the healthiest it has ever been. It isn't there yet and it needs to keep improving but why would you want to knock out the foundations at this point?

I might be completely wrong and rolling might work but we lose nothing if we stick with the 6-month cadence... What is the risk of switching to rolling? Embarrassment? Losing users? Collapsing the community? *Is any of that really worth it?*