Since Jill started her PhD we’ve been slowly converting the guest room into a home office. For those of you not familiar with grad school and beyond, this is basically a room with a computer, a high capacity printer, and 2,347,345 reams of paper that routinely explode into mountains of tree-killing mayhem.

She has been comfortable with her Dell XPS 1330, but she’s gotten to the point where working out of the couch in a laptop is distracting and a desktop in the middle of a pile of papers started to make sense. I didn’t want to spend too much, so we decided that a full Ubuntu PC would meet her needs. I wanted something quiet and sleek, with a webcam and built in wireless, since I wasn’t about to run a cable up two stories.

After much deliberation I settled on a black friday Amazon deal, $431 for an Asus Eee Top ET2002 (video review) with free shipping. This is an all in one box with a 20″ monitor, Atom 330 processor, and 2gb of RAM , and ~240gb drive. This is quite an amazing deal so I went with it. Having seen one of these at an Ubuntu booth at Ontario Linuxfest I was confident that everything would just work. Keep in mind at this price this is the non-touchscreen screen. (EDIT: Correction to the price, this PC was $431, not $331, that would be ridiculous!)

The hardware is nice, it comes in one box and when it’s set up there’s only one cable (power) that you need. The out-of-the-box Vista experience is one of the worst I’ve ever seen from any vendor on any platform. After the 15-minute “finish the OEM OS install” the vendor’s next installer comes in, which installs out of date versions of Adobe Reader, their weird desktop launcher bits, etc. after a reboot it then goes and updates all that software. After (I kid you not), 45 minutes of grinding, the computer was finally ready to use. After I got the hardware info I needed (I could not find any hardware specs on the internet for the wifi so I had to get it from the PC) I went ahead and reached for my Karmic CD. This BIOS in the machine didn’t have an option to PXE boot (which is a shame, it would be a great LTSP client) or boot from USB so I had to use a CD. The install went off without a hitch.

On boot up I set up her account and added the Ubuntu b-sides to take care of the obvious additions. The wireless was odd, it kept conking out every few minutes for about 30 seconds. I thought that an updated driver might do the trick, so I installed the backported new wireless drivers that our kernel team provides and after that the wireless was solid. The wireless card is an Atheros AR9285 btw. After that I added her the PC to the Dropbox account and let it sync overnight.

Some tidbits about the hardware:

• The Atom 330 – I was expecting a typically horrible netbook processor, but this is a really great little chip. It shows up as 4 CPUs (it’s dual cored and hyperthreaded) and is 64 bit capable. I wouldn’t recommend encoding DVDs but for general computing use it did the job and I don’t really complain about it.
• Nvidia ION – Ok, this is fantastic. I’ve switched her over to mplayer to use VDPAU and it just cuts through HD like butter. I am looking forward to having gstreamer-enabled VDPAU in the future so I don’t have to swap the default bits out.
• Flash – is of course still absolutely terrible. However I found a neat plugin that replaces the flash on youtube with the h264 file that they use for the iPhone and then inlines it in the page with html5 video. It’s slick, and more importantly since the ffmpeg in chrome is multithreaded it spreads the decoding over the CPU cores, so the playback is much, much better than the flash video. I’ve asked fta if it’s possible to use the browser’s ffmpeg with a VDPAU backend to accelerate this in hardware, but I haven’t gotten too far into that.
• The hard drive – It’s a pokey 5400rpm drive, was probably used to keep the heat down. This kind of makes IO intensive applications not very fun to use. Firefox was a grindfest, and OOo is not very fun to launch either. However Jill seems to find the OOo performance acceptable and I’ve almost completed moving most of her work to Google Docs anyway.
• Amazon MP3 in 64 bit was annoying to fix, I used some work around on the internet I am not proud of, however I hope to transition to the Ubuntu One music store when it is available. Striving to keep with as much a default install as possible I left Rhythmbox on there for her. Her G1 is detected and syncs as expected.
• The mouse – it’s kind of crap so I replaced it with one she uses for her laptop. In case you’re wondering the colored keyboard in the picture is a gboard, which is a dedicated keyboard for Gmail that the manufacturer sent me to test how well it works in Linux (it works great and ootb with 0 config by the way).
• Suspend and Resume just work, I have it set up to suspend when you hit the power button.
• The Camera works great:

All in all, I think the ET2002 is a great little box, especially for the price I got it at! On some days I go up there and work out of her office and have no problems getting work done. I am mulling replacing the pokey drive with a cheap SSD for noise,heat, and performance win, but this isn’t the kind of machine that has easy to see drive bays or things of that nature so I don’t know if I want to take it apart. The speakers aren’t amazing but good enough to listen to music while working.

I only wish that there was an option for Ubuntu out of the box on an all-in-one so I wouldn’t have had to spend 2 hours making it work better. I think system76 should take the guts of the meerkat and put together something just as compelling! If you’ve seen these with the touchscreen and Ubuntu Netbook Remix (now the Netbook Edition) then you know how cool it can be with the touch stuff.

We’ve had to make an adjustment to the Open Week schedule for tomorrow. The “Ask Mark” and “AppArmor” sessions have been swapped. Ask Mark is now on Friday at 1700UTC and AppArmor is tomorrow at 1500UTC. Please see the schedule for the change.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

So about half way through this cycle I moved to squid for my apt-caching needs since all the others ones would fail or be rewrites of other ones or something. Ends up squid is real easy to use and I get the bonus of caching everything instead of just .debs. It’s been real solid for me. Here’s how mine is set up if you’re looking to do a bunch of upgrades and want to save time and load on your local mirror.

1. Find a machine you want to be your server.
2. Install squid: sudo apt-get install squid
3. Configure squid by editing /etc/squid/squid.conf (Warning, this file is probably the most commented file in the history of UNIX so it’s big)

By default squid won’t accept connections from remote hosts so I modified one line to be like this (My server is not internet-facing):

http_access allow all #forgive me kees


And … add this to the bottom (I nicked this from another blog and cranked the numbers up but can’t find it now for some reason, shucks for attribution):

refresh_pattern deb$ 1577846 100% 1577846
refresh_pattern udeb$ 1577846 100% 1577846
refresh_pattern Packages.gz$ 1440 100% 1440
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 15000 2 8
maximum_object_size 409600 KB


4. Restart squid: sudo /etc/init.d/squid restart
5. Configure your machines to use your server, either by setting it in the GNOME Proxy gui thing (squid defaults to port 3128 so make sure you specify that), or in http_proxy in your environment, or for apt in /etc/apt/apt.conf:
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://192.168.1.117:3128"
Setting it in the GUI GNOME thing is easiest for me.

6. Confirm it’s working. On the server do sudo tail -F /var/log/squid/access.log to watch the log. Now go to one machine and do an apt-get update and upgrade and the log should show a bunch of TCP_MISS lines for each deb you download. Now go to the second machine and do the same thing. This time each deb should show something like TCP_REFRESH_HIT, which means squid is intercepting the request and sending the deb directly to that machine. Rinse and repeat. This will also work for PPAs and whatnot.

Random tips:

• Use the same mirrors on every machine. If you have a mirror on one machine and the other machines don’t the debs won’t get cached. (Anyone know a fancy rewrite or something to get around this?)
• Do one machine and then do the others when that one is done, otherwise if the one machine is partially done the other ones will catch up and you’ll end up with all the machines trying to pull the last few debs at the same time.
• I haven’t figured out an easy way to have my laptop use a proxy when it’s connected to my home network, but have no proxy set when travelling, I have to do it by hand.
• I set one machine to autodownload updates in the update-manager prefs, that way when I wake up in the morning the debs are already cached, making for quick upgrades as soon as you wake up. That’s what everyone does first thing in the morning right?

Any other bandwidth saving tips? Leave a comment!

Rick Spencer’s Quickly video tutorials are now available in a more digestible form in the Ubuntu Developer’s Blip channel, which is syndicated to the youtube channel of the same name.

blip.tv allows us to post natively in ogg video, so check out episodes one, two, and three. To download directly just click the download link at the bottom.

Alan Pope and I have now set it up that native ogg videos will be uploaded to the blip channels for both the developer channel and the screencasts channel in native ogg. Blip will syndicate it out to youtube and the Internet Archive, so that’s useful. If you’re looking at making video content that is relevant to Ubuntu people please let me know and I’ll help you get it out there.

It’s that time of the year folks. Ubuntu Open Week, the IRC workshop that’s taking the world by storm. We’ve got a great schedule of talks for you from some really great people from the Ubuntu Community. The wiki page has all the information you need to participate. Hope to see you there!

Update: Speak Spanish? If so, there’s an entire week of Spanish Open Week goodness available as well, thanks to the people who put that together!

I remember once hearing a radio interview with Kirk Hammett where he mentions that he’s still waiting for the band’s greatest record and song to be written. That’s because he’s never satisfied and in his mind perfection is always one step away. It’s the pursuit that matters right? I am surrounded by these kind of people every day.

It’s been a stressful few weeks for a bunch of us. October and April always suck because the release is coming up, we’ve got Jams, release parties, planning for UDS, and all sorts of crazy shit going on. I was kind of sucking a few weeks ago. It was one of those bad days where I felt like I didn’t get anything done, I was having empathy problems so I was having crashers and missing IMs, and just when I would get it working Ken Vandine would ping me and have me break it more for the sake of testing. I just couldn’t get a break because everyone was GO GO GO. So I was feeling a bit down, but let’s not dwell on that. Today when I logged in and saw what we have accomplished this cycle I want to take a moment before crunchtime to thank some people who have done a really awesome job.

I am going to thank some really hardworking people who make Ubuntu awesome. And since I can’t possibly name them all it’s up to you, Planet Ubuntu, to add to this list, consider this your meme for the weekend. I am going to touch up on my favorites:

• The Ubuntu Community Team – and I don’t mean just the four horsemen. Alan Pope, Nick Ali, Mike Basinger, Amber Graner, Lyz Krumbach, Nathan Handler, Rich Johnson, Christophe Sauthier, Jacob Petticord, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre, Laura Czajkowski, Dave Walker, Greg Grossmeier, Jono Bacon, James Westby, David Planella, Daniel Holbach, Dan and Chris down in Florida … wow, the list is endless.
• Upstreams – This list is waaaaaaaay too long for one post.
• Xavier Claessens and Guillaume Desmottes for being rocking upstreams with empathy, in fact, the entire crew at Collabora rocks.
• I’d like to thank Ryan Paul for working on Gwibber for Karmic despite not having enough time.
• Sandy Armstrong (Tomboy), who was really a great sport working along side our Ubuntu One folks on note syncing. (yeah yeah Brad, you rock too). Also thanks for being so patient with regard to our SRU policies.
• Seif Lofty – the Zeitgeist crazyman is unstoppable. I don’t know whether I should be feeding you more caffeine or shooting you with a tranquilizer, it’s all good.
• Paul Cutler – I’d like to thank you for recharging my GNOME battery. I still owe you an article. :-/
• GCDS People (omg crossdesktop) – The folks at KDAB, couch.io, codethink (Rob and crew), Yorba, imendio, lamendo…etc. Also I don’t think Guy Lunardi at Novell ever got props for paying for dinner for like 30+ some people on the last night.
• Puppet – Shout out to Luke Kanies and Andrew Pollock.
• Dan Nurmi and the crew at Eucalyptus.
• Debian – Thanks to all the Debian folks who continue to rock and roll. Thanks to Uncle Steve, all of debian-uk, Lucas Nussbaum, Martin Krafft, Bdale and Edale Garbee, and John Wright.
• The entire Boot Experience Team – I remember a few months ago Mat Tomaszewski showed off a demo of what the boot experience would look like. I kind of shrugged it off as “just a demo, it’ll never really look like that.” But it does. Kudos to Mat for the design, and Cody Russell for making alot of that happen. Underneath it all is Scott James Remnant’s plumbing.
• The “Is it a Store or a Center People” – In 20 years there will be a TV show about Matthew Paul Thomas and Michael Vogt and how they were roomates and how they get into wacky adventures. It will be epic. I’ve got a whole angle for it and everything; it’ll be like a kid’s cartoon, and one guy will be the funny ‘out of control’ one and one guy will be the straight man. I have no idea who the straight man will be. Stay tuned.
• I’d like to thank the entire server team for just brutally chomping through EC2, Eucalyptus, and the 39,847,592,348 things they need to do.
• Anyone who had anything to do with 100 papercuts gets a hug.
• The ubuntu-news team is just awesome.
• Bazaar – Great job reaching 2.0, and Emma Jane’s website redux is \m/
• Launchpad – off the hook, way too many people to thank, I’ll let someone more awesome do it.
• I’d like to thank Eric Hammond for shining a light on an entire area of computing that I knew nothing about.
• Thanks to Ken Vandine who constantly forces me to help test shit. I hate the work you make me do, I want to punch you so bad sometimes.

My final hug is reserved for Kyle Rankin, my partner in Linux Crime, for his heartfelt acknowledgement in the Ubuntu Server Book; There aren’t metal horns brutal enough for you bro. Well, that’s my SHORT LIST. Add your own, blog it. Go forth and hug. Who are your heroes?

PS – Ken Wimer, you are fucking awesome.

Thanks to SRT Solutions for hosting us!

I will see you all tomorrow and Saturday at THE Ohio Linuxfest. I’ll be floating around tomorrow, probably spending time in the Hackathon area with other ubu-maniacs. If you’re around consider dropping by, I am keen on having an impromptu bug jam or if you need some Ubuntu tips or something.

Reminder! Tomorrow will be the last “How to Run a Jam” tutorial session in IRC. Join me at 1500UTC in #ubuntu-classroom for tips and tricks, and don’t forget to join us for the Ubuntu Global Jam the weekend of 2-4 October!

Chris Jones, creator of Terminator has been working on a small little tool that you might like. It’s called Lifesaver. It’s a small screensaver that searches for “ubuntu” on twitter and identi.ca and then presents it on your screen all slick-like. Here’s what it looks like on my dual monitors:

Cute huh? Chris has a PPA for Karmic here. Unfortunately the version of goocanvas in Jaunty is too old to do what he needed to do to get a PPA working for Jaunty. So if you’re feeling like contributing, you might want to check out the code and see if you can make it work on Jaunty to give Chris a hand, patches in this area are very welcome.

Greg Grossmeier has announced the time and place for the Michigan Team’s Global Jam session. Hey, if a State fan can go to Ann Arbor in October then anyone can participate! Looking for a place to Jam? Check out the list, and if your LoCo isn’t on there, then plan one! More information here.

Go Green, Go White! errr, I mean … go Ubuntu.

Dinosaurs and Open Source! You know, for those days you want to read a review on a EEE PC and ankylosaur tail club function on one blog. Speaking of dinos, Dinosauria is coming to a close, and I will miss the hat …

Photo by Craig Maloney

Behold, my first screencast, it’s about linking bugs to upstream trackers. I am having a hard time figuring out how to do the <video> tag in wordpress (it keeps removing(!) it when I do a publish), so if you know how please post a comment so can add it to the docs.

(Yes, I know I speak way too fast, it’s kind of how I roll. :-/ )

At the end of every work day I check the wiki’s RecentChanges for cool new stuff. I mean, who doesn’t do that. I ran into some of James Westby’s work on daily builds, specifically this page on BzrBuilder and I was able to make a daily build of an upstream in about 5 minutes, that includes reading the docs! Here’s what I did. First off, pick a project. I picked Quickly, since it’s the new black.

Then install the bzr plugin like in the instructions. Then I created a recipe file like so:

jorge@bojack:~/dailies$ cat quickly.recipe
# bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 1.0+{revno}+{time}
lp:quickly


Then it’s ONE command:


bzr dailydeb quickly.recipe --key-id FFC27DD0 --dput ppa:jorge/ppa


Booyah, that’s it. Now, we got lucky here since Quickly is all in launchpad already and has a debian directory already in there. For other projects I suspect that grabbing them from vcs-imports and then merging in the packaging branch will also work, however I have not done this yet, but if you want to try it, the instructions are available. So if your project is already in launchpad you can start making dailies right now. Make sure you read up on more docs.

More than one way…

James isn’t the only person looking into dailies. The now-famous Fabien Tassin has been working on this as well, but taking a different approach. His scripts are available here:

https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~fta/+junk/ppa-scripts
https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~fta/+junk/ppa-confs

Fabien’s daily builds have been insanely popular, the chromium PPA alone has over 10k users (and that’s just the fractional popcon numbers). Also, odd that people keep the wine build around, but whatever.

He also has them for the various mozilla projects, gwibber, and has just set up one for network-manager. Other people are using it as well. Since they were announced in February the Mozilla daily builds have about 10,000 users of Firefox and over 1000 of Thunderbird. (Sorry no graphs for that, but look at numbers.

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Alexander mentions in his blog post on the ideal type of person to use daily builds.

• All advanced users that run the current ubuntu development release (e.g. karmic for now) that also want to focus their testing efforts on network-manager
• Users that have filed a bug against NM which then got fixed upstream can verify the fix by trying our daily build.
• Since we are targeting 0.8 for karmic the dailies reflect what will go into karmic soon. So if you like to run the bleeding edge and like to report issues right when they happen, this PPA is meant for you too.
• We also have jaunty builds, but those are not yet fully tested. If you want and run jaunty please try them and report your findings back (of course, be sure that you know how to recover from not having network-manager network)

And James points out: “Obviously, as there is automation involved in the process the resulting packages can be risky as they haven’t had human verification. This means that there has to be some care taken with them, and the project and packager should do there best to ensure that the risks are minimized. They are also not something that an average user should be using. With due diligence the benefits can certainly outweigh the risks though.”

My view is that people will always want crack, and the availability of things like PPAs certainly lowers the barrier for users to use your software. But those people aren’t necessarily capable of giving you the kind of bug reports you need to fix problems, or things might be in a state where you know things are broken and don’t need bug reports spamming you every day. Chromium even tells you “Don’t file bugs without doing the work!”

I am interested in how upstreams perceive the idea of daily builds, I’m sure there are plenty of plusses and minuses to having them. However, I am convinced that Chromium’s spike in popularity in Ubuntu is because of the ease in which it is to use them. So the real question becomes, do the benefits of getting more testers outweigh people arguing in circles?

Internets,

I am interested in a home server to replace my aging POS. I need something that can hold a bunch of disks and have eSATA and a bunch of USB ports and some gigabit ethernet. The hp and acer “home server” models look ideal except they come with only Windows Home Server and one of them doesn’t even have a VGA port, and I don’t want a weekend project to deal with these things to make them work.

Surely there’s a vendor out there putting together atom-based home servers for enthusiasts who just want to put ubuntu-server on a bunch-o-disks and shove it in a closet?

I’d just like to do a shout out to the folks behind the latest Ubuntu Weekly News. The amount of detail in each issue continues to improve and it’s becoming more invaluable as the community grows. It’s really becoming a life saver. Great job everyone!

My friend Andrew came over yesterday and helped me set up dhcp/dns/kickstart on a spare machine because it would help me out for testing karmic and after 2 years I basically have no idea how to sysadmin anything. Here are the basic instructions.

I have a squid proxy at home that I use to cache my .deb files (See this great post for more information) so that I am not constantly hammering my local mirror with my 6+ machines in the household. Last cycle I was getting frustrated at how long it took me to do testing, so I vowed to make it all efficient so I can do real hardware and VM installs easily. Plus you know sometimes we have dinner parties and whatnot and it’s polite to offer Ubuntu to your guests. So after we set up kickstart I wanted the installer to use my squid proxy so that I could take advantage of all the caching goodness. That’s when I discovered that one can use preseed arguments in your kickstart file and it Just Works(tm):

preseed mirror/http/proxy string http://chichi:3128/
preseed popularity-contest popularity-contest/participate boolean true
preseed finish-install/reboot_in_progress note
#NTP
preseed clock-setup/ntp boolean true
preseed clock-setup/ntp-server string ntp.ubuntu.com
#One big partition
preseed partman-auto/choose_recipe select atomic
#Add local repo

# Tasks
preseed tasksel tasksel/ubuntu-desktop

# Packages
%packages
banshee
gnome-do
openoffice.org
ubuntu-restricted-extras
… etc…

I didn’t know you could do this!! Now I can get my preseed goodness and not have to relearn a whole new system. (Right now some of you are going omg use d-i, FAI, or one of the other million ways to do this). I prefer ks for two reasons, a) everyone I know uses it in production, and b) I can rip off other people’s ks scripts since they seem to be more common. This (and other) features have probably been around for a while, I need to spend more time hanging out with installer people.

Help needed: For some reason the karmic installer installs ubuntu-desktop, and the package gets installed, but none of the dependencies do. So after the install I get a semi-complete ubuntu desktop. After removing ubuntu-desktop and then reinstalling it /then/ it goes and grabs firefox, tomboy, and the rest of the desktop. I’ve tried the preseed line you see above and mentioning ubuntu-desktop explicitly in the %packages section to no avail. It doesn’t feel like a bug as much as I think I missed a step myself. On a positive note, installing ubuntu-restricted-extras is automated, I don’t get bothered for licenses or any of that, so woo hoo on that front.

Other random thing: Why not run a local ubuntu mirror? I set up an rsync and everything and started with main, then I realized that throughout the course of a cycle I am constantly updating and installing stuff, so it’s already in my squid cache, why have rsync firing off hitting my mirror when I keep most of the .debs locally anyway? Sure if I was at a University or something a full mirror would make more sense.

Related story on LWN about package repository proxies. I still find the squid method to be the most reliable for me, though hopefully apt-zeroconf will make this transparent and easy for normal people. (The caching part, not the kickstarting part.)

What ways are you sysadmins out there deploying Ubuntu? Share your tips and tricks in the comments.

So, we’ve got the videos from the Ubuntu Developer Summit posted here, but as Alan Pope pointed out, a big Apache listing isn’t necessarily useful. So he made an attempt to make something better.

Since we recorded these I’ve been thinking about ways we can not only get this stuff out to people, but also in a way that would be slick and available to people in multiple formats, preferrably supporting open formats. Alan suggested blip.tv, and in very little time I was able to upload all the videos and have them aggregated throughout many video sites. The most useful thing to me so far has been the bulk upload (I just fired up an ftp client and loaded all the videos in at once), and of course they offer Ogg Theora video support along with flash.

They also let you blog with inline stuff like this (let’s hope this makes it onto planet properly):

Here’s the channel: http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/
and here are the archives which I find more useful. I just set it up to send our videos to archive.org. This seems to be a good way to put our content on the internet. I like the support for Ogg Theora, I wish it had automatic Theora-to-Flash fallback so we could default to Theora in the channel – but this seems to be a much better solution than the YouTube channel. Please note that I am just experimenting with this to see how well it works, I think it’s much better than the file listing. What do you guys think?

Longer post to follow. I met a ton of passionate people who love what they do and that’s very motivating. One talk was poisonous garbage, but the majority of us moved past that and didn’t let it ruin our week.

The three highlights of my week (in no particular order) were PiTiVi, Zeitgeist, and the couchdb desktop work.

I have been toying with a bunch of apt-proxy-like things since I read jdub’s blog about approx. apt-cacher-ng seemed to be working but tends to wonk out on occasion. I decided to try squid for a bit (because then I could use it to cache other things, not just debs).

So after a while of messing with this stuff I decided “this is dumb, why aren’t the computers just maintaining themselves, I am doing too much work for this crap.” I didn’t want to go computer to computer setting a proxy and I didn’t want to mess around with a transparent proxy so I was just annoyed. (And lazy!)

apt-zeroconf was doing this nice and automatically in the past but it was dead upstream and the website disappeared. Maybe if someone fixed this up this would be a nice little solution for home users with multiple PCs. Ends up that Jeremy Austin-Bardo had written a blueprint and a spec. So I gave him a call and now we have started a project to resurrect apt-zeroconf.

Here it is.

The idea is simple. On your home machines you check a box in the gui someplace, and then all your machines share their apt packages with each other. Which means that on release day you upgrade one machine, and then when you upgrade the others you don’t have to redownload everything again. Nice huh? Combine this with deb delta syncing and you’ve got a nice little bandwidth saving solution.

The project is small so some of the guys from the Michigan LoCo will be looking into this as their summer project. If you know python and avahi we could use your help. Also, something changed in pyinotify that we can’t figure out, so help there would be appreciated. Branch away and feel free to join the team and mailing list for updates.

I’d like to point out Robbie Williamson’s summary of the combined Debian and Ubuntu boot performance sprint, which was held at the Canonical office in Millbank, London, UK.

Though we (as in Ubuntu developers) typically have a presence at Debconf this is the first time I can recall (In my admittedly short memory) a targeted sprint specifically designed for Ubuntu/Debian collaboration on a specific feature. I look forward to seeing the discussions that come out of Debconf9 on this as well as admiring the tartans. I’ll see you guys in Spain!

David has blogged the set of 100 papercuts that we’re shooting to fix for Karmic. As you can see here they are divided into 10 milestones of 10 bugs each. Now we have a nice concrete list of bugs that are attainable.

Please see Jean-Louis Dupond’s bug as an example of Doing It The Right Way(tm) by working upstream. On a related note, the word “Ubuntu” is no longer considered a misspelling.

Please feel to dig into any of these and help the cause.

Here’s a project that I’m sure will be popular. David Siegel has just blogged instructions on how to tag bugs “that will improve user experience if fixed, is small enough for users to become habituated to it, and is trivial to fix.”

You know, those tiny little nitpick bugs that drive you mad. One of my favorites is this one, which I’ve nominated to the list. David’s post shows you how to do it. Another great example is this bug, which has been driving me mad for a long time.

Now before you go into Launchpad and nominate all your pet bugs, remember that this is a nomination process for trivial fixes. So, for example, in my non-developer eyes my Nautilus bug seems simple. It might end up being complicated, so if your bug ends up not being a papercut (and more of a gaping chest wound) then don’t worry about it, we’re shooting for high-bang-for-the-buck and low-hanging-fruit. Not that non-papercut bugs aren’t important – this is an effort to fix little things, nip and tuck at the corners if you will. Have at it!

On a related note, you can now follow the Ubuntu Design Team on identi.ca – and while you’re at it, please take part in the Ubuntu Usability Study.

Public Service Announcement: There is now a WINE session for Open Week on Friday 200UTC as well as an Ubuntu Women talk tonight at 2300 UTC.

Also, people have noticed that the Forums session is actually after the final feedback session. That’s due to availability of the presenter, but no worries. Sessions have been hovering around ~300 participants per with the Docs Day hovering around ~350 and Mark’s talk hitting ~400. We’re about half way through and there’s no indication of any slow down yet, so feel free to join us in #ubuntu-classroom on freenode. I’ve purposely tried to not +m the sessions so people asking the questions can follow up and also thank the presenter after. So far, other than the occasional interruption the participants have been well behaved and very collaborative with the sessions, thanks so much for helping us help you!

Ars Technica also has a write up of the popular screen-profiles session.

Special thanks to Jeremy Austin-Bardo from the NY LoCo team for taking care of the logs on the wiki page. As always please feel free to send me feedback (good, bad, or otherwise) on Open Week at jorge at ubuntu dot com.