I ducked out of the Open Infrastructure Day in the mid-afternoon to give my talk, 10 Years of Xubuntu. This is a talk I’d been thinking about for some time, and I begin by walking folks through the history of the Xubuntu project. From there I spoke about where it sits in the Ubuntu community as a recognized flavor, and then on to how specific strategies that the team has employed with regard to motivating the completely volunteer-driven team.

When it came to social media accounts, we didn’t create them all ourselves, instead relying upon existing accounts on Facebook, G+ and LinkedIn that we promoted to being official ones, keeping the original volunteers in place, just giving access to a core Xubuntu team member in case they couldn’t continue running it. It worked out for all of us, we had solid contributors passionate about their specific platforms and excited to be made official, and as long as they kept them running we didn’t need to expend core team resources to keep them running. We’ve also worked to collect user stories in order to motivate current contributors, since it means a lot to see their work being used by others. I’ve also placed a great deal of value on the Xubuntu Strategy Document, which has set the guiding principles of the project and allowed us to steer the ship through difficult decisions in the project. Slides from the talk are available here: 10_years_of_Xubuntu_UbuCon_Summit.pdf (1.9M).

Thursday evening I met with my open source infrastructure friends for dinner, but afterwards swung by Porto Alegre to catch some folks for evening drinks and snacks. I had a really nice chat with Nathan Haines, who co-organized the UbuCon Summit.

On Friday I was able to attend the first keynote! Michael Hall gave a talk titled Sponsored by Canonical where he dove deep into Ubuntu history to highlight Canonical’s role in the support of the project from the early focus on desktop Linux, to the move into devices and the cloud. His talk was followed by one from Sergio Schvezov on Snaps. The afternoon was spent as an unconference, with the Ubuntu booth starting up in the expo hall on 2PM.

The weekend was all about the Ubuntu booth. Several volunteers staffed it Friday through Sunday.

They spent the event showing off the Ubuntu Phone, Mycroft AI, and several laptops.

It was also great to once again meet up with one of my co-authors for the 9th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book, José Antonio Rey. Our publisher sent a pile of books to give out at the event, some of which we gave out during our talks, and a couple more at the booth.

In light of this, I thought I’d quickly share a few of my own tips and stumbling points. My focus is typically on Xubuntu testing, but things I talk about are applicable to Ubuntu too.

ISO testing on a rainy day

1. Downloading the ISO

Downloading an ISO every day, or even once a week can be tedious. Helpfully, the team provides the images via zsync which will only download the differences in the ISO between days, saving you a lot of time and bandwidth. Always use this option when you’re downloading ISOs, you can even use it the first time you download one, as it will notice that none exists.

The zsync URL is right alongside all the others when you choose “Link to the download information” in the ISO tracker:

You then use a terminal to cd into the directory where you want the ISO to be (or where it already is) and copy the zsync line into the terminal and hit enter. It will begin by examining the current ISO and then give you a progress bar for what it needs to download.

2. Putting the image on a USB stick

I have struggled with this for several releases. At first I was using UNetbootin (unetbootin), then usb-creator (usb-creator-gtk). Then I’d switch off between the two per release when one or the other wasn’t behaving properly. What a mess! How can we expect people to test if they can’t even get the ISO on a USB stick with simple instructions?

The other day flocculant, the Xubuntu QA Lead, clued me into using GNOME Disks to put an ISO on a USB stick for testing. You pop in the USB stick, launch gnome-disks (you’ll need to install the gnome-disk-utility package in Xubuntu), select your USB stick in the list on the left and choose the “Restore Disk Image…” option in the top right to select the ISO image you want to use:

I thought about doing a quick screencast of it, but Paul W. Frields over at Fedora Magazine beat me to it by more than a year: How to make a Live USB stick using GNOME Disks

This has worked beautifully with both the Xubuntu and Ubuntu ISOs.

3. Reporting bugs

The ISO tracker, where you report testing results, is easy enough to log into, but a fair number of people quit the testing process when it gets to actually reporting bugs. How do I report bugs? What package do I report them against? What if I do it wrong?

I’ve been doing ISO testing for several years, and have even run multiple events with a focus on ISO testing, and STILL struggle with this.

How did I get over it?

First, I know it’s a really long page, but this will get you familiar with the basics of reporting a bug using the ubuntu-bug tool: Ubuntu ReportingBugs

Often times being familiar with the basic tooling isn’t enough. It’s pretty common to run into a bug that’s manifesting in the desktop environment rather than in a specific application. A wallpaper is gone, a theme looks wrong, you’re struggling to log in. Where do those get submitted? And Is this bad enough for me to classify it as “Critical” in the ISO Tracker? This is when I ask. For Xubuntu I ask in #xubuntu-devel and for Ubuntu I ask in #ubuntu-quality. Note: people don’t hover over their keyboards on IRC, explain what you’re doing, ask your question and be patient.

This isn’t just for bugs, we want to see more people testing and it’s great when new testers come into our IRC channels to share their experiences and where they’re getting stuck. You’re part of our community :)

Simcoe thinks USB sticks are cat toys

Resources

• ISO Tracker
• Package Tracker
• Screencast: How to make a Live USB stick using GNOME Disks
• Xubuntu: QA Team
• Xubuntu: Package and ISO Testing
• Xubuntu: Dealing with bugs
• Ubuntu Quality Team wiki
• Ubuntu ReportingBugs

I hope you’ll join us.

It’s totally worth it though, so I present to you the full list of prep, should you wish to do a QA event in your region:

• Secure venue: Completed in December (thanks AJ at Gandi!).
• Secure refreshments funding: Completed in January via the Ubuntu donations funding.
• Create LoCo Team Portal event and start sharing it everywhere (social media, friendly mailing lists for locals who may be interested). Do this for weeks!
• Prepare goodies. I had leftover pens and stickers from a previous event. I then met up with Mark Sobell earlier in the week to have him sign copies of A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux, 4th Edition we received from the publisher (thank you Mark and Prentice Hall!).

• Collect and stage all the stuff you’re bringing.
• Print out test cases, since it can be tricky to juggle reading the test case while also navigating the actual test on their laptop.
• Also print out signs for the doors at the venue.
• Tour venue and have final chat with your host about what you need (plates, cups and utensils? power? wifi? projector?).
• Send out last minute email to attendees as a reminder and in case of any last minute info.

• Make sure dietary requirements of attendees are met. I did go with pizza for this event, but I made sure to go with a pizzeria that offered gluten free options and I prepared a gluten free salad (which people ate!).
• Download and burn/copy the daily ISOs as soon as they come out on the day of the event, and put them on USB sticks or discs as needed: Xubuntu went on USB sticks, Lubuntu for PPC went on a CD-R (alternate) and DVD-R (desktop, currently oversized).

• Bring along any extra laptops you have so folks who don’t bring one or have trouble doing testing on theirs can participate
• Make penguin-shaped cookies (this one may be optional).

With all of this completed, I think the event went pretty smoothly. My Ubuntu California team mates James Ouyang and Christian Einfeldt met me at my condo nearby to help me carry over everything. AJ met us upon arrival and we were able to get quickly set up.

I had planned on doing a short presentation to give folks a tour of the ISO Tracker but the flow of attendees made it such that I could get the experienced attendees off and running pretty quick (some had used the tracker before) and by the time they were starting we had some newcomers joining us who I was able to guide one-on-one.

I did a lot of running around, but attendees were able to help out each other too, and it was a huge help to bring along some extra laptops. I was also surprised to see that another PPC Mac showed up at the event! I thought the one I brought would be the only one that would be used for Lubuntu. Later in the event we were joined by some folks who came over after the nearby BerkeleyLUG meeting wrapped up at 3PM, and caused us to push the event a full hour later than expected (thanks to AJ for putting up with us for another hour!).

Prior to the event, I had worried some about attendance, but throughout the event we had about 12 people total come and go, which was the perfect amount for me and a couple of other Ubuntu Members to manage so that attendees didn’t feel ignored as they worked through their tests. Post event, I’ve been able to provide some feedback to the Ubuntu Quality team about some snafus we encountered while doing testing. Hopefully these can be fixed next time around so other teams don’t run into the same issues we did.

Aside from some of the hiccups with the trackers, I received really positive feedback from attendees. Looking forward to doing this again in the future!

More photos from the event available here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157650663176996/

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Jam!

What’s an Ubuntu Global Jam? From the FAQ on the wiki:

A world-wide online and face-to-face event to get people together to work on Ubuntu projects – we want to get as many people online working on things, having a great time doing so, and putting their brick in the wall for free software as possible. This is not only a great opportunity to really help Ubuntu, but to also get together with other Ubuntu fans to make a difference together, either via your LoCo team, your LUG, other free software group, or just getting people together in your house/apartment to work on Ubuntu projects and have a great time.

The event will take place on Sunday, February 8th from noon – 5PM at the Gandi offices on 2nd street, just south of Mission.

Community members will gather to do some Quality Assurance testing on Xubuntu ISOs and packages for the upcoming release, Vivid Vervet, using the trackers built for this purpose. We’re focusing on Xubuntu because that’s the project I volunteer with and I can help put us into contact with the developers as we test the ISOs and submit bugs. The ISO tracker and package tracker used for Xubuntu are used for all recognized flavors of Ubuntu, so what you learn from this event will transfer into testing for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME and all the rest.

No experience with Testing or Quality Assurance is required and Quality Assurance is not as boring as it sounds, honest :) Plus, one of the best things about doing testing on your hardware is that your bugs are found and submitted prior to release, increasing the chances significantly that any bugs that exist with your hardware are fixed prior to release!

The event will begin with a presentation that gives a tour of how manual testing is done on Ubuntu releases. From there we’ll be able to do Live Testing, Package Testing and Installation testing as we please, working together as we confirm bugs and when we get stuck. Installation Testing is the only one that requires you to make any changes to the laptop you bring along, so feel free to bring along one you can do Live and Package testing on if you’re not able to do installations on your hardware.

I’ll also have the following two laptops for folks to do testing on if they aren’t able to bring along a laptop:

• PowerBook G4 for Lubuntu PPC ISO testing
• Lenovo G575 for Xubuntu installations

I’ll also be bringing along DVDs and USB sticks with the latest daily builds for tests to be done and some notes about how to go about submitting bugs.

Please RSVP here (full address also available at this link):

http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-california/2984-ubuntu-california-san-francisco-qa-jam/

Or email me at lyz@ubuntu.com if you’re interested in attending and have trouble with or don’t wish to RSVP through the site. Also please feel free to contact me if you’re interested in helping out (it’s ok if you don’t know about QA, I need logistical and promotional help too!).

Food and drinks will be provided, the current menu is a platter of sandwiches and some pizzas, so please let me know if you have dietary restrictions so we can place orders accordingly. I’d hate to exclude folks because of our menu, so I’m happy to accommodate vegan, gluten free, whatever you need, I just need to know :)

Finally, giveaways of Ubuntu stickers and pens for everyone and a couple Ubuntu books (hopefully signed by the authors!) will also be available to a few select attendees.

Somewhere other than San Francisco and interested in hosting or attending an event? The Ubuntu Global Jam is an international event with teams focusing on a variety of topics, details at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGlobalJam. Events currently planned for this Jam can be found via this link: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/global/2967/

I realized that I never mentioned it here, but I was interviewed on a podcast earlier in the month about Xubuntu, available here: Frostcast Episode 084. While the 13.10 release for Xubuntu didn’t quite make a big splash feature-wise, it was great talking about some of the work we did this cycle around XMir testing.

On October 19th I had the pleasure of going with my friend Steve (recently imported from Boston) to see a Cinematic Titanic double feature, which was sadly part of their farewell tour. It was a fun night and as Steve and I met in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 chat room years ago so it felt fitting as our first adventure together in this city since his move.

I also began taking an Islam and Judaism Course at the synagogue this month. Unfortunately of the six classes I’ve only been able to attend two so far and will attend the final one in a couple weeks, but it’s still been a fascinating class given my very limited knowledge of Islam. I missed the class that talked about the holy books specifically so I might need to do a bit more reading myself about the Quran (of which I’m now the proud owner of a copy of).

Last week I ended up with a cold that slowed me down for a few days, but after recovering over the weekend I was able to spend this week running around to events in the evenings. Monday it was off to the CNET offices to hear Lavabit’s Ladar Levison talk about the actions by the FBI that led up to him shutting down the Lavabit email service. Story-wise it was very similar to his recounting for NANOG earlier in the month that MJ attended (video here, worth the watch!), but it was good to get out and I had some interesting conversations that night. Tuesday as the Islam & Judaism class and then last night I attended an event put on by Double Union, the new feminist hackerspace opening up here in San Francisco. There were a lot of interesting topics throughout the night, and although I long ago realized that my own feminism is much more passive than that of many of these strong women at these events, I’m always happy to see folks working for equality.

Tonight, on Halloween, I’m staying in. I finished off the 13th episode of the Hammer House of Horror television series that I had expected to really campy, but turned out to actually be quite well-paced and good, particularly for a series produced in 1980. I’ve also spent some time lately going through the classic Doctor Who episodes on Netflix. Like many casual fans my age, I’ve seen all the new episodes, but my classic Doctor Who exposure came from the late night runs on PBS channels, and in my case my father’s interest in the show when I was young (hello Dalek nightmares as a kid!). As such I don’t remember a lot and I lack continuity. It’s been interesting watching the sampling of shows on Netflix in order, and setting me up for exploring beyond their collection in the future.

In free moments I’ve been making time for reading more. Carrying around my NOOK in my purse even when I don’t plan on reading has led to me reading things I want to rather than idlying checking Facebook/Twitter/G+ during spare moments, which has been a healthy change. My stack of magazines has a nice dent in it too, I hope to improve that further on some upcoming flights. I’ve also been watching the fascinating lectures from A Brief History of Humankind by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. I’ll be loading up the ones I don’t finish onto my tablet to take along on my trip to Hong Kong.

Which brings me to Hong Kong! I’m leaving for the OpenStack Design Summit tomorrow night. It will be my first time in Asia so I’m really looking forward to it, even if there is some “new place” stress building up. I got a direct San Francisco to Hong Kong flight that will take about 15 hours, putting me in Hong Kong on Sunday morning. I have plans lined up for much of the time prior to the summit, which starts on Tuesday, including a Women of OpenStack boat tour on Monday. Here’s hoping the other-side-of-the-world jet lag doesn’t hit me too hard.

Finally, I’ve also booked my trip to Perth for linux.conf.au in January. In another first, this will be my first time in Australia. I’ll be speaking on Wednesday on Systems Administration in the Open and have also submitted proposals for short talks to two of the miniconfs on Monday and Tuesday so I can make the most of my trip there.

And now, time to finish up laundry and get packing!

You may notice several familiar names as authors!

Huge thanks to everyone in our community who took the time to write an article.

The magazine is available for purchase here: Linux Identity Starter – Ubuntu Family 13.04 Raring Ringtail

Yes, it has been pointed out that they called 13.04 an LTS. We didn’t do review on that part and didn’t see the error until publishing.

We also rewrote the offline documentation for 12.10. This was a Herculean undertaking. The struggle with documentation writing is always one where you have to find people who are not only talented at writing and documenting, but who can also use the tools required to make maintainable, translatable docs (which, in our case, meant DocBook). We spent a fair amount of time brainstorming how we’d make this work after an attempt to just toss it out to the community and “hope they can figure out something” was ineffective. Since we were doing such a comprehensive rewrite, we decided to just toss up a temporary wiki on one of my servers, redo the structure, and have people copy over content from the old docs manually and update it. Then we had a team of editors sweep through the wiki and Pasi tracked the reviews in a spreadsheet. Finally, Pasi rewrote the theme and manually converted it all to DocBook! Moving forward we’ll strive to do all changes in DocBook directly, and to do it sooner in the cycle so we don’t need to scramble for access and doc approval at the last minute (thanks Matthew East and Jeremy Bicha for helping us out!). We also have created a blueprint for the next cycle to tackle some refinements we didn’t get to this time around. I’m really happy we got this done and we had so many community members pitch in at the end, I have to admit I had my doubts as things were so slow to start.

I ordered some case badge stickers from NameThatComputer.com several weeks back, and they arrived last week. The recommendation to use them came from Emma Marshall of System76, thanks again!

Up close they have a slight pixelated quality, but the size makes it so it’s not easy to tell on the stickers themselves. Next time we’ll work closer with them on the artwork we provide so we can get the most crisp results. They are custom-sized for the image with rounded corners, which is really nice and on this page the options we had were “flexible” and “flat” and they aren’t kidding when they say the “Adhesive REALLY STICKS” – it’s great. With these options and the custom images they came out to $1/ea for 100 of them, plus $8 shipping.

After my trip to Ghana (which I leave for tomorrow so I’ll miss the 12.10 release itself), I’ll be heading to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen. I’m excited to finally meet the project lead, Pasi Lallinaho, and to see Micah Gersten again and hopefully some of the other project members who may be able to pay their own way out to the summit. I’ll be bringing along the case badges and regular stickers, and I’ve started making a pile of ping pong balls with my eggbot!

The next cycle will be launched with me spending an extra day Copenhagen with some of the Xubuntu folks to discuss plans moving forward and to do some sight-seeing. This is made significantly easier by UDS itself being a day shorter, so we all have Friday to go on our own adventure (even if that does mean paying for the hotel myself the last night). I’m excited about the sight-seeing too, I’m currently reading through my Copenhagen travelers book!

In spite of my enthusiasm, it wasn’t until Friday night that I finally carved out some time to begin assembling mine:

…and assembling…

On Saturday morning I fired up Inkscape, the loaded up the Egg-Bot Extensions and hooked it up to my netbook. I was off! …to practicing. My first couple ping pong balls are a bit messy.

I grabbed (begged) Pasi Lallinaho, the artist for the Xubuntu logo and Xubuntu project lead, away from what surely were actually important tasks for the task of creating a line-art version of the logo as an SVG so I could use it with the eggbot. I plotted it on the recommended 800×3200 SVG image, it’s available here: xubuntu-eggbot.svg.

I’ve spent time the past couple days working on getting it properly aligned and doing tests on ping pong balls to get a nice demo put together. My first logos were a bit wobbly, getting a circle right took some work.

But tonight I ended up with a pretty good one:

Video of it being created:

Direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKcKes6OidI

Much fun! I think my next experiment will be created a filled in version. Then maybe larger ones and tracking down some artists so I can make some more interesting patterns :)

The group was incredibly welcoming and engaged during my presentation, asking interesting questions throughout. At the end I was able to give a demo of the Xubuntu 12.10 daily build from the 13th so I could show off some of the new features of Xfce 4.10.

Slides: PDF, ODP
Slide template: http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/presentation/xubuntu-presentation

Thanks again to Bob Lewis for inviting me to speak and afterwords taking me out to visit nearby Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park where I got to see some huge trees and Roaring Camp Railroads (I’ll have to go back some time to actually ride the trains!).

As such, I now have over 100 Xubuntu and Ubuntu Women stickers. I give them out at events, carried around some for the Ubuntu Developer Summit in my TARDIS laptop bag (no time traveling, but it did seem bigger on the inside, pretty much any time anyone asked me for something I was able to oblige, except for having more “I’m a Local” buttons, which I bought from Zazzle and didn’t get nearly enough of!).

Now that I have all these stickers that I’d like to share with non-local Xubuntu fans and Ubuntu Women project supporters. Just drop me an email at lyz@ubuntu.com and I’ll reply with details on how to receive a sticker or two. If you’re in the United States, I’ll reply to you with my postal address and you can send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll ship you the stickers for free. If you’re outside the United States, I’ll probably just ship them to you out of pocket.

In the email I’ll need:

• Subject: [STICKERS]
• Which stickers you want (Xubuntu or Ubuntu Women)
• Quantity (1, 2, or a reason why you need more)
• If outside the United States, a name and address to ship them to

And since people have asked… yes, I’m doing this all out of pocket and I’m a community member just like you. If you want to help support buying more stickers and shipping outside the US, small donations to the paypal account linked to lyz@princessleia.com are welcome, but not expected or required.

Want to buy stickers directly from MOO yourself? I’ve posted details I’ve used to make both stickers on the wiki pages for each team:

• Xubuntu: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Marketing/Products#Stickers
• Ubuntu Women: http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/Resources#Stickers