Unfortunately 13.04′s Ubuntu Developer Week is over. All the logs and videos are linked from the timetable, so you can still enjoy the sessions again and again. We hope you had a great time and we will see you soon again in one of our Ubuntu development channels.

Here’s what happened on day 3:

1. Automated Testing in Ubuntu & Automated Testing Technologies — Martin Pitt did a great job of summarising the current work in the Quality Assurance team. It’s getting more and more important to automatically assure us that software we rely on still provides the functionality we expect and nothing breaks. Check out the log and get an idea of how diverse the activities are and where you can get involved.
2. Syncing your app’s data with u1db — Stuart Langridge has been involved in Ubuntu One since ages and knows how to make app authors happy. If you want simple data storage and syncing without headaches, have a look at u1db and Stuart’s introduction to u1db!
3. Interacting with Debian’s Bug Tracking System — You explain things best if you talk about things you make use of every day. As Stefano Rivera is both a Debian and Ubuntu developer, this talk was quite easy to deliver for him. Debian’s Bug Tracking System is a central place of exchange between the two projects and Stefano’s session will surely make it clearer to you.
4. Building Ubuntu images & The Ubuntu Nexus 7 images — Oliver Grawert has been building Ubuntu images for various platforms for quite a few cycles already, so he knows the problems you probably run into most. His sessions give some good insight into what’s involved in bringing Ubuntu up on all kinds of devices.
5. Fixing packages to cross-build — As a member of the Foundations team Dmitrijs Ledkovs has gathered quite some experience cleaning up problems, including build problems in the archive for a while now. Check out the session to find out how to make packages build for other architectures most easily. Get involved in fixing these issues once and for all.
6. Developers Roundtable — Benjamin Drung and Michael Bienia were kind enough to take on the last session of UDW and answer all the remaining questions regarding Ubuntu development. Be sure to check out the log as your favourite question might well be among the ones answered.

Oh, and before we forget it: join us in the Automated Testing Hackfest today!

In a couple of hours, I'll be taking the train and heading to Brussels for FOSDEM. I've lost counts of how many FOSDEM I've attended, which is probably a good indication of how great the event is!

As usual, this will be a good place to catch up with friends, but also to talk with tons of different people about so many topics. If you want to chat about OpenStack, SUSE Cloud, openSUSE or GNOME, I'll be glad to join you.

The schedule is quite packed, but from what I can tell so far, I'll be sitting in the cloud devroom on Sunday (don't hesitate to join in order to learn about what's happening in the OpenStack world!). Oh, I'll also give a talk in Janson about challenges that the GNOME project is facing, just before the closing keynote.

And no, I won't have my blue hat, so you'll need to find another way to catch me (hint: I have a SUSE backpack nowadays) ;-)

Back in January, the Classroom team hosted Section 1 of the Quality Assurance sessions for this cycle, logs here. During the week of February 4th, the Classroom team is happy to report that we will be hosting a series of sessions given by phillw, Gema, Noskcaj, letozaf, SergioMeneses, and primes2h!

Section 2: Reporting Bugs

These sessions will be an introduction to reporting bugs

This section will be held in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions).

Introduction to bug reporting

• Wednesday, Feb 6th at 1600 UTC
• Instructor: phillw
• Duration: 1 hour

Following a bug report

• Wednesday, Feb 6th at 1700 UTC
• Instructor: Gema
• Duration: 30 minutes

Laptop testing

In this section, several of our instructors will be guiding users through the basics of laptop testing!

This section will be held in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions).

Registering your laptop on the database

• Thursday, Feb 7th at 2000 UTC
• Instructors: letozaf, SergioMeneses, and primes2h
• Duration: 1 hour

Testing on a laptop

• Thursday, Feb 7th at 2100 UTC
• Instructors: letozaf, SergioMeneses, and primes2h
• Duration: 1 hour

Section 3: Introduction to QA tools

Now learn more tools of the Ubuntu QA trade!

Due to overlap with Ubuntu User Days in the classroom channels on Saturday, these classes will be hosted in #ubuntu-quality on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-quality-chat for questions).

These sessions and beyond will require people to have various things pre-installed, please see to Section 3 requirements for the details.

Introduction to QA tools; Zsync, Vbox, KVM

• Saturday, Feb 9th at 1900 UTC
• Instructor: phillw
• Duration: 3 hours

Using Testdrive

• Saturday, Feb 9th 2200 UTC
• noskcaj
• Duration: 60 minutes

The full details and any last minute changes will be available here on this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Activities/Classroom

Some news from Gwenview world:

New mailing-list

One year ago, I decided to replace Gwenview mailing list with a forum. The idea behind that move being that forums were more adapted for user support.

Gwenview forum is doing quite well: there are more users helping each others there than what used to happen on the mailing-list. I assume this is because there are more users on KDE forums.

One thing happened during this cycle, though: a new contributor, Benjamin Löwe, joined and has been very active on Gwenview. Therefore I decided it would be a good idea to create a developer mailing-list: gwenview-devel.

Gwenview 2.10.0 is dead, long live Gwenview 4.10.0!

Until now Gwenview has always been using its own version number, which was the same as KDE SC version number, except the major was 2 instead of 4. For example, the version of Gwenview which came KDE SC 4.9.5 was 2.9.5.

This made sense to me because the version of Gwenview shipped with KDE SC 4.0.0 was the first major rewrite of Gwenview: so I bumped the version number to 2.0.0.

Even if it made sense to me, people were often confused by these two version numbers. Furthermore, Benjamin pointed out that since we used 2.y.z in the "FIXED-IN" Bugzilla field, our fixes did not show up in KDE SC release changelogs. Therefore I decided to bump the version to 4.10.0. No more confusion!

More reviews

Benjamin and I have been busy fixing as much bugs as possible for the 4.10.0 release. I am quite happy that almost all the latest commits have gone through review before landing in the KDE/4.10 branch.

I believe doing more reviews will help improve the quality of Gwenview code and avoid regressions. To this end I decided to start asking for review for my own code as well. Gwenview has been mostly a one-man project until now, so I committed directly to master. Now that the bus factor has been multiplied by 2, it is possible to get all code reviewed before it lands in master.

That's it for now, time to plan 4.11!

(PS: I am going to FOSDEM, see you in Brussels!)

It seems very incredible, but I’ve already arrived at my third week of this wonderful adventure that this OPW is representing for me.

Almost a quarter of this trip is over and I’m here to tell what I’ve done.

Marketing work is hidden, but I knew it. All the subtle details you see, even those you don’t notice, require painstaking labor, and there is much I’ve done, much I’m working on and, of course, much I’ve planned to do.

Article about Keyboard data.

GNOME desktop is released in many localized versions. GNOME developers refer to a database to predict which keyboard layouts are relevant to a user. The developers are collecting data to fix database bugs and to improve localization.

This is the post I’ve written (thanks to Allan for his patience!) and this is the project page.

 Next article instead will concern Andrea Veri, who has joined GNOME as a part-time SysAdmin: we’ve already discussed the key elements of this post, and write it will be one of the tasks I’ll devote the next few days.

Interviews! Interviews!

I’ve been asked by Karen to help her in preparing some interviews to very cool GNOME 3 users.

And the first one is really really cool: Greg Kroah-Hartman.

 What I’ve done is to compose a draft for a questionnaire, divided in three sections: the first one with some general questions about how and when the interviewee began to use GNOME3, which part of GNOME 3 she/he likes most, if they use extensions, and so on.

The second part strictly depends on interviewee, there are questions involving her/his interests; the third part consists of tips for newcomers and the request for a quote: I believe our interviewees are inspiring people, and I like to ask them who/what has been inspiring for them.

I’ve sent everything to Greg, I hope to make this interview public very soon, I’m very excited and proud of this work.

Many thanks to Karen for making my questions smarter – she is an awesome donna. -

Now I’m planning to interview Brett Legree, I’m wondering what can I ask a nuclear engineer!

Outreach project.

This is probably the project that will ask my effort during all my OPW.

Sriram asked me to do marketing research about newcomers: to list key elements in successful outreach.

What I’ve found is that, generally, a successful outreach depends from a good mentorship.

As Sriram has brilliantly summarized, you need a human touch.

But this is only the first step to plenty understand how can GNOME Community becoming as welcoming as it desires to be.

I was planning to prepare a survey to submit to newcomers, current and past OPW and SoC interns, but Marina suggested me to contact Kevin Carrillo, who reached out to several open source communities with a survey in late 2012, focusing on outreach activities, and got hundreds of responses.

We got in touch and now we’ll work together for a while.

I don’t know where we’ll arrive, but we’re going.

FoG meme.

More than a project, this is an idea I had.

I was drinking a cup of tea from my GNOME mug, and I thought that could be funny make and share a G+ post showing the mug and linking FoG campaign (this is my post).

I work very much to this post, that in my idea should be re-shared like a “meme”.

Unfortunately, at moment this post is still unsatisfying, is lacking of groove and even if Juanjo Marin spent some of his night-time time to work on it with me, I’m not sure this project will be completed.

Ok, I suppose that for this time is really enough!

If you like, you could put an eye on my sandbox, where I write-up my ideas…

For all the rest…stay tuned, news are arriving!

#ubuntu-offtopic is often quite funny, but we’re really all just accidental and often oblivious comedians. This is why levo decided to bite the bullet and simply ask if anyone might be aware of something more professional. Turns out this valuable piece of information is the sole property of IdleOne, and it ain’t cheap. For shame!

We all want more quality. We all wasted too many hours trying to fix broken software and we all know that new users struggle the most when facing crashes or other unexpected results. We probably all also agree that testing is a good idea and if it’s automated, then that’s even better.

Automatically exercising large parts of some software’s functionality helps a lot in guaranteeing that things still work, even if the code or some underlying foundations change. The idea is to write the test-case once and have it do its work whenever bits change and let us know if things break unexpectedly – especially before users run into bugs.

Tomorrow, 1st February 2013, we are going to hang out in #ubuntu-quality on irc.freenode.net to have a Hackfest about Automated Testing.

So what’s going to happen there?

• We are going to have seasoned Ubuntu developers who will introduce you to autopilot (for UI testing) and autopkgtest (for integrating tests with the package in a more general sense).
• We have a list of tests we want to work on together (but you can work on your own tests if you like as well).
• We are going to have lots of fun and make Ubuntu a better place.

If you are interested, that’s great, because this is one of the coolest contributions to Ubuntu you can make. For autopkgtest it might be good to have at least a bit experience with scripting or programming, for autopilot less so. Be curious, be there, make Ubuntu better!

Check out our docs here and see you tomorrow!

 

Ubuntu Developer Week is passing by much too quickly, as always. Still it’s great to see how many new people get involved, find out more about Ubuntu Development and get involved. Day 2 was yesterday and brought us many great sessions. Here’s what happened yesterday:

1. How to write apps for Ubuntu — dpm: David Planella was well prepared as always and gave some good insights into what it takes to take an app from idea to a working app. He got quite a number of questions during the session, so I guess we can expect more apps coming to Ubuntu soon.
2. Ubuntu App review process explained — coolbhavi: Bhavani Shankar explained the next step in terms of apps and demonstrated how a typical App Review works. Unfortunately the session was interrupted by a bot misbehaving towards the end, but lots of questions were still answered.
3. Finding memory leaks — achiang (Hangout!): Memory leaks can become huge problems in no time, and sometimes it’s not easy to debug or fix them. Alex Chiang is passionate about fixing them and provided a great session about how and where to start.
4. Testing with autopilot — balloons: Nicholas Skaggs and Thomi Richards are becoming the autopilot double-act (you will likely see them in tomorrow’s Automated Testing Hackfest as well). They gave a very nice introduction into autopilot and how to use it to test UI elements properly. Be sure to check it out and make good use of it.
5. Unity integration — mhall119: Michael Hall, the author of “Hello Unity” and things like “singlet” knows how Unity works and how best to integrate your apps with it. It’s these finishing touches which make your app stand out and give the users the nice feeling of a seamless experience.

Here’s what’s on for today. Hope to see you all there!

• 15:00 UTC – Automated Testing in Ubuntu — pitti
• 16:00 UTC – Syncing your app’s data with u1db — aquarius
• 17:00 UTC – Interacting with Debian’s Bug Tracking System — tumbleweed
• 17:30 UTC – Building Ubuntu images — ogra
• 18:00 UTC – The Ubuntu Nexus 7 images — ogra
• 18:30 UTC – Fixing packages to cross-build – xnox
• 19:00 UTC – Developers Roundtable — bdrung & geser

This is the last day of this cycle’s UDW, so make sure you let your friends know and show up yourself. Join in!