Archived blog
I now blog on tumblr here, but keep this blog around for archival purposes. Or check out my about.me page or find me on Launchpad.
Presentation attire
Everyone cheer for Jason Smith(irc:DBO) today for his Computer Science presentation. He even combed his chinbeard and wore a bowtie:
Clamav updates for Ubuntu users
People love to point out when someone is making mistakes, so I’m going to end this Friday with some great news for Ubuntu Server sysadmins about someone who’s been silently doing the right thing. While some people are scrambling on a Friday to square away their servers, Ubuntu Server users are sitting in a good spot thanks to the work of Scott Kitterman, who has already taken care of this on all supported versions of Ubuntu.
I asked Jamie Strandboge (from the Security team) on the amount of work this takes. Here’s what he told me:
a) Clamav is obviously a virus scanner. It needs to be kept up to date.
b) Clamav upstream often does API/ABI bumps to handle new types of malware.
c) Ubuntu likes to stick with an old version and patch.
Options ‘b’ and ‘c’ are at odds with each other and can’t be done. Scott does major version upgrades for clamav while testing all the rdepends so they don’t break. He uploads them to -backports first where it is tested; when they are in good shape he basically tells me “Go!”. I then spend about a day rebuilding/testing everything in -security and upload the fixes. He created all the documents, the actual packaging work, and went to the tech board for the SRU exception and walked it through the process. He does this for Ubuntu development AND stable releases.
For more information on how it all works, check out the wiki pages:
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ClamavUpdates
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Clamav
- https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#clamav%20and%20rdepends
Don’t forget to give ScottK a hug when you see him on IRC.
EDIT: ScottK mentions that Imre Gergely did the bulk of the testing, so if you see him on IRC (nick:cemc), go ahead and give him a hug too!
Announcing Ubuntu Open Week
Every cycle we have a week’s worth of IRC sessions for users of Ubuntu and/or people who want to get more involved in Ubuntu. Think of it as “kicking the tires” on the community, see if you like it, and
then finding something you’re interested in and going and doing it. We’ve just posted the initial schedule here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek/
Also, don’t miss the Spanish Open Week!
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek_ES/
Here’s a quick FAQ:
Is it too late to run a session?
Nope, we can always add extra sessions if we get more volunteers, so if you want to run a session then get a hold of us! This is the week after release so the buzz of new users will be exciting, a perfect opportunity to teach a class!
I want an Open Week in my own language!
Grab a wiki page and Just Do It(tm). Let us know and we’ll help get the word out. If you can’t find enough speakers for a whole week then just do what sessions you can.
Hey no fair, my *buntu (and/or other team) is missing!
We always want to use OpenWeek to get more users interested in your project and to find volunteers. Ping me for a session and we’ll get you on the schedule.
Sneaky, you scheduled me for a session and didn’t even ask!
Likely you’ve done a session in the past and people demanded more of you. Don’t be so awesome next time.
If there’s any questions or if you’re unsure if you want to commit just stop by #ubuntu-community-team on freenode IRC and ask!
Better webmail integration.
Check out desktop-webmail in Lucid if you use web mail! This fixes up mailto’s, etc. Thanks to Alexander Sack for this little gem.
Necromancy/2
OS/2 coming back? I called this years ago, which is why I kept my OS/2 box all these years! Blue spine too! Go Team OS/2!
… ok back to work.
Nexus One Car Dock, decent, not great.
Since it took them so long to get the Nexus One Car Dock ready I was relieved to see it finally come out. I got it today so here’s my short review. First of all, it’s obvious why the thing is $50, it comes in the same heavy duty Nexus-style box, it’s made of some nice heavy plastic and is generally very well made. As a point of reference both of our cars currently have docks for our G1′s from ProClip USA, which have a great system and great service, I’ve been using them for years.
What is not obvious in the pictures is that the funky disc it comes with is optional. If you want to windshield mount it on multiple cars then you just move it. I was under the impression that I would have to buy mounting disks for each car. Anyway, here it is:
You just stick it on the windshield and twist it on. It comes with an adapter for the power, which you plug into the side of the disc:
Now here is where I got confused. I started looking around for where I can plug in my line in for the car stereo. It doesn’t have one. They leave the port on the phone accessible. So now instead of just one huge black disk with rectangular plastic blocking my view I have _2_ cables dangling on top of that. The problem isn’t just aesthetic. Now I have to plug in a cable after I dock the phone every time I get in and out of the car. Why they didn’t get an audio out on the dock itself (preferably on the phone charger) is beyond me.
Remember I said the dock was expensive? It has bluetooth, which is nice. When you first dock it asks you with 2 checkboxes how you want it to do the audio out. It even remembers different settings between different docks, nice! I have mine set up to use the dock’s speaker and microphone for phone calls. Inexplicably it asks if you want your Music(!) to output via dock, I guess that’s for when you don’t want to listen to music through your expensive 10 speaker car stereo and enjoy it from the tinny dock speaker behind a dock pointed at your windshield.
The truly disappointing bit is the software when it’s in “car mode”:
If I could show one picture that can classify what it’s like to be an Android user it would be this one. My Nexus can navigate me around the most dangerous parts of Detroit without getting me killed, and the voice navigation is great, but look at this. “Contacts” is available from the homepage and this is what it looks like, and I don’t mean the fingerprints. The best part is when someone calls you … the entire receiving call screen is oriented wrong, so you have to unlock the phone sideways. WTF. This isn’t the dock’s fault, however this is really crap, so I just use it vertically.
The sound quality is ok. When I called Andrew he said I sounded “processed”. I’ve only made two calls on it so I will reserve judgement. As a general review the headphone quality on my Nexus has been subpar. Both with the supplied headset and a bt headset. I don’t appear to be the only one. One time Jono and I tried to have a call with both of us using headsets and we couldn’t even carry on a normal conversation; so I don’t know if there’s a Nexus-specific problem or what.
I won’t get into the MP3 player and why it’s not even on the Car home screen, which makes no sense to me. It could be great in a car mode. My dream UI is the map view when I’m navigating with a music widget overlayed so I can drive around AND crank the Metallica. The Nexus can totally do this, it multitasks (hey, it’s the reason we buy these things) but the ui is cumbersome switching between the map and the mp3 player.
So overall I guess I give it a 7 out of 10. Being able to move the dock around from car to car is a plus, but unfortunately the lack of the audio out and the software not working well in landscape mode suck for me. The build quality is fantastic, it feels like the Thinkpad of docks. Sound quality gets a mixed review for now, so read around. Is it better than your standard dock from ProClip? I think it could have been. It’s pricey, but I like that it’s portable so I can take it in a rental or a friend’s car. I’m in the strange place where I was willing to move to an N1 but Jill still likes her G1, so we have both micro and mini USB things laying around, which isn’t fun.
- Sidenote: Does anyone have bluetooth in their car? If you could pair it with your existing stereo and have that not sound like a shitty FM transmitter then I could totally get into that.
- Sidenote 2: I am being overly critical on purpose, but to put some perspective on the matter; my dad has a sixty thousand dollar Cadillac and the nav system on that is pure garbage. I know automakers are slow but you’d think we’d have nice Android nav systems in cars by now.
- Sidenote 3: Sorry Google, I won’t be purchasing the normal desk Dock; you need to be able to charge another battery in a dock. However you get a + for making the spare battery just $25 in an age of battery scams.
I left my head and my heart on the dance floor!
Sense beat me to it but yes, we’ve got some nice app indicator stuff in Banshee now:
Sense has some instructions on his blog while we finish up the little details. Thanks to everyone who has tested and implemented this. Thanks to Sense for doing the work, and I’d like to thank Betrand Lorentz and Gabriel Burt @ Banshee for their help getting the stuff up to snuff. And of course, users wouldn’t have any of this if it wasn’t being cared for and packaged by Chow Loong Jin and the rest of the Mono team, who are doing all this great work in both Ubuntu and Debian.
On top of that, the store had landed in banshee-community-extensions, implemented by Jo Shields:
Find out more about Banshee 1.6 on Gabriel’s Blog and the upstream release notes.
Sad chromium tabs got you down?
Just a warning that the chrome-ubuntu-theme scrollbar extension has been causing crashes for people. Mike Basinger reported the bug here but it appears to be triggering a webkit bug.
Disabling the extension fixes the crashes for me.
Adopt a Package reminder!
Tomorrow on #ubuntu-classroom at 2000UTC (That’s 4pm EDT) I will be holding a Adopt a Package session!
Handy version checking thanks to rmadison
Sometimes I need to check what’s in Debian and what’s in Ubuntu for a certain package. Usually I just go to the packages.debian|ubuntu site and compare them in browser tabs. Turns out there’s an easier way and I wanted to share this with everyone who might not know. Thanks to Scott Kitterman for pointing this out to me!
jorge@bojack:~$ rmadison -u debian tasque
tasque | 0.1.6-1 | stable | source, all
tasque | 0.1.9-1 | testing | source, all
tasque | 0.1.9-1 | unstable | source, all
jorge@bojack:~$ rmadison -u ubuntu tasque
tasque | 0.1.6-1ubuntu1 | intrepid/universe | source, all
tasque | 0.1.8-1build2 | jaunty/universe | source, all
tasque | 0.1.8-4 | karmic/universe | source, all
tasque | 0.1.8-5 | lucid/universe | source, all
Become a Friend of GNOME
Photo by Germán Póo-Caamaño
The GNOME Foundation is always looking for support to help grow the desktop we all love. The generous contributions of GNOME’s Advisory Board are always appreciated. However a good portion of these funds come from people like you and me, who want to support GNOME and see it prosper. Some people don’t know that you too can support GNOME with donations. So where does that money go? Here are some of the events we’d like to support this year that would make a significant impact on improving GNOME:
- Marketing Hackfest – This hackfest is primarily to define and being the GNOME 3.0 launch plans.
- PyGTK Hackfest – Will take place in Cambridge, MA, 14th-18th April 2010, thanks to OLPC for hosting.
- GSettings Hackfest – Novell is hosting this April 12-17 in Cambridge, Boston, USA; thanks guys!
- GNOME Outreach Program for Women – This one isn’t a hackfest but a sponsorship for individual interns.
You can do one time donations or a small monthly donation, whichever works for best for you. Rock on.
Hear ye, hear ye… adopt an upstream IRC sessions, buy one get one free…
Next Wednesday, 31 March, 2000UTC (That’s 4pm EST) in #ubuntu-classroom. We’re going to go over what it means to Adopt-a-Package. These are stalwart individuals that work with upstreams to keep the juices flowing by filtering out bad bug reports, forwarding good ones, making sure patches flow upstream, and generally be “My person at Ubuntu” for upstreams that might not be familiar with how we work.
As you can see on the page, some people have stepped up to the plate, but with like all things we could use a hand!
Translators, ahoy!
Pedro has announced the next hug day, this one is for translators! Here’s the list ‘o targets.
And no, I still don’t hablo. Mi malo.
All about ureadahead.
Scott has posted an informative post on ureadahead and other boot related things on the forums. Recommended reading!
Marriage, Coffee, and Free Software
So I’m getting married and when that happens people go to the internet and buy you things they think you need to live your life. As it ends up I got one of these:
As it ends up it’s a coffee thing, but it’s pretty much proprietary. Only certain brewers make “K-cups” and they’re a bit more expensive than normal coffee. The K cup thing is patented, so I am pretty sure a normal person can’t just make K cups without paying someone money.
Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew about this travesty. They’re fricking delicious by the way.
The Great Gwibber Bugkill II
The first one was great, so we’re bringing it back tomorrow. This time we’ve got Pedro helping us out, and he’s got a nice target list of bugs we’re going to concentrate on. Basically grab a bug, try to resolve it or replicate it, mark it accordingly, and move on. Refer to the triage guide for more info, or feel free to ask on #ubuntu-bugs on freenode.
We could also use people banging on gwibber in general. Feel free to fire up testdrive and bang on it, file bugs, break stuff, post your emo mood on facebook, flame someone on Twitter, or whatever.
Here’s some inspiration from Pantera.
21 teams are in ….
As of right now 21 Local teams have committed to the Global Jam next weekend. Check out the event page on the LoCo directory to sign up your team! Surely we can bring in more teams. You can try some positive motivation, or some competitive motivation, like so: “Where are you Ohio? It’s on. Michigan is once again on top.” Let’s see what paultag has to say about that!
As always, we’re idling in #ubuntu-locoteams on freenode if you need help planning the last minute details.
Using testdrive to save time on testing.
mpt pinged me today to ask why Empathy has two icons in the panel.
That’s odd, what is that yellow icon on the left?!? I responded that we didn’t we ship it that way, we ship it with messaging indicator support built in! You have to go check a box to turn that off. Likely he flipped the box at some point in his install and forgot about it. This happens to everyone all the time!
I don’t maintain Empathy, the desktop team does, so how did I know we shipped it that way out of the box? I checked on a new system, with a fresh ISO from the day before, right then and there when he asked the question. How do we keep track of what we’re shipping by default and what we’ve customized on our own day-to-day PCs?
Enter testdrive. It’s in Lucid already or if you’re in Karmic use the PPA.
After that I dragged the little wheel into my panel. When you click on it you get something like this:
Now you need to wait for a minute. The first time you do this it will download the whole ISO. So just stick an old one in the cache directory or let it sync. Don’t worry, after the first time it gets much easier. Then a few minutes later we can confirm our findings:
Aha, indeed by default we don’t ship that weird icon in the tray. Whew! The best part of this is tomorrow when we need to know about how something is working in the default install we just click on the wheel, let it sync, test, confirm, and then move on! And since it keeps a cache you never have to redownload the whole ISO. And there’s things in there for -server, netbooks, and other arches, so it’s handy to check things across different kinds of Ubuntu.
This is great for confirming bugs and checking out what’s new!
Add your LoCo to the List!
Please don’t forget to add your team to the Event List if you’re planning on running a jam as part of the Global Jam! People can’t show up to your wonderfully planned event if they don’t know about it!
I see what you did there…
Brian Murray finds out what makes LP’s new patches view awesome.
Not bad! Karl Fogel is currently working on hiding the Fix Committed and Fix Released bugs by default so it’s more of a queue than a huge pile in your face. I am keen to get more feedback on +patches and how it affects your team so don’t be shy!
Keeping track of patches and getting them visibility!
Today the Launchpad team released a feature that some of us on the platform team have been dying to see, the +patches view. This basically gives us another way to look at bugs in Launchpad, but now we can concentrate on bugs with patches attached. And since this is done inside Launchpad, we can use this view to look at packages, teams, people, and distro series. So if you’re doing maintenance on Hardy and want to look at patches submitted for that, you can. We also do a nice view that shows us patches by age, to help prevent the dreaded “patch fell through the cracks”. Here’s what it looks like for Gwibber. We’ve left the fixed bugs in there so that if someone runs into the page and wants to look at it they can (Let us know how we can improve this).
What Needs to Get Finished
There are some limitations. Namely right now it just shows us patches sitting in Launchpad. It currently doesn’t show us what patches are shipping in versions of Ubuntu. This is the bug to follow for this work. If you are passionate about this and want to work on it please get ahold of me and I will point you to the right guys on the Launchpad Bugs team. (Don’t worry Anthony Liguori we won’t forget about you!)
We also have a tool called Harvest that aggregates this information from other distributions and upstreams. It would be nice to suck all this up into this kind of view as well!
My Big Dream
I want this more out there in your face as part of everyone’s workflow. I want one page where every person who packages Upstart to see every patch everywhere in one place for every version. And not just for Upstart either, I want everything in the distro. And I want to know by person, or by team, or by package. We know other distros keep track of all their patches like we do, so let’s shove those in there too. I want to be able to have every patch in a package available as a bzr branch so that any person out there can just cherry pick what they want and apply it in a distro branch and push it out. If you’ve ignored a patch sitting in LP for 1048 days the world should know about it. Not to dime you out, but so other people can help you! That’s my dream anyway.
Many thanks to Karl Fogel, Abel Deuring, Deryck Hodge, and Bryce Harrington for the work they’ve put into this first step. If you’re passionate about getting patches visibility then go grab the launchpad code and come talk to us, we have plenty of work to do to make the rest of the dream happen!
If you’re coming to UDS I am planning on having a session on ways forward from here, so I hope you show up if you want to help!
Zeroconfing squid-deb-proxy
EDIT: Please see this post on the stack exchange for updated instructions on how to use this.
For Lucid this is how you will set up a caching apt server for machines inside your network.
On the server:
sudo apt-get install squid-deb-proxy avahi-utils
Avahi will now advertise that there is a caching proxy available on your network! Now to tell the rest of your computers to look for it. On the client:
sudo apt-get install squid-deb-proxy-client
You might want to set this up as the demand on the package servers increases over the next 2 months. This is also great for laptops because if a caching proxy is there it will use it, if there isn’t one it won’t care. Thanks Michael Vogt!
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