Day 3! The plenaries from Tuesday are up now, see here. The flavors talks start at about 30 minutes into it with Kubuntu, then my Xubuntu bit and on from there.

– Community Roundtable –

We talked some about Ubuntu Membership with regard to expectations, members not being siloed in their communities, and better documenting expectations for members as they cross into new communities within Ubuntu. There was also some discussion about some of the hardware (and other) reveals with Canonical partners that the community is not involved with, how to improve culture on both sides so that Canonical can protect relationships with clients and the community won’t be so troubled by Canonical not disclosing everything.

– Multi-Monitor Improvements –

Reviewed some of the improvements in multi-monitor support in precise, bug fixing (some of which are xorg and kernel fixes that all window managers benefit from, not just Unity), and features like the option of having launchers available on both screens. The Unity Multi-Monitor interactions toolkit is available here, including the Multiple Monitors UX Specification, Phase 1, which was used during the session. Went through sections on booting up, a proposed “presentation mode” where notify-osd does not activate (embarrassing or distracting notifications!) and power-saving isn’t enabled (display going blank during inactivity), laptop docking behavior, face lift of System Settings-Display Preferences, improvements to proper display focus, and more.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Ubuntu Desktop in an Enterprise Setup –

Premise of the session: “We want to be able to use Ubuntu in an environment where it’s currently a small player and we believe a relatively small effort could grease the wheels significantly.” Currently there is not much Exchange calendaring support in Mozilla Lightning, there is some more in Evolution but it’s not all that reliable and doesn’t work in all instances (requires Exchange webmail option to be enabled). Simplifying authenticating against various types of LDAP-based implementations with different security profiles. Discussed management of keys for encrypted filesystems (so IT staff can hold encryption keys for systems they deploy so they can recover user systems in cases of password losses, diagnostics and such). Actual management of systems can be done with CFEngine or Puppet, but no great tools for machine inventory: packages installed, hardware details, users logged in (Landscape offers some of these, but it’s proprietary and Canonical-managed). Touched upon the issue of Windows or Mac-specific applications, but it’s not a problem that can easily be solved in the short term. Wrapped up by talking about Office formats integration, LibreOffice is fine for some users, but many are very closely tied to Microsoft Office specifically.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Upstream App Developer Outreach –

The idea of this session is ways to more proactively reach out to application developers to get their applications into Ubuntu. One group is collecting a list of interesting applications and contacting the authors to see about getting them to package and submit it to Ubuntu. It was pointed out that personal contact is key for getting responses, automated emails or form mails don’t typically illicit replies. Also might want to go to gaming and programming conferences with fliers that have been proposed, which probably should point developers to developer.ubuntu.com/publish. The session wrapped up with brainstorming of suggestions of where else to look for potential applications.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

First up for the plenaries was Rich Hilleman from Electronic Arts. He opened by discussing how the gaming environment has changed over the past 5 years, focusing on being more mobile, social and free apps that people pay for “on the way out” rather than “on the way in.” They are platform agnostic by developing for various platforms and have been discussing with Canonical how to release on specific hardware configurations on Ubuntu. Noted that they have open sourced some of their older codebases like Sim City back in 2008 (released as Micropolis). Next up was Vin Sharma of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel. Intel contributes both code and money on upstream upstream projects. Sharma’s work is also focused on downstreams like Ubuntu. Discussed some of the interests and requirements of Cloud vendors and customers and are seeking to fulfill some of those resource implementations with OpenStack.

– Review of the ARB process using MyApps –

MyApps is the webapp the Application Review Board uses to track application submissions and this session is reviewing how that’s working and what improvements could be made. There was discussion about teams with review permissions and allowing flexibility of sources on the PPA upload user interface. Reviewed some existing bugs in the developer registration portal to assess priority.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– LoCo Portal Design Iteration –

We want to keep the concrete plans somewhat simple due to low number of developers for the portal this cycle. Discussed possible redirection of users using GeoIP, but there have been very mixed results in accuracy. Proposed creating a “planet like” feed of blog posts by LoCo members which can be managed by team admins. We quickly reviewed the front page and decided to put out a survey to LoCo teams to see what they may find useful. Wrapped up by finding a few more volunteers in the room who may be able to help with development.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– QA Team Organization –

There are a lot of QA teams (see here), so the discussion centered around how they could best collaborate, it was generally felt that administrators of the QA teams may find value in all project meetings a couple times a cycle, rather than seeking to create more teams or consolidate diverse teams. There was also the topic of giving feedback and recognizing contributions and avoiding burnout. There was an item to see about collecting data from trackers about who is doing what to give to team leads so they can handle recognition of their team members. The session wrapped up by talking about non-desktop testing, with focus on servers and hardware.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

That wrapped things up for the day, and it was on to the evening activities!

I planned an evening of San Francisco Tourism and met about 30 people in the hotel lobby at 6:30PM and passed out handouts detailing the plans for the night. James Tatum was kind enough to offer help for the evening as another local and so together we managed to get tickets for everyone and on to BART and over to San Francisco.

The tour started at Ferry Building where we were able to walk around the pier and get photos of the Bay Bridge and check out the ferries.

From there it was on to a street car which we all managed to fit in and head up to Pier 39 where about half the group went their own way to explore and get dinner. We took the other half of the group down the pier to see Alcatraz Island, the very distant Golden Gate Bridge and the sea lions. We then walked up to Fisherman’s Wharf for dinner at Boudin. Our dinner ran a bit late so I skipped down to the Fisherman’s Wharf sign at 9:30 to tell those gathered there that we would be running a bit late and encouraged them to head up to Ghirardelli Square for some ice cream while we finished up.

We all managed to finally meet up at the cable car turnaround across the street from the Buena Vista Cafe for a ride to Powell station.

James ended up taking most of the group on one cable car as the 6 or so of us remaining caught the next one. We all met at Powell station and hopped on BART, I got off at Montgomery station while everyone else headed back to the hotel. In all, quite a fun evening, it was great to have so many people come out!

Day 2 of UDS! Mark’s keynote from yesterday is now up on youtube, you can view it here.

– Community Roundtable –

The session started off with some discussion around the use of Trello.com boards. Several teams have found them to be useful and we’ll likely continue use, we do want to be mindful that we’re not duplicating the work of other methods for work item tracking (ie blueprints). There was also some discussion about community documentation which was picked up in a session later in the day. Finally, Jono let us in on EA’s announcement that was supposed to be big news tomorrow but had already leaked to several sources: Electronic Arts now have two games in the Ubuntu Software Center: Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima (he blogs about it here). For now these are just links to web applications, but it is very cool that a company like EA is showing interest in Ubuntu as a gaming platform.

– Continuing Packaging Guide Improvements –

The two biggest take-aways from this session was that they need more user testing and there is a fair amount of work to be done to consolidate and complete packaging documentation. There are several open bugs (here), so there is some feedback coming in, but to continue testing and feedback there was a proposal for user testing at packaging jams. On the consolidation side, there is still an Ubuntu packaging guide on the Ubuntu wiki, so the one on the wiki will be merged into the formal one here. The formal packaging guide is written in Sphinx and they are looking for volunteers to help with the transition. It was also noted that there is a translation infrastructure is available, but there will need to be milestones for when we can do calls from translations, so they began developing some milestones.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Keybindings Health Check –

This session went through reviewing default keybindings in Unity and discussing what worked, what people where having trouble with and how changes can be made to alter how accessible it was. Representatives from the Accessibility team were available to chime in on changes. Throughout reviewed portions of the keyboard shortcut overly to see about whether additions/subtractions need to be made.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

– Transition help.ubuntu.com to SUMO –

In this session we did an analysis of SUMO to replace the help.ubuntu.com/community/ moin wiki. There are a lot of complaints about the current infrastructure, including that wikis are difficult to maintain and aren’t really built for the dynamic support documents that organizations like Mozilla have, plus there is no real support for translations. I did have some concerns about who can edit it, particularly surrounding whether moderator approval would be required for edits, unlike the wiki, and who would be responsible for handling the additional moderator burden that such an infrastructure may bring (the docs team is already spread pretty thin!). A test instance will be deployed so we can explore some of this.

I’ve uploaded the notes from the session here.

After lunch it was off to the plenaries! They started out with an Ubuntu at Google presentation with Thomas Bushnell, Tech Lead for Google’s Goobuntu team. He began by hinting at the size of their Ubuntu deployments at Google, saying “tens of thousands of employees” including graphic designers, managers, software engineers, systems engineers, translators and more. They push workstations to their limits, have very high costs for reboots and re-logins. Goobuntu is a light skin over standard Ubuntu in most cases, they don’t customize the UI, use centralized administration with Puppet and apt, LDAP-based user database and automated release testing. He went over some of the special demands based on security, including purging packages which may be dangerous and more secure network authentication, internal apt repository framework and very diverse developers they support. They use the Ubuntu LTS and make extensive use of multiple testing methods and automation.

Someone took notes from the plenary which I’ve uploaded here.

We then had the official flavors planery, where representatives from Kubuntu (David Wonderly), Xubuntu (me!), Lubuntu (Julien Lavergne), Studio (Scott Lavender) and Edubuntu (Jonathan Carter) gave quick updates on the status of their respective flavors.

Thanks to Benjamin Kerensa for taking a photo during my Xubuntu section!

The plenaries wrapped up with Jono Bacon discussing his journey creating the new Ubuntu Accomplishments system.

– Leadership Summit –

The rest of the afternoon was spent at the leadership summit. It was a small group and some of the topics we covered were nurturing leaders, handling conflict, best practices for leadership. The final hour ended up being quite a valuable time, with some of the core community contributors sharing personal stories about their rise into leadership within the project and some of the challenges they faced and lessons learned. I think one of the key take-aways is that some of our core struggles around recruiting and retaining great volunteers are very similar, and for every time we cast our net out for contributors there will be only a tiny percentage of that group who will be retained, whether due to changing interest, time constraints or other factors which prevent prolonged involvement.

I had some great “hallway discussions” before heading down to the Google-sponsored “Circus” themed party. All I want to say about the party itself right now is that it made me uncomfortable, I left pretty quickly. Instead I went with Michael Hall, Penelope Stowe, Alan Bell and Jamesha Fisher over to a sports bar down the street where we enjoyed beers and some sandwiches, which was quite enjoyable!

Being local to the Ubuntu Developer Summit this time I had the pleasure of meeting up with several friends prior to the summit. Enjoying dinner in Oakland on Saturday evening, picking up a first time UDS attendee at the airport Saturday night after BART stopped running. Then on Sunday a lovely brunch at EPIC Roadhouse with a couple of friends who were staying in San Francisco Sunday and then heading over with them to Oakland with their luggage.

Having a UDS that’s local to me is actually quite a surreal experience. The excitement of visiting a new place and all the travel that goes along with it has been part of the whole experience every time I’ve attended a UDS until now. This morning between walking to the station, waiting for the BART train and then walking to the hotel I spent less than 30 minutes getting there!

It has also meant that I’ve traded the exhaustion of travel for that of being a helpful local. This morning I quickly ran out of my 15 “I’m a local” pins I bought for Ubuntu California attendees and was giving out blank Clipper transit cards throughout the day (I still have some if you’re reading this and need one). There was also plenty of helping folks with maps and quick questions (“where is chinatown?” and the like). I really love the bay area and have enjoyed sharing that with my fellow UDS attendees.

The day kicked off with an introduction by Canonical’s Community Team lead Jono Bacon and a keynote by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Quality and having a usable release throughout development were a major part of Mark’s keynote. As he mentions here the exciting part of the keynote was the unveiling of the first rack-ready 48-node 192-core ARM server from Calxeda. Some day I’ll get my sysadmin paws on such hardware!

From there, it was off to sessions.

– Community Roundtable –

We started off with introductions around the room and discussed some of our take-aways from Mark’s keynote. We also touched upon some documentation discussions that are scheduled or should happen during this UDS, including the proposed move to SUMO. Tomorrow we’ll be brainstorming a bit more for the Leadership Summit happening in the afternoon.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

– OpenStack HA –

Having not kept completely up to date with OpenStack, but working with many of the technologies at work (HA clusters on Debian with pacemaker and corosync, drbd and application-level replication strategies), this was an interesting session for me. The discussion centered around what kinds of things should be handled by the OpenStack infrastructure and what should obviously be handled application-side, for several technologies in the stack, including MySQL, RabbitMQ, Nova, and with an eye out for what to do when Quantum comes out.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

– LoCo Portal Content Review –

This session covered a lot of ground, but at the core it was a review of static text content itself on the LoCo Team Portal. Some action items were made for gathering photos for About Local Community (LoCo) Teams to make it more lively. I agreed to do some “wiki archaeological work” once a defined list of documents we want included directly on LTP is put together, as I’m quite sure all the text has been written at some point, it’s just hard to find on the wiki. There was also a fair amount of discussion about the severe lack of developers for the platform, which runs on Django, so a few folks will be reaching out to the community with some “getting involved” documents and blog posts to spark more interest – perhaps next UDS we can even add more features!

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

After lunch it was on to the plenaries.

First off was “How Ubuntu and Canonical work with OEMs” with Chris Kenyon. It was a very interesting talk that quickly dove into the adventure it’s been over the past 4 years to work with OEMs to learn the steps they need to take to get Ubuntu pre-installed at scale. A lot of the OEMs are exclusively geared toward Windows, so all their testing and automation is built around Windows. As a result, the Canonical OEM team has spent a considerable amount of time working with the professionals at the OEMs to develop these same tools to work on the rapid installation and testing required in this area.

The next talk was on “HP & Ubuntu” by Bdale Garbee. Garbee, always an excellent speaker, explained that HP is world’s largest IT company, and they have the opportunity to interact with hugely diverse market and get feedback. He discussed the Moonshot, Odyssey and Voyager programs and how they relate to Linux and Ubuntu. Then discussed Ubuntu on ProLiant story: 2006: support for Debian, 2009: broader support for “Community” distributions, 2012: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to be Certified and Supported. He also mentioned that they are doing a significant amount of work with OpenStack (not only technical content, but also hosting the build farm). The latest Ubuntu LTS is the core for HP Cloud offering, public beta begins May 10th.

The last plenary was about the juju Charm Store by community member Marco Ceppi. He quickly explained what juju is “apt-get for the cloud” and what Charms are (deployment scripts, or the “packages” in the “apt-get” analogy). Charms are submitted to the Charm Store, charms are reviewed for security, best practices and completeness. It’s a living archive, not frozen like you’d find with Ubuntu itself. And he gave demo of a juju deployment he just deployed a few minutes before the presentation. There is a charm browser at jujucharms.com

– Test Drive Different Tablet UIs – User Experiences –

I ended up in this testing room after some sessions got shuffled around, and I’m glad I did! There were several Exopcs on display running various operating systems and environments, including Gnome3, Windows 8 and Unity on 12.04. ZaReason also brought one of their soon-to-be-released Zatabs running Android. It was a popular room, but the traffic was flowing enough that it wasn’t too hard to get to see everything.

– QA community structuring and needs –

Aside from testing I did when I was maintaining packages in Debian, I’ve never actually done a whole lot of software testing until just this past release when I started to help test ISOs for the Xubuntu team. The session centered around analysis and proposals of changes which may need to be made to the QA community to raise effectiveness, recruit more volunteers (and not burn them out!) and in general leverage the resources they have to get the best results.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

– App Developer Events –

Last session of the day! Ubuntu is seeking to get more developers to port (or simply write) applications to Ubuntu. I think the most interesting thing for me in this session was discussion related to some proposed “app contests” and how the discussion went from monetary and goods-based prizes to a more thorough analysis of what motivates people and is a compelling reward. It was generally agreed that something like recognition (ability to add to your resume “Winner of top app in Ubuntu for the month of July”) or prominent placement in the Software Center is going to be more valuable to a potential developer than a $100 gift certificate or goods (like a netbook) that may not be very useful to the developer who won it. There was also more general discussion about how we can better publicize app development for Ubuntu in general so potential app developers know it exists and have a clear path laid out to begin submitting apps.

I’ve uploaded notes from the session here.

After sessions I had several great hallway conversations before heading to the night’s meet and greet welcome event. I only stayed for about an hour, as I needed to head home to do some more preparation for the days ahead.