– Community Roundtable –

First up for the Community Roundtable today was a discussion about the /community page on ubuntu.com and possible redirect of /contribute to it see bug here. Tomorrow one of the website design folks from Canonical to talk with us about what we can do proposal-wise for improving it as we don’t want to ask people for mock-ups if they won’t be accepted.

The next topic was the ubuntuforums.org upgrade status. The OpenID plugin is done (thanks Kyle Baker!) and now it needs to be installed, tested and then hopefully deployed in the near future.

We then discussed some of the Ubuntu TV developments. This past cycle the community struggled somewhat with communication with Canonical as the project was back-burnered a bit for the 12.10 cycle with the dropping of Unity 2D (which the original prototype ran on). They confirmed that will have a PPA with a public prototype before a product launch which will be a good place for community to contribute, this is targeted for 13.04. It was also noted that the best places for community to keep up with the project are the #ubuntu-tv IRC channel, blog and the wiki.

Finally, we talked about how announcements in the community are done. If people aren’t following planet or ubuntu-dev – how will they know about important changes? It was generally agreed that the fridge should be used for this, but the fridge team itself isn’t always notified of things, encouraged more use of the ubuntu-news-team mailing list and informing volunteers in #ubuntu-news so that posts can be made. Volunteers are always welcome on this team, I’ll write a post about precisely what we need soon.

I then met up with Xubuntu project lead Pasi Lallinaho so we could talk about what he intended to include in the Xubuntu section of the flavors plenary after lunch. The Community Council then met to have a quick face-to-face discussion about the general community, and we got a photo!

Ubuntu App Review Board – Update and Planning for R cycle

One of the things the board wishes to do is streamline the approval process because the queue for reviews is growing faster than the review board itself can scale. Currently approval of a package by the ARB requires 3 members to review and approve the package. There was a proposal to allow any Ubuntu developer, beyond just ARB-contributors, do one of the reviews and just have a single ARB member required to approve it. They also discussed some more ways of automating tools to check things like licensing compliance and copyright. Full notes from the session here: appdev-r-arb-review

Plenaries

The plenaries for today began with presentations from the flavors.

Lubuntu – In the last cycle they created a new icon set, made look & feel improvements, new file manager, and managed to still fit the iso on the CD and keep the alternate installer and have builds on PowerPC and ARM. 13.04 they want more improvements to and additional icons (and other improvements with artwork), more testing and more devices (perhaps the Nexus 7?).

Kubuntu – Did a presentation introducing many of the Kubuntu developers who are attending UDS and the work they work on in Kubuntu. Lots of fun pictures of the Kubuntu folks!

Ubuntu Studio – Talked about the current state of Ubuntu Studio and the focus on multimedia creation with the Xfce desktop, low-latency kernel (required for audio) and is very workflow-oriented. Plans for the next cycle include recruiting more developers, improving team organization, collaborating with other flavors to improve developer docs and reach out more to the community through email, forums, social media and websites, settings GUI improvements, workflow manager and a system start-up script which does things like notify of bad settings (like ones which aren’t optimized for multimedia). They also wish to create a better user experience through more workflow-orientated documentation and videos.

Xubuntu – In the past cycle the strategy guide was completely rewritten, recruited members of the community to rewrite offline documentation, asked existing owners of social media outlets to make them “official” and on the dev side it now has Xfce 4.10, had to drop GIMP and Gnumeric to fit on the CD and dropped the alternate CDs. In 13.04 looking for more developers and keeping track of long-standing bugs to wish to polish up, improvements to documentation, a new and improved display dialog, replacing Alacarte with MenuLibre, introducing a dialog to control GTK theme colors and more. Finally, marketing materials, my stickers and case badges and of course the ping pong balls made with the eggbot!

Edubuntu – They win for brightest slides! Last cycle they decided to be more focused on long-term projects, reviving the Edubuntu Server project and seeing what they could do with tablets. They really are focused on LTS releases, so they’re aiming for these for landing the long-term projects.

Then it was on to talking about reliability and the reporting of crash bug reports from the desktop and encouraged more use of errors.ubuntu.com by developers who are looking to see that metric of how their programs are doing crash-wise. In 13.04 they are going to be extending this to recoverable errors so reports can be sent on those as well, like GPU hangs, debconf dialogs, kernel OOPSes, application hangs and installation failures. They’re always looking for contributors, more details about the project on their wiki page:

Improving Communications Outward

The reason for this session: “As Ubuntu members (and contributors), we understand Ubuntu (culture, community, technology, project, etc). How can we communicate Ubuntu to others outside the project (especially journalists/media) in a way that makes things easy to understand and reduces the tendency on the non-Ubuntu-community to “get the story wrong” or to “spin” stories with a default negative bias.”

There were a lot of ideas during this session about how to deliver Ubuntu community-based responses to some of the more contentious news that has come out of the Ubuntu project, and the possibility of a team being built to develop and offer these responses rather than having people (and the press) rely upon clarification from Mark’s blog or are just left guessing. There is a proposal to form an “Ubuntu Evangelists” group to handle such responses, but there were some reservations about the team being seen as a “spin” team and not really being taken seriously. A couple representatives from LoCos also raised concerns about how they are asked by the press to speak on releases and other news, but they don’t have translated release notes or anything, highlighting even problems within the project with communication. Full notes from the session here: community-r-improving-communications-outward

– Nexus7 Q&A –

This was quite the well-attended session! Ubuntu has been put on the Nexus 7, so the team in this session was available to answer questions about it, explain the “plumbing” work that Canonical is working on and reach out to the community for other parts. They’ll be adding cleaned up FAQ from the session to the wiki, but for the impatient the session notes are here: nexus7-qa

After this session Laura let me borrow her Nexus 7 to play around with the install of Ubuntu on it. Very fun.

This evening Flavia Weisghizzi and Na’Tosha Bard organized an Ubuntu Women dinner in the city. I had a great time and it was very fun to get out and have dinner in the city and have some time to talk to Na’Tosha and her husband about the work they do developing the Unity Game Engine to Linux.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Hard to believe tomorrow is our last day of UDS, I have a lot going on tomorrow though, second Xubuntu session at noon, planning on doing a lightning talk about my trip to Ghana, and the Ubuntu Women session at 3PM.

– Community Roundtable –

My day started off with the Community Roundtable where we first discussed the Code of Conduct draft and then scheduled time during Wednesday’s roundtable to invite discussion about it (here). The next topic was the Google Summer of Code, which a couple community members volunteered to lead up and work with the Canonical community team as needed.

Next was some discussion about how the members of the community can be supportive and factual about news around Ubuntu when there are news sites that thrive on sensational headlines to get page clicks. The creation of a FAQ was also proposed for journalists who tend to get facts about Ubuntu and Canonical wrong, but it seemed unclear how useful it would actually be.

– UTAH School 1 –

I’ve been interested in and dabbling with testing for a few release cycles now, so I was interested to see the development of UTAH test automation harness since discussions at the last UDS. This was a hands on session where attendees could follow along writing some basic test cases in UTAH. For reference I put up notes for the first two here and the directory created so I could keep track of changes made to files in each step is here. The session resumed after a break but I had another session to attend and I really just wanted a glimpse at the progress of the tool anyway.

– Ubuntu LoCo Best Practices, Tips, & Tricks –

This session covered a few topics where representatives from several LoCos could weigh in on how their team handled them. Topics and suggestions included collaboration with non-profits and companies to handle money and materials and non-traditional locations for events and outreach to attract more interest in the team. There was also concern about LoCos feeling out of touch with news from Ubuntu due to communication and sometimes language barriers between Canonical and the teams, causing them to feel they can’t be authoritative, which we hope to discuss during an upcoming round table.

Full session notes here: community-r-ubuntuloco-best-practices

– Xubuntu: General planning for R –

Last cycle the Xubuntu team rewrote the offline documentation, but now it needs to be set up for translations, so that was one of the first action items of the meeting. The team would also like to get better about writing team reports, so hopefully we can get scripts to track Xubuntu packagesets bug changes so we have a script-able way to get a basic idea of what has been worked on in a given timeframe.

There have been improvements to display dialog upstream in Xfce by Xubuntu contributors, which will be soon put into a PPA for testing, but some screenshots are available now:

• Advanced dialog
• Minimal dialog
• display-identification popups

After some discussion about possibly using gtk-theme-config and options for screen locking it was time for a team photo!

Xubuntu team at UDS: Elizabeth Krumbach, Pasi Lallinaho, Micah Gersten and Christian Dywan

We’ll be having another session on Thursday to cover Artwork, Marketing and other remaining topics.

– Plenaries –

Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s head of Sales presented on “Ubuntu Means Business” by showing off some of the diverse places where Ubuntu is used. Began by talking about how “The future is being built on open options” with examples of many start-ups and key businesses. He also highlighted how they now shipping on a great deal of hardware that is certified to work with Ubuntu, particularly in China, explaining that the important thing is not that you can go buy a computer at your local shop (you largely can’t) but that Canonical is working with OEMs and getting hardware supported with Linux. He then moved into the topic of gaming on Ubuntu and how important gaming engines are and introduced Na’Tosha Bard, as Software Developer on Unity gaming platform who announced that in Unity 4 and Unity 4 Pro there will be support for Linux. In the enterprise the most compelling arguments for open desktops are security, cost, flexibility and manageability. New trends include additional devices on networks (not just desktop and laptops) and that a lot of work has been pushed to the cloud. Then had David Barth demonstrated the remote login capabilities to get into remotely running desktop sessions (ie – on a server), also talked about plans to stream single applications from Windows to an Ubuntu desktop. On to Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu is at the heart of a lot of cloud technologies.

It was then to the HP Plenary by Paul Morgan to talk about HP innovations for low-power hyperscale computing. He spoke about the need for most effective data centers and HP Project Moonshot: The future of extreme low-energy servers. They’re predicting explosive growth in scale, cost and complexity given the amount of cloud-related data being used by consumers and in this space it’s essential to have low-powered servers. Paolo Faraboschi of HP labs then spoke about some of the major pain points that we’re approaching with new workloads, metrics, complexity and technology scaling rules. Also talked about some of HP’s work to innovate in new hardware technologies including use of photonics, memristors, nanostore.

– Leadership Mini-Summit –

The leadership mini-summit took up 3 sessions and covered:

• Actively training successors and empowering contributors in your team
• How to most effectively respond to the “How can I get involved?” question from new contributors
• Encouraging people to apply for Ubuntu Membership once they have a proven record within a community
• Usefulness of team reports (and how they can be improved) and whether communities were using blueprints, milestones and having check points

Detailed notes from the session available here: leadership-mini-summit

– Ubuntu Testing Extravaganza –

This was an evening event that kicked off with lightning talks. First up Martin Pitt talked about the Mock UPower python script to do mock testing of power settings, which can do a variety of tests with power like when it’s plugged in or when battery is critical without actually being in that state, he’s planning on having it packaged for inclusion in Raring. The next talk was about some tests in checkbox including create_connection which creates a connection in network-manager, network_reconnect_resume_time to see how much time was taken for wifi to resume (only works on some chips) and rotation_test which performs a full screen rotation using X (and it even worked on the projector!), auto_test and audio_settings for audio testing, removable_storage_watcher to detect USB changes and removable_storage_test for file transfer tests. Then there was a “Testing Rant” by Thomi Richards where he talked about what qualifies as a unit test: the test can only fail in one way, in addition to be easier to test, it also makes your code more modular and in general better. Stéphane Graber was next up to talk about LXE containers to quick and easy testing on pristine installs, and also showed off some of the functions in the new python-lxc module. Finally, Daniel Manrique made a proposal for centralized automated testing repository, he covered an example of how UTAH and Checkbox are pretty much doing the same thing and that duplication of work could be avoided if the repository of tests existed.

I ended up heading out after this to have dinner in the city with a bunch of Finns, Pasi Lallinaho, Jussi Kekkonen and Timo Jyrinki. We had beers and steak along with some great conversations before coming back to the hotel.

Now time to rest, on to day 3 tomorrow!

My first day of UDS this time started off with remarkably little jet lag. I’m pretty sure I didn’t adjust to California time so I’m still on UTC (Ghana) time, that’s fine for here!

There was lots of fruit on my plate at breakfast, and then it was off to registration and then the opening and keynote.

– Jono Bacon introduction by video –

Jono isn’t able to attend UDS this cycle because he and his wife are expecting a child any day now, so he recorded a video and that’s what we got to watch as a very standard introduction to how UDS works. Including a reminder to eat your vegetables.

– Mark Shuttleworth Keynote –

In this keynote Mark started off by discussing a subject that seems to be a theme this UDS: real convergence of Ubuntu on TV, tablets, desktops, phones, supercomputers and more. There is currently a working build of Ubuntu for the Nexus 7 and they’re working toward a really polished version of 13.04 that works on it, and not specific tablet edition. He also discussed the choice of the Nexus 7 specifically it’s highly available, inexpensive, they wanted to start somewhere with a single device. Then he did a demonstration of Ubuntu for Android.

He also talked about how he was happy to see Valve develop Steam for Linux, and that more gaming companies are following. There is a lot of work going into Ubuntu being preinstalled with partnered OEMs, in China HP Pavilions started shipping an option of Ubuntu preinstalled.

There was then a review of some of the cloud accomplishments in the past cycle, including improvements to the juju and MAAS products and the hurdles and out of the ordinary collaboration that had to be done to get Ubuntu running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Finally, there was discussion of Ubuntu on ARM, Linaro Connect is co-hosted with UDS, this cycle will show continuation of progress but also expansion of work with other low-power chipsets.

– Empowering Flavors –

This session was held because the plan is for changes to the Ubuntu release cycle to try and avoid having solid freeze moments to increase development velocity, but freezes may still be useful for flavors. The long term plan is for allowing flavors the ability to manage their own releases so that flavors have the ability to release on their own schedule and provide tools so flavors can do push-button creation of ISOs. This will need to be done in multiple steps, so they discussed engineering changes to both front and back ends. Work will also need to be done to determine what needs to be frozen for flavors if they want to ship alpha/betas, and how feasible this all will be while maintaining velocity of non-frozen Ubuntu.

Full session notes from the session’s etherpad here: foundations-r-empowered-flavors

– Ubuntu Development Videos –

This session began with a look through some of the older videos made about development and people discussed some of the issues with the older videos. The one comment that stood out the most is that they should be shorter, and if they were directed at specific answers or small topics they’d be much easier to watch.

Proposed videos to start off with:

• Introduction to Ubuntu Development (developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/introduction-to-ubuntu-development.html)
• Getting Set Up (launchpad, tools, etc.)(http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/getting-set-up.html)
• Fixing a small bug (http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/fixing-a-bug.html)
• Discussing an example package (developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/packaging-new-software.html)
• My bugfix in the bigger picture
• Request Merge

And lots more ideas in the session notes: community-r-dev-videos

– Feedback on Quantal Release and Improvements –

In this session they reviewed some of the changes made in the Quantal release cycle and what worked, and what needs more work. One of the things brought up of interest to me was how the ISO tracker displays images so testers know whether they should be tested or not, example: alternate images were kept for some time after it was largely decided we shouldn’t bother testing those images because they won’t be included in the release. Also discussed how collaborative editing and general handling of product release notes worked, and moved into the topic of blueprints not being managed well (not completed, etc). Then talked about the queue accepts process and generally agreed that to avoid duplication people should be more vocal on IRC when they’re reviewing something.

For everything discussed, see the meeting notes here: foundations-r-prior-release-feedback

Plenaries

In a Design and Community talk, Ivo Weevers really focused on how the various form factors (TV, Desktop, Tablet, Phone) impacts design and UI. Drew Bliss of Valve was next up, he introduced what Steam gaming platform is and the community that has been built up around it. Steam currently does run on Ubuntu and it’s an ongoing process to test and improve the experience and their release games on it. He explained the reason for selecting Ubuntu as the first distribution to target as it has a large, active user base and a company they can collaborate with. We were then treated by the fun announcement that UDS attendees will get access to their Beta testers program!

Next up was David Planella of the Canonical Community team on Ubuntu and App Developers, beginning by explaining why they are dedicating resources: attracting more developers who create desirable applications makes Ubuntu a more attractive operating system for users. He then explained some of the existing tools: the app developer site, My apps and the app showdown this past summer. Moving forward they wish to streamline the upload process, but retain a way to deliver the users in a secure way and continue to grow the community and the app developer site. Finally Nick Skaggs led a plenary on testing, including autopkgtest running against all developer uploads to -proposed and AutoPilot functional testing for Unity.

– Meeting for Ubuntu IRC ops –

This was a pretty sparsely attended session, so we discussed the current op application process and how more timely responses to people who apply on launchpad would be good. Also talked some of the ways that users can contribute aside from being ops, including factoid editing and documentation maintaining.

– Edubuntu Planning for “R” Cycle –

In this session the Edubuntu team reviewed previous work items for desktop, tablet and server to re-evaluate and assign for this cycle. Of particular interest to me work item-wise, there was also some discussion about documentation postponed from last cycle. One of the struggles we had in Ghana was lack of teacher-focused documentation for Edubuntu and I was happy to learn that they had thought about reaching out to the Ubuntu Manual team to see about doing an Edubuntu edition of the Manual. I hope to work with them on this, particularly if we can integrate some of the materials Nancy and I worked on, I’ve already shared the link with one fellow UDS attendee who is deploying Edubuntu in schools.

– IT Manager Meet up –

I wasn’t all that sure what to expect from this meeting since it was a bit impromptu, but it ended up being a very interesting discussion. There were a fair number of representatives from larger companies who were doing massive Ubuntu desktop deployments and working through the woes of finding good calendar replacements and interfacing with Active Directory and other proprietary infrastructure. Of course all the deployments I’ve been a part of where either SMBs at work or small schools, but I wasn’t alone in that boat either! There were also some representatives from Canonical products (including Ubuntu Advantage) attending the session who were engaged and very interested in these deployments. It ended up going so well that there is a second meetup now on the schedule this week.

This evening I headed over the nearby mall to pick up a Telia SIM and 1G of data (total for both was about $13) for when we adventure beyond the hotel wifi later this week. I also got a local charger for my 3DS as it’s not happy about the voltage situation here in Europe (wasn’t in Ghana either), $17 for that, not bad since I’ll use it again when I travel here next year. I then spent an hour or so at this evening’s Meet and Greet even to wrap up the first day of UDS.

Good first day, looking forward to tomorrow!