I blogged about the progress on our community website a while ago and we’re getting closer. A few community members helped on getting the content for the site ready. Here I’d like to take the time and thank all of them – they are all not the kind of person who end up in long arguments, but those who see that a task is important, ask what needs to get done and get right to it. A big kudos to all of you!

The first stage of the work is largely done. Michael Hall set up a wordpress test instance here where we put all the updated content, which is a great achievement already. It’s not only up to date, but also much more welcoming and friendly. The Canonical Web team should help us update the style to match the new ubuntu.com site.

What we need now is to get a few eyes over the test instance, so we can make sure all the content is accurate and makes sense. Any help is appreciated. Please just leave a comment on the blog post and we’ll take care of it.

Once we’re happy with the content, we will ask for the site to be put up in a more official place and then ask for redirects and links to be placed into all the right spots.

Thanks everyone. Let’s make the new community website happen together!

(There’s also a session at the next UDS about this. Make sure you attend if you want to get involved.)

These are very exciting times for Ubuntu. In so many parts of our community so many awesome things are happening every day and it’s great that many talk about it so you can get a sense of what’s happening.

We’ve been doing Ubuntu Development hangouts for a while now, but in last few weeks the pace increased even more. If you have missed some of the hangouts, have a look at the Ubuntu On Air youtube channel (better yet subscribe to it) to get an idea of what happened recently, what’s planned and where you can get involved. Here’s some recent examples:

• A discussion about image-based updates for Ubuntu Touch
• Didier Roche talking about autolanding stuff in Ubuntu
• Thomas Voß and Kevin Gunn explaining what to expect from Mir and the next Unity
• Ricardo Salveti and Sergio Schvezov talking about what’s happening with Ubuntu Touch

Of course there’s many many more.

Today (2013-04-18) we are going to have some more special people talking to us, so make sure you’re going to be there, at ubuntuonair.com!

• At 13:30 UTC we are going to have Loïc Minier, Seth Forshee, Thomas Voß, Michael Frey, Ricardo Salveti, Alex Chiang, Martin Pitt, Tony Espy and Matthew Fischer on the channel, who will discuss some of the main choices around how and where power management will happen (kernel driver model; supporting Android and mainline kernels, indicators and service daemons vs. power manager daemon)
• At 16:00 UTC Robert Park and Ken vanDine will talk us through the friends-app and its API.

I’m very much looking forward to both!

You can help!

I’m looking for a co-presenter, who knows a bit about Ubuntu Development, who can help hosting some of the sessions. Bonus points if you live in a different timezone (I’m in CET right now), so we can more easily cover different times.

Thanks a lot to José Antonio Rey who helps a lot with keeping Ubuntu On Air in shape!

If you have something you’d like to talk about (roughly in the area of Ubuntu Development), please let me know as well!

The Design team recently updated the look of ubuntu.com and I think it looks great.

In the announcement of the redesign they actually explained what led to the changes and it’s a nice read.

Some noticed that the link to the Community page is missing in the navigation bar, and Inayaili León responded to it:

We understand your concerns. The Community link is present in the footer section of the site.

We know that work is on its way to create a more vibrant and useful community site, and the web and design teams are also helping out with that.

One of the things mentioned in the post is that we’re still working on improvements to the navigation not just within ubuntu.com but across the entire ubuntu web universe, of which Community is surely an important part. Hopefully this will bring higher visibility to other sites when someone visits ubuntu.com.

We need, however, to divide work in smaller chunks, as I’m sure you understand, keeping the bigger goals in mind, so we should see this as a first step, which we can iterate on and evolve and be positive about the process.

So at last UDS we had a discussion about how we want to make this work and you can see the planning and stand of things over here. Since some of the members of the team got busy with other things, it’d be GREAT if anyone of you could help out with this. It’s very likely just going to be a set of small tasks, so any help would be much appreciated.

Let’s make the new Community page fantastic and invite many many new people!

If you’re interested, please leave a comment or contact me as usual.

We have a number of super interesting hangouts lined up and some others are planned for the next time. For now I’d like to announce we’ll have these two coming up this week:

• 2013-04-02 14:00 UTC – Thomas Voß and Keving Gunn will talk about Mir and the next iteration of Unity. What’s happening and how to get involved.
• 2013-04-04 15:00 UTC – Didier Roche will talk about auto-landing and auto-testing Unity, Ubuntu Touch Core apps and other Desktop bits.

Both hangouts are going to happen on http://ubuntuonair.com – simply go to the page, use the chat window below the video to connect and ask questions and enjoy the show. Make sure you bring your friends and questions.

Want to talk about your project/team? Demo something?

We are always looking for Ubuntu developers who want to show something, talk about their project or team or anything else. No matter if you’re a new developer and want to tell us how you got involved or if you want to show something new and interesting you found out, please let us know and we’ll make time for you.

I’m posting this on behalf of the Ubuntu Touch team. (Originally posted here.)

The interest in Ubuntu Touch is still going strong, many work on apps, many helped with porting, some started fixing bugs in Ubuntu Touch, so here’s a few highlights of Ubuntu Touch development of the last week:

• Jim Hodapp worked on enabling Qt multithreaded rendering in the camera app.
• The media app received a number of updates. Jim also enabled Qt multithreaded rendering here and greatly simplified the UI orientation/rotation support. It’s based on Screen.orientation instead of directly using QtSensors now. Renato Filho added some autopilot tests.
• qtubuntu-media-signals (a library that coordinates qtvideo-node, qtubuntu-camera and qtubuntu-media across thread contexts) was added by Jim and Francis Ginther.
• Gustavo Boiko put quite a bit of work into the telephony app, which was optimised to load data from telepathy-logger by reading it just once and dispatching the events to the correct model. Also some unit tests were added, the autopilot tests now pass as well. HUD actions were added and the app now uses the toolbar from the SDK.
• Guenter Schwann worked on the gallery app, which had its event view updated to use Listview. Also “Add album” and opening the photos view from the album view were reenabled.
• The Platform API was updated by Jim and Ricardo Mendoza to read the resolution and getting the updated rates of sensors. The accelerometer support was refactored so that it supports calling more than one observer listener per Sensor instance. Sessions can now be tracked in a different namespace than the app manager. Various tests were fixed.
• ubuntu-session had support added for SMDK4210 (Samsung GT-I9100) by Oliver Grawert.

Many other fixes have gone into the lower levels of the stack which were not considered for this update.

The ports team was busy as well and many Ubuntu Touch ports received updates. Some of them regularly and daily (just like the normal images on cdimage.u.c). Newly added ports are:

• working: Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 (GT-P6800)
• work in progress: HTC Sensation XL, SGS III (Qualcomm AT&T), Toshiba AC100

Thanks to everyone involved for your fantastic work!

—-

Ubuntu Touch runs on tablets, phones and other devices. We are open to suggestions, fixes and new crazy ideas. If you want go get involved, please get in touch: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Contribute

I can’t precisely date back when I got involved in Ubuntu, all I do know is that Michael Vogt helped me out with some Debian CDs in university and some months later told me: “you might like this, you can upgrade to it”. I tried it and was hooked immediately.

Ubuntu 4.10

When some time later the Ubuntu preview was announced and I learned more about the project goals and values, I felt totally inspired and knew I would totally love this. I had a hard time focusing on my thesis, I ignored it for a while and got involved in Ubuntu. Many folks encouraged me and I started to do some packaging. I packaged some software outside of Ubuntu first (coaster for example, it seems not to exist any more), but quickly got dragged into Ubuntu itself. (pyzor was the first upload I could find.)

Life in 2004 was exciting:

• Plugging in a USB key and having it show up on your desktop finally worked.
• We used GNOME 2.8, Firefox 0.9, XFree86 4.3, Evolution 2.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2.
• Some months later we had Live CDs!

This was a very special time, it inspired many to do all kinds of crazy things.

April Fool’s login

Admittedly, I looked funny too.

myself at Ubuntu Down Under

Ubuntu was very different. Its focus on making things work and favouring simplicity won many hearts over. Also its friendly community with high social standards inspired many and made it a pleasure to be involved and try something new. Ubuntu introduced LoCo teams, which brought Ubuntu into many parts of the world, which helped many finding new friends and which brought many new opportunities to everyone.

Ubuntu always was full of change. We pioneered and forged ahead in many many places. We were the first to ship a 2.6 kernel, we modularised X, derooted many services, made it easier to upgrade and install packages, wrote upstart, made booting fast and very often were the first to think new, shake up the standards and improve things for everyone.

Each of these changes was hard work, sometimes brought some problems with it, had its opponents, but also inspired many others, often new folks to jump in and help.

Some of these disagreements were very loud, sometimes they were inside the Ubuntu community, sometimes included Canonical people, sometimes they were on the sidelines of the Ubuntu world. And they were almost accompanied by calls that Ubuntu/Canonical should do more, do less, do it earlier or do it later. Some of the decisions which were made were reverted as a result of testing and feedback, but many stuck around and proved themselves as wise choices.

We were quick to embrace and count on new technologies. Many casual Ubuntu users might not be aware of the great work and innovation which made Ubuntu quickly became a favourite in the Cloud space, which is moving fast as well. This is a significant achievement and the fast pace and amount of change might have been just unnoticed by some because they’re don’t actively use the cloud or don’t watch the space.

Being and staying relevant in the software world is tough, it requires lots of hard work, sometimes a surprise element – quite often it requires change. This is hard, especially in a large community like ours, with many subcommunities, teams, different goals and directions.

Another possible source of disagreements is the symbiosis between Canonical and Ubuntu. The ideals of Open Source communities and business decisions sometimes go against each other and trust me, I’m not always 100% convinced or 100% happy with every decision. Then again all these  decisions are very hard to make. Partners, long-term plans, the press, big investments and lots more have to be considered carefully, which is not always on the radar of people who comment first.

Canonical’s and Ubuntu’s success are very tightly intertwined and it’s worth keeping these mutual benefits and what we achieved together in perspective.

Who would’ve thought this is possible 8 years ago?

Looking at the client side, I still can’t believe where this wild ride took us. We went from “working USB keys” to “favourite product” at MWC, which according to Wikipedia is the “world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry”, an industry known for moving fast and being unforgiving. This is a major achievement for us as a community. People trust us to actually pull this off.

There are many open questions right now, many uncertainties, some problems, but one thing is clear: if we want this to happen and Ubuntu on devices everywhere, this is the opportunity. This is the time and we’ve got to work together.

Perfect teamwork

We have the world’s attention, we’re off to a great start, but we have lots of work to do. This year will be the year in which we make it happen.

In the last weeks I’ve been working alongside the Ubuntu Touch team and have been able to witness how hard they work and how quickly the team gained new members from everywhere, how inspired everybody was to contribute and work on core apps, port Ubuntu to new devices, write patches and kick off discussions to lead us into new places. In some ways this is not unsimilar to what Ubuntu felt like in the early days. A lot of people thought we were crazy, there were established projects and players, still we managed to bring something new to the table together.

This is exactly the pioneer spirit we need, the inspiration we need. If you want Ubuntu to succeed, ask yourself what the best place is in which you contribute. There are many, but obvious picks I can see are QA (both manual and automated testing), work on core apps, porting and fixing bugs in Ubuntu in general.

I realise that the increased pace and a set of new priorities in the project are painful for some of us and they are disruptive. There are problems which need to be resolved and as some pointed out elsewhere before, communication and compromises are hard. What I feel is most important in our current discussions is: We all care a lot, and we all agree on much more than we actually disagree on. Let’s resolve the issues and figure out what we all can do make this a success.

Ubuntu, you’ve changed, yes, but we were never closer to our goal of bringing free software to all of the world! Let’s work together to make this happen!

Port-a-thon

I can’t believe it hasn’t even been a week since we announced the availability of the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview images. We also put instructions out to contribute to the effort and specifically how to port Ubuntu Touch to new devices.

In the recent Ubuntu Development Hangout with some members of the Ubuntu Touch team I mentioned it already: these people are heroes. They’ve worked day and night and it was a pleasure to put the porting guide and Port-a-thon event together with them.

After that it has been very satisfying to be subscribed to the Ubuntu Touch devices list. We started with four devices, on which Ubuntu ran right from the start. The reference devices so to speak. Fast-forward 5-6 days and we have images and instructions for 15 other devices. FIFTEEN!

On this list currently are: Asus Transformer Infinity, Asus Transformer Pad TF300T, Galaxy Nexus (toro + toroplus), Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wifi, HTC Desire, HTC DNA, Huawei Ascend G300, Nexus One, Samsung Galaxy Note II, Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung Galaxy S (GT-I9000), Sony Xperia S, Sony Xperia T, VZ SGSIII.

If your device is on the list and you’re curious, head to the devices list and find out how to get the new Ubuntu Touch hotness straight to your device.

Another 22 ports are work-in-progress with developers or teams of developers working on them.

Update 2013-02-27 17:56 UTC: it’s 23 work-in-progress ports.

Update 2013-02-28 09:38 UTC: On the list of completed ports we now also have: LG Nitro/Optimus HD, Kindle Fire 1st Gen, Kindle Fire 2nd Gen, Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ and 2 more work-in-progress ports. Awesome!

Thanks a lot to everyone who helped make this happen. If you’re curious what’s happening, make sure you join the ubuntu-phone mailing list and ubuntu-touch IRC channel. More info on the Contribute page.

JAMS!

Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up this weekend (1-3 March) and if you have a look at the list of events, you can see that from Tempe to Tehran we have events lined up where people get together to make Ubuntu better. With all the excitement around Ubuntu Touch, we added instructions to the Ubuntu Global Jam page on how to help by either testing, porting or writing apps.

If you don’t have an event nearby or your team is too spread out over the state or country, you could at least still get together on IRC or over Hangouts. We have docs on how to run an event.