Image courtesy of Melissa Draper.

Want to own all this goodness, including Ubuntu Backpacks, women’s t-shirts, key chains, 1 year digital subscription to Linux Pro Magazine or a 1 year print subscription Ubuntu User, and a copy of the The Art of Community by some beardy community guy?

On January 10, 2010 the Ubuntu Women Project announced an International Women’s Day Competition; an awesome effort to gather wonderful stories of how women have discovered Ubuntu. From the announcement:

Ubuntu-Women has tried in the past to find some way to celebrate this event, but as far as I can remember it has never really amounted to much other than some chattering on IRC. So let us try a bit harder for 2010!

We have all come to Ubuntu in our own special ways — every single one of us differently to the next. Yet one of the most common questions we get asked is “How can I get $woman to use Ubuntu?”.

Obviously we cannot really answer that question, but we would dearly love to have a collection of stories by women about how they discovered Ubuntu. Such a repository would allow us to demonstrate that there’s no one definitive answer, and at the same time maybe provide the gift of inspiration to women who are interested — showing them that it’s really not so unusual to be Ubuntu fans after all.

We are not expecting any particular length, but do remember that these stories should be suited to perusal at leisure and not require someone to allocate hours of their day to read. Anywhere between a few paragraphs and a OO.o Write page is ideal.

Two prizes up for grabs. One prize pack will be given to the story that the community votes is their favourite. One prize pack will be given to a randomly drawn entrant. I have been given the pleasure of drawing this entrant in a videocast, and announcing both winners to the world on March 8th. Thanks to the Ubuntu Women project for asking for to do this.

So, get your entries in to ubuntuwomen.competition at gmail.com by 23:59UTC on 22nd February 2010. Rocking!

The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week, but instead providing a week jam packed with awesome sessions about writing applications that scratch your itch, and predominantly focusing on Python tools and frameworks, Bazaar, Launchpad and infrastructure. The goal for the week is give attendees a head start on a given technology useful for applications.

So, I am looking for volunteers. If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop me an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will liaise with you to get it scheduled. I am also look for some showcase sessions: stories about how you put together an application, how it scratched your itch and what tools you used. Thanks to everyone who contributes to leading a session!

The week has already been added as a Lernid event and I am going to encourage session leaders to create slides for their sessions. As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page. Rocking!

Check out Master Of The Situation in MP3 and Ogg format.

Created in Cubase with Halion One, a KeyRig and Drumkit From Hell.

At the heart of the project is Ground Control by Martin Owens and Quickly by Rick Spencer and Didier Roche. I have been thinking about the challenges of how we build a great first incarnation of a platform optimised for opportunistic developers, and it struck me that we can divide the first set of tasks into three broad areas:

• Creating a Project – we need to help opportunistic developers ramp up as quickly as possible: they feel the itch and they are ready to scratch right away.
• Collaborating on a project – it should be really simple grab code, create a contribution and submit it to the project.
• Fixing a Bug – bugs are at the heart of software projects, and we should optimize the bug fixing process making it a doddle for opportunistic bug fixing developers to grab some code and make it work.

A key part of this workflow which I designed yesterday is the Fixing a Bug component, and this is something I am really passionate about us trying to deliver in the Lucid timeframe. This is not a formal project that my team is working on, this is something that I am focused on in my spare time and coordinating with Ground Control author and rock star, Martin Owens.

Let me explain how it works:

Opportunistic development lives in the Projects/ directory in your home directory. When you load this directory in Nautilus, you see this:

Ground Control places three buttons that identify the key use cases we are keen to satisfy. When the user clicks the ”Fix Bug” button the following dialog box appears

For the first cut of this feature a bug number is required, but the feature could also include a search box for finding bugs and even potentially have an option on the Launchpad project page saying ”Fix a bug on your desktop” (or some other descriptive term) and when you click that link, Nautilus opens up and is fed the bug number.

When a bug number is submitted, Ground Control will create a branch that the bug affects (typically trunk) into your Projects/ directory. You can then go and hack the code:

When a source file in the branch is changed (and ultimately the coder fixes the bug), we now see an ”Upload Fix” button:

At this point the branch has the fix committed, so the coder clicks the button and then sees this dialog box:

This dialog box asks for the following:

• The first box is the content that goes into the commit message.
• The second box is the content that goes into the merge proposal.
• The third box is optional additional characters for the branch name.

When the user clicks the OK button, the following process occurs:

• Bazaar commits to the local branch.
• The branch is pushed to the branch location specified.
• The branch is added to the bug report.
• A merge proposal is made.

So, I fleshed this idea out over the last few days and documented it and had a chat with Martin Owens who created Ground Control, and he has committed to finish off the current feature set of Ground Control and creating the Fix a Bug feature in the next two weeks. Martin has volunteered to invest a significant amount of time and effort into solving this problem in Ground Control, and I am going to be working to grow awareness of the project, handle the packaging in Universe, and help to get more people involved in testing and translations. See the Create a Project, Collaborate and Fix a Bug blueprints for this feature. Feel free to subscribe to them to track progress.

For this feature to flourish and for us to rock the socks off opportunistic developers everywhere, we are going to need your help, particularly with testing and where possible bug fixes. Here are the main ways in which you can help:

• Fixing Bugs – Martin is largely a one man band on this project and he needs help fixing Ground Control Bugs. If you are interesting in helping, see the bug list here and get involved. He will love you and I will hail you.
• Testing – Testing is critical to this project. We have a tight timeframe on this, so we need you to help. How do you test? Simple, grab the dailly PPA of Ground Control set up by the awesome Nathan Handler, test it and report bugs.
• Moral Support – Martin Owens is doctormo on Freenode. Ping him and tell him he is awesome. He and I hang out in #ubuntu-community-team: buy him a virtual beer.

So that is the goal. Let’s see if we can rock it and fire up more opportunistic developers.

Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 26th – 28th March 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam!

In the last few cycles we have organized and run an event called the Ubuntu Global Jam. The idea was simple: encourage our awesome global Ubuntu community to get together in the same room to work on bugs, translations, documentation, testing and more. And they did, all over the world, as can be seen here.

To make the event as simple and accessible as possible, we have picked five topic areas and we are encouraging you lovely people to organize an event with one or more of them:

• Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
• Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
• Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
• Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.
• Packaging – packaging software for Ubuntu users to install with a clock.

With five primary methods of getting involved, there is something for everyone in this rocking global event. In this event we are also adding an Upgrade theme too: upgrading to Lucid from Hardy or Karmic and reporting your upgrade experience.

One thing that I am keen that everyone remembers: you don’t have to be an official developer, packager or programmer to take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. Also, lets not forget that Ubuntu Global Jam events are a fantastic place to learn and improve your skills: you can sit next to someone who can show you how to do something or explain something in more detail.

If this is all sounding right up your street and you fancy organizing an event, go and read this page and then add your event to this page.

Rock and roll: let’s make this one to remember. Start your engines, folks…

UPDATE: I have scheduled some regular meetings every two weeks in #ubuntu-meeting on Freenode to discuss the Ubuntu Global Jam, provide a place to ask questions and get together as a community to make the most out of the event and awareness of it. These meetings are on the Fridge Calendar.

Something I have talked about extensively recently has been my passion to see opportunistic developers served well on the Linux desktop. These kinds of programmers are people who want to write small, focused, fun little applications that scratch an itch, even if that itch is to have fun. These kinds of developers are having a whale of a time filling the iPhone App Store with scratch-your-itch type of applications, and I am really keen to see more of these kinds of applications on the Linux desktop, and making Ubuntu the perfect platform to develop them on.

We have been seeing a growing movement inside the Ubuntu community in helping to make Ubuntu a rocking platform for opportunistic developers. While all the components are Open Source and can be shipped on any distribution, I am really keen for Ubuntu to really optimize and integrate around the needs of opportunistic programmers and I just wanted to highlight some of the work that has happened here.

In much the same way that Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) became a popular arrangement of tools for web development, we have been seeing a similar scenario in Ubuntu too, in which a set of tools work well together and are often preferred by developers. These are:

• Python – a simple, easy to learn, flexible and efficient high-level language.
• GTK – a simple, comprehensive and powerful graphical toolkit for creating applications.
• GNOME – the desktop environment that ships with Ubuntu, offering many integration facilities.
• GStreamer – a powerful but deliciously simple framework for playing back and creating audio, video and other multimedia content.
• Glade – an application for creating user interfaces quickly and easily, which can then be loaded right into your Python programs.
• DesktopCouch – a framework for saving content in a database that is fast and efficient, hooks neatly into Ubuntu One and is awesome for replication.

In Ubuntu land we love this framwork. Many of our applications are written using them and this helped make it simple for others to get involved and contribute patches and bug fixes. It has been interesting seeing many folks settle on the same set of tools.

There are of course may other tools and facilities that can augment this list, but this is a common foundation in many applications. Fortunately, all of these ship with an Ubuntu system except Glade, but you can install Glade 3 by using Applications->Ubuntu Software Center.

Many of you will have heard of Quickly which provides a devilishly simple way of generating a new application, hacking on the code, changing the GUI and saving it to bazaar. Quickly also provides some awesome features for uploading the code to Launchpad and releasing your program to others in a Personal Package Archive.

What I like about Quickly is that it automates much of repetition surrounding software development and it ultimately allows you to deploy software to a PPA which people can then download and use. Now, PPAs are a little more complicated to install right now: you need to know what a PPA is, know where to find it, and click a few things or enter some commands to switch it on. Fortunately, the rather awesome Ubuntu Software Center which everyone’s favourite Vogt…Michael Vogt…is developing, is going to be extended with functionality to better support PPAs. This, combined with the ratings and review features coming to the Ubuntu Software Center is pretty rocking. I am not sure of the specifics of how PPAs will be supported, but I believe they will first begin on visibility and then follow up with integration features later. If you want to get started with quickly take a look at this entry.

With Quickly able to get folks up and running with development, I wanted to make it easier for opportunistic developers to get their hands on code snippets and examples to learn from. As such, I created the Acire and Python Snippets projects. These projects provide a simple means in which you get access to a freely available regularly updated library of examples, across a range of different areas. With Acire you will always have a growing knowledge base of real code that you can read, run and share, and the community works together to regularly add to and support that knowledge base. The response so far has been great and you can read more about this in my previous blog post.

So, at this point we have all the tools needed to build applications, learn from code examples, and publish packages that ultimately will be visible in the Ubuntu Software Center. The one area that neither Quickly nor Acire has particularly served well is improving on how we collaborate together on software. Few Open Source projects have one sole developer, so we really want developers work well together, in conjunction with translators, documentation writers, bug triagers and more.

To do this we have the rather awesome Launchpad and Bazaar which are a doddle to use. Launchpad provides everything you need to work together on a software project and I have become a bit of a Launchpad fan as I have got used to using it. In my earlier days I tried Sourceforge, Trac and other systems, but Launchpad is rocking it for me.

While I love Launchpad and Bazaar, their integration in Ubuntu could have been better. As an example, to get code in and out of Launchpad so you can contribute to a project, you use the bzr command and the process typically works like this:

• You download some code from the Launchpad project with bzr.
• You branch the code: this effectively means making a duplicate directory of the code.
• In that duplicate directory you add a feature, fix a bug or make some other kind of improvement.
• You then commit your changes to your local branch: this effectively tells Bazaar of the changes you have made.
• You then upload your branch to Launchpad (this is called pushing a branch).
• The final step is to propose a merge. This is when you offer your branch and it’s changes to the project maintainer to merge into the main codebase. Launchpad ties together nicely with bzr to handle this process and has a web front end for doing code review.

Now, understanding how all this works and doing it a few times takes a little getting used to, and much of it is learning how to use the different bzr commands and how they hook in with Launchpad. Well, very recently my friend and yours Martin ‘doctormo’ Owens has released his Ground Control project which provides a graphical interface to the whole process by building it into the file manager in Ubuntu. I cannot tell you how bloody cool this is. It works a little like this:

• You create a Projects directory in your home directory.
• Click Places->Home Folder and go to the new Projects folder.
• In there you can see a button to login to Launchpad. Click the button, enter your username and password. Job done.
• You now see a a button where you can select a project to work on. Click on it, enter a project name, select it and it creates a new folder.
• Now go into the folder and there is a button to download the code. Click it, select a branch and the code is downloaded.
• You can now hack on your feature and a button will appear to commit your changes.
• Finally, you will then see a button to propose a merge. You enter some text to describe your change, and it is uploaded.

No commands. None. What I love about Ground Control is that it is highly contextual: it is built into the file manager and it only ever shows you a button for what you can do at that time. It is simple, quick and Martin has done a wonderful job with it. Go and see a video demo of Martin showing Ground Control here.

Ground Control is still very very new so expect bugs, but do give it a go, report bugs, and importantly, he is looking for help to make sure it has full translations support. If you have done this before, drop him a line. The Ground Control Launchpad project is here.

With each of these components we are seeing more and more gaps in the integration and ease of the development process getting filled. I am hugely excited about this and I am excited about it bringing more and more people to Ubuntu as a development platform and it ultimately generating more and more Free Software for us all to use. We still have a long road ahead though and plenty of good work yet to do. If you think there is a gap you can fill, come and help us rock it.

I wrote Lernid because I just wanted to JFDI a solution to something that I thought could squeeze a huge amount of extra value out of online learning events. I am proud of where the project stands now, but I think now is the time to move stewardship of the project over to hands with more time and oversight to keep up to date with a growing Lernid development community. With this in mind I am proud to announce that the new leader of the Lernid project is Michael Budde.

Michael has taken a phenomenal amount of initiative with Lernid and has been keeping on top of the many merge requests and bugs while I have been busy cavorting around the Internet with work. I had a call with Michael today to talk through the transition, and you good folks can expect Lernid to bring in a session leader mode, easier question asking features and other awesome features. I am excited to see where Michael takes the project. I am also excited to see how other distributions and projects use Lernid now that it supports user-specified server configurations.

So, folks, please join me in welcoming Michael as the new Lernid Leader and a continued healthy future for our new e-learning tool!

Application developers are pretty excited about the technology, and as such we have scheduled a tutorial session about how to make use of the application indicator framework as part of the awesome Ubuntu Developer Week. The session is today, the 26th Jan at 7pm UTC / 11am PST / 2pm EST lead by the always awesome Ted Gould. More info on joining the session is here or you can use Lernid to join really easily.

Just in time for Ubuntu Developer Week I have rolled out a new release of Lernid; a simple tool for connecting to our learning events. The new release fixes a bunch of bugs, makes the IRC Chatroom view a native widget (instead of the crusty web view), modularizes Lernid, adds a terminal for making playing with Linux commands simple, adds application indicator support on Lucid and fixes some daylight savings time issues. Thanks to the many contributions to this release from the Lernid team.

Quick screenie:

With a new release of Lernid out and an awesome week of Ubuntu developer learning events ahead, I wanted to explain how you can get all this goodness up and running. It is a doddle…

Step 1: Install Lernid

Installing Lernid is a piece of cake. There are packages available for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Alan Bell did a wonderful screencast showing how to install Lernid. You can see it by clicking here. Please note the screencast shows an older version (0.4) but the steps should be the same for the new Lernid 0.5 release.

Just click Applications->Accessories->Terminal and enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

You can now load Lernid from Applications->Internet.

Step 2: Join Ubuntu Developer Week

Joining Ubuntu Developer Week is also deliciously simple:

1. First load Lernid by clicking Applications->Internet->Lernid.
2. When Lernid starts, select Ubuntu Developer Week and enter a nickname and click Connect.

You can then click on Schedule to see the list of events happening and the times (in your local timezone). The sessions will happen in the Classroom pane and you can discuss the session in the Chatroom pane.

NOTE: We have heard of a bug when clicking Edit->Preferences causing Lernid to crash. Right now the workaround is don’t click on preferences.

There we go! Having a rocking week and I look forward to many of you getting your first taste of Lernid.