as you may have noticed, updates to this blog are few and far between. Sadly, I’ve found it harder and harder to find Xubuntu-related material to blog about. I imagine it’s because I’ve shifted more towards GNOME and Openbox. That being said, I felt that was no reason to go months without blogging. To make up for it, I’ve decided to start a more general-purpose Linux blog:

http://toodumbforgentoo.wordpress.com/

Unlike this blog, this one won’t be tied to any certain niche. It’ll basically run on the basis of posting whatever I like whenever I like. That being said, I won’t be abandoning this blog altogether. My blog partner Vincent will still be around to make posts, and I’ll probably pop in and blog from time to time.

It’s been a great 2 years with this blog, but now I feel it’s time to move on to something more.

That meeting led to several decisions, the most important one being that Cody Somerville was appointed as Xubuntu’s project leader and assigned to create a strategy for Xubuntu, so that everybody knows where Xubuntu stands and what its goals are.

Well, Cody set to the task and, after gathering feedback at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, came up with the first draft of what is to be the Xubuntu Strategy Document.

This being a first draft, everybody is invited to send feedback to Cody’s email address cody-somerville@ubuntu.com.

My first impression was that Cody did a great job on this one: Xubuntu has a bright future ahead under his lead

This how-to is extremely easy and short, but it helps me work with one of my favourite programs. In short: uninstall jackd.

1) Go to Xfce Menu > Accessories > Terminal, and enter in the following:

sudo apt-get remove jackd

Reopen up Audacity. Hopefully, it should start working again as it should. If not, you may have to quit the jackd program. Go back to the terminal and enter the following:

killall jackd

Now Audacity should be working just as it did before. Good luck!

(Credit goes to http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4812244&postcount=5.)

As some of you already know, I’m in the process of applying to Google’s
Summer of Code as a mentoring organisation. Xfce applied in 2006, but
wasn’t accepted. I don’t really know why, but hopefully this year we
can do a bit better. To that end, I’ve created a few pages on our wiki,
and people have been working on them for the past couple weeks:

http://wiki.xfce.org/gsoc-2008-ideas

http://wiki.xfce.org/gsoc-2008-mentors

http://wiki.xfce.org/gsoc-2008-students

Now, we won’t know if we’ve been accepted into the program until March
17th. However, I’d like to generate some interest for our participation
in the program; in particular, I’d like to get some names on that
‘students’ wiki page.

So, if you don’t mind, if you have a blog, or some other means of
publishing to a group of people (via means other than spam, of course),
could you please do a little advertising for us? Just point out that
we’re applying to the program, we’re looking for student participants,
and give a link to our wiki page (the main ‘ideas’ page).

Thanks!

He also posted the following on his blog:

While we haven’t been accepted into the program yet, we (Xfce) are applying to participate in the 2008 Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organisation. Please see our wiki page for more information, and add your name to the students list if you’d like to work on one of the projects. Feel free to add to the project ideas list as well.

If you’d like to act as a mentor, you still have a few more days before I submit the application. Add your name to the mentors list and email me to let me know.

The message is simple: if you’re a student that likes Xfce and would like to earn some money improving it over the summer, be sure to add your name to the list so Google can see there are students willing to participate, hopefully being a reason for approving Xfce.

If you own a personal website, a blog, or happen to know a student passionate about Xfce: spread the word! This is an excellent opportunity to improve upon our favourite desktop environment, so make sure Xfce can grab it!

An idea on brainstorm can easily be linked to a Launchpad blueprint as well as to a bug or a forum discussion thread. In this way we expect to bridge the locations where ideas are often submitted now, as forum posts or bug reports, with the blueprint format they should be expressed in to be implemented.

Here are the current ideas for Xubuntu: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=Xubuntu&ordering=mostvotes

Do you have an idea that you’ve been itching to share with the developers, but didn’t know how? Now’s your chance to post it at the Brainstorm!

1) If you haven’t already, install audio-convert. To do so, open up a terminal (Xfce Menu > Accessories > Terminal) and run the following:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-script-audio-convert

2) Next, open up the Thunar file manager and go to Edit > Configure custom actions…. Click the Add (plus) sign and put in the following:

a) Under the Basic tab:

Name: audio-convert
Command: /usr/share/nautilus-scripts/ConvertAudioFile %f

b) Under the Appearance Conditions tab:

Put a checkmark next to Audio files. Click Ok and exit out of the actions manager.

Now you can right click any audio file and go to audio-convert. audio-convert will do the work from there. Enjoy!

Hello Friends,

I am pleased to announce the immediate release of a brand new and sparkling, Fedora 8 Xfce Spin. Fedora Xfce Spin is a bootable Fedora Live CD image available for x86 and x86_64 architecture. It can be optionally installed to hard disk or converted into boot USB images and is ideal for Xfce fans and for users running Fedora on relatively low resource systems. As a additional bonus, this release rolls in updates for Fedora 8 released till yesterday (2008/02/12).

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment available in Fedora. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources. More information at http://xfce.org

Nicu has posted some screenshots, and it looks as if this spin-off is really focusing on being light-weight and minimalistic. Some Xubuntu users might want to give this a try – being based on Fedora might prevent the speed decrease Xubuntu has by being based on Ubuntu.

In any case, seeing another big distribution providing an Xfce version is always good news, so it will be interesting to read some reviews. Have you tried it? If so, how did you like it?

Luckily, David Mooney comes to the rescue: in a post to the xubuntu-users mailinglist, he explains how to restore GRUB:

If for some odd reason you missed having the Windows operating system and you decided to install it on another partition, you will notice your GRUB is missing afterwords. This usually happens and is a huge headache for those trying to get their GRUB back. Here’s what you need to do to get it back:

Put your bootable Ubuntu/Xubuntu install disk in the CD drive and run it. Instead of installing anything, click on the menu to open the terminal application.

In terminal mode, type the following:

sudo grub
find /boot/grub/stage1
root (x,y)
setup (x)
quit
sudo shutdown "now" -r

The resulting “find” command will display something like (hd0,1). In this example, you would then type root (hd0,1) and then setup (hd0) in the above area. These numbers might be different; that’s why I included the “find” command so that folks who might have their Ubuntu partitions located either in front or behind their Windows installation or on a completely separate internal/external hard drive so that you will get the appropriate/correct setup numbers.

Ok, now you got your GRUB-on, but what about that darn GRUB menu? It’s not displaying what you want it to display? Well, let just see here…

Upon reboot, select “Recovery Mode”, usuaully the second option down on the GRUB menu. This will allow you to boot into the root. Once you’re in the terminal mode, type:

editor /boot/grub/menu.lst

Well, the rest is pretty much self explanatory. There should be enough comments in the menu.lst to direct you to what you can and cannot do to your GRUB menu.lst.

I usually put the Windows option at the top of the menu so that others (none-Linux users) who use my computer can find it easily if they have to do a reboot. Your Windows installation will have a different root than your Ubuntu/Xubuntu, but it’s usually automatically placed by GRUB once it’s set up again (like the above). I also recommend removing the timeout option as this is sometimes annoying. Have fun!

-David

P.S.- If you have a question, I’ll be happy to answer to the best of my ability.

Thanks David!

Read the guide here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=653006

Getting them installed in Ubuntu is a breeze, thanks to a script I found.
To install the Vista ClearType fonts in Ubuntu, you need to install cabextract first. Cabextract is a utility found in the universe repository, so before you run the following command, make sure you have universe enabled in your repository list. Once this is done, install cabextract using:
$sudo apt-get install cabextract

Then, once that is done, use this script to install the Vista fonts. Create a file called “vista-fonts-installer.sh” in your home (~) directory.
Then open up a text editor and copy and paste the script into that file.
Do a chmod a+x ~/vista-fonts-installer.sh to make the file/script executable.
Then run the script using:
$ ~/vista-fonts-installer.sh

The script downloads the Powerpoint Viewer installer from microsoft.com, and then extracts the Vista cleartype fonts using cabextract. These fonts are then installed in the ~/.fonts directory.

Please remember that the ClearType Vista fonts are not free as in they are not GPL-ed or made available under a re-distributable license. Since you are downloading the fonts from the MS website, and since you might already have a Windows XP/Vista license, this is not a crime, but consider yourself warned against the perils of supporting closed systems

Update::

1. Looks like the use of these fonts are restricted to only Microsoft Windows/Vista operating systems according to the terms of the license. I am sorry, but you’ll be installing them at your own risk.
2. Also, please make sure you use the bash shell, or change the first line of the code to #!/bin/bash
3. In retrospect, this was a bad post – I think we’re better off not using stuff folks don’t want us to use – let’s use the better, freer, easier to install fonts.

Jorge, I for one, would love to see your mug again on Planet Ubuntu. I would love to see whiprush.org up and about again.

Jorge’s disappearance from the interwebs was followed by pleas for his return, about 9 months ago (you can find his last post here if you really want to). I used to love reading what Jorge had to say. It’s good to have him back in the Ubuntu world, now if only we could have his blog back too Welcome back, Jorge!

So when I had to find a replacement, and was short on time and money, I settled for another Acer. An Acer Aspire 5003 LMi. Piece of junk. The plastic looks cheap. The “Aluminum” next to the keyboard is poorly spray painted plastic. The area next to the touchpad, and the left-click button have lost all their paint due to repeated use, and then look white. All within a year. For the last few days, occasionally, I would open up the laptop, and the display wouldn’t work properly. Loud cracks can be heard at the hinges when I open it up. I’d usually fix the display problem by opening the lid to an angle where the display worked. Today it failed completely. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the display to display anything coherent. The quality of the parts, and the “casing”, is terrible. I admit, this was a cheap laptop, but it had what I needed at a minimum. I am not someone who buys the cheapest thing around. I buy computers with exactly the minimum I need. This one has a Broadcom wireless card, but I thought I could live with that for a bit. I don’t need a separate video card – I never play games. I do need a large screen, and a DVD-burner – well, you get the point. I would have gladly paid $250 more to Acer for the same laptop with better quality.

Personally, I have vouched for Acer laptops, and have directly influenced my friends into buying at least 3-4 Acers. Now I feel like an idiot. I have to try something new. I don’t like how ThinkPads are designed with the recessed screen and clunky looks and all. The Sony Vaios I have known through friends and others have all been terrible – each of them making the trip back to Sony at least once. That leave the glitzy HPs and the Dells. I’d rather have a MacBook or the Pro, which looks infinitely cooler. Wish I had the money for a new MacBookPro. It has way more features and power than I need, though. Anyways, I feel much better having written this – may those that I recommended Acers to find it in them to forgive me!

Trivial, I know, and not too original either, since I got it from LiveJournal, but I couldn’t resist posting this

However, the stat freak in me got another tool, and the results are surprising!

I did not have any clue that the number of 45-65 year olds that visit my site are above the average numbers for the internet by around 25-45%. Also, most of my visitors are as poor as I am, with an income of less than $30K a year. That is surprising when you realize that college graduates outnumber any other kind of visitor, based on education. Finally, the male-female disparity is not too high – I get 25% less female visitors, and 25% more male visitors than the average site. Here’s my quantcast report.

Now, like me, you must be thinking, what about ubuntu.com?
Maybe Canonical should sign up for the quantcast setup like WordPress.com and then we could start fixing the problem where, right now, my blog seems to get more visitors than ubuntu.com. Clearly, quantcast is orders-of-magnitude off with the numbers. Let’s hope the percentages are right when it comes to the demographics. If they are, then then, again, Ubuntu seems to attract a middle-aged, may I say “mature” crowd. Ubuntu.com attracts more Asian, Hispanics and “Others” than the average website out there. Also, “linux drivers” seems to be leading the charge of visitors to Ubuntu.com. It would be good to put something related to drivers – perhaps an article with links peppered throughout to the various compatibility resources and hardware profiling tools somewhere on the front page of help.ubuntu.com which seems to be quite a popular destination. Of course, if I had a say in how Ubuntu’s websites worked, I would first ensure that the help pages show up where they belong on Google searches. Somehow, I can’t seem to end up at the Ubuntu help wiki after a web search. I suspect the wiki software’s intricacies, and the “https://” (now why does a help wiki have to be served over https?), are partly responsible for that issue. You get the idea that shipit must be doing something right, since it seems to be quite a popular destination. Also, OpenSuse, FreeSpire and Damn Small Linux seem to the other Linux distributions that are popular among those that visit the Ubuntu website. Scanning the quantcast results might help lots of folks involved with planning, developing and marketing Ubuntu – whether it is deciding what/who to focus on, or finding out how meta-plans are working out.

As is often the case, I found something better than SecureCRT – a panel applet for GNOME that gives me a drop-down list of SSH connections. SSHMenu is cool, way too cool.


Above, you can see my list of ssh accounts in all their glory. A connection is just a click away.

When you set up the connections, you can specify the geometry – ie, where on your desktop you want the gnome-terminal window to pop up, as well as a “profile” for the gnome-terminal instance – very handy if you want to have different color schemes for different ssh accounts to be able to distinguish between them better.

What’s even better is, in the “Hostname (etc)” field, you can prepend ssh options to the hostname. The figure below shows my port forwarding setup for IRC at school, since I can’t chat using port 6667 at school.

There’s a Debian/Ubuntu repository for SSHMenu, and of course, nothing stops you from downloading the .deb packages and installing them if you don’t wish to add another repository to you list of repositories. I wonder how long before SSHMenu finds itself into the Ubuntu repositories

Once you get SSHMenu installed, you can add it to your panel by right-clicking on your GNOME panel, and selecting “Add to Panel”. SSHMenu should be listed as “SSH Menu Applet” under the “Utilities” section. Then all you have to do is use the tool to add accounts that pops-up when you install the applet, or add the accounts later by clicking on the “SSH” in your panel. However, this still doesn’t take us to “one-click” login, since you will be prompted for your password by the server you are trying to connect to.

To make the connections truly one-click (or two-click), you might want to setup password-less logins using ssh-keygen and ssh-copy-id. A quick overview of that process follows:
On your local computer, type:
$ssh-keygen -t rsa
When prompted for a password, you may want to enter none. If you enter a password there, you will have to enter it everytime you try to use the “passwordless” login, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Enter a password here. Then when you try to connect to the accounts using SSHMenu, you will asked for the password only once, the very first time. (Thanks to Grant, SSHMenu’s author for the explanation in the comments).

Once your RSA key-pair is generated, you need to add the public key to your server’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. You can do this very easily by typing (on your local computer):
$ssh-copy-id ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@example.com
This will copy your public key for the just-generated RSA keypair to the example.com ssh account, where your username is “username”.
Of course, for this passwordless login to work, the server needs to accept this method of authentication. There’s an old article at the Debian Administration blog that describes the process in a little more detail, and countless others have written about this, so you won’t have trouble finding info.

Should the save icon be replaced by something else (a picture of a cd/usb drive)? Or should floppy discs be “icon”ized forever?
Somehow, all these days, the above thought never occurred to me. That icon with a floppy drive in it meant “Save” and to be honest, I have failed to think “floppy” when I have seen the icon before.

Do I? I can honestly say I don’t. I write for the competent computer user who has switched to Ubuntu. Anything that 90-95% of the people who formerly used Windows or Macs, and are competent enough to help others won’t be published here. Guaranteed. I can say that since I have a target audience of one – myself before I knew what I wrote here. I write so that, some day in the future, when I search for a solution to a problem, I get the pleasure that only a goojà vu (google + déjà vu ) can provide – finding something you wrote as the result of a Google search is priceless.

There are some authors of blogs that write tutorials and guides that cover all and sundry. The installation of some software that should be pretty straightforward to install, and so on, ad nauseum. I understand that the pleasure of earning a check through Google’s adsense can be great, and I wish these authors good luck. There are also the book equivalent of these sites that really do treat Ubuntu users as dunces.

But Jem, what’s the problem with any of that? The world needed a “Linux for Dummies” – something that is inanely simple to install, setup, use and maintain – and that is exactly what Ubuntu is. Power users don’t need to fear it since it does not take away anything in doing that. So there you are – a Linux-based OS that is simple enough for the stupid and as (if not more) flexible and powerful than the best OSes out there. It’s not like there aren’t books out there that don’t address the intricacies of subjects that are technically complex. The wiki and the Official Ubuntu Book, not to mention all the documentation and books out there for Debian all address the power users’ documentation needs.

I was happy to read that article, especially the parallels drawn with how Mac users were once perceived the way the author perceives Ubuntu users now. I was happy because it is a sign that we are moving in the right direction – towards a “Linux for Human Beings” (regardless of IQ).

Well, by some strange coincidence, which cannot be explained rationally, I ran into her again on the tubes. I followed the user profile link at this comment on Ask MetaFilter to end up at her profile page.

Of the billions of unknown users of the internet, we are two.

What are the chances?, I ask you!! The mind blows.

In other news, there is no news – I’m on the slow track to the Ph.D.

The doctor said I had tenosynovitis – which is a member of the much talked-about Repetitive Strain Injuries. He advised me against using the laptop on my lap – this keep my hands all hunched up together. He also advised a couple of days of rest. So needless to say, I haven’t typed much over the weekend, though I wanted to write a short guide on implementing a Getting Things Done workflow in Linux. I had set things up for GTD the past week, and the search for tools that work on Linux was frustrating, to say the least. I finally had to narrow it down to an online tool that seems very capable of the task. I have been itching to write the article and yet have resisted.

Monday brought me back to work, and I thought I should look at options to reduce the risk of recurrence of the pain. For two reasons – the pain was real bad, and the doctor said that repeated occurrences of RSI would lead to the much-dreaded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and perhaps permanent numbness of the digits in my hands.

GNOME is very advanced when it comes to providing methods to save your hands.

There is the Typing Break in GNOME’s keyboard preferences dialog (System -> Preferences -> Keyboard). Here’s a snapshot:

It is easy enough to ask you computer to lock up every once in an hour or so for 5 minutes to enforce a break.

But for those of us who are not satisfied with a fly swatter to swat flies, there is workrave, with the little sheep for a mascot.

You can install workrave using:
$sudo apt-get install workrave

Once installed, you can add it to your panel as an applet by right-clicking on a panel and adding the applet:
.

Once on the panel, you get to right click on the panel applet and set preferences:

There’s a whole lot to choose from – you can choose to have micro-breaks of less than minute every 10 minutes, say. You can also enforce a longer break every hour or so. A break of 5 minutes every hour seems normal. You can also choose whether to be able to postpone the break when you get the warning of an impending break or not. A break can be either just a disabled keyboard, or a locked screen too, just so you don’t use your mouse to sneak a peek at you mail, or visitor stats

Workrave also has a neat feature where you can exercise your fingers, wrist, neck and arms during the break – there is an on-screen display of how to do the exercise and a virtual character does it with you. Marcel has written about workrave in detail and even has some more screenshots – including one of the dudette who does the exercises with you.

In addition to the forced typing breaks, I am thinking this would be a good time to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. The initial learning phase where typing gets really slow is what’s holding me back. Maybe that is one thing to filed under “someday/maybe” in my GTD system.

In the work to underpin a rolling release, we made huge strides in automated quality assessment and performance testing. From here on our, I’m going to treat the cutting edge of Ubuntu as a rolling release, because the team have done such an amazing job of making daily quality a reality. That’s a value that we have all adopted, and the project is much better off for it.

Slipping the phrase ‘ring ring’ into the codename of 13.04 was, frankly, a triumph of linguistic engineering. And I thought I might quit on a high… For a while, there was the distinct possibility that Rick’s Rolling Release Rodeo would absolve me of the  twice-annual rite of composition that goes into the naming of a new release. That, together with the extent of my travels these past few months, have left me a little short in the research department. I usually spend a few weekend afternoons doodling with a dictionary (it’s actually quite a blast, and I recently had the pleasure of actually knowing what some ponce was talking about when they described something as ‘rugose’).

So today I find myself somewhat short in the naming department, which is to say, I have a name, but not the soliloquy that usually goes with it!

Which is why, upon not very deep reflection, I would like to introduce you to our mascot for the next six months, the saucy salamander.

The salamander is one of nature’s most magical creatures; they are a strong indicator of a pristine environment, which is a fitting way to describe the new world emerging around Ubuntu Touch – new applications, a new SDK, a gorgeous clean interface. You’ll find salamanders swimming in clear, clean upstreams – which is exactly what’s forming around Ubuntu’s mobile ecosystem. It’s a way of saying ‘thank you’ to the tremendous community that has joined the effort to create a single unified experience from phone to PC, with tons of crisp and stylish core apps made by people from all over the world who want to build something fast, fresh and free. And we’re saucy too – life’s too short to be stodgy or stilted. Our work is our play – we make amazing things for a huge audience, we find space for pretty much every flavour of interface and do it with style.

Happy release day everyone! Here’s to a super saucy cycle.

It’s obviously not helpful to have mass hysteria break out when ideas like this get floated, so I would like to thank everyone who calmly provided feedback on the proposal, and blow a fat raspberry at those of you who felt obliged to mount soapboxes and opine on The End Of the World As We Know It. Sensible people the world over will appreciate the dilemma at being asked to take user feedback seriously, and being accused of unilateralism when exploring options.

Change is warranted. If we want to deliver on our mission, we have to be willing to stare controversy in the face and do the right thing anyway, recognising that we won’t know if it’s the right thing until much later, and for most of the intervening time, friends and enemies alike will go various degrees of apoplectic. Our best defense against getting it wrong is to have a strong meritocracy, which I think we do. That means letting people like Rick, who have earned their leadership roles, explore controversial territory.

So, where do we stand? And where do I stand? What’s the next step?

What makes this conversation hard is the sheer scale of the Ubuntu ecosystem, all of which is profoundly affected by any change. Here are the things I think we need to optimise for, and the observations that I think we should structure our thinking around:

Releases are good discipline, cadence is valuable.

Releases, even interim releases, create value for parts of the Ubuntu ecosystem that are important. They allow us to get more widespread feedback on decisions made in that cycle – what’s working, what’s not working. Interestingly, in the analysis that played into Rick’s proposal, we found that very few institutional users depend on extended support of the interim releases. Those who care about support tend to use the LTS releases and LTS point releases.

Release management detracts from development time, and should be balanced against the amount of use that release gets.

While reaffirming our interest in releases, I think we established that the amount of time spend developing in a cycle versus spent doing release management is currently out of whack with the amount to which people actually DEPEND on that release management, for interim releases, on the desktop. On the server, we found that the interim releases are quite heavily used in the cloud, less so on physical metal.

Daily quality has raised the game dramatically for tip / trunk / devel users, and addresses the Rolling Release need.

There’s widespread support for the statement that ‘developers can and should use the daily development release’. The processes that have been put in place make it much more reliable for folks who want to track development, either as a contributor to Ubuntu or as someone who ships software for Ubuntu and wants to know what’s happening on the latest release, to use Ubuntu throughout the development cycle. For those of you not aware, uploads to the edge get published in a special ‘pocket’, and only moved into the edge if they don’t generate any alarms from people who are on the VERY BLEEDING EDGE. So you can use Raring (without that bleeding edge pocket) and get daily updates that are almost certain not to bork you.  There is a real community that WANTS a rolling release, and the daily development release of Ubuntu satisfies this need already.

LTS point releases are a great new enhancement to the LTS concept.

On a regular basis, the LTS release gets a point update which includes access to a new, current kernel (supporting new hardware without regressing the old hardware on the previous kernel, which remains supported), new OpenStack (via the Cloud Archive), and various other elements. I think we could build on this to enhance the LTS with newer and better versions of the core UX (Unity) as long as we don’t push those users through a major transition in the process (Unity/Qt, anybody? ).

Separating platform from apps would enhance agility.

Currently, we make one giant release of the platform and ALL APPS. That means an enormous amount of interdependence, and an enormous bottleneck that depends largely on a single community to line everything up at once. If we narrowed the scope of the platform, we would raise the quality of the platform. Quite possibly, we could place the responsibility for apps on the developers that love them, giving users access to newer versions of those apps if (and only if) the development communities behind them want to do that and believe it is supportable.

Phew.

That’s what I observed from all the discussion that ensued from Rick’s proposal.

Here’s a new straw man proposal. Note – this is still just a proposal. I will ask the TB to respond to this one, since it incorporates both elements of Rick’s team’s analysis and feedback from wider circles.

Updated Ubuntu Release Management proposal

In order to go even faster as the leading free software platform, meet the needs of both our external users and internal communities (Unity, Canonical, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and many many others) and prepare for a wider role in personal computing, Ubuntu is considering:

1. Strengthening the LTS point releases.

Our end-user community will be better served by higher-quality LTS releases that get additional, contained update during the first two years of their existence (i.e. as long as they are the latest LTS). Updates to the LTS in each point release might include:

• addition of newer kernels as options (not invalidating prior kernels). The original LTS kernel would be supported for the full duration of the LTS, interim kernels would be supported until the subsequent LTS, and the next LTS kernel would be supported on the prior LTS for teh length of that LTS too. The kernel team should provide a more detailed updated straw man proposal to the TB along these lines.
• optional newer versions of major, fast-moving and important platform components. For example, during the life of 12.04 LTS we are providing as optional updates newer versions of OpenStack, so it is always possible to deploy 12.04 LTS with the latest OpenStack in a supported configuration, and upgrade to newer versions of OpenStack in existing clouds without upgrading from 12.04 LTS itself.
• required upgrades to newer versions of platform components, as long as those do not break key APIs. For example, we know that the 13.04 Unity is much faster than the 12.04 Unity, and it might be possible and valuable to backport it as an update.

2. Reducing the amount of release management, and duration of support, for interim releases.

Very few end users depend on 18 months support for interim releases. The proposal is to reduce the support for interim releases to 7 months, thereby providing constant support for those who stay on the latest interim release, or any supported LTS releases. Our working assumption is that the latest interim release is used by folks who will be involved, even if tangentially, in the making of Ubuntu, and LTS releases will be used by those who purely consume it.

3. Designating the tip of development as a Rolling Release.

Building on current Daily Quality practices, to make the tip of the development release generally useful as a ‘daily driver’ for developers who want to track Ubuntu progress without taking significant risk with their primary laptop. We would ask the TB to evaluate whether it’s worth changing our archive naming and management conventions so that one release, say ‘raring’, stays the tip release so that there is no need to ‘upgrade’ when releases are actually published. We would encourage PPA developers to target the edge release, so that we don’t fragment the ‘extras’ collection across interim releases.

That is all.

Of course what Kubuntu and Xubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME Remix et al do matters. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t invest a ton of time and energy in finding ways to share the archives effectively. And I consider it one of the lovely things about Ubuntu that there is room for all of us here. As long as there are people willing to make it happen, there’s room for a new face.

You all make the broad Ubuntu family more diverse and more interesting. For which I’m grateful.

In return, you get the benefit of an enormous and concentrated investment in making a core platform that can be widely consumed (on top of the already enormous efforts of the open source community, Debian, and any number of other groups). That investment brings with it a pace of change, and a willingness to be focused on specific outcomes. Mir, which is a fantastic piece of engineering by a very talented team that has looked hard at the problem and is motivated to do something that will work well, is just one example. Every week, we’re figuring out how to coordinate changes. Why blow a gasket over this one? I’ve absolutely no doubt that Kwin will work just fine on top of Mir. And I’m pretty confident Mir will be on a lot more devices than Wayland. Which would be good for KDE and Kubuntu and Plasma Active.

So, before you storm off, have a cup of tea and think about the gives and gets of our relationship. Seriously.

Mark

Consider for a minute, Jonathan, the difference between our actions.

Canonical, as one stakeholder in the Ubuntu community, is spending a large amount of energy to evaluate how its actions might impact on all the other stakeholders, and offering to do chunks of work in support of those other stakeholder needs.

You, as one stakeholder in the Ubuntu community, are inviting people to contribute less to the broader project, and more to one stakeholder.

Hmm. Just because you may not get what you want is no basis for divisive leadership.

Yes, you should figure out what’s important to Kubuntu, and yes, you should motivate folks to help you achieve those goals. But it’s simply wrong to suggest that Canonical isn’t hugely accommodating to the needs of others, or that it’s not possible to contribute or participate in the parts of Ubuntu which Canonical has a particularly strong interest in. Witness the fantastic work being done on both the system and the apps to bring Ubuntu to the phone and tablet. That may not be your cup of tea, but it’s tremendously motivating and exciting and energetic.

The problem for me is straightforward: a rolling release isn’t actually a release at all. It offers little certainty for those who need certainty. And we essentially accommodate the need for daily crack with our development releases, which have become highly usable (for developers) because of the strong commitment the Canonical and community teams made to daily quality throughout the release cycle.

So I haven’t personally given any air time to the topic of rolling releases over the years.

This year, the topic bubbled up again, and given the level of interest I supported that the core Canonical engineering team do a deep assessment of what it would actually mean, in hard pro’s and con’s, and how we might implement it, so that a straw man proposal (‘one you can poke holes in’) could be presented. Rick put forward that proposal last week. It should be clear that Rick is a strong and sincere proponent of the idea, hence the passion with which the case is made, but he is not the sole decision maker.

It’s nonsense to portray Rick’s position as a final position for Ubuntu. The TB have not weighed in,  the CC (who were briefed that the assessment was being made and that a straw man would be proposed) are still considering their perspective, and I’m not convinced either. So, for those inclined to melodrama, you may want to calm down and join the conversation.

Some unexpected findings

In the course of Rick’s team’s assessment, several interesting and (to me) unexpected findings emerged.

First, there’s real confusion around interim releases. Between 12.04 LTS and 14.04 LTS there will be three interim releases on our current approach, and lots of people will find that confusing. Should ISVs target quantal AND raring AND ssssss? In practice, we have lots of data to say they can’t and won’t. PPAs are often inconsistent between interim releases. That suggests that having an ‘edge’ release (for which PPAs would over time build up a rich source of extra software) and LTS releases may be easier on that segment of the community.

Second, we have proven the LTS point release mechanism, which brings new hardware support and new software to the LTS releases. The cloud archive, for example, brings the latest OpenStack release to 12.04 LTS, and is by far the most popular way to deploy OpenStack. Point releases have brought fresh kernels, fresh OpenStack, and fresh Unity to 12.04 LTS, and there is no reason why we could not broaden that commitment. It’s worth discussing whether that doesn’t become a better mechanism to meet the needs of people who care about a stable release.

Third, the daily quality story really has been impressive. The amazing work of a sizable quality team has transformed the widespread expectations of participants and contributors in Ubuntu – raring is really useful, every day, with little risk of unproductive hours when things go wonky. That’s grown the number of *developers* running raring, and boosted Ubuntu in other ways as a result. I’m not convinced it’s good enough for end-users, but it’s worth digging in to see how it could get there.

Some unrealistic expectations

In the commentary I’ve seen during the course of the discussion, some of the expectations expressed by stakeholders strike me as unrealistic.

Ben Collins’ perspective, which addresses the need of a PowerPC OEM, is an example. Ben is a friend and former colleague, I’d like to be supportive, but the real cost of supporting an architecture is way outside the scope of Ubuntu’s non-commercial commitments. IBM and Canonical discussed bringing Ubuntu to the PowerPC architecture some years ago and chose not to; the gap is not something Canonical will close alone. I’m delighted if Ubuntu is useful for Ben, and pretty certain it will remain the best platform for his work regardless, but we should not spend millions of dollars on that rather than cloud computing or mobile, which have a much broader impact on both society and our commercial prospects.

Some unwarranted melodrama

The sky is not falling in.

Really.

Ubuntu is a group of people who get together with common purpose. How we achieve that purpose is up to us, and everyone has a say in what they can and will contribute. Canonical’s contribution is massive. It’s simply nonsense to say that Canonical gets ‘what it wants’ more than anybody else. Hell, half the time *I* don’t get exactly what I want. It just doesn’t work that way: lots of people work hard to the best of their abilities, the result is Ubuntu.

The combination of Canonical and community is what makes that amazing. There are lots of pure community distro’s. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment. Why? Because people are people, and work is hard, and collaboration is even harder. That’s nothing to do with Canonical, and everything to do with life. In fact, in most of the pure-community projects I’ve watched and participated in, the biggest meme is ‘if only we had someone that could do the heavy lifting’. Ubuntu has that in Canonical – and the combination of our joint efforts has become the most popular platform for Linux fans.

If you’ve done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on. That’s normal – there’s no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else.

It’s also the case that we’ve shifted gear to leadership rather than integration.

When we started, we said we wanted to deliver the best of open source on a cadence. It was up to KDE, GNOME, XFCE to define what that was going to look like, we would just integrate and deliver (a hard problem in itself). By 2009 I was convinced that none of the existing free software communities could create an experience that could challenge the existing proprietary leaders, and so, if we were serious about the dream of a free software norm, we would have to lead.

The result is Unity, which is an experience that could become widely adopted across phones, tablets, PCs and other devices. Of course, that is a disruptive change, and has caused some members of existing communities to resent our work. I respect that others may prefer different experiences, so we remain willing to do a large (but not unlimited) amount of work to enable KDE, GNOME, and other DEs to thrive inside the broader Ubuntu umbrella. We also take steps to accommodate developers who want to support both Unity and another DE. But if we want to get beyond being a platform for hobbyists, we need to accelerate the work on Unity to keep up with Android, Chrome, Windows and Apple. And that’s more important than taking care of the needs of those who don’t share our goal of a free software norm.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

Everyone that I care about in open source has a shared dream: they want free software to become the norm, not the exception. And Ubuntu is the only way I can see for that to happen, which is why I spend all my time on it, and why so many other people spend huge amounts of time on it too.

I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. ‘Linux is supposed to be hard so it’s exclusive’ is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say. People being people, there are of course smart people who hold that view.

What I’m really interested in is this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a free and open platform that is THE LEADER across both consumer and enterprise computing.

With Ubuntu (and Unity) we have that. It’s amazing. Think about it – unlike years gone by, a free software platform is actually winning awards for innovative leadership in the categories that count: mobile, cloud. Investing your time and energy here might have a truly profound impact on the world. That’s worth digging into. Just roll your eyeballs at the 1337 crowd, roll up your sleeves, find something interesting to improve, and join in. To the extent that you can master a piece, you will get what you want. If you think the grand vision should follow your whims, you won’t.

If we work hard, and work together, Ubuntu will become a widespread platform for phones, tablets and PCs. You’ll have the satisfaction of designing, building and fixing tools that are used every day by millions of people. That’s meaningful. And it’s worth looking hard at our practices to ask the question: how best to achieve that goal? Of those practices, interim releases are just as subject to evaluation and revision as any other.

Going faster

So, rolling releases are not real releases.

But cadence is good, releases are good discipline even if they are hard. In LEAN software engineering, we have an interesting maxim: when something is hard, DO IT MORE OFTEN. Because that way you concentrate your efforts on the hard problem, master it, automate and make it easy. That’s the philosophy that underpins agile development, devops, juju and loads of other goodness.

In the web-lead world, software is moving faster than ever before. Is six months fast enough?

So I think it IS worth asking the question: can we go even faster? Can we make even MORE releases in a year? And can we automate that process to make it bulletproof for end-users?

That’s where I think we should steer the conversation on rolling releases:

• Can we make the update process from point to point really bulletproof? Upgrading today is possible, but to keep the system clean over multiple successive upgrades requires an uncommonly high level of skill with APT.
• Can we strengthen the definition of point releases in the LTS so that interim releases are obviously less relevant?
• Can we do a reasonable amount of release management on, say, MONTHLY releases that they are actual releases rather than just snapshots?

Daily quality has made the Ubuntu development release perfectly usable for developers. That’s a huge accomplishment. Now let’s think carefully about the promises we’re making end-users, and see if it isn’t time to innovate again, just as we innovated when we created Ubuntu on a six month cadence.

First, what matters most?

It matters that we not exclude people from our audience. From the artist making scenes for the next blockbuster, to the person who needs a safe way to surf the web once a day, it’s important to me, and to the wider Ubuntu community, the people be able to derive some benefit from our efforts. Some of that benefit might be oblique – when someone prefers XFCE to Unity, they are still benefiting from enormous efforts by hundreds of people to make the core Ubuntu platform, as well as the Xubuntu team’s unique flourish. Even in the rare case where the gift is received ungraciously, the joy is in the giving, and it matters that our efforts paid dividends for others.

In this sense, it matters most that we bring the benefits of free software to an audience which would not previously have had the confidence to be different. If you’ve been arguing over software licenses for the best part of 15 years then you would probably be fine with whatever came before Ubuntu. And perhaps the thing you really need is the ability to share your insights and experience with all the people in your life who wouldn’t previously have been able to relate to the things you care about. So we have that interest in common.

It matters that we make a platform which can be USED by anybody. That’s why we’ve invested so much into research and thinking about how people use their software, what kinds of tools they need handy access to, and what the future looks like. We know that there are plenty of smart people who’s needs are well served by what existed in the past. We continue to maintain older versions of Ubuntu so that they can enjoy those tools on a stable platform. But we want to shape the future, which means exploring territory that is unfamiliar, uncertain and easy to criticise. And in this regard, we know, scientifically, that Ubuntu with Unity is better than anything else out there. That’s not to diminish the works of others, or the opinions of those that prefer something else, it’s to celebrate that the world of free software now has a face that will be friendly to anybody you care to recommend it.

It also matters that we be relevant for the kinds of computing that people want to do every day.

That’s why Unity in 2013 will be all about mobile – bringing Ubuntu to phones and tablets. Shaping Unity to provide the things we’ve learned are most important across all form factors, beautifully. Broadening the Ubuntu community to include mobile developers who need new tools and frameworks to create mobile software. Defining new form factors that enable new kinds of work and play altogether. Bringing clearly into focus the driving forces that have shaped our new desktop into one facet of a bigger gem.

It’s also why we’ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce. Whether you’re building out a big data cluster or a super-scaled storage solution, you’ll get it done faster on Ubuntu than any other platform, thanks to the amazing work of our cloud community. Whatever your UI of choice, having the same core tools and libraries from your phone to your desktop to your server and your cloud instances makes life infinitely easier. Consider it a gift from all of us at Ubuntu.

There will always be things that we differ on between ourselves, and those who want to define themselves by their differences to us on particular points. We can’t help them every time, or convince them of our integrity when it doesn’t suit their world view. What we can do is step back and look at that backdrop: the biggest community in free software, totally global, diverse in their needs and interests, but united in a desire to make it possible for anybody to get a high quality computing experience that is first class in every sense. Wow. Thank you. That’s why I’ll devote most of my time and energy to bringing that vision to fruition. Here’s to a great 2013.

Ubuntu set the standard for transparency as a company producing a distribution a long time ago, when we invited anybody who showed a passion and competence to have commit and upload rights, a strong contrast with the Fedora policy of the time, which required you to be a Red Hat employee. We continue that tradition with a leadership Community Council that has no requirement of Canonical employment, unlike our competitors. And we invite everyone to participate in the design and development of Ubuntu, which happens in public at UDS (week after next, as it happens) and online on IRC and Launchpad.

Every member of a community works on personal projects. Our competitors do so too. There are any number of changes thrust upon Gnome by Red Hat for example, that then get whitewashed as “maintainers discretion” or “designers design”. There are any number of reveals, prototypes, patents and other decisions that are taken in private, by all members of all communities. Even amongst volunteers its normal to see someone saying “I’ve been hacking on this for a while, now I want some feedback”.

What I offered to do, yesterday, spontaneously, is to invite members of the community in to the things we are working on as personal projects, before we are ready to share them. This would mean that there was even less of Ubuntu that was NOT shaped and polished by folk other than Canonical – a move that one would think would be well received. This would make Canonical even more transparent.

So please disregard the commentary by folk who assumed that the public discussion of Ubuntu development would somehow change. Instead, I hope you will welcome the idea that even Canonical’s most exciting initiatives will now be open to participation by members of the community. And I challenge you to find another place where you can participate at EVERY level in the design and construction of a free platform that is used by millions of people.

This would provide early community input and review, without spoiling the surprise when we think the piece is ready. It would allow community members to work on something that will be widely covered at release (at least, on OMG )

The skunkworks approach has its detractors. We’ve tried it both ways, and in the end, figured out that critics will be critics whether you discuss an idea with them in advance or not. Working on something in a way that lets you refine it till it feels ready to go has advantages: you can take time to craft something, you can be judged when you’re ready, you get a lot more punch when you tell your story, and you get your name in lights (though not every headline is one you necessarily want ).

So, we thought we would extend the invitation to people who trust us and in whom we have reason to trust, to work together on some sexy 13.04 surprises. The projects range from webby (javascript, css, html5) to artistic (do you obsess about kerning and banding) to scientific (are you a framerate addict) to glitzy (pixel shader sherpas wanted) to privacy-enhancing (how is your crypto?) to analytical (big daddy, big brother, pick your pejorative). But they all make the Ubuntu experience better for millions of users, they are all groundbreaking in free software, they will all result in code under the GPL (or an existing upstream license if they are extensions to existing projects). No NDA’s needed but we will need to trust you not to talk in your sleep . We’ll also need to trust you to write code that is thorough and tested, stuff you’ll be as proud of as we are of the rest of the Ubuntu experience. Of course.

There’s also plenty going on that doesn’t warrant the magician’s reveal. But if you are game for a bit of the spotlight, bring some teflon and ping Michael Hall at mhall119 on Freenode.

Nevertheless, it’s way past time to root our next rhythmic release in some appropriate adjective.

The challenge, of course, has been the number of entirely inappropriate adjectives that presented themselves along the way. Go read the dictionary. R is just loaded with juicy stuff we can’t use without invoking the radge wrath of the rinky-dink chorus. Sigh.

Nevertheless, somewhere between the risibly rambunctious and the reboantly ran-tan, the regnally rakish and the reciprocornously rorty, there was bound to be a good fit. Something radious or rident, something to rouse our rowthy rabble.

So what will we be up to in the next six months? We have two short cycles before we’re into the LTS, and by then we want to have the phone, tablet and TV all lined up. So I think it’s time to look at the core of Ubuntu and review it through a mobile lens: let’s measure our core platform by mobile metrics, things like battery life, number of running processes, memory footprint, and polish the rough edges that we find when we do that. The tighter we can get the core, the better we will do on laptops and the cloud, too.

So bring along a Nexus 7 if you’re coming to Copenhagen, because it makes a rumpty reference for our rootin’ tootin’ radionic razoring. The raving Rick and his merry (wo)men will lead us to a much leaner, sharper, more mobile world. We’ll make something… wonderful, and call it the Raring Ringtail. See you there soon.

Update: for clarity, this ringtail is no laconic lemur, it’s a ringtail raccoon. However, for the sake of sanity, it’s not a raring ringtail raccoon, just a raring ringtail. There.

The Home Lens of the Dash is a “give me X” experience. You hit the Super key, and say what you want, and we do our best to figure out what you mean, and give you that. Of course, you can narrow the scope of that search if you want. For example, you can hit Super-A and just search applications. But if you throw your query out to the Dash, we need to be a smart as possible about where we go looking for answers for you.

In 12.10 we’ll take the first step of looking both online and locally for possible results. The Home lens will show you local things like apps and music, as it always has, as well as results from Amazon. Note – these are not ads, they are results to your search. We don’t promote any product or service speculatively, these are not banners or spyware. These are results from underlying scopes, surfaced to the Home lens, because you didn’t narrow the scope to a specific, well scope.

What we have in 12.10 isn’t the full experience, so those who leap to judgement are at maximum risk of having to eat their words later. Chill out. If the first cut doesn’t work for you, remove it, or just search the specific scope you want (there are hotkeys for all the local scopes).

Here’s a quick Q&A on the main FUD-points.

Why are you putting ads in Ubuntu?

We’re not putting ads in Ubuntu. We’re integrating online scope results into the home lens of the dash. This is to enable you to hit “Super” and then ask for anything you like, and over time, with all of the fantastic search scopes that people are creating, we should be able to give you the right answer.

These are not ads because they are not paid placement, they are straightforward Amazon search results for your search. So the Dash becomes a super-search of any number of different kinds of data. Right now, it’s not dynamically choosing what to search, it’s just searching local scopes and Amazon, but it will get smarter over time.

I don’t wan’t to search Amazon for the Terminal

Use Super-A. You can tell Unity exactly what you want to search. And in future you’ll be able to do that from the home lens, too, more easily than the current Lens Bar at the bottom of the Dash.

I want to control what is searched on the Home Lens

So do I! Designs and patches welcome in the usual places. I’m pretty sure by 14.04 LTS we’ll have the kinks unkinked. Till then, come along for the ride, or stick with 12.04 LTS. We can’t wait till it’s perfect before landing everything, because the only way to learn what’s not perfect is to have other people – real people – use it.

I can’t believe you just changed Ubuntu. I liked it the way it was.

Looks like those six months are nearly up again

This is just a moneymaking scheme.

We picked Amazon as a first place to start because most of our users are also regular users of Amazon, and it pays us to make your Amazon journey  get off to a faster start. Typing Super “queen marking cage”  Just Worked for me this morning. I am now looking forward to my game of Ultimate Where’s Waldo hunting down the queens in my bee colonies, Ubuntu will benefit from the fact that I chose to search Amazon that way, Amazon benefits from being more accessible to a very discerning, time-conscious and hotkey-friendly audience.

But there are many more kinds of things you can search through with Unity scopes. Most of them won’t pay Ubuntu a cent, but we’ll still integrate them into the coolest just-ask-and-you’ll-receive experience. I want us to do this because I think we can make the desktop better.

Why are you telling Amazon what I am searching for?

We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err.

The query should be encrypted!

It will be in the release version.

I want to control this in the settings!

Yes, we agree, and designs and work are under way to make that possible. That should land in 12.10 too, or as an update, or in 13.04.

In summary – please don’t feed the trolls. We’re interested in feedback in what sorts of things would be useful to search straight from the home lens, and how to improve the search results, as well as provide better control of the process to you.

Here is the key question, as I see it:

Can Canonical and the Ubuntu community handle the responsibility associated with this sort of service?

Well, if we want to run a modern platform, that updates automatically and provides users with the full benefit of living in a connected world, then we have to be able to do that. If we can’t we won’t be relevant. So we should talk about the appropriate kinds of privacy policy, appropriate encryption, appropriate settings and preferences, to make this all world class.