I woke up far too early again on Tuesday morning, jet lag fun! The first session I attended was the Community Roundtable again where Jono talked about some of the plans for the emerging QA infrastructure, and we discussed the need for quickstart getting involved pages and general wiki pruning for a lot of teams, and then plans for the revitalization of the Ubuntu Weekly News in a way that doesn’t overwhelm contributors (it was taking over 30 man hours to prepare it in the past, something I learned when Nathan Handler and I released an issue in January).

– Forums Health Check –

Apparently I am a pretty typical UDS attendee in that I don’t use or care for web forums all that much for personal use (I prefer IRC and mailing lists), but I admire and appreciate the tremendous value they bring to the support community. A major project that forums council member Mike Basinger has been tackling is the upgrade of this forum and this session he presented the fruits of some of this labor, most visibly the new theme but also a lot of underlying technical issues related to the upgrade including security and spam handling options for the newer version. Ivanka Majic from the Canonical Design Team was also attending and offering comments about the overall new design. Session notes available here.

– Edubuntu plans for Oneiric –

While Partimus.org doesn’t strictly use Edubuntu itself, we certainly use a number of metapackages from the project and it’s always nice to be able to give direct feedback to the project admins regarding our real world deployments. The session began with some follow-up from some known issues including translations in several areas and some small technical cleanup tasks. The discussion then moved to what attendees at the session and others had been requesting as far as features. Major pain points for school deployments appear to be some of the large, popular web applications that are commonly used for schools but which are either old in the Debian/Ubuntu archives (such as Moodle, discussion around this has been happening since my first UDS) or don’t exist at all (in the case of Koha). A suggestion was made to link to installation and maintenance documentation to the Edubuntu site itself so people have good resources at their fingertips even if it’s not as simple as an apt-get install. There was also some discussion about educational Windows apps that work in wine and how to get potential administrators of Edubuntu to be made aware of use the existing database at appdb.winehq.org. Session notes available here.

– Debian Health Check for O –

I have been attending this session since my first UDS in Dallas a couple years ago and each time I attend it feels like the social delta between the projects has been cut down so now these sessions are very calm and focusing on some key points of issue. Now with the recent launch of DEX the Debian team is also making a more public and direct effort to communicate with downstream projects that are based on it. I’d say it’s a pretty exciting time to be involved with collaboration between projects. Session notes available here.

It was then off to lunch, after which I had a great hallway discussion with Jim Campbell about documentation of all kinds.

– Integrate Lubuntu into Ubuntu ecosystem –

As far as flavors go I’m actually involved with the Xubuntu project rather than Lubuntu, but I’ve been greatly interested the work that Julien Lavergne and his team have been doing the past year in really getting Lubuntu cleaned up to be a flavor of Ubuntu. Becoming a flavor means that a project gains all the benefits of iso hosting, daily builds, release announcements (the other flavors are: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio). I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked how a version of Ubuntu becomes one of these flavors and I haven’t had a good answer, but with this move for Lubuntu to join the ranks they are working to smooth out the process. Mark attended this session and I joined him and Julien to take notes. The project now has the blessing to become included and right now there are really only some technical barriers to making this happen. Based on the feedback from this session it really looks like Lubuntu will be among the other flavors for 11.10. How exciting! Session notes available here.

– How to run usability sessions –

With the defaulting of Unity and all the changes that come with Gnome3 and the shell interface usability has really come to the forefront of testing in the Linux world. From my perspective the sharp rise in popularity of smartphones and slate/tablet systems has also increased my interest in how people use devices and methods of testing. This session was really great for all that, gave piles of very direct, practical tips for running even a small coffee shop usability study (ask 5-6 strangers in a coffee shop to try your new thing). Session notes available here, and are very detailed with everything that was discussed.

– Discussion of the goals of the accessibility team in the Oneiric cycle –

As a blessedly able person, accessibility really just started to show up on my radar last year because I never had a compelling need to seek it out. As I’ve watched the team over these past several months I’ve really come to learn that the team is so much beyond just making Ubuntu more accessible for people with disabilities, it’s about making Ubuntu really great for human beings and taking advantage of the amazing opportunity that a solid open source operating system community has to deliver a highly superior product when it comes to accessibility. While there are still many uncertainties, one of the things I was happy to hear from this session is that they want to do Classroom sessions to give some introductions to contributing to the team and some general Q&A sessions so the community has an even better opportunity to approach the team with questions. Session notes available here.

After the session I was able to get an email out about the Invisible Exhibition outing tonight with more details about costs and logistics (read here if you’re interested). I’m pretty excited about attending it tonight.

The evening was spent by first meeting up with some folks down in the ballroom for buffet-style dinner and checking out some of the cool hardware that Linaro had to show off. I then met up with Cherí Francis and around 9:30 we met up with several others for a ride down to the river to do some exploring. The river is beautiful and while we were there we ran into several other UDSers and mixed up our party a bit to explore in separate directions.

We did a bunch of walking, caught public transit for the first time and I ended up getting back to the hotel around midnight.

Now off to day 3!

My weekend began with a quick ride down to the San Francisco airport for a noon flight to Los Angeles. I dashed across LAX only to arrive at my gate to a flight that was delayed by over an hour. At the gate I met Clint Byrum who was on the same fight. The long flight over the Atlantic was uneventful, but unfortunately the delay in LAX caused us to miss the connection in Frankfurt. Lufthansa rebooked us on a flight 5 hours later so we spent the afternoon paying too much for wifi in the airport, chatting and eating frankfurter sausages.

It was almost 8:30PM on Sunday evening by the time I was checked in to Corinthia Hotel Budapest. The hotel was stunning, but I was too tired to enjoy it and headed straight up to my room to meet my roommate and get some rest!

Monday morning the day started with a gathering of UDS crew for the week, we picked up our t-shirts and helped set up the registration table. It was then off for a great breakfast (all the food here has been very good) and then the opening and keynote by Mark Shuttleworth.

You can view Mark’s keynote on youtube here: Ubuntu UDS O Mark Shuttleworth Keynote

I left the opening early for crew duty, and then it was off to the first session, a short Community Roundtable.

– Remote Desktop Improvements –

I don’t do a lot of Remote Desktop work and do all of my own systems administration via ssh but I was interested in this session to get a view of the changes in the remote technology over the past several years and to see what the goals were in Ubuntu. The session discussed two very different needs for remote access, one being a way for systems administrators who prefer the GUI to remote in to a server, and the other being a demo instance of Ubuntu for people who want to try it. I had never heard of x2go or noVNC prior to this session, both of which I’ll have to give a try. They also discussed several other options including ones based on familiar VNC and NX technologies. Session notes available here.

– UDS-O LoCo Team Directory –

This was a great session where we discussed the future plans for the LoCo Directory. One of them was to include more documentation in the LoCo Directory itself rather than having it on a separate wiki page that people may not be able to find. There were also a number of ideas thrown out to make it more people-oriented, like adding rotating photos of people at LoCo events as a banner across the top, create a planet-like feed for just LoCo feeds from appropriate categories on personal and LoCo team blogs. Session notes available here.

After lunch I attended the planeries before running off for crew.

– Beginners Team Roadmap for Ubuntu-O Cycle –

This session was booked at the same time as the NGO Team Oneiric Plans which I somehow forgot to subscribe to so I went to this one and chose to catch up on the NGO session after. I ended up leading this session with komputes as we spoke with members of the community about their perception of the team and what we could do to improve the mentoring program. The resounding response was that at last UDS the team didn’t have enough quality control of mentors, and at this UDS there was too much structure in place so potential mentors were put off by the “hoops they had to jump through” to volunteer to be a mentor. It certainly is a delicate balance and I look forward to the Beginners team tackling this issue. This was probably the session with the most participation from IRC of all the sessions I’ve been to so far, a number of the representatives from the Beginners Team who couldn’t attend were active remotely. The session inspired remote attendee David Wonderly to write this blog post about the team. Session notes available here.

I then met up with Chris Crisafulli so we could finish our crew duty for the day and then catch up on the missed NGO session, notes are available here. Sessions were beginning to wrap up and so we went out with Paolo Sammicheli and Chris on my first geocache! And second!

Plus it was a nice walk around our area of the city.

We got back around 7:30 and headed to the UDS Meet & Greet where I met up with Scott Sweeny who I knew from the Pennsylvania LoCo but hadn’t seen since before I moved to California. We ended up going for drinks with a couple of others and had a very enjoyable, (and very late!) night.

Perfect first day.