Archive for October 17th, 2007

Posted on October 17, 2007 - by jono

Eve Of The Gibbon

It was the night before the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon came to visit, and all was quiet. All over the world, boys and girls lay excited in their beds, awaiting the treats that would present them the following day. Yes indeed, its that festive time when an Ubuntu release is about to hit the tubes. For each release two distinctive things happen:

• Lots of people get excited around the world about the next iteration of Ubuntu being released.
• The sysadmin team clench a little harder than usual.

I want to use the eve of gutsy to issue a few notices:

• Firstly, we don’t release a new release to the Internet at any specific time, it will be released at some point on the 18th Oct 2007.
• Secondly, as usual, you can catch the rip-roaring-release-rollercoaster-ride-of-excitement by joining #ubuntu-releaseparty on Freenode. It is always a fun atmosphere in there as many people wait for the release, and many people literally starve themselves of toilet breaks so as not to miss the release hitting the Internet.
• Thirdly, we have a whopping 69 release parties going on all over the world. See the list of parties here. Go along to your nearest one, and have some fun. Unfortunately I won’t be at a party tomorrow night, but stuck in the studio with the LugRadio fellas. Rest assured, I will be drinking.
• Finally, if you do go to a release party, record a video or photograph the party. If you video it, please say “Happy Release 7.10 from ” as a group in the video and send it to our marketing friend, Gerry Carr. We want to pull together a compilation video for all to share, and would love your contributions.

Get Ready. Get Set…

Posted on October 17, 2007 - by jono

First Shot at Packaging

One of the most important projects in the Ubuntu community is MOTU – a project to produce Ubuntu packages for the many and various Linux applications out there. MOTU is not only for producing packages, but is also the place where people actually learn to package, eventually becoming MOTU contributors (people who produce packages for the universe repository) or core-dev (people who produce packages in the main repository).

For a while now I have had an item on my TODO list:

• learn how to produce Ubuntu packages, and maybe learn to become a MOTU

Well, yesterday evening while trying to sleep I developed a cold, and as the day continued, I felt progressively worse. After meeting up with a mate last night, I tried to sleep and failed. So, instead of laying in bed wishing for sleep (I hate that), I figured I would use the time to learn how to package.

To get started I followed the excellent Ubuntu Packaging Guide. As I worked through it, I made some notes about bits of the guide that need fixing, and posted them to ubuntu-motu where they are planned to be merged in. After I had produced the hello packages with the different techniques, I then tried my hand at packaging something. I decided to try and package the new PiTiVi 0.11.0 release.

This resulted in this package. It works on my system, and is built for gutsy. Give it a shot, but this is my first package, so if it eats your important documents, don’t expect sympathy. And as for hardcore packaging nutters, yes, I used CDBS for this package, and used the existing PiTiVi package to learn from, and I am new, so don’t kick me too hard.

I do plan on continuing to learn how to produce a package using debhelper and not using CDBS. Thanks to everyone in #ubuntu-motu for their help; you are a fine bunch of people.

To be frank, I was a bit worried that packaging would be a bit too hardcore for me, but it was easier than I expected, the the tools available are excellent – from the tools to automate creating the package control files, to the pbuilder which helps build the binary package and ensures it pulls in the right dependencies. Obviously, I am at the start the journey, but has gone much smoother than I expected.

Also, don’t forget the range of sessions at Ubuntu Open Week next week for those of you who want to learn to contribute to Ubuntu as packagers.

Posted on October 17, 2007 - by jono

Bit By Bit

Adam is not wrong. The post is not just a good title though, but a great update on the things that are going on with NetworkManager. Congratulations to team hacking on it – keep up the great work.

This takes me back to 2000 or 2001 time when I remember there being significant blockers between what the kernel and other low-level bits and pieces were exposing, and how graphical interfaces could talk to them. Back then it seemed that the hooks were not there for GUIs to plug into to make things easy to configure and use.

With the great work that has gone into the kernel, udev, sysfs, hal, dbus, and various other chunks, its great to see each of these barriers being broken down. Bit by bit, the free software community is nailing these different problems, and I love the fact that the desktop is becoming more and more mature and functional by the day. NetworkManager, while not perfect, has made incredible progress on this front of nailing yet another thing where the Linux desktop fell down.

Brick by brick, everyone is filling in the wall, and the diversity behind the Open Source community never ceases to impress me.