Ubuntu Docs: A Call for Help

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Jeremy Bicha

What would you do if you were a brand new Ubuntu user and had a problem with your computer or wanted to learn how to use it better? Perhaps you’d try searching on the Internet, but what happens if you don’t have an Internet connection? Also, the Internet isn’t really organized, and if you’re new to Ubuntu it’s probably pretty difficult to tell the difference between wrong information and the right answers.

If you type help into Ubuntu’s dash, you can find the Ubuntu Desktop Guide, which is a really awesome resource. (And it’s also available online at https://help.ubuntu.com/ ) A lot of the built-in help comes straight from GNOME documenters who have done amazing work in the past two years. Of course, GNOME uses GNOME Shell by default and Ubuntu uses Unity, so in order for the Ubuntu help to be, well, helpful, we have to make our own derivative version of the GNOME Desktop help.

The Ubuntu Desktop Guide is completely community maintained and that’s why I’m blogging today. We can use more help in finishing the guide for Precise. We just got a freeze extension, but the new deadline to finish writing and editing content is only one week away!

You can see the current version of the guide by running the following commands in a terminal. (If you’ve never used bzr before, you’ll first need to install bzr and set up your SSH key in Launchpad first.)

 bzr branch lp:ubuntu-docs
 cd ubuntu-docs/ubuntu-help/C
 yelp .

Ubuntu-docs are written in Mallard, an XML format. You can edit the .page files in your favorite Text Editor. For more info about Mallard, see the home page or this one page guide.

Some of the topics we’d love to see written include:

The new multi-monitor behavior, including how to enable the launcher on all monitors, and how to disable sticky edges
How to set the launcher to autohide
The HUD
Filtering Dash search results
How to enable hibernate including the system requirements (how much swap is needed for instance)

For the full list or brainstorming other ideas, see the pad.

Contributing to documentation is not necessarily easy but it is appreciated. It requires the ability to express yourself clearly in English and explain a user interface simply but with enough detail to not confuse readers. It requires skills in version control, problem solving, and a bit of how XML works. It is a great way to get involved in Ubuntu development without needing to be a C guru.

If you’re interested in volunteering, you can express your interest either on the pad, IRC (we’re in #ubuntu-doc ), or the mailing list. Although a bit out of date, you probably want to check out our wiki too.

Tagged with: docs
Posted in Ubuntu

Ubuntu Classic, Now With Indicators

Posted on February 11, 2012 by Jeremy Bicha

I’m happy to announce that indicators have been ported to gnome-panel 3, thanks to Jason Conti for the patch and Ted Gould for merging it. I’ve taken the opportunity to update gnome-panel’s default layout to include the “indicator” status menus and the show desktop button instead of the upstream clock and notification area. I for one really appreciate the Ubuntu design work on the status area and believe it is far better than the classic notification area.

The theming is still broken (see the two different gray backgrounds in the top panel) but I expect that will be fixed in the coming weeks. Patches are appreciated. And the window switcher in the bottom has barely readable light gray on dark gray. I don’t remember if that’s a new problem due to the intense GTK+ theme changes this cycle or has been there for a while. I normally run GNOME Shell or Unity and run Classic just enough to help with its packaging.

Anyway, the Classic desktop had some issues in 11.10 but I’ll be happy to recommend 12.04 for fans of the GNOME 2 style.

Posted in Linux, Ubuntu

Update on GNOME Versions for Ubuntu 12.04

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Jeremy Bicha

Now that Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” Alpha 2 will be rolling out on Thursday and Feature Freeze is soon after (on February 16), I want to give an update on the versions of GNOME components that will be in 12.04. Because 12.04 is a Long Term Support release, designed for people and businesses that prefer a stable Ubuntu to the newest code, we’ve been a bit more cautious this cycle. For those who like things a bit less cautious, there’s the GNOME3 PPA.

3.0

The Totem movie player will stay at 3.0 because 3.2 switched to using clutter which means that (as currently configured & tested on Ubuntu) videos won’t play for people who don’t have working 3D drivers (as is the case with a Dell Mini I own unless I use a hacked X stack and drivers). At this point, we don’t have a newer version of GDM than 3.0 ready (it requires a lot of patching to work well on Debian/Ubuntu), but you’re using LightDM now anyway, right?

3.2

We’ll be keeping Evolution at version 3.2 since it will be better tested and stable than 3.4 which was scheduled to get some significant infrastructure work done this cycle (specifically switching to gsettings and webkit). On the other hand, I don’t think Evolution 3.3 has been considered either to see how stable it is and whether the planned new features will make it this cycle or not. Aisleriot Solitaire will probably remain at 3.2 because it uses guile-2.0 and we don’t want to support two different guile versions in main.

Disk Utility (renamed in 3.4 to “Disks“) will stay at 3.2 because 3.4 is a complete rewrite and drops libgdu in favor of udisks2. udisks2 has not been tested by as many people and libgdu is currently used by unity, update-notifier, gvfs (which is pretty important). Similarly, gnome-keyring has had some refactoring which hasn’t really been tested in Precise so that will stay at 3.2.

System Settings (gnome-control-center, gnome-settings-daemon, and gsettings-desktop-schemas) is also unlikely to be upgraded to 3.4. This requires an update to unity-greeter as it expects certain things to be present in g-s-d which were reshuffled in the new version (and is why the new version isn’t in the GNOME3 PPA because we haven’t tried to patch the greeter yet). And Unity will need to be checked to make sure keyboard shortcut settings are recognized correctly but the Compiz developers have plenty of work to do already this month. So, using 3.4 is possible but it’s probably too much work to get done in 2 weeks. The unfortunate side effect is that GNOME Shell 3.4 needs the new settings stack so that its keyboard shortcuts can be changed without people having to dig into gsettings or dconf-editor. GNOME Shell 3.2.2.1 is a good release though.

3.4

Basically everything I haven’t mentioned will be getting 3.4 (well the kernel will also be 3.2 but that doesn’t count!) which is a pretty long list. And there’s quite few cool features: among them are Nautilus undo support (should land in Precise next week), significant work to the GNOME Games, and GNOME’s new menu system (Unity support isn’t in Precise yet). And even without shipping 3.4, bugfixes and even some features are being backported to Precise packages.

I’ve also done some initial packaging for Boxes (GNOME’s new virtualization and remote desktop app). But the default remote desktop app for 12.04 is still scheduled to be Remmina.

And of course, we’re always looking for more packagers and developers to join the Ubuntu Desktop Team to allow us to do more. There’s quite a few spots where we could use some help (testing Evolution 3.3, packaging the split gnome-utils, fixing bugs, etc.) so join us in #ubuntu-desktop if you’re interested. Your contributions can directly influence an operating system used by millions around the world!

Posted in Ubuntu

POSSCON: Open Source in the South East

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Jeremy Bicha

It seems the majority of tech conferences are located in California and there aren’t near as many to choose from on the East Coast of the United States. There are even fewer in the South East. I only know of two open source conferences in the area and that’s why if you live nearby, I strongly recommend you reserve March 28-29 on your 2012 Calendar for the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON). I consider myself very fortunate to be working with Todd Lewis and the others on the POSSCON team to help make this year’s POSSCON another top-notch event.

POSSCON brings together developers and business leaders together in a fun, professional environment to discuss and learn about the latest open source technologies and how to use them in your . Bringing the best of open source concepts to the business world is what makes this conference unique. As Jim Jagielski said last year, “Imagine if OSCON and OSBC had a baby: its name would be POSSCON.” In addition, the conference always has good turnout from the government and healthcare sectors, many of whom are still learning all that open source has to offer.

Now in its fifth year, POSSCON brings world-class content and speakers to Columbia, South Carolina. The featured speaker this year is Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. As one of the most influential leaders in Silicon Valley, McNealy has a unique perspective on open source’s place in business. Larry Augustin, another driving force in open source and founder of SourceForge will also be keynoting. As there are too many great speakers to list here, please visit our website to read about the others.

This year’s tracks are Technical, Big Picture, Education, and Demo. The education track is one of our perpetually popular tracks; it was about the first to fill up with speakers this year. Ubuntu sysadmins will get a chance to learn more about JuJu with Canonical’s Charm School.

Early Early Bird Registration ends tomorrow so register now for the best deal on one of the best open source conferences in the South. And we’re still looking for sponsors to allow us to continue to make POSSCON an affordable opportunity for everyone.

Posted in Conferences, Linux, Ubuntu

Link: Ubuntu in the Corporate

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Jeremy Bicha

I read this post today by Neil Broadley and thought it would make good reading for the Ubuntu Planet because personally I like hearing about how Ubuntu works in real world deployments.

Ubuntu in the Corporate

Posted in Ubuntu

Accidental dput upload

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Jeremy Bicha

Today, I uploaded the latest development build (3.3.4) of the Totem video player to the GNOME3 PPA (Rico actually did most of this packaging). The Ubuntu Desktop Team is keeping Totem 3.0 in the normal Ubuntu archives because newer versions of Totem require clutter which means users would need to have working 3D graphics which isn’t the case for everyone. For instance, I am “lucky” enough to own a Dell Mini which came with Ubuntu pre-installed but also unfortunately came with the poorly supported Intel GMA500 “Poulsbo” graphics cards and the open source drivers don’t really do 3D yet.

The purpose of the GNOME 3 PPA is to provide the pieces of GNOME that don’t make it into the archives (specifically, GNOME 3.0 for Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty” [no longer supported], 3.2 for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric”, and 3.4 for Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise”) and Totem is a great example of one of these pieces.

But when I went to upload totem, I used the following command

dput ../build-area/totem_3.3.4-0ubuntu1~precise1_source.changes ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

which didn’t do what I expected. For some Linux commands, the order of arguments doesn’t matter; for quite a few others like dput, order is important. dput completely ignored the “ppa:gnome3” part of my command because the destination has to go before the .changes filename. If no destination is listed before the .changes filename, then dput by default uploads to the official Ubuntu archives. Within a few minutes, I was contacted by the ever watchful Martin Pitt and Micah Gersten to find out if I really meant to do that.

For the Ubuntu archives, packages in main like Totem can only depend on other packages in main, but the new totem depended on a universe package, mx. Because the new Totem was in dependency hold and didn’t actually build, Colin Watson was able to delete the source package and I uploaded a new totem-3.0.1-0ubuntu13 to replace it (which made a stop in the new queue first). If the package had built (which happens automatically unless there’s a dependency hold or the archives are frozen), we would instead have had to upload an ugly name like 3.3.4really3.0.1-0ubuntu1. Uploads to the Ubuntu archives must always have a greater number than previous uploads so that upgrades work (except -proposed but that’s different) but there weren’t any binary packages produced for anyone to upgrade to so this worked. By the way, the “really” uploads aren’t always accidents; sometimes Ubuntu developers decide that it would be better to remain with an older, more stable package when the newer version is found to not work very well.

I’m posting this so that when someone else does this in the future, they’ll have a bit of a writeup on what needs to happen to fix it. Also, I’ve fixed my dput so this won’t happen so easily to me in the future.

Edit /etc/dput.cf .
In the [DEFAULT] section, change the value of default_host_main to local. Leaving it blank isn’t a good choice as dput will default to uploading to the Debian FTP incoming server which isn’t a great place to accidentally upload something either.

I strongly recommend that anyone with Ubuntu upload rights make this change to their dput configuration, but I wonder if dput should be made more foolproof and not default to uploading to the Ubuntu official archives?

Posted in Ubuntu

Ubuntu 12.04: Now With Quieter Logins

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Jeremy Bicha

With all of the changes in Ubuntu’s desktop over the past few months, it might seem remarkable that Ubuntu’s logon sound has been basically unchanged in 5 years. The sound theme was designed by a community contributor named Peter Savage. Back in those “edgy” days, Ubuntu had more of an African flavor which is of course reflected in the sound theme. (Peter also has contributed to Edubuntu and wrote Emblem Divide, a sci-fi book distributed at no cost but the author encourages readers to contribute to charities.)

I had only been using Ubuntu for a few months at that point so I have a hard time remembering what the earlier sound theme was (which had been introduced for Ubuntu’s first release, Warty Warthog in 2004). For historical reference, here are the sound clips:

Warty Startup

Warty Shutdown

Edgy Login Sound

For a while, I was thinking that Ubuntu should have a community contest similar to the wallpaper and countdown banner ones. More recently, I think that it would be better not to have a login sound at all. How many of us have had our computers (Ubuntu, Windows XP or whatever) or cellphones loudly announce to everyone that they have been turned on, too often at the wrong time? I think a historical reason for the logon sound was because computers used to take a long time to turn on. Fortunately, Ubuntu boots pretty quickly these days so that reason is obsolete.

Today, I uploaded a new version of libcanberra to Precise (12.04) which disables the login sound by default:

  * 02_disable_login_sound.patch:
    - Disable the login sound by default, since it seems to be more
      disruptive than helpful especially with faster boots

If you still like hearing the login sound, click Startup Applications in the system menu at the top right of your computer and make sure the GNOME Login Sound box is checked. (Or if you’re using Ubuntu 11.10 or earlier and don’t like it, make sure that box is unchecked.)

I’d like to close by reminding you that it’s possible to contribute to Ubuntu without being a Canonical employee and without even being a programmer. You contributions can have a big impact like Peter’s 7-second composition which has been heard by tens of millions of people since 2006.

Posted in Ubuntu

How to Sync Packages from Debian to your PPA

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Jeremy Bicha

If you’re a PPA maintainer, what do you do when you have the cool app (or a newer version of that cool app) you want to use has already been packaged in Debian but isn’t available in the Ubuntu repositories yet? I couldn’t find documentation on how to sync to a PPA so I thought I’d share what I figured out today.

First, install ubuntu-dev-tools.
Then run syncpackage --no-lp nameofpackage
Then upload to your PPA: dput ppa:username/ppaname *source.changes

The --no-lp option is very important; if you don’t use that, syncpackage will attempt to upload to the main Ubuntu repositories.

If you’re running Ubuntu 11.10, step 2 will sync from Debian unstable for upload to Oneiric. If this isn’t what you need then use -d to specify the Debian download series and -r to specify the Ubuntu upload series.

Here’s a real-world example:
$ syncpackage --no-lp tracker -d experimental syncpackage: Downloading tracker_0.12.4.orig.tar.bz2 from ftp.debian.org (7.640 MiB) syncpackage: Downloading tracker_0.12.4-1.debian.tar.gz from ftp.debian.org (0.018 MiB) dpkg-source: info: extracting tracker in tracker-0.12.4 dpkg-source: info: unpacking tracker_0.12.4.orig.tar.bz2 dpkg-source: info: unpacking tracker_0.12.4-1.debian.tar.gz signfile tracker_0.12.4-1.dsc Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL> signfile tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL> Successfully signed dsc and changes files $ dput ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes Checking signature on .changes gpg: Signature made Sun 09 Oct 2011 11:28:07 AM EDT using RSA key ID EBFE6C7D gpg: Good signature from "Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL>" Good signature on /home/jeremy/devel/nemiver/temp4/tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes. Checking signature on .dsc gpg: Signature made Sun 09 Oct 2011 11:28:06 AM EDT using RSA key ID EBFE6C7D gpg: Good signature from "Jeremy Bicha <EMAIL>" Good signature on /home/jeremy/devel/nemiver/temp4/tracker_0.12.4-1.dsc. Uploading to ppa (via sftp to ppa.launchpad.net): tracker_0.12.4-1.dsc: done. tracker_0.12.4.orig.tar.bz2: done. tracker_0.12.4-1.debian.tar.gz: done. tracker_0.12.4-1_source.changes: done. Successfully uploaded packages.

EDIT: micahg has suggested backportpackage which can do all this and more. One command can pull from any official Debian or Ubuntu repository, build locally, and upload to your PPA.

Posted in Ubuntu

Getting Started with GNOME Shell & Fallback in Ubuntu 11.10

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Jeremy Bicha

GNOME Shell

Whether Ubuntu users are fans of Unity or not, I expect many are interested in at least looking at what GNOME Shell is. This wasn’t easily possible in Ubuntu 11.04. (As explained elsewhere, converting Unity–including rewriting it as a Compiz plugin–and migrating to GNOME 3 was too much for one cycle. And arguably, it wasn’t certain if GNOME 3 would be ready in time or not.) But in Ubuntu 11.10, all it takes to try it out is to simply install gnome-shell. Log out and choose GNOME from the gear next to your name as you login.

You’ll also likely want to install gnome-tweak-tool since Ambiance doesn’t fully support GNOME Shell yet and will look out-of-place with orange-striped titlebars. Once in gnome-tweak-tool (it shows up in the application launchers as Advanced Settings), go to the theme panel and set Window theme to Adwaita. If you are already running GNOME Shell, you’ll need to reload either by logging in and out or via a shortcut by pressing Alt+F2 and entering the letter r. It’s probably a bug that you can’t change the window theme live but since Adwaita is Sanskrit for “one and only”, perhaps the GNOME developers aren’t too worried about that. (Just kidding.)

There simply isn’t space here to explain the new interface for GNOME Shell so if you want to learn more, I recommend you look at:

The official GNOME Desktop Help (also available if you run yelp ghelp:gnome-help )
The GNOME Shell Cheat Sheet

GNOME Fallback

Some may also be interested in continuing to run gnome-panel, which is the basic component of GNOME Fallback. All you need for that is to install gnome-panel. Choose GNOME Classic for a Compiz version or GNOME Classic (No Effects) for the plain Metacity version. (By the way, Unity uses Compiz and Unity 2D uses Metacity but they look quite a bit different.)

While about 20 panel applets are included, if you use third-party panel applets you’ll likely find that these haven’t been ported to gnome-panel 3 yet. Notably absent also are the indicators which may still be ported before Ubuntu 11.10’s release but this hasn’t been completed yet. Note that even after the indicators are converted, they likely won’t be turned on by default as the Ubuntu Desktop developers prefer to keep gnome-panel mostly “vanilla” because maintaining a bunch of patches is a pain. There’s a theory that gnome-panel users may prefer the plain GNOME look instead of the Ubuntu feel.

You probably also want to know that editing the different parts of the panel now requires holding down the Alt key. Once again, Ambiance doesn’t display quite right with gnome-panel but this time it’s the GTK+ theme that you’ll want to switch to Adwaita with gnome-tweak-tool.

I believe the vast majority of GNOME developers do not use GNOME Fallback and I recommend you begin looking at switching to an alternate desktop environment. It’s still supported but it won’t be forever.

Recommendation

Ubuntu 11.10 is still in beta with a fair amount of bugs and is not recommended if you don’t know how to fix your system when things break. Because GNOME Shell wasn’t fully supported in Ubuntu 11.04 (despite the existence of the Ubuntu Desktop-sponsored PPA. Thanks ricotz for keeping it updated!), Shell users should consider upgrading. GNOME Panel users on the other hand will definitely get a worse experience, at least until the indicators are converted. And Unity users should only upgrade if you don’t mind running beta software and know how to fix things when they go wrong. Anyway, Ubuntu 11.10 will be officially released in a bit over 1 month!

Posted in Ubuntu

Should Upstream Contributions Count?

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Jeremy Bicha

The Ubuntu Community Council will be deciding in a week or so whether upstream or external contributions count for Ubuntu membership & commit privileges. I always thought that all contributions that were for the good of Ubuntu counted. I believe part of my thinking comes from Mark Shuttleworth’s quote in 2005:

Every Debian developer is also an Ubuntu developer, because one way to contribute to Ubuntu is to contribute to Debian….Without Debian, Ubuntu would not be possible.

But it looks like I hold the minority viewpoint.

I believe contributors should not be penalized for working upstream. For instance, I could write Ubuntu desktop documentation or I could write the documentation for Gnome, knowing that my work would be shipped with Ubuntu & other distributions. I could fix KDE bugs by patching Kubuntu or I could fix them at the source (Kubuntu in particular does try to fix as much as possible at the source). Gwibber is shipped by default in Ubuntu but not as far as I know in any other non-Ubuntu derivative distribution. Should Gwibber developers be held back because they did not make their software Ubuntu-only?

Upstream contributions should carry significant weight. It is definitely not Ubuntu’s philosophy to discourage improving upstream.

An upstream developer who has no involvement with the Ubuntu community should not gain Ubuntu status, but an individual who does have strong Ubuntu social connections but contributes upstream should get appropriate status. More specifically, Ubuntu membership should be granted, and PPU (per-package upload rights) can be granted if the individual has decent Debian packaging skills. Core & MOTU upload privileges must only be given to those with strong, proven packaging skills…which obviously includes many Debian Developers.

Therefore, my opinion is that significant upstream contributions should count as significant contributions to Ubuntu if they are indeed significant to Ubuntu. However, it is important that the prospective member also be a part of the Ubuntu community and hold to Ubuntu values.

Posted in Ubuntu

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Every Debian developer is also an Ubuntu developer, because one way to contribute to Ubuntu is to contribute to Debian….Without Debian, Ubuntu would not be possible.

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