I first installed Ubuntu when Ubuntu 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” was released. I was brand new to Linux. This was Ubuntu’s first LTS release; the very first release of Ubuntu was only a year and a half before. I was impressed by how usable and useful the system was. It soon became my primary home operating system and I wanted to help make it better.

On October 15, 2009, I was helping test the release candidates ISOs for the Ubuntu 9.10 release. Specifically, I tested Edubuntu. Edubuntu has since been discontinued but at the time it was an official Ubuntu flavor preloaded with lots of education apps. One of those education apps was Moodle, an e-learning platform.

When testing Moodle, I found that a default installation would make Moodle impossible to use locally. I figured out how to fix this issue. This was really exciting: I finally found an Ubuntu bug I knew how to fix. I filed the bug report.

This was very late in the Ubuntu 9.10 release process and Ubuntu was in the Final Freeze state. In Final Freeze, every upload to packages included in the default install need to be individually approved by a member of the Ubuntu Release Team. Also, I didn’t have upload rights to Ubuntu. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock), an Edubuntu maintainer, sponsored my bug fix upload.

I also forwarded my patch to Debian.

While trying to figure out what wasn’t working with Moodle, I stumbled across a packaging bug. Edubuntu provided a choice of MySQL or PostgreSQL for the system default database. MySQL was the default, but if PostgreSQL were chosen instead, Moodle wouldn’t work. I figured out how to fix this bug too a week later. Jordan sponsored this upload and Steve Langasek from the Release Team approved it so it also was able to be fixed before 9.10 was released.

Although the first bug was new to 9.10 because of a behavior change in a low-level dependency, this PostgreSQL bug existed in stable Ubuntu releases. Therefore, I prepared Stable Release Updates for Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

Afterwards

Six months later, I was able to attend my first Ubuntu Developer Summit. I was living in Bahrain (in the Middle East) at the time and a trip to Belgium seemed easier to me than if I were living in the United States where I usually live. This was the Ubuntu Developer Summit where planning for Ubuntu 10.10 took place. I like to believe that I helped with the naming since I added Maverick to the wiki page where people contribute suggestions.

I did not apply for financial sponsorship to attend and I stayed in a budget hotel on the other side of Brussels. The event venue was on the outskirts of Brussels so there wasn’t a direct bus or metro line to get there. I rented a car. I didn’t yet have a smartphone and I had a LOT of trouble navigating to and from the site every day. I learned then that it’s best to stay close to the conference site since a lot of the event is actually in the unstructured time in the evenings. Fortunately, I managed to arrive in time for Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote where the Unity desktop was first announced. This was released in Ubuntu 10.10 in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and became the default for Ubuntu Desktop in Ubuntu 11.04.

Ubuntu’s switch to Unity provided me with a huge opportunity. In April 2011, GNOME 3.0 was released. I wanted to try it but it wasn’t yet packaged in Ubuntu or Debian. It was suggested that I could help work on packaging the major new version in a PPA. The PPA was convenient because I was able to get permission to upload there easier than being able to upload directly to Ubuntu. My contributions there then enabled me to get upload rights to the Ubuntu Desktop packages later that year.

At a later Ubuntu Developer Summit, it was suggested that I start an official Ubuntu flavor for GNOME. So along with Tim Lunn (darkxst), I co-founded Ubuntu GNOME. Years later, Canonical stopped actively developing Unity; instead, Ubuntu GNOME was merged into Ubuntu Desktop.

Along the way, I became an Ubuntu Core Developer and a Debian Developer. And in January 2022, I joined Canonical on the Desktop Team. This all still feels amazing to me. It took me a long time to be comfortable calling myself a developer!

Conclusion

My first Ubuntu bugfix was 13 years ago this week. Because Ubuntu historically uses alphabetical adjective animal release names, 13 years means that we have rolled around to the letter K again! Later today, we begin release candidate ISO testing for Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu”.

I encourage you to help us test the release candidates and report bugs that you find. If you figure out how to fix a bug, we still sponsor bug fixes. If you are an Ubuntu contributor, I highly encourage you to attend an Ubuntu Summit if you can. The first Ubuntu Summit in years will be in 3 weeks in Prague, but the intent is for the Ubuntu Summits to be recurring events again.

Recently, I needed to check if a regression in Ubuntu 22.04 Beta was triggered by the mesa upgrade. Ok, sounds simple, let me just install the older mesa version.

Let’s take a look.

Oh, wow, there are about 24 binary packages (excluding the packages for debug symbols) included in mesa!

Because it’s no longer published in Ubuntu 22.04, we can’t use our normal apt way to install those packages. And downloading those one by one and then installing them sounds like too much work.

Step Zero: Prerequisites

If you are an Ubuntu (or Debian!) developer, you might already have ubuntu-dev-tools installed. If not, it has some really useful tools!

$ sudo apt install ubuntu-dev-tools

Step One: Create a Temporary Working Directory

Let’s create a temporary directory to hold our deb packages. We don’t want to get them mixed up with other things.

$ mkdir mesa-downgrade; cd mesa-downgrade

Step Two: Download All the Things

One of the useful tools is pull-lp-debs. The first argument is the source package name. In this case, I next need to specify what version I want; otherwise it will give me the latest version which isn’t helpful. I could specify a series codename like jammy or impish but that won’t give me what I want this time.

$ pull-lp-debs mesa 21.3.5-1ubuntu2

By the way, there are several other variations on pull-lp-debs:

• pull-lp-source – downloads source package from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-debs – downloads debs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-ddebs – downloads dbgsym/ddebs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-lp-udebs – downloads udebs package(s) from Launchpad.
• pull-debian-* – same as pull-lp-* but for Debian packages.

I use the LP and Debian source versions frequently when I just want to check something in a package but don’t need the full git repo.

Step Three: Install Only What We Need

This command allows us to install just what we need.

$ sudo apt install --only-upgrade --mark-auto ./*.deb

--only-upgrade tells apt to only install packages that are already installed. I don’t actually need all 24 packages installed; I just want to change the versions for the stuff I already have.

--mark-auto tells apt to keep these packages marked in dpkg as automatically installed. This allows any of these packages to be suggested for removal once there isn’t anything else depending on them. That’s useful if you don’t want to have old libraries installed on your system in case you do manual installation like this frequently.

Finally, the apt install syntax has a quirk: It needs a path to a file because it wants an easy way to distinguish from a package name. So adding ./ before filenames works.

I guess this is a bug. apt should be taught that libegl-mesa0_21.3.5-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb is a file name not a package name.

Step Four: Cleanup

Let’s assume that you installed old versions. To get back to the current package versions, you can just upgrade like normal.

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

If you do want to stay on this unsupported version a bit longer, you can specify which packages to hold:

$ sudo apt-mark hold

And you can use apt-mark list and apt-mark unhold to see what packages you have held and release the holds. Remember you won’t get security updates or other bug fixes for held packages!

And when you’re done with the debs we download, you can remove all the files:

$ cd .. ; rm -ri mesa-downgrade

Bonus: Downgrading back to supported

What if you did the opposite and installed newer stuff than is available in your current release? Perhaps you installed from jammy-proposed and you want to get back to jammy ? Here’s the syntax for libegl-mesa0

Note the /jammy suffix on the package name.

$ sudo apt install libegl-mesa0/jammy

But how do you find these packages? Use apt list

Here’s one suggested way to find them:

$ apt list --installed --all-versions| grep local] --after-context 1

Finally, I should mention that apt is designed to upgrade packages not downgrade them. You can break things by downgrading. For instance, a database could upgrade its format to a new version but I wouldn’t expect it to be able to reverse that just because you attempt to install an older version.

There is an interesting hidden feature available in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and newer. To enable this feature, first install cpdb-backend-gcp.

sudo apt install cpdb-backend-gcp

Make sure you are signed in to Google with GNOME Online Accounts. Open the Settings app1gnome-control-center to the Online Accounts page. If your Google account is near the top above the Add an account section, then you’re all set.

Currently, only LibreOffice is supported. Hopefully, for 19.04, other GTK+ apps will be able to use the feature.

This feature was developed by Nilanjana Lodh and Abhijeet Dubey when they were Google Summer of Code 2017 participants. Their mentors were Till Kamppeter, Aveek Basu, and Felipe Borges.

Till has been trying to get this feature installed by default in Ubuntu since 18.04 LTS, but it looks like it won’t make it in until 19.04.

I haven’t seen this feature packaged in any other Linux distros yet. That might be because people don’t know about this feature so that’s why I’m posting about it today! If you are a distro packager, the 3 packages you need are cpdb-libs , cpdb-backend-gcp, and cpdb-backend-cups. The final package enables easy printing to any IPP printer. (I didn’t mention it earlier because I believe Ubuntu 18.04 LTS already supports that feature through a different package.)

Save to Google Drive

In my original blog post, I confused the cpdb feature with a feature that already exists in GTK3 built with GNOME Online Accounts support. This should already work on most distros.

When you print a document, there will be an extra Save to Google Drive option. Saving to Google Drive saves a PDF of your document to your Google Drive account.

This post was edited on October 16 to mention that cpdb only supports LibreOffice now and that Save to Google Drive is a GTK3 feature instead.

October 17: Please see Felipe’s comments. It turns out that even Google Cloud Print works fine in distros with recent GTK3. The point of the cpdb feature is to make this work in apps that don’t use GTK3. So I guess the big benefit now is that you can use Google Cloud Print or Save to Google Drive from LibreOffice.

This week, the popular screenshot app Shutter was removed from Debian Unstable & Ubuntu 18.10. (It had already been removed from Debian “Buster” 6 months ago and some of its “optional” dependencies had already been removed from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS).

Shutter will need to be ported to gtk3 before it can return to Debian. (Ideally, it would support Wayland desktops too but that’s not a blocker for inclusion in Debian.)

See the Debian bug for more discussion.

I am told that flameshot is a nice well-maintained screenshot app.

I believe Snap or Flatpak are great ways to make apps that use obsolete libraries available on modern distros that can no longer keep those libraries around. There isn’t a Snap or Flatpak version of Shutter yet, so hopefully someone interested in that will help create one.

GNOME 3.30 will be released within a few days. That makes this a good time to showcase the improvements in GNOME Tweaks 3.30.

One problem with moving power settings from Tweaks into Settings a year ago was that the Power panel only had one setting. GNOME Designer Allan Day suggested we use a new General panel to include the remaining power switch, the sound Over-Amplification switch, and the Animations switch.

(Note that if you’re using Ubuntu’s default session, the Over-Amplification switch is in the Settings app, not in Tweaks.)

Also, the volume indicators in GNOME 3.30 now indicate when over-amplification is in use:

There is only one new setting here: a sound theme selector. While sound themes aren’t very popular yet, maybe this will help them become a bit more noticeable. Ubuntu 18.10’s new Yaru theme (not pictured here) includes a sound theme named Yaru.

The Top Bar page now has a toggle for the weekday in the top bar clock. (The Activities Overview Hot Corner switch will only show if your distro includes the gnome-shell patch for that feature.)

Since we now have so many windows settings available, I split Window Titlebars into its own page. The Edge Tiling and Center New Windows switches are new in 3.30.

Ubuntu 18.10 now enables Center New Windows by default. I think it’s a nice touch and it would be nice if it were the default in GNOME too. Try it out for yourself!

For more details about what’s changed in 3.30 and who’s done the changing, see the project NEWS file.

Congratulations to Ubuntu and Fedora on their latest releases.

This Fedora 28 release is special because it is believed to be the first release in their long history to release exactly when it was originally scheduled.

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release is the biggest release for the Ubuntu Desktop in 5 years as it returns to a lightly customized GNOME desktop. For reference, the biggest changes from vanilla GNOME are the custom Ambiance theme and the inclusion of the popular AppIndicator and Dock extensions (the Dock extension being a simplified version of the famous Dash to Dock). Maybe someday I could do a post about the smaller changes.

I think one of the more interesting occurrences for fans of Linux desktops is that these releases of two of the biggest LInux distributions occurred within days of each other. I expect this alignment to continue (although maybe not quite as dramatically as this time) since the Fedora and Ubuntu beta releases will happen at similar times and I expect Fedora won’t slip far from its intended release dates again.

Today, gksu was removed from Ubuntu 18.04, four weeks after it was removed from Debian.

Today, gksu was removed from Debian unstable. It was already removed 2 months ago from Debian Testing (which will eventually be released as Debian 10 “Buster”).

It’s not been decided yet if gksu will be removed from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. There is one blocker bug there.

Edit April 18, 2018: See my follow up post about the removal from Ubuntu

webkitgtk is the GTK+ port of WebKit. webkitgtk provides web functionality for many things including GNOME Online Accounts’ login panels; Evolution’s HTML email editor and viewer; and the engine for the Epiphany web browser (also known as GNOME Web).

Last year, I announced here that Debian 9 “Stretch” included the latest version of webkitgtk (Debian’s package is named webkit2gtk). At the time, I hoped that Debian 9 would get periodic security and bugfix updates. Nine months later, let’s see how we’ve been doing.

Release History

Debian 9.0, released June 17, 2017, included webkit2gtk 2.16.3 (up to date).

Debian 9.1 was released July 22, 2017 with no webkit2gtk update (2.16.5 was the current release at the time).

Debian 9.2, released October 8, 2017, included 2.16.6 (There was a 2.18.0 release available then but for the first stable update, we kept it simple by not taking the brand new series.)

Debian 9.3 was released December 9, 2017 with no webkit2gtk update (2.18.3 was the current release at the time).

Debian 9.4 released March 10, 2018 (today!), includes 2.18.6 (up to date).

Release Schedule

webkitgtk development follows the GNOME release schedule and produces new major updates every March and September. Only the current stable series is supported (although sometimes there can be a short overlap; 2.14.6 was released at the same time as 2.16.1). Distros need to adopt the new series every six months.

Like GNOME, webkitgtk uses even numbers for stable releases (2.16 is a stable series, 2.16.3 is a point release in that series, but 2.17.3 is a development release leading up to 2.18, the next stable series).

There are webkitgtk bugfix releases, approximately monthly. Debian stable point releases happen approximately every two or three months (the first point release was quicker).

In a few days, webkitgtk 2.20 will be released. Debian 9.5 will need to include 2.20.1 (or 2.20.2) to keep users on a supported release.

Report Card

From five Debian 9 releases, we have been up to date in 2 or 3 of them (depending on how you count the 9.2 release).

Using a letter grade scale, I think I’d give Debian a B or B- so far. But this is significantly better than Debian 8 which offered no webkitgtk updates at all except through backports. In my grading, Debian could get a A- if we consistently updated webkitgtk in these point releases.

To get a full A, I think Debian would need to push the new webkitgtk updates (after a brief delay for regression testing) directly as security updates without waiting for point releases. Although that proposal has been rejected for Debian 9, I think it is reasonable for Debian 10 to use this model.

If you are a Debian Developer or Maintainer and would like to help with webkitgtk updates, please get in touch with Berto or me. I, um, actually don’t even run Debian (except briefly in virtual machines for testing), so I’d really like to turn over this responsibility to someone else in Debian.

Appendix

I find the Repology webkitgtk tracker to be fascinating. For one thing, I find it humorous how the same package can have so many different names in different distros.

GNOME 3.28 has reached its 3.27.90 milestone. This milestone is important because it means that GNOME is now at API Freeze, Feature Freeze, and UI Freeze. From this point on, GNOME shouldn’t change much, but that’s good because it allows for distros, translators, and documentation writers to prepare for the 3.28 release. It also gives time to ensure that new feature are working correctly and as many important bugs as possible are fixed. GNOME 3.28 will be released in approximately one month.

If you haven’t read my last 3.28 post, please read it now. So what else has changed in Tweaks this release cycle?

Desktop

As has been widely discussed, Nautilus itself will no longer manage desktop icons in GNOME 3.28. The intention is for this to be handled in a GNOME Shell extension. Therefore, I had to drop the desktop-related tweaks from GNOME Tweaks since the old methods don’t work.

If your Linux distro will be keeping Nautilus 3.26 a bit longer (like Ubuntu), it’s pretty easy for distro maintainers to re-enable the desktop panel so you’ll still get all the other 3.28 features without losing the convenient desktop tweaks.

As part of this change, the Background tweaks have been moved from the Desktop panel to the Appearance panel.

Touchpad

Historically, laptop touchpads had two or three physical hardware buttons just like mice. Nowadays, it’s common for touchpads to have no buttons. At least on Windows, the historical convention was a click in the bottom left would be treated as a left mouse button click, and a click in the bottom right would be treated as a right mouse button click.

Macs are a bit different in handling right click (or secondary click as it’s also called). To get a right-click on a Mac, just click with two fingers simultaneously. You don’t have to worry about whether you are clicking in the bottom right of the touchpad so things should work a bit better when you get used to it. Therefore, this is even used now in some Windows computers.

My understanding is that GNOME used Windows-style “area” mouse-click emulation on most computers, but there was a manually updated list of computers where the Mac style “fingers” mouse-click emulation was used.

In GNOME 3.28, the default is now the Mac style for everyone. For the past few years, you could change the default behavior in the GNOME Tweaks app, but I’ve redesigned the section now to make it easier to use and understand. I assume there will be some people who prefer the old behavior so we want to make it easy for them!

GNOME Tweaks 3.27.90 Mouse Click Emulation

For more screenshots (before and after), see the GitLab issue.

Other

There is one more feature pending for Tweaks 3.28, but it’s incomplete so I’m not going to discuss it here yet. I’ll be sure to link to a blog post about it when it’s ready though.

For more details about what’s changed, see the NEWS file or the commit log.