The Kubuntu Council terms for David Wonderly, Harald Sitter, and Jonathan Thomas expire on 2013-05-20. This is a call for nominations for the Kubuntu Council to elect three members.

The term will be for two years, 2013-05-21 to 2015-05-20.

As in the past, the election will be conducted using CIVS (Condorcet Internet Voting Service). The top three ranking vote recipients will be elected.

Schedule:

Nomination period: Now to 2013-05-01
Ballot Preparation: 2013-05-01 to 2013-05-04
Voting Period: 2013-05-04 to 2013-05-20
End Poll/Results Announced: 2013-05-20
New Term Begins: 2013-05-21

Eligibility:

All Kubuntu Members are eligible to be nominated and to vote. If you have a public email address in launchpad, you need take no further action to receive your voting ballot. If you do not have a public email address, please contact me offlist with the address you’d like your ballot sent to, otherwise you will be unable to vote.

Nominations:

All Kubuntu Members are eligible. The Kubuntu Council is intended to represent all of the Kubuntu community. Applications from involved non-developers are encouraged. If you are nominating someone else, please confirm their willingness to serve before nominating them. Nominations should be done in public via either kubuntu-users or kubuntu-devel mailing lists. If there is some extraordinary reason that precludes that, contact me directly.

Commitment:

The Kubuntu Council is the leadership body of Kubuntu. Members of the council are expected to be active in Kubuntu. The Kubuntu Council has three primary roles:
- Approve development plans for future Kubuntu releases
- Approve Kubuntu membership applications
- Resolve disputes within the Kubuntu project

The time commitment is not large. Meetings are generally only once every several months and conducted via IRC.

Questions:

If there are questions, you can contact me (preferably) via this mailing list or (if really necessary) via direct mail.

Scott K
For the Kubuntu Council

Port-a-thon

I can’t believe it hasn’t even been a week since we announced the availability of the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview images. We also put instructions out to contribute to the effort and specifically how to port Ubuntu Touch to new devices.

In the recent Ubuntu Development Hangout with some members of the Ubuntu Touch team I mentioned it already: these people are heroes. They’ve worked day and night and it was a pleasure to put the porting guide and Port-a-thon event together with them.

After that it has been very satisfying to be subscribed to the Ubuntu Touch devices list. We started with four devices, on which Ubuntu ran right from the start. The reference devices so to speak. Fast-forward 5-6 days and we have images and instructions for 15 other devices. FIFTEEN!

On this list currently are: Asus Transformer Infinity, Asus Transformer Pad TF300T, Galaxy Nexus (toro + toroplus), Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wifi, HTC Desire, HTC DNA, Huawei Ascend G300, Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Note II, Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000), Sony Xperia S, Sony Xperia T, VZ SGSIII.

If your device is on the list and you’re curious, head to the devices list and find out how to get the new Ubuntu Touch hotness straight to your device.

Another 22 ports are work-in-progress with developers or teams of developers working on them.

Update 2013-02-27 17:56 UTC: it’s 23.

Thanks a lot to everyone who helped make this happen. If you’re curious what’s happening, make sure you join the ubuntu-phone mailing list and ubuntu-touch IRC channel. More info on the Contribute page.

JAMS!

Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up this weekend (1-3 March) and if you have a look at the list of events, you can see that from Tempe to Tehran we have events lined up where people get together to make Ubuntu better. With all the excitement around Ubuntu Touch, we added instructions to the Ubuntu Global Jam page on how to help by either testing, porting or writing apps.

If you don’t have an event nearby or your team is too spread out over the state or country, you could at least still get together on IRC or over Hangouts. We have docs on how to run an event.

Was about to blog about the 0.2.0 release yesterday, but some bugs sneaked in at the last minute, so here comes Homerun 0.2.1. Here is an overview of the main changes.

"Single runner query mode" support

Homerun 0.1.x can show results from KRunner runners through the Runner source, which lets you combine a set of runners and query them for results.

A little-known feature of KRunner runners is the "Single runner query mode". This feature means Homerun can take advantage of these special runners to display a list of items without requiring the user to search for something.

This makes it possible, for example, to add the Activity runner to your Home tab and switch between running activities, or to add the Kate or KDevelop session runners and get a quick list of available sessions.

In Homerun 0.2.1, these runners are directly listed as Homerun sources in edit mode, making it easy to add them to your tabs.

This is still experimental though: one important limitation right now is that there is no way for such sources to refresh themselves. This means that your list of activities is not going to update itself as you start or stop activities. It also means the "Recent documents" runner is not yet a suitable replacement for the "Recent documents" source since it cannot refresh itself :/

Multiple actions per item

Homerun sources now have the ability to expose additional actions for each item.

The other actions are accessible through a context menu, which can be triggered by:

• Left-clicking the arrow in the top-right corner of the item
• Long-clicking the item
• Right-clicking the item
• Pressing M or the "Menu" key

File-oriented sources like the "Dir", "Recent Documents" and "Favorite Places" sources take advantage of this by showing relevant "Open With" actions and a "Properties" action. This makes it possible to open a file with another application or to open a folder with Dolphin instead of browsing it within Homerun.

The "Recent Documents" source also adds an action to let you remove an item from the list.

Actions exposed by runners are also displayed in this context menu.

Note that favorite handling has also been moved to this menu, making it more unlikely to remove a favorite place by mistake.

Improved Power tab

The Power tab received a few improvements:

• Unavailable sleep modes are not listed anymore.
• Opened sessions are now directly listed below the session items, making it fast and easy to switch between opened sessions.

Visual changes

Homerun is a fullscreen launcher, it is now even more fullscreen: the borders around the screen has been removed, reducing clutter a bit.

Header titles are now aligned to the left of the screen, they look less odd on tabs which do not have many items, such as the Power tab.

In containment mode, a shadow is now shown behind the text. This improves the readability of text over highly-constrasted wallpapers.

Conclusion

That's it for this version. You can get it from download.kde.org. Note that this new version requires KDE SC 4.10.

Recently Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager, has annouced that UDS-S for Oakland, USA will be cancelled. Instead Ubuntu Developer Summits will be held online every three months, and the first one: Next WEEK.

This is quite a problem.

1. Tell us earlier!!!! We all are expected to UDS-S in May. Some even booked their flight tickets and hotel vouchers, and now suddenly Canonical is telling us to cancel the reservations…. Give us a pre-notice at least please.

2. What to plan? For example, for the coming UDS in March, it’s in the middle of the Raring release cycle, and FeatureFreeze is already coming up. Of course some might say that Canonical is trying to get rid of non-LTS releases. I do think so.

3. Timezone. I’m at UTC+8, and planned UDS sessions will start at 16:00 UTC. That’s basically midnight for me.

4. Friendship. People tend to get close in UDS. Will this ever happen online?

5. Length. Two days wasn’t actually enough, considering the length of past UDS summits.

6. Away from community. One of the Ubuntu Studio developers thought it would be an act to move away from the *community* which means contributors mot getting along together.

7. Budget. Is Canonical really want to save up budget to develop that they don’t want to sponsor people anymore?

I hope Canonical can really think about this idea twice (maybe thrice).

Are you tired of typing a hostname, username, password and WiFi password every time you flash Nexus7 with Ubuntu Core images?

Do you wish to automate those boring steps?

Do you wish you could reboot into fastboot mode over ssh without reaching and fiddling with volume down and power keys?

Now you can!

$ bzr branch lp:~ubuntu-nexus7/ubuntu-nexus7/preseed

Has a nifty command called

$ ./prepare-preseed

By default it takes preseed.cfg, attempts to copy wifi.cfg or fetch current active WiFi connection settings from Network Manager's /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/* downloads latest bootimg and twiddles it to include all of the above.

After that you can fastboot flash standard user-data image + this cusom bootimg and voila, upon fastboot reboot ubiquity will come up and will automatically answer all the questions for you and boot into desktop with wifi connected.

If you want to customize settings simply edit the sample preseed.cfg.
If you do not want to always type in sudo password to get the network password you can run:

$ ./get-network-info > wifi.cfg

After that each reflash will be a breeze and not require root password. (Note that I uploaded udev rules in fastboot a while a go to allow using fastboot as a non-privileged user, if you need to support more devices please file bugs against android-tools with the output of lsusb when your device is connected).

So what about rebooting back into fastboot mode?

Well, I recently uploaded upstart 1.6.1-1ubuntu3 into Raring that supports:

$ sudo reboot -f bootloader

That will get you back into fastboot mode.

Happy Hacking everyone!

My laptop is sitting a few meters away from me. I'm behind a desktop in the same /24. I'd like to SSH to this laptop, but don't know its IP address. On this network there are quite a few machines, mostly macs. How do I find the IP address?

Arp and nc to the rescue! First we arp-scan the network, then we find SSH versions.

$for h in $(arp-scan --localnet | grep 10.15 | cut -f1); do echo -ne "$h\t"; (echo "" | nc -w1 $h 22 || echo)|head -n1; done | grep ubuntu
10.15.3.28    SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.9p1 Debian-5ubuntu1
10.15.3.73    SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_6.0p1 Debian-3ubuntu1
10.15.3.158    SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.8p1 Debian-7ubuntu1
10.15.3.185    SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_6.0p1 Debian-3ubuntu1

Of course it was the last one I needed :)

That day had to come. It was just a matter of time. Debian bootstrapped new architecture port using just own tools and packages…

It was long trip. During last few years we saw bigger amount of work spent in Debian/Ubuntu on cross building packages. Then were Google Summer of Code projects on bootstrapping Debian and one for multiarch cross toolchains. And we had Wookey with his ideas, knowledge and abilities to get one thing to work on for months in a way that managers were agreeding that it needs another month and another ;)

And today I found an email from Wookey about AArch64 port. I suggest you to read it as it has a lot of information. You can find ready to use rootfs there which (connected with kernel from OpenEmbedded) boots to fresh Ubuntu 13.04:

Ubuntu Raring Ringtail (development branch) localhost ttyAMA0 localhost login: root Last login: Thu Jan 1 00:07:37 UTC 1970 on ttyAMA0 Welcome to Ubuntu Raring Ringtail (development branch) (GNU/Linux 3.8.0 aarch64) * Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/ root@localhost:~# uname -a Linux localhost 3.8.0 #1 SMP Wed Feb 20 14:31:07 CET 2013 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

You need to have patience as Upstart needs to run lot of stuff before it gives login prompt.

Still lot of work required as there are many patches to packaging waiting for being merged but I think that it is a big day for Debian and all distributions derived from it.

Related content:

1. AArch64 porting update
2. Going for FOSDEM

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
AArch64 port of Debian/Ubuntu is alive! was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Now that UDS will be purely online, it’s also moved from using tools for remote participation based in FOSS (such as IRC, icecast, and etherpad (previously gobby) to one requiring use of Google+.  So if the Google+ privacy policy is not your cup of tea, then no UDS for you.

Correction: As Jono pointed out in the comments, there will be etherpad and IRC, just Google+ replacing icecast. I don’t think that changes the fundamental point though.