Daniel Holbach

Blogs

2 Years at Weaveworks

March 2, 2020

Time flies when you’re having fun: it’s now been two years since I started working at Weaveworks and I 💕 the experience it’s been. Back then I was just concluding my sabbatical and had started pursuing a second career in that year. So my mind wasn’t exactly in the tech space, still I felt rested and open to new challenges. In the meantime, many old friends had already waved over from Cloud Native land and tried to lure me there.

What's been happening in Ignite

August 23, 2019

First of all: thanks Dennis Marttinen and Lucas Käldström for helping write this up. It’s been only a bit over a month since Weave Ignite was announced to the world (others talked about it as well). Time to catch up on what happened in the meantime, the team around it has been busy. If you’re new to Weave Ignite, it’s an open source VM manager with a container UX and built-in GitOps management (check out the docs).

Weave Scope and Weave Flux @Hacktoberfest

October 1, 2018

Long time no blog It’s been a busy half a year since my last blog post. Immersing myself in the cloud native world and my non-work related training kept me quite busy. I learned quite a lot and it’s been a very rewarding experience, but whenever I thought “hey, I should blog about this”, something else came up which grabbed my attention. This time I wanted to get the word out about a fun project I was involved in and reflect a bit on some aspects of these last six months.

A month with Dell XPS 13 (9370)

April 19, 2018

After years of using Thinkpads, I went for a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Although I had bought devices with Linux pre-installed and laptops for friends as well, this was going to be my first own laptop coming with Ubuntu straight from the factory. The hardware The specs looked great (big SSD disk, enough memory to play around with VMs/containers, etc.), but I had to brush away some fond memories of old laptops, where I was able to easily replace parts (memory, screen, disk, power jack, keyboard and more for my x220).

I'm joining Weaveworks

February 19, 2018

My sabbatical is over and today is my first day working at Weaveworks where I’m joining the Developer Experience team. I’m incredibly excited about this. I got to know quite a few of my colleagues in the past weeks and they were without exception all incredibly likeable and smart people. The company believes in open source, is quite diverse and has an office in Berlin - also I’ll get to work with Cezzaine, Jonathan and Steve again.

Took a year off...

February 9, 2018

Since many of you reached out to me in the past weeks to find out if I was still travelling the world and how things were going, I thought I’d reconnect with the online world and write a blog post again. After a bit more than a year, my sabbatical is coming to an end now. I had a lot of time to reflect, recharge batteries, be curious again, travel and make new experiences.

Taking a break

December 13, 2016

It’s a bit strange to write this blog post in the same week as Martin Pitt is announcing moving on from Canonical. I remember many moments of Martin’s post very vividly and he was one of the first I ran into on my flight to Sydney for Ubuntu Down Under in 2005. Fast forward to today: 2016 was a year full of change - my personal life was no exception there.

Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day

November 20, 2016

It’s 20th November 2016, so today marks another Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day. The idea for the event was put together by Ahmed Shams in 2011 and it’s simple but brilliant: once a year (at least), take the time to thank some specific people for their work in Ubuntu. As I’m at UbuCon Europe this weekend, it’s incredibly easy to pick somebody whose work I’m grateful for. Today I’d like to thank all the event organisers in the Ubuntu world.

Ubuntu Online Summit from a snap perspective

November 17, 2016

Earlier this week the Ubuntu community was busy with the Ubuntu Online Summit. If you head to the schedule page, you can watch all the sessions which happened. As I’m interested in snaps a lot, I’d like to highlight some of the sessions which happened there, so if you missed them, you can go back and see what happened there: Intro and keynote by Gustavo Niemeyer Gustavo (amongst others projects he is involved with) is one of the lead developers of snapd.

Ubuntu Online Summit coming up 15-16 Nov

November 10, 2016

Ubuntu Online Summit is here again! 15th and 16th November 2016 we are talking about the great stuff which landed in Ubuntu 16.10 and we talk about our plans for 17.04. Now is the last call for adding sessions, find out how to do that here. See you all next week!

Writing snaps together

September 27, 2016

Working with a new technology often brings you to see things in a new light and re-think previous habits. Especially when it challenges the status quo and expectations of years of traditional use. Snaps are no exception in this regard. As one example twenty years ago we simply didn’t have today’s confinement technologies. Luckily is using snapcraft a real joy: you write one declarative file, define your snap’s parts, make use of snapcraft’s many plugins and if really necessary, you write a quick and simple plugin using Python to run your custom build.

Get your software snapped tomorrow!

September 19, 2016

For a few weeks we have been running the Snappy Playpen as a pet/research project already. Many great things have happened since then: With the Playpen we now have a repository of great best-practice examples. We brought together a lot of people who are excited about snaps, who worked together, collaborated, wrote plugins together and improved snapcraft and friends. A number of cloud parts were put together by the team as well.

Need helping getting started with snapping?

September 12, 2016

Are you interested in snapping software and need help? There’s a lot of good reasons for snapping software: You get software out to millions of users: Ubuntu (snapd installed by default since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), snapd available too on Arch, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, openSUSE, openembedded, yocto and OpenWRT. You get to define the experience: ship the stack the way you tested it. Just one simple test-scenario for you. Building a snap is simple (one piece of YAML controls the build), publishing is instantaneous (one command to run, automatic review).

Snapcraft workshop at Akademy

September 2, 2016

I’m looking forward to next week, as I’m going to Akademy. On Wednesday I’m going to give this workshop WHAT: Creating snaps with snapcraft MAR 0.017 - Wednesday, 7th September 10:00 - 12:00 So if you are interested in learning how to publish software easily and directly to users, this might be just for you. Snaps are self-contained, confined apps, which run across a variety of Linux systems. The process of snapping software is very straight-forward and publishing them is very quick as well.

Snappy Playpen event tomorrow!

July 18, 2016

Over the last few weeks, Tuesday has become the Snappy Playpen day. Although you can find us on IRC and Gitter all the time basically, Tuesday is where many of us have their eyeballs locked on the discussion and are happy to help out. We’re making no exception tomorrow, 19th July 2016 will be another Snappy Playpen event. It’s beautiful to see all the recent additions to the Snappy Playpen repository and other contributions.

Snappy Playpen event tomorrow!

July 11, 2016

Distributing software has never been easier. snapcraft makes it easy to build any kind of app, snapd and snap-confine bring security and hassle-free updates. Maintaining the app in the store is simple and you get lots of flexibility with different release channels. If you’re interested or curious, adding your software to the Snappy Playpen, might be a good first step. Tomorrow, Tuesday 12th July 2016, we are working together on getting more snaps landed, getting things improved, updating our docs, helping out the snapd/snapcraft people, and upstreaming snaps.

Contributing to the world of snaps

July 7, 2016

Zygmunt Krynicki wrote about the availability of bite-sized bugs for the snapd project. I took this as an opportunity to go through the snapcraft bugs as well and tag a few as bitesize myself. snapcraft is written in python, nicely commented documented and comes with a comprehensive test-suite. The people working on it are a lovely bunch and very helpful. So if you are interested in publishing software and have some knowledge in how a certain class of projects is built, you could do a lot of good here.

Snappy Playpen event next Tuesday

June 30, 2016

Next week on Tuesday, 5th July, we want to have our next Snappy Playpen event. As always we are going to work together on snapping software for our repository on github. Whatever app, service or piece of software you bring is welcome. The focus of last week was ironing out issues and documenting what we currently have. Some outcomes of this were: documentation of some of our best practices, adding a FAQ a list of known issues consolidation in terms of using common parts (launchers, etc.

Being among the first in a new community

June 20, 2016

It takes a special kind of people who enjoy being in the first in a new community. It’s a time when there’s a lot of empty canvas, wide landscapes to uncover, lots of dragons still on a map, I guess you already see what I mean. It takes some pioneer spirit to feel comfortable when the rules are not all figured out yet and stuff is still a bit harder than it should be.

Second week of Snappy Playpen

June 16, 2016

We are in the second week of the Snappy Playpen and it’s simply beautiful to see how new folks are coming in and collaborate on getting snaps done, improve existing ones, answer questions and work together. The team spirit is strong and we’re all learning loads. Keep up the good work everyone! :-) It’s only Thursday, but let’s have a quick look at the highlights of this week. New snaps Added Tyrant Unleashed Optimizer, by Christian Ehrhardt Added mpv git build, by Alan Pope Added imagemagick6-stable, by Andy Keech Added keepassx, by Leo Arias Added consul, by Leo Arias dcos-cli snap, by Leo Arias deis workflow snap, by Leo Arias Work in progress snaps Some of these snaps still need help, so take a look at the list of our open PRs and dive in.

Ubuntu Core at UOS 16.05

May 2, 2016

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is out of the door, we started work on the Yakkety Yak already, now it’s time for the Ubuntu Online Summit. It’s all happening 3-5 May 14-20 UTC. This is where we discuss upcoming features, get feedback and demo all the good work which happened recently. If you want to join the event, just head to the registration page and check out the UOS 16.05 schedule afterwards. You can star (☆) sessions and mark them as important to you and thus plan your attendance for the event.

Ubuntu 16.04 has landed

April 21, 2016

Ubuntu 16.04 is out! Ubuntu 16.04 - yet another LTS? Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, aka the Xenial Xerus, has just been released. It’s incredible that it’s already the 24th Ubuntu release and the 6th LTS release. If you have been around for a while and need a blast from the past, check out this video: Click here to view it on youtube. It’s available in /usr/share/example-content on a default desktop install as well.

Trip report: UbuCon Summit + SCaLE14x

February 11, 2016

(This trip report was brought to you by the Canonical Community team, i.e. Alan Pope, Daniel Holbach, David Callé, David Planella, Michael Hall and Nicholas Skaggs. Some individual posts might still pop up in the next days… :-)) For a few years, the Californian LoCo team has been involved in SCaLE and held an UbuCon at the event or an Ubuntu-themed day and always an Ubuntu booth. Because of the immense popularity of SCaLE and the level of planning which went into this year’s UbuCon, the Community team decided to get involved and make this the first ever UbuCon Summit.

Long time no Snappy Clinic

February 8, 2016

It’s been a while since our last Snappy Clinic, so we asked for your input on which topics to cover. Thanks for the feedback so far. In our next session Sergio Schvezov is going to talk about what’s new in Snapcraft and the changes in the 2.x series. Be there and you are going to be up-to-date on how to publish your software on Snappy Ubuntu Core. There will be time for questions afterwards.

What's happening at UbuCon Summit

January 13, 2016

I can’t wait for UbuCon Summit to start. The list of attendees is growing and with some of the folks it’s been ages since I met them in person the last time. For me that’s the number one reason to be there. Catching up with everyone will be great. The schedule for UbuCon Summit is looking fantastic as well. We have many many great talks and demos lined up from a really broad spectrum, there’s going to be much to learn about and there’s going to be more surprises coming up in the unconference part of UbuCon.

The world of Snappy at UbuCon Summit

December 22, 2015

I’m very excited about UbuCon Summit which will bring many many Ubuntu people from all parts of its community together in January. David Planella did a great job explaining why this event is going to be just fantastic. I look forward to meeting everyone and particularly look forward to what we’ve got to show in terms of Snappy Ubuntu Core. We are going to have Manik Taneja and Sergio Schvezov there who are going to give the following talk:

Snappy Clinic: News from Snapcraft

December 2, 2015

It’s been a while since our last Snappy Clinic (here’s a link to all videos) and since Ubuntu Online Summit a lot of great things happened in Snapcraft: Summary of changes in Snapcraft 0.5 Summary of changes in Snapcraft 0.6 Among the changes: a nil plugin, support of pip packages, support globs in the copy plugin, a nodejs plugin, add go-packages to the go plugin, countless bugfixes and tests, a more beautiful interface and more documentation.

Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day

November 20, 2015

The Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day is a really nice tradition and it’s always to think of somebody I could thank (Thanks Ahmed Shams for setting it up in the first place!). Narrowing down my list of thank-yous to just one or two for a blog post is much harder for me. :-) First I’d like to thank Elizabeth Krumbach. Liz has been all over the place in the Ubuntu world for ages and has helped out in many many forms.

A snappy UOS summary

November 6, 2015

Ubuntu Online Summit featured more than 70 sessions this time around and quite a big turnout. You can find the full schedule with links to session videos and session notes in summit.ubuntu.com. Here’s a quick summary of what happened in Snappy Ubuntu Core land: Testing Snappy: In this Show & Tell session Leo Arias showcased a lot of the QA work which has been done on Ubuntu Core along with many useful techniques to run tests and easily bring up Snappy in a number of different scenario.

UOS Session Roundup for Ubuntu Snappy Core

October 30, 2015

With Ubuntu Online Summit happening 3-5 November, it is really just around the corner. Time to check out the schedule and see what’s planned. UOS is our online planning and show-and-tell event. We use a mix of Hangouts-on-Air, IRC and Etherpad to organise ourselves. It’s a great opportunity to get to know people, have your say and find out what’s planned the next weeks and months. Register for the event at http://summit.

Another great Ubuntu release to be proud of!

October 22, 2015

This morning I chatted with Laura Czajkowski and we quickly figured out that wily is our 23rd Ubuntu release. Crazy in a way - 23 releases, who would’ve thought? But on the other hand, Ubuntu is a constant evolution of great stuff becoming even better. Even after 11 years of Ubuntu I can still easily get excited about what’s new in Ubuntu and what is getting better. If you have read any of my recent blog entries you will know that snappy and snapcraft are a combination too good to be true.

Snappy Clinic: using snapcraft to ship software

October 20, 2015

As announced earlier, we had a Ubuntu Snappy Core Clinic yesterday and we had a great time. Sergio Schvezov, Ted Gould and I talked about snapcraft in general, what’s new in the 0.3 release and showed off a couple of examples how to package software for Ubuntu Snappy Core. As you can see in the video, none of the snapcraft.yaml files length exceeded 30 lines (and this file is all that’s required); compared to what packaging on various platforms usually looks like that’s just beautiful.

Our next Snappy Clinic

October 16, 2015

We promised more Snappy Clinics and Monday, 19th October 2015 16:00 UTC is going to be our next one. This time we are going to have two of the main Snapcraft developers, Sergio Schvezov and Ted Gould around, who are going to give an introduction to what snapcraft is, talk about what’s new in the 0.3 release, show how we can use a custom plugin from upstream snapcraft for a new project and put together a snap from scratch.

Nominations for CC election are still open

October 11, 2015

I guess most of you saw the post on Fridge or the post on the Community team mailing list: Nominations for the Community Council are still open until Friday, 16th October. We already received a number of good nominations so far, but I thought it’d be good to try to convince a few more of you to nominate yourself or nominate a friend of yours. If flavours and other important teams would get some more representation on the CC, that’d be great.

The future of shipping software is coming together

September 24, 2015

I have some very exciting news, but wanted to share some thoughts I had earlier today. Since I joined the Ubuntu community I’ve always had to do with people who want to ship their software in Ubuntu and as I’m a generally excitable guy I always thought “finally, it became so much easier - we’re there”! Over the past years we got better documentation, PPAs in Launchpad, the dh command, bzr-builddeb, daily builds in Launchpad, pkgme, the ARB process, translated documentation and lots of other initiatives which always felt like we made the world a better place for ISVs, third party app developers, upstream developers and whoever else wanted their software to be in Ubuntu.

Tomorrow is a special anniversary

September 4, 2015

Tomorrow is a special anniversary: 2005-09-05 I joined Canonical - that’s right: It’s going to be a decade. A lot of what we as Ubuntu Community experienced and went through I wrote up some time ago and it’s well-documented in blog posts, articles, LoCo event reports and pictures from Ubuntu Allhands events, so don’t expect any of that here. For me personally it’s been a ride I could never have expected like this.

Free Culture and Ubuntu

September 4, 2015

Thanks to Nathan Haines and José Antonio Rey we have the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase again. It’s Ubuntu’s way of acknowledging that there’s not just “free software”, but a wider movement which wants to make sharing the fruits of our labour an obvious and straight-forward reality. You still have some time to submit your works for the competition. The winners are going to get their free culture works included in Ubuntu itself.

Snapcraft has landed in the archive

August 18, 2015

In the flurry of uploads for the C++ ABI transition and other frantic work (Thursday is Feature Freeze day) this gem maybe went unnoticed: snapcraft (0.1) wily; urgency=low * Initial release What this means? If you’re on wily, you can easily try out snapcraft and get started turning software into snaps. We have some initial docs available on the developer site which should help you find your way around.

Ubuntu Community Q&A

August 11, 2015

If you haven’t heard of it yet, every Tuesday we have the Ubuntu Community Q&A session at 15:00 UTC. It’s always up on http://ubuntuonair.com and you can watch old sessions on the youtube channel. For the casual Ubuntu users it’s a great way to get to know people who are working in the inner circles of Ubuntu and can answer questions, clear up misunderstandings or get specialists on the show.

Join the first Snappy Open House!

July 7, 2015

Snappy is evolving, becoming more robust and is getting loads of new users. This week will see a new stable release of Snappy. For us that’s reason enough to invite you all to our first Snappy Open House today. Starting from 14:00 UTC today (2015-07-07), we are going to be on Ubuntu-on-Air, introducing team, talking about what’s new and talking about testing Snappy. If you want to get involved or wanted to get to know snappy, this is a great opportunity.

Дуже дякую, team Ukraine!

June 9, 2015

Out of nowhere, the Ukrainian translations team came up and translated 70% (the threshold where we call translations ‘complete enough to be official’) of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide into Ukrainian. This all happened within just a couple of days. All I can say is: amazing work and Дуже дякую (thanks a lot)! Keep it up! We are going to prepare an upload to Debian and Ubuntu in the coming days as well.

More Help App design ponderings

May 20, 2015

Daniel McGuire is unstoppable. The work I mentioned yesterday was great, here’s some more, showing what would happen when the user selects “Playing Music”. More feedback we received so far: Kevin Feyder suggested using a different icon for the app. Michał Prędotka asked if we were planning to add more icons/pictures and the answer is “yes, we’d love to if it doesn’t clutter up the interface too much”. We are going to start a call for help with the content soon.

RFC: Help app design

May 19, 2015

Some of you might have noticed the Help app in the store, which has been around for a couple of weeks now. We are trying to make it friendlier and easier to use. Maybe you can comment and share your ideas/thoughts. Apart from actual bugs and adding more and more useful content, we also wanted the app to look friendlier and be more intuitive and useful. The latest trunk lp:help-app can be seen as version 0.

The Snappy Online Summit is in full swing!

May 7, 2015

It’d be a bit of a stretch to call UOS Snappy Online Summit, but Snappy definitely was talk of the town this time around. It was also picked up by tech news sites, who not always depicted Ubuntu’s plans accurately. :-) Anyway… if you missed some of the sessions, you can always go back, watch the videos of the sessions and check the notes. Here’s the links to the sessions which already happened:

What a tease...

May 4, 2015

Not sure if you saw Marks’ blog post earlier, but I’ll make sure to be watching the keynote at http://ubuntuonair.com/ at 14:00 UTC today. :-)

Shaping Ubuntu Snappy

April 30, 2015

Next week we are going to have another Ubuntu Online Summit (5-7 May 2015). This is (among many other things) a great time for you to get involved with, learn about and help shape Ubuntu Snappy. As I said in my last blog post I’m very impressed to see the general level of interest in Ubuntu Snappy given how new it is. It’ll be great to see who is joining the sessions and who is going to get involved.

Ubuntu 15.04 is changing the game

April 28, 2015

15.04 is out! And another Ubuntu release went out the the door. I can’t believe that it’s the 22nd Ubuntu release already. There’s a lot to be excited about in 15.04. The first phone powered by Ubuntu went out to customers and new devices are in the pipeline. The underpinnings of the various variants of Ubuntu are slowly converging, new Ubuntu flavours saw the light of day (MATE and Desktop next), new features landed, new apps added, more automated tests were added, etc.

On being an Ubuntu member

March 26, 2015

What does being an Ubuntu member mean to you? Why did you do it back then? I became an Ubuntu member about 10 years ago. It was part of the process of becoming member of the MOTU team. Before you could apply for upload rights, you had to be an Ubuntu member though. That wasn’t all of it though. For me it wasn’t the @ubuntu.com mail address or “fulfilling the requirements for upload rights”.

Giving Ubuntu devices users a head-start

March 6, 2015

In the past weeks Nick, David, a few others and I worked on an app / a website, which could easily collect information which will give users of an Ubuntu device a head-start. All our collective experience and knowledge, easily added and translated. We achieved quite a bit. We’re now very close to getting a first version of it online (both as an app in the store and as a website).

Sometimes it's so easy to help out

February 27, 2015

I already blogged about the help app I was working on a bit in the last time. I wanted to go into a bit more detail now that we reached a new milestone. What’s the idea behind it? In a conversation in the Community team we noticed that there’s a lot of knowledge we gathered in the course of having used Ubuntu on a phone for a long time and that it might make sense to share tips and tricks, FAQ, suggestions and lots more with new device users in a simple way.

Get trained on Ubuntu's HTML5 story

February 5, 2015

Did you always want to write an app for Ubuntu and thought that HTML5 might be a good choice? Well picked! We now have training materials up on developer.ubuntu.com which will get you started in all things related to Ubuntu devices. The great thing is that you just write this app once and it’ll work on the phone, the desktop and whichever device Ubuntu is going to run next on.

Helping Ubuntu devices users

February 1, 2015

In a recent conversation we thought it’d be a good idea to share tips and tricks, suggestions and ideas with users of Ubuntu devices. Because it’d help to have it available immediately on the phone, an app could be a good idea. I had a quick look at it and after some discussion with Rouven in my office space, it looked like hyde could fit the bill nicely. To edit the content, just write a bit of Markdown, generate the HTML (nice and readable templates - great!

Always something new...

January 30, 2015

What do Kinshasa, Omsk, Paris, Mexico City, Eugene, Denver, Tempe, Catonsville, Fairfax, Dania Beach, San Francisco and various places on the internet have in common? Right, they’re all participating in the Ubuntu Global Jam on the weekend of 6-8 February! See the full list of teams that are part of the event here. (Please add yours if you haven’t already.) What’s great about the event is that there are just two basic aims:

Building a great community

January 16, 2015

In last night’s Community Council meeting, we met up with the Xubuntu team. They have done a great job inviting new members into their part of the community. Just read this: <pleia2> elfy notes all contributors in his announcements <dholbach> that's really really nice <pleia2> we do blog posts, emails directly to all the testing members and to -devel list <dholbach> wow <pleia2> this cycle we're giving out stickers to some of our top testers <elfy> if we get that sorted <pleia2> share on social media too This is just fantastic.

Scope training materials

December 15, 2014

For some time we have had training materials available for learning how to write Ubuntu apps. We’ve had a number of folks organising App Dev School events in their LoCo team. That’s brilliant! What’s new now are training materials for developing scopes! It’s actually not that hard. If you have a look at the workshop, you can prepare yourself quite easily for giving the session at a local event. As we are working on an updated developer site, right now, for now take a look at the following pages if you’re interested in running such a session yourself:

Summarising the last CC meeting

December 12, 2014

I’m very happy that folks took notes during and after the meeting to bring up their ideas, thoughts, concerns and plans. It got a bit unwieldy, so Elfy put up a pad which summarises it and is meant to discuss actions and proposals. Today we are going to have a meeting to discuss what’s on the “actions” pad. That’s why I thought it’d be handy to put together a bit of a summary of what people generally brought up.

Ubuntu Community Discussions distilled, in a hangout, in work items

December 10, 2014

It’s fantastic that a we have more discussion about where we want our community to go. We get ideas out of it, people communicate and get a common understanding of issues. Jono’s blog post and the ubuntu-community-team mailing list generated a lot of good stuff already. Last week we had an IRC meeting with the CC and discussed governance and leadership in there. We took quite a bit of notes, and Elfy set up a doc where we note down actions.

Foundation or no foundation

December 9, 2014

The call for an Ubuntu Foundation has come up again. It has been discussed many times before, ever since an announcement was made many years ago which left a number of people confused about the state of things. The way I understood the initial announcement was that a trust had been set up, so that if aliens ever kidnapped our fearless leader, or if he decided that beekeeping was more interesting than Ubuntu, we could still go on and bring the best flavour of linux to the world.

Mailing list woes

December 1, 2014

Despite being an “old” technology and having its problems, we still use mailing lists… a lot. Some of the lists have been cleaned up by the Community Council some time ago, especially if they were created and then forgotten some time later. We do have a number of mailing lists though which are still active, but have the problem of not having enough (or enough active) moderators on board. What then happens is this:

Long mailing list discussions

November 27, 2014

I’m very happy that the ubuntu-community-team mailing list is seeing lots of discussion right now. It shows how many people deeply care about the direction of Ubuntu’s community and have ideas for how to improve things. Looking back through the discussion of the last weeks, I can’t help but notice a few issues we are running into - issues all to common on open source project mailing lists. Maybe you all have some ideas on how we could improve the discussion?

I Am Who I Am Because Of Who We All Are

November 24, 2014

I read the “We Are Not Loco” post a few days ago. I could understand that Randall wanted to further liberate his team in terms of creativity and everything else, but to me it looks feels the wrong approach. The post makes a simple promise: do away with bureaucracy, rename the team to use a less ambiguous name, JFDI! and things are going to be a lot better. This sounds compelling.

Appreciation for Michael Hall

November 20, 2014

Today marks another Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, one of Ubuntu’s beautiful traditions, where you publicly thank people for their work. It’s always hard to pick just one person or a group of people, but you know what - better appreciate somebody’s work than nobody’s work at all. One person I’d like to thanks for their work is Michael Hall. He is always around, always working on a number of projects, always involved in discussions on social media and never shy to add yet another work item to his TODO list.

Ubuntu Online Summit: 12-14 November

November 11, 2014

Yet another Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) is ahead of us. It’s going to happen from 12-14 November. Participation is open to everyone, so to attend simply: Register your attendance. Visit the schedule and join the sessions you are interested in. If you still need to get a session on the schedule to discuss a topic related to your field, create the session soon! What I love about the Ubuntu Online Summit is that people get together, invite some fresh sets of eyes and brains and figure out together where Ubuntu is going.

Washington sprint

October 29, 2014

In the Community Q&A with Alan and Michael yesterday, I talked a bit about the sprint in Washington already, but I thought I’d write up a bit more about it again. First of all: it was great to see a lot of old friends and new faces at the sprint. Especially with the two events (14.10 release and upcoming phone release) coming together, it was good to lock people up in various rooms and let them figure it out when nobody could run away easily.

ubuntu-community-team list: Hang out, discuss new ideas

September 3, 2014

We just created a new Ubuntu mailing list called ubuntu-community-team. As we didn’t have a place like this before, we created it so we can have discussions around planning community events start all kinds of initiatives around Ubuntu allow enthusiasts of the Ubuntu community to kick around new ideas bring people from all parts of our community together so we can learn from each other hang out and have fun We are looking forward to seeing you on the list as well, sign up on this page.

Making it easier for LoCos to share news/stories

June 27, 2014

The idea At the last Ubuntu Online Summit, we had a session in which we discussed (among other things) the idea to make it easier for LoCo teams to share news, stories, pictures, events and everything else. A lot of great work is happening around the world already, but a lot of us don’t get to hear about it. I took an action item to schedule a meeting to discuss the idea some more.

Got any plans for the weekend?

April 2, 2014

This weekend (4-6 April) the Ubuntu community is celebrating another Ubuntu Global Jam! The goal, as always, is to get together as a team and make Ubuntu better, get people involved and have fun. In the past we all focused on packaging, fixing bugs, translations, documentation and testing. The most recent addition to the mix are App Dev School events. The goal of App Dev Schools is to have a look at developing apps for Ubuntu together.

Teaching Ubuntu App Development

March 24, 2014

At the vUDS in November we talked about having events where local communities could learn more about app development for Ubuntu for the first time. Since then we have come a long way: We have some really nice materials set up. The first events were held in a number of places around the world. We got feedback and improved our docs. Before the Ubuntu Global Jam and the release parties for 14.

Ubuntu Apps in China

March 18, 2014

The last weeks have been very exciting. New features have been added to the SDK (among other things these things were added: cross-compiling through ‘click chroot’ support, running the click reviewers tools automatically), HTML5 support was improved a lot (update to Cordova 3.4, new JavaScript APIs surfaced and many other great things) and new docs went up on developer.ubuntu.com as well. To me it feels like it’s getting easier and easier to write great apps every day.

Bringing Ubuntu App Dev Schools to YOUR LoCo

March 18, 2014

App development for Ubuntu is a hot topic and many have blogged and talked about this in the past months. Still I’d like to point out two things which never cease to amaze me: Writing the code of the app once and have it work on everything from a phone to a TV. It’s easy. We had people join the Ubuntu Core Apps team, who had never written apps using QML or HTML5.

Packaging Guide News!

December 5, 2013

I’m pleased to announce the following changes have landed in the Ubuntu Packaging Guide: The Packaging Guide is now fully translated into French! Bravo, équipe français! Thanks a lot everyone who helped out here! We moved from developer.ubuntu.com/packaging to our new home http://packaging.ubuntu.com - don’t despair, redirects are in place!This was done, because developer.ubuntu.com more and more moved into the direction of delivering tutorials for people who want to create content (apps, scopes, charms, etc.

Another UDS, a new world to discover

November 18, 2013

As part of the Ubuntu community, I’ve been part of many UDSes and a growing number of vUDSes and while it’d be easy to say “Another UDS, more new work items.” and be done with it, I’m very excited about this UDS. In the last years I’ve mostly been involved with the Ubuntu Developer community, so the people who build Ubuntu itself, which is what other people install, deploy and build on.

It's all coming together

September 2, 2013

I’m very proud of what quite a number of teams achieved together last week. On Friday we announced the opening of the Ubuntu Touch software store. Just to quickly illustrate who was all responsible for this, here’s a list of the teams/projects involved: Click itself - the format in which we ship apps. Community team - helped with coordination of whole app story and project management. Design team - putting together plans for how the experience should be.

Ubuntu Developer Summit coming up next week

August 22, 2013

The next Ubuntu Developer Summit is coming up next week (27-29 August 2013) and you can already see a nice set of topics coming together in Launchpad. The schedule will, as always, be available at summit.ubuntu.com. Jono Bacon and I are going to be track leads for the Community track, so I wanted to send out an invitation to get topics in, especially for bits concerning the Community track. If you are a team lead and had feedback from your team or you want to bring up a discussion topic where you are interested to help out with, check out our docs on how to submit a session for UDS.

Ubuntu Touch Porting Clinic: next Thursday

August 19, 2013

Whether or not Ubuntu Edge will get the green light or not (read Joey’s great 5 Reasons Why You Should Stop What You’re Doing & Pledge to #UbuntuEdge), everybody’s hard at work making Ubuntu Touch, the beautiful mobile OS happen. Two weeks ago we had our first Ubuntu Touch Porting Clinic and it went quite well. We found and fixed a number of issues in our tools, our porting guide and many porters turned up to ask their questions and update the images.

Surprising stats

August 9, 2013

Sébastien Bacher told me I was a bit obsessed with Ubuntu Packaging Guide translations and maybe I am, but I do believe that we’re thus eliminating one blocker on the way of people becoming Ubuntu developers. Looking at the level of completion of translations of the packaging guide (or Ubuntu Development Guide), you might need to know that with 70% of completion and above we publish the translated versions of the guide online and packaged in the archive translations by newer team members are first reviewed, then accepted If we just look at approved translations in Launchpad, things look like this:

Want to try Ubuntu Touch on your phone? We're almost there!

August 8, 2013

In the last weeks I blogged a couple of times about how we want to get Ubuntu out to more and more users in a much much easier way. It would be great if we could have gotten all images built in the data centre, but unfortunately do redistributability issues (some firmwares, blobs and proprietary kernel modules) not allow us to redistribute them easily. Another issue were some short-comings in our infrastructure, which have to some degree been fixed already.

Ubuntu Touch Porting: next steps

August 2, 2013

We had our first Ubuntu Touch Porting clinic yesterday and we made quite a bit of progress there. Sergio Schvezov published a branch of phablet-tools, which will allow everyone to flash all kinds of devices (for which we have images) just by running something like phablet-flash community –device i9100 This should make things a lot lot easier for everyone. The only thing which needs to be done is to follow this process which documents where the images live.

Join our Ubuntu Touch Porting Clinic today

August 1, 2013

These are very exciting times for Ubuntu Touch. Not only is the Ubuntu Edge, an Ubuntu super-phone, being funded right now, but we are also making lots of progress on getting Ubuntu running perfectly on phones and tablets near you. I blogged about this a couple of times now, but Ubuntu Touch has been ported to LOTS of devices in the meantime. If we consult our Touch Devices list, there are 45 working ports, with 30 more in progress, and across 21 different brands.

Mixtape: No No No

August 1, 2013

Jazzsticks 013 - Decon - Rareties Innerground 058 - DJ Marky & Makoto - Bloody Mary Hospital 237DD - Camo & Krooked - All Night Shogun 061 - Rockwell feat. Kito & Sam Frank - Childhood Memories (Neosignal Remix) Atlantic 825646424429 - Flux Pavillion - Do Or Die (FuntCase Remix) Viper 050 - Trei - Habituated Jungle Cakes 019 - Ed Solo & Deekline - No No No (Serial Killaz Remix) Sub Slayers 023 - Wizard - Phenomenon One feat.

Getting Ubuntu Touch out to more users

July 29, 2013

The unstoppable Sergio Schvezov is working on bug 1201811 right now. Once it’s fixed this should put is into a position where users of devices for which we have Ubuntu Touch images (and not just the four devices we supported right from the start) can just use phablet-flash. This doesn’t mean that they are “officially supported” or that they’re built daily in the Canonical data centre, but that you can make use of the images much more easily.

Bold moves

July 29, 2013

Some weeks ago I wrote a blog post and shared a personal view on Ubuntu’s history as a project. In there I explained (among other things) my view that Ubuntu as a project has quite often taken hard decisions to bring something new and exciting to people. The goal always was the same: bring open source in a beautiful form to as many people as possible. If I look around me today, it’s just beautiful to see what we’ve achieved.

Gute Arbeit, deutsches Übersetzungsteam!

July 14, 2013

The German translations team have done it! They brought the German translation of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide above 70%, which is the magic threshold for us to enable the translation in the package. Since earlier today you will find this in the Packaging Guide Daily Build PPA (soon going to land in Debian and then in Ubuntu too): daniel@daydream:~$ apt-cache search german packaging guide ubuntu ubuntu-packaging-guide-html-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - HTML guide - German version ubuntu-packaging-guide-pdf-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - PDF guide - German version ubuntu-packaging-guide-epub-de - Ubuntu Packaging Guide - EPUB guide - German version daniel@daydream:~$ You can also check out the HTML version, single page HTML, PDF version and EPUB version on the web.

More transparency

June 4, 2013

In many Ubuntu conversation I’ve been part of many of the participants agreed that we need “more transparency”. It’s very easy to agree on as transparency is a good thing, it feels good and it makes things better. Achieving it in a meaningful way is a hard problem to solve though. Meaningful to me means not just “all information is available”, but also “relevant information is easy to find”. In Ubuntu development where hundreds of people put of lots of hard work into Ubuntu, we depend on thousands of other open source projects, where there’s discussions on IRC, on mailing lists, hangouts, in specifications and elsewhere, it’s incredibly easy to lose track of what’s important or relevant.

Mixtape: Taking Over

June 2, 2013

Breakbeat Paradise 061 - DJ Rudd - Shake It Out DJ Mujava - Mugwanti (Shooting Horses Remix) Surfer Rosa 008 - Top Cat, Tim Healey, Pippa Trix - Tempting To Touch (Grand Ruckus Remix) Instant Vibes 004X - Krafty Kuts feat. Dynamite MC - Pounding Buraka Som Sistema - Sound of Kuduro Schlachthofbronx - Chambacu (Symbiz Sound Remix) Enchufada DG017 - Schlachthofbronx - Backup Run Boban I Marko Markovic Orkestar - Od Srca (DJ Delay Cut) Village Kollektiv - Romani Ćhaj ft.

Our Community Website

May 13, 2013

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.

Ubuntu Development - live!

April 18, 2013

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.

Community on ubuntu.com

April 17, 2013

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.

Ubuntu Development Hangouts planned

April 2, 2013

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.

Accompanying a new generation of developers

March 25, 2013

The Ubuntu Developer Advisory Team has been in place for two or three release cycles already and it’s been a fun journey so far. We’ve got in touch with many many new contributors and old contributors as well. If you don’t know what this team does, here’s what our wiki page has to say: We Reach out to new contributors, thank them for their work and get feedback. Reach out to people who might be ready to apply for upload rights and help them.

Parabéns e muito obrigado!

March 19, 2013

I’m particularly happy to announce that the Brazilian team managed to get their translation of the Ubuntu Packaging Guide up to more than 70% of completion, which is the magic threshold to get it accepted and posted on developer.ubuntu.com. This means that our current list of available languages is: English Spanish (99%) Russian (85%) Brazilian Portuguese (74%) You can view the individual forms of the Packaging Guide in Brazilian Portuguese here:

Ubuntu Touch summary (week 11)

March 18, 2013

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.

Ubuntu coming to more devices near you

March 13, 2013

What’s been going on? It’s been three weeks since we published the Porting guide for Ubuntu Touch. Since then we have Ubuntu Touch running on 34 devices (in addition to the original four) and work is in progress on 22 more devices. This is pretty amazing! Kudos to everyone involved who built images, rebuilt kernels and probably flashed their devices a hundred and two times in the process. You can see the an overview over what’s happening on the Touch devices list.

Ubuntu: you've changed

March 8, 2013

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. 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.

The Port-a-thon is in full swing

February 27, 2013

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.

It takes two

February 15, 2013

At the last UDS we talked quite a bit about LoCo teams in during the Leadership Mini Summit. One interesting point was that many seemed to have the impression that events have to be big, everything has to follow an established protocol or a rigid process. That’s not the case. I’m sure my friend Jorge Castro would agree with me if I told you to JFDI. The result of not doing things is that things will not get done.

Спасибо всем!

February 12, 2013

If you track the Packaging Guide page very closely, you will have noticed it already. We have the main piece of Ubuntu Development instructions available in English Spanish Russian now, which is just fantastic. Months of hard work were translated and some small issues sorted out by the unstoppable Dmitry Shachnev. Without his outstanding help, in translations, the guide itself, in Debian and upstream, this wouldn’t have been possible.

Going mobile

February 6, 2013

Many asked me in the last time what became of the Ubuntu on Nexus7 project. I’m happy to say that it’s going really well. Some weeks ago it was already very easy to install Ubuntu on a Nexus7, since then things got better and better. Many bugs were ironed out, but the piece most folks have been concentrating on recently was the desktop-r-reduced-power-ram blueprint. The spec says: In the past few cycles, we saw that our desktop took more and more RAM to run the full session.

Automated Testing Hackfest

January 31, 2013

We all want more quality. We all wasted too many hours trying to fix broken software and we all know that new users struggle the most when facing crashes or other unexpected results. We probably all also agree that testing is a good idea and if it’s automated, then that’s even better. Automatically exercising large parts of some software’s functionality helps a lot in guaranteeing that things still work, even if the code or some underlying foundations change.

Next week: Ubuntu Developer Week

January 24, 2013

I mentioned the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Week in my last blog post already, but I thought I’d mention a couple more great sessions we are going to have during the event. If you haven’t read the original post yet, here’s the quick details: running from 29th to 31st January 2013 we are going to have sessions, mostly on IRC, some on Hangouts-on-Air, where you get a introduction to all kinds of topics surrounding Ubuntu Development.

Ubuntu Developer Week is back

January 21, 2013

The times for Ubuntu have never been more exciting. Cloud, server, desktop, laptop, TV, tablet, phone - everything runs Ubuntu or is soon going to. This makes developing Ubuntu very special, because fixes which go into Ubuntu in one place will benefit all form factors and all circumstances where it’s used. By improving Ubuntu you make millions of people around the globe happy. During every 6 month release cycle we run Ubuntu Developer Week.

What's going on with the Nexus 7?

December 17, 2012

Raring! Many have asked me what’s been going on with the work on Ubuntu on the Nexus 7 recently. A lot of people put work into getting the raring images ready for public consumption. 12.10 worked great on the Nexus, but there were a few blockers on getting 13.04 to work as well. On this road among other things these issues were fixed: A new onboard pre-release made it into 13.

Live from the Automated Testing Hackfest

December 13, 2012

Today is the first in a row of Automated Testing Hackfests for Ubuntu in the 13.04 cycle. The QA team is already busy, fixing, improving and adding test cases for all kinds of packages in Ubuntu. If you have a bit of background in programming you can easily get involved. Just join us in #ubuntu-quality and ask all the questions you have. Everybody’s super-friendly and knows their stuff. We have documentation and a list of tests we want to look into, but if you have your own packages you want to take care of, that’s fine as well.

Automated Testing Hackfest

December 10, 2012

A great way to contribute to Ubuntu is to ensure its functionality always works. What’s even better is that our infrastructure allows us to write tests once and continuously test if the tests still all pass, so whenever a package is updated or changed, we run the tests and can see if the functionality we rely on is still there and working perfectly. This puts us into a situation where we all can contribute tests once and can basically monitor forever if the code still works.

The Packaging Guide finally does speak Spanish

December 5, 2012

We have achieved a huge milestone in the development community. For years we wanted translatable packaging and development documentation. It’s there. If you head to http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/ you can see the following: The Ubuntu Packaging Guide (Spanish) – would you like to learn how to package or become an Ubuntu Developer? Here’s a comprehensive, topic-base guide that explores and describes the main concepts of packaging. It is available as a single HTML page (Spanish), a PDF document (Spanish), or in EPUB format (for eBook readers) (Spanish).

Ubuntu Development Hangouts for you

December 3, 2012

Our Ubuntu Development Hangouts have had guests every now and then, but we wanted to get more people on board to talk about what’s going on in Ubuntu development. Many of our viewers asked for more detailed information about specific topics. So here’s what we’re up to in the next weeks (we’ll add more dates and more sessions): 4th Dec 2012, 15:00 UTC: Rick Spencer, Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical will talk to us about 13.

13.04 progress

November 27, 2012

We are on the road towards 13.04 where the Raring Ringtail will be released on April 25th. Until then we still have some time, but everybody has made great progress in the last few weeks. The time after UDS is usually the busiest, where people massage the discussions at the conference into specifications and blueprints, but also get busy on figuring out what might and what might not work for the Ringtail.

Ubuntu Core on the Nexus 7

November 21, 2012

There was lots of buzz around Ubuntu on the Nexus 7 and I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Nexus 7 myself, so I had to try out getting Ubuntu on it. The instructions were incredibly clear and everything worked just perfectly. I couldn’t believe how quickly the the Nexus 7 booted into a standard Ubuntu Desktop. When I started to play around with it, I noticed how much of the vision which shaped Ubuntu in the last years works really well on such a small device.

Appreciation for Andrew Starr-Bochicchio

November 20, 2012

It is another Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day already and although it’s hard to pick just one person, and I’ve worked with many great people and I admire many for what they do and who they are, today I will mention one person I’ve enjoyed working with a lot. To everybody else: you know there’s always enough hugs for you where I am. :-) Andrew has helped out in many unnoticed places, never claimed much credit and never stood much in the limelight.

Restarting the Ubuntu Development Hangouts

November 20, 2012

For the 13.04 cycle, the Ubuntu Development Hangouts will be back from today onwards and we’ll be live on ubuntuonair.com at Tuesdays at 16:00 UTC and Thursdays 9:00 UTC. The first one is going to be today, 20th Nov 2012, 16:00 UTC. Can’t wait to see you there! :-D

Meet the Ubuntu-Nexus7 team

November 16, 2012

For the 13.04 cycle a team of people got together to make sure that the standard Ubuntu Desktop works great on the Nexus 7 device. This is a great opportunity for Ubuntu as we can all refer to one device and one chipset and make sure that Ubuntu is capable of dealing with the device. This will lay the foundations for making Ubuntu ready on many other devices. The team meets on the 16th November 2012, 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Report: Leadership Mini-Summit at UDS

November 5, 2012

Our UDS in Copenhagen was the busiest for me ever, but I enjoyed it a lot. There was heaps of energy, good ideas and many good conclusions for the Raring cycle. One thing I really enjoyed was the Leadership Mini-Summit. We had it at UDSes two times before and what I feel we did better this time around was that we had more concrete examples of Ubuntu teams, their leadership and the challenges we face.

What I'm looking forward to in Copenhagen

October 28, 2012

For me this Ubuntu Developer Summit (http://uds.ubuntu.com) is going to be very special. As always I look forward to meet all you great people again - it’s like meeting “the other party family” again. Ubuntu Development A number of development-related sessions are on my list as always and they are going to be very interesting. We are going to kick off with Ubuntu Development Videos, a session where we’ll discuss how to update our Ubuntu Development videos.

Leadership Mini-Summit at UDS

October 25, 2012

At Ubuntu Developer Summit we are going to have another Leadership Mini-Summit. This time it will only be one afternoon and it’s currently pencilled in for Tuesday afternoon. One thing we also would like to change since last time is to make it a bit less heavy on governance-related bits and pieces, but more open to general team leadership. This leadership mini-summit we want to share as much experience among everyone interested as possible.

Upcoming Ubuntu Development Events

October 24, 2012

It’s time for some Ubuntu Development Events for those of you who are raring to go get started for 13.04 development. We will be starting the fun today at 13:00 UTC with Ubuntu Open Week. Luckily I still managed to book a double session, so we’ll have plenty of time to get you started and introduced to Development team and what we do. The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) will be happening form 29th October to 1st November in Copenhagen and we will have some workshops there as well.

Packaging Guide: Hablamos español.

October 19, 2012

One group in Ubuntu which never gets the credit they deserve are the translators. These fine people spend hours smoothing the road for Ubuntu into all the parts of the world. One project where this recently became clear to me again was the Packaging Guide. Weighing in at 759 strings or 196K of text, and at times very technical text, it’s probably not the easiest document to translate. Still we have a very nice success story to share.

1308,42€ (£ 1055) raised for Oxfam

October 9, 2012

I’m going to take a leaf out of Michael’s book who wrote a great blog post about the 24h madness our team was involved in last week. Many people supported us throughout the event. Friendly comments on IRC and social media, text messages from friends, people helping to organise the event and many many people who donated. I’d like to thank everyone who made this possible in whichever capacity. I explained already why donating to Oxfam is a good idea, but I want to mention it again: everybody who donated did a good job helping people around the world to have to worry less and be able to grasp opportunities.

New dev hangouts

October 8, 2012

After the 24h marathon craziness I promised to get back to a more regular schedule of hangouts, but due to a personal scheduling conflict the next Ubuntu dev hangout is going to be tomorrow, Tuesday, 9th Oct 2012 at 14:00 UTC. The next one afterwards will be at the normal time, Thursday, 11th Oct 2012 at 8:00 UTC again. See you all on ubuntuonair.com. Follow the ubuntudev account on Twitter/Identica/Facebook/G+ to get more information closer to the time.

Ubuntu Community Charity Marathon: New challenge

October 4, 2012

So the Ubuntu Community Charity Marathon is in full swing and we are just getting into the 14th hour. We had a number of challenges posted already: Nick is going to write a manpage for Debian for every 5 donations he gets which have ‘Debian’ in the comment. Daniel is going to send patches to Debian for every donation with the word ‘Debian’. Jono is going to shave his beard off if he hits £3000.

Mixtape: Can't get you out of my head

October 1, 2012

Smoove - Ray’s woman (Smoove retouch) K. Sabroso & Dave Owen ft Jonny Butter - Cruz Control (Daytoner Remix) Smoove - The man with 2 watches Thomas Schumacher - Yara Jalla Banda - Czardas (Daniel Haaksman Remix) Rene Bourgeois - at Night (Umami Remix) klischée - TinTin Parov Stelar - Hotel Axos Twin Beats - Manak Drops The Pressure Charkha feat. Balkar - Sidhu Freestyle 015 - Fdel - Let The Beat Kick Third Degree - Can’t get you out of my head (Smoove Remix) MC Hammer - U Can’t Touch This Mad Decent 143 - Zeds Dead - Rumble In The Jungle

Next video hangouts

October 1, 2012

So for the last few weeks we have been doing Ubuntu Development video hangouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and it was a lot of fun. We had quite a number of viewers, some new, some coming back for more info and lots of great questions. Tomorrow we’ll do another one at 15 UTC, but we will skip the one on Thursday, as it will be the day of our Ubuntu Community Team 24 Hour Marathon, where we will stay up for 24 hours, work on Ubuntu and broadcast the video live on the internet.

Community Team Marathon: Why Oxfam?

September 27, 2012

On 4th October everyone on our team at Canonical will work for a solid 24 hours period and stream it live to the internet. It will be hard, but it will also be lots of fun and we do it to raise money for charities. We all picked different ones and you can get more info about each of us on the Marathon page. So a few friends already asked me: “Why Oxfam?

Ubuntu Dev hangouts

September 17, 2012

Last week I did two public video hangouts. The first one got a bit full, because I had not made it a hangout-on-air. Unfortunately Hangouts on Air don’t provide a chat widget, which makes communication a bit hard. So in the second one I used ubuntuonair.com which adds an IRC widget to the live stream. You can see the recorded session here. As you can see from the comment on the video (and others told me too), I should have used the Ubuntu on Air account for this.

Ubuntu Packaging Guide is progressing nicely

September 14, 2012

I’m quite happy with the progress the Packaging Guide is making. We managed to fix a bunch of bugs this cycle and most importantly we got it into Ubuntu and made it translatable. We only opened translations a couple of weeks ago, but some language teams have been hard at work: pt_BR.po (18%) ja.po (14%) ru.po (9%) es.po (5%) id.po (4%) de.po (4%) nl.po (1%) sv.po (0%) fr.po (0%)

The five minute introduction to Ubuntu development

September 10, 2012

We need some feedback. Can you please leave a comment with the information you wish you had had heard when you got involved with Ubuntu development you want to share with new starters in Ubuntu development you learnt and found invaluable As you can imagine, your feedback is going to make the experience for new contributors even better. Thanks a lot in advance.

Mixtape: Para mis amigos

September 7, 2012

Finally a non-Drum’n’Bass mix for you all. Hope you like it. Mas Que Nada (suonho Shuffle Rhythm Renumber) Mo’horizons ft. Yanez - Cowboy Bossa (Fab Samperi Remix) Omegaman - Para mis amigos Bertie Blackman vs Ozomatli - It’s Like That (Daigo Re-Bake) Frenic vs Busta Rhymes & Method man - Better Get happening (Redline Refix) Breakbeat Paradise 035 - Kool Hertz - Whatta Joint The Diplomats of Solid Sound - Hurt Me So (Lack of Afro Remix) Parov Stelar - Booty Swing Parov Stelar - Charleston Butterfly Quantic - Sol Clap Kormac - Show Time Nachna Onda Nei - Tigerstyle ft Kana Bhainiwala Amarik singh - Naughty boy Mr Bird - Talk of the Town (Joe Revell’s gun in hand remix) Eskew Reeder - Undivided Love (suonho Soul Stomp Edit) Siriusmo - Wow Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit (umami Edit) Giant Pussy X004 - Tim Healey, Felguk - Rio (Slyde Remix)

Hanging out with Ubuntu developers

September 7, 2012

We want Ubuntu development to be as accessible as possible. Ubuntu Developer Week (logs available on the page if you couldn’t make it) was a lot of fun, but now it’s time to take the next steps. There are around 7 weeks left until our beloved quetzal is released. Now is the best time to get started, help out and fix a couple of bugs. To help you with this, we’ll start a series of Google Hangouts you can join easily.

With UDW over, what's next?

August 31, 2012

So Ubuntu Developer Week is over (summaries day 1, day 2, day 3), what’s next? If you enjoyed UDW and want to learn more about Ubuntu Development, I’d recommend reading the Packaging Guide and finding more information and examples to get a better idea. Then you obviously need some tasks to work on. We identified a number of tasks on the Bug Fix Initiative page along with instructions. Among them are:

Bringing new developers up to scratch

August 24, 2012

I talked many times about getting involved with developing Ubuntu and how it can seem daunting and that there’s much to learn. When I talked to contributors who had reached the critical point where they understood what they can do, who they can talk to and how the processes roughly work, most of them said that three things helped them to get to the point: the documentation, talking to the people, code reviews.

Ubuntu Packaging Guide has finally landed

August 23, 2012

Users of Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) now can easily install the Ubuntu Packaging Guide: daniel@daydream:~$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-packaging-guide Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: ubuntu-packaging-guide-html The following NEW packages will be installed: ubuntu-packaging-guide ubuntu-packaging-guide-html 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/488 kB of archives. After this operation, 1244 kB of additional disk space will be used.

Daunted

August 10, 2012

… was probably written across my face when I first got involved in Ubuntu and contributed my first patch. I wasn’t quite sure if I had followed the right procedure or if anything else was wrong, but luckily I found a lot of very friendly people who helped me out and got my contribution in. That was almost 8 years ago. Today it’s a lot easier. There is good documentation, there are more consistent processes and better tools.

Making better apps possible

July 3, 2012

We’re on day 2 of our apps sprint and made loads of progress. It has been a lot of fun to be in the midst of all this activity, so here goes just a quick list of things we worked on: A number of bugs were fixed in arb-lint, the tool we use to check apps. It learned where we expect files to be put in /opt and we added some examples how to fix some of the issues.

Be part of the Ubuntu Apps Sprint

June 29, 2012

Apps are super-important for Ubuntu. Many of us have blogged about this in a more general sense, but I want to provide an update of what has been happening behind the scenes in the last few weeks. Before I start, I want to reach out to you to be part of the upcoming Apps Sprint. Join us on #ubuntu-arb on irc.freenode.net from Monday, 2nd July to Wednesday, 4th July to learn more about Ubuntu apps, get involved in reviewing them and bringing more progress to this effort.

A few days as an ARB helper

June 25, 2012

In the last few weeks I have been looking into helping the Ubuntu App Review Board and with the help of some of its members I learned a lot about our app submission process and how apps need some special treatment with regards to their installation and package generation. It’s been lots of fun and I think I have successfully contributed to a few apps. Some of them are up for vote now.

Mixtape: Flashing lights

June 22, 2012

Dj Marky & S.P.Y. - Love Affair Turtled - Jazz Shadows Chase And Status, Sub Focus - Flashing Lights (S.P.Y. Remix) Figure - Must Destroy State Of Mind - Mass Media Cookie Monsta - Time To Get Crunk Optiv & Btk - Zero Hour Black Sun Empire, Bulletproof & State Of Mind - Roulette (Gridlok Remix) Noisia - Diplodocus (Kill The Noise Remix) Zardonic, Numbernin6, Mark Instinct, Run Dmt - Real Steel Hamilton - Rich Kids Taktix - It’s The Way (Serum Remix) Submotion Orchestra - All Yours (Spy Remix) Calibre - Foreign Bodies Mayforms - Love Hangover

Processing feedback

June 22, 2012

Some of you might remember when Andrew Starr-Bochicchio send out the Developer Advisory Team’s analysis of the feedback new contributors gave us. It was a great read, told us a lot about how new contributors get involved, but it was a also quite a bit of work. As we conducted most of our interviews via mail, we had lots of answers in our inbox. As a team, we put them into a Google Doc and after the release cycle had passed, we had amassed 6 months worth of feedback.

Welcoming new developers

June 15, 2012

For more than once cycle I have been involved with the Developer Advisory Team and it’s been a fantastic time. I’ve blogged about it before, but if you need a short intro, you could watch the lightning talk from last UDS about it. Think of it as a team of people who help to make the development experience of Ubuntu more social. We welcome new contributors to the community, we collect feedback, we help with applying for upload rights and the atmosphere in our team is great.

Making Apps in Ubuntu a success

June 13, 2012

I’ve rambled about this before and still feel strongly about the importance of apps in Ubuntu. We all need to put some work into this to make apps in Ubuntu truly rock. The good news is: you can help and you’re not alone! The App Review Board has been hard at work, but they need help. So how does this work? If you have packaging experience and would like to help, you can join

You can help: code review

June 4, 2012

This morning I woke up and found the sponsoring queue at 103 items! I mailed the ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-motu lists and the current count is down to 81. This is great, but I’m sure we can get it down to 0. Jani Monoses also filed these bugs to discuss how we can improve our sponsoring strategy: Bug #1008449: explicit forward-to-debian tags? Bug #1008445: Support for blacklisting packages Bug #1008441: Allow grouping by contributor You might want to join the conversation.

UDS is a great time...

May 11, 2012

… for planning things, but also for getting things done. In-between sessions I had discussions with many many folks and I’m happy to say there was renewed and much interest in the Packaging Guide. Heroes like Andrew Starr-Bochicchio, Leo Iannacone, Joseph Mills and others have contributed suggestions, code, ideas and text bits to improve the packaging guide, and that’s on top of what was discussed in the session we had.

"After the release" is "before the release"

May 4, 2012

Congratulations everyone, we got a fantastic LTS release out, some of the reactions of our users you can see here. Well done! :) At the same time understandable, but also worrying is the look at our sponsoring page. Silently with all the release freezes in place, the number of open sponsorship items has crept up to ~70 again. If you are an Ubuntu developer or can help out with reviewing patches, please head to the sponsoring queue and help out.

The importance of apps in Ubuntu

April 30, 2012

Jono blogged about the importance of application developers to Ubuntu earlier and I wanted to echo some thoughts and add some of my own. I have been in the Ubuntu Developer camp for most of Ubuntu’s life as a project, so the mindset of “App developers? Why don’t they just set up an open source project and get it packaged?” or “Apps? We have packages.” is what I have heard a couple of times already and is what I would probably have answered some years ago myself.

What new development contributors have to say

April 18, 2012

One class of new contributors has always been successful: self-starters who knew what they wanted to do, where to get involved, with possibly some already existing experience or knowledge. For others it’s been a tougher ride. To remedy some of this, we set up the Developer Advisory Team. We figured that (among other things) reaching out to new contributors who just got their first fix into Ubuntu to thank them, encourage them and ask for their feedback would help us a lot in terms of bringing them into the fold and finding out what current stumbling blocks are.

Mixtape: Live Set with MC Massiv La Gaza in Trickster, Berlin

April 13, 2012

A live set I recorded on a Cargo Cult Crew Berlin event in Berlin’s Trickster. Some technical difficulties, some mixing mistakes still couldn’t stop us from having a great time. Half-way through the set MC Massiv La Gaza joined in, plugged in his mic and got everybody to rock out. It was an awesome night - thanks everyone! Liquid V 002 - Calibre - Drowning In You Jungle Cakes 008 - Ed Solo & Ghostline - Ghost Town feat.

If only I had known what needs to be done...

April 10, 2012

I just went over the soon-to-be-released report of the Developer Advisory Team, where we sum up feedback from first-time contributors to Ubuntu Development and many noted that they found developer documentation easily and things generally worked out for them, but they struggled finding stuff to work on. The Ubuntu Development team has always been good at creating new TODO lists (merges, Debian RC bugs, build failures, heaps of different bug lists and much much more), but you need to know what you are looking for.

Making sure code gets reviewed in Ubuntu

March 15, 2012

New contributors who don’t have upload rights to Ubuntu yet get their code reviewed and their packages uploaded by Ubuntu developers. This process is called “sponsoring” and our current process has been in place since pretty much forever. It has even gotten easier over time, so new branches or patches show up on our review queue. Two years ago when we were struggling with getting code reviewed, we put in place “patch pilots”, a great concept we borrowed from the Bazaar team.

Putting the Ubuntu Development process to the test

March 15, 2012

Many engineering teams in the Ubuntu world have made extensive use of User Testing in the last years. This is an important reality check for everyone defining the experience of users. Do my assumptions still hold true? What do users expect? Are there use-cases we never considered? Which steps confuse our users? The Ubuntu developers, so everyone who builds Ubuntu, integrates pieces to work nicely with each other, maintains packages and produces the distribution we all love, everyone is interested in this kind of feedback.

Ubuntu Dev Hangouts this week

March 14, 2012

We had some excellent Google+ Hangouts last week, where everyone who was interested in getting involved in Ubuntu Development could join in and we had a nice chat in a very relaxed atmosphere. This week we are going to do some more. Here’s the times: Thursday, 15 March 2012, 16:00:00 UTC Friday, 16 March 2012, 08:00:00 UTC Friday, 16 March 2012, 14:00:00 UTC If you haven’t dived into Ubuntu Development yet, but you’re interested, please check out our Ubuntu Development guide!

Hanging out

March 9, 2012

I’ve been using Google+ Hangouts for a while and some of you might have seen that Jono posted some evidence of these. Mostly I just used them for team calls with a fixed agenda or to keep in touch with friends. Yesterday I did a free-for-all hangout, using the new “named hangout” feature of Google+. It’s basically like a chat room with a fixed URL, where you can discuss whatever is on your mind.

Today is a good day!

March 9, 2012

Today is a good day to join Ubuntu development. Here’s your own, personal checklist: You like doing some detective work. Reading some docs or using the terminal does not scare you. You might have tinkered with some source code before. You love Ubuntu and want to help improve it! Here’s how we are going to help you: We have a bunch of friendly people on #ubuntu-motu on irc.

Ubuntu Development: answering ALL your questions

March 7, 2012

As part of our Fix-It Fridays we saw many many new faces joining the #ubuntu-motu IRC channel which always has many helpful developers who are there to answer questions and help if you should get stuck. Still it seems like some feel uncomfortable asking questions or getting their feet wet in this forum. After some discussion we thought it might make sense to have an additional low-key event where you can show up, get to know everyone and ask whatever you have on your mind.

Welcoming Monday

March 5, 2012

Welcoming Monday is a lot easier if you have a great weekend to look back to. 32 LoCo teams in 23 countries definitely had a great time at Ubuntu Global Jam. The Fix-It Friday activity continued for hours and I thought it’d be a nice idea to go through just a few bits that came in and showcase what exactly was done, so it becomes a bit clearer what all constitutes as a “fix” for Ubuntu 12.

A great way to start the Ubuntu weekend

March 2, 2012

This is going to be a real Ubuntu weekend. Not only is Ubuntu Global Jam kicking off today, but there is also Fix-It Friday going on and the Linaro/ARM teams are having an ARM Porting Jam. If you always felt like getting more involved in Ubuntu, this weekend might be just the right opportunity. The Ubuntu Global Jam page lists a number of events in all parts of the world, on the list of countries there are: Egypt, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Australia, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Canada, Mexico, USA, Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago.

Great things coming together

March 1, 2012

A lot of really great things are coming together right now: tomorrow we kick off Ubuntu Global Jam for the 12.04 cycle, additionally we will have Fix-It Friday tomorrow! The Ubuntu developer community is putting a lot of effort into this event. There will be experienced developers who take the time to answer all the questions you have, help you fix problems, review code for you, use the time to clear up the sponsoring queue.

Hitting the ground running

February 29, 2012

Since I heard it, I always like the idiom “to hit the ground running”. There’s no really good German translation of it, but the thought of arriving somewhere, knowing what to do and how to do it definitely has its charm. In practical terms it’s often hard, especially if there’s complicated rules, tools and processes. I won’t deny that there’s an interesting learning experience involved if you want to get into Ubuntu development.

We had a great Fix-It Friday!

February 24, 2012

WOW. So this was our first Fix-It Friday and there’s still a few to come until release. Here’s what we collectively got through: Dmitry Shachnev requested a sync for retext. Michael Hall added a quick list entry for geany. David Baucum added a quick list entry for smplayer. bcbc fixed a bug in wubi. Paolo Sammicheli merged acm. Rigved Rakshit fixed a bug in live-build. Barneedhar Vigneshwar fixed a bug in software-center.

Fix It Friday!

February 23, 2012

Every Friday… …we hack together with you… …on Ubuntu. It’s no Rocket Science… …but rather a lot of fun! Join us and… …you’ll make lots of friends! Here’s what you need to do: Read the first few articles. Join us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net on Friday. Have fun and start making Ubuntu better! More info here.

Making Ubuntu better: the Italian team

February 21, 2012

From 2nd-4th March 2012 we will hold an Ubuntu Global Jam again. This is an event where Ubuntu teams around the world come together, meet locally and together make Ubuntu better. We have a number of events and teams already lined up, among them: the Italian team. I had a chat with Andrea Grandi and Paolo Sammicheli, here’s how they organised everything. How did you organise the event? Paolo Sammicheli: Andrea is the president of the Pistoia LUG.

Making Ubuntu development more personal

February 21, 2012

Getting involved in Open Source development can seem a bit daunting, first you have to go through the documentation, then find a task you are interested in, then work on a fix and then, although the first parts might have been hard enough already, either go public with questions you have or a fix you have worked on. From my own experience I can say that it is daunting. The good thing like with all other learning experiences, especially the social ones, you often find out afterwards: “all my worries were unfounded, this is actually pretty cool and the people I interact with are actually pretty nice”.

New Ubuntu developers in the making

February 10, 2012

Ubuntu has always tried to attract more developers making Ubuntu even better. In doing so it’s always good to try to cover the following points: Outreach - you want many people to fully realise they can be part of the effort. Documentation - interested new contributors need a good place to learn. TODO lists - you need easy tasks new contributors can sink their teeth in. Feedback loop - give new contributors feedback and allow them to learn from more experienced team members.

Mixtape: Love Radar

February 5, 2012

Uprising 028 - Prolix & Dose - No One Else Critical Presents Modulations 010 - June Miller - Snapcase Don’t Play 002 - TC - Tap Ho Type G Audio 007 - D-Man - Mince Meat (Dub Zero Remix) Streetlife 009DG - DJ Nut Nut - Special Dedication (Sigma Remix) Jungle Cakes 008 - Ed Solo & Ghostline - Ghost Town feat. DJ Concept Mad Decent 143 - Zeds Dead - Undah Yuh Skirt Feat.

Meeting friends in Morocco

January 16, 2012

One thing I love about Ubuntu is that Ubuntu fans and contributors are spread around the whole globe. So when I started planning holidays in Morocco it was almost certain that we’d meet somebody from the LoCo team there. When I let everyone know about my plans, Adnane Belmadiaf immediately came up with dozens of ideas what I could go and visit in his country. For those who don’t know Adnane, he is one of the heroes behind many of our Ubuntu web projects, for example the LoCo Team Portal, Summit or cloud.

Syncing from Debian

January 16, 2012

A few days ago I read the mail from Iain Lane on ubuntu-devel-announce, which announced that ‘syncpackage’ is now able to directly perform syncs for you (if you have sufficient upload rights), without having to get the sync through the archive admin queue first. Great work to everyone involved, both in the Launchpad and the ubuntu-dev-tools team. Awesome! Of course I had to try it: I had a look at the sponsoring queue, picked a sync request for projectm (among others), reviewed it, test-built it and finally ran:

Morocco

December 23, 2011

Aït Ben Haddou (Photo by Oscar Gomez - CC-BY-NC-ND) See you back on 9th January 2012. :-)

Stories and saying thanks

November 30, 2011

Don’t you love it when you get contributions to your project when you didn’t expect them at all? By reaching out to contributors, thanking them and welcoming them to the Ubuntu community you do a lot to encourage them and help them integrate into your team more quickly. Generally I feel this is part of our culture already. Discussions at UDS indicated what we probably could do better is: do this even more, try to be more personal, talk about it more, because it encourages others and motivates others who might still be a bit unsure about getting their feet wet, generally talk more about what we’re doing and what’s going on, to explain where you need help.

Weekly Ubuntu Development News

November 21, 2011

I have been writing weekly Ubuntu development updates for about one cycle now. As many seem to like these updates, it’s time to raise the bar a bit. As I can’t do this just on my own, I need your help. After some discussion with the Ubuntu News team, we agreed that development news can now be submitted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by simply sending a mail there with “[dev]” in the subject.

It's human beings who make Ubuntu!

November 20, 2011

Today is Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, which is excellent. It’s the first time we do it and from now on 20th November will be a day to remind ourselves that Ubuntu is put together by humans and not “fabricated somewhere”. The human aspect of Ubuntu was what instantly won me over in 2004. This comes in multiple facets: From a product point of view, that computers stopped being dull and grey boxes, but devices I use to interact with the people I care about.

Where's Chuck?

November 16, 2011

If you lack context, here you go.

Mixtape: Cryptkeeper

November 15, 2011

Intrinsic 005 - Submorphics & Chino - Infused Bad Taste 017DD - Telekinesis - Sacrifice OWSLA 001 - Porter Robinson - Spitfire (Kill The Noise Remix) Critical 057EP - Enei - Movin Fast Digital Soundboy 037 - Breakage ft. Jess Mills - Fighting Fire (Loadstar Remix) Funkatech 050D - Far Too Loud - Moneymaker Audioporn 014PT1 - Shimon & Tali - Get Out Play Me Too 020 - Flufftronix - Bassface (Kanji Kinetic Remix) Bad Taste 011DD - Hedj & Neonlight - Joker Hospital 194DDS - Camo & Krooked - Funk You MTA 009 - Nero - Crush On You (Knife Party Remix) Hospital 194DDS - Camo & Krooked - Cryptkeeper Life 003DG - Sigma - The Jungle (Sub Zero Remix) Digiform 006 - Blockhe4d & Cabbie - Dive RAM 104D - Cyantific & Wilkinson - Get Into It Metalheadz 094 - Lenzman - Broken Dreams

Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day

November 9, 2011

Ahmed Shams and others have put together a fantastic idea! Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day. Ubuntu is not only an operating system, but also a community full of awesome people, who want to make the world a better place. Sometimes a little thanks is all it takes to make somebody’s day, to bring us closer together and show that you care. It’s important for us to remember that Ubuntu is put together by people.

Survey Summary: Getting involved with Ubuntu development

November 1, 2011

Some weeks ago, I asked for feedback in a survey about Ubuntu development. Particularly, how well we reach out and how Ubuntu development is generally perceived were focus points of the survey. The great thing is: we had ~350 people replying and we have lots of great feedback and ideas in the results. You can download the summary (including all the answers) here. Let’s use all the feedback to make Ubuntu development even easier.

Planning Ubuntu 12.04

October 26, 2011

I love planning a new Ubuntu release. It’s a great experience to take a few steps back and look at the biggest challenges and opportunities in your area of interest and try to identify the most promising. Personally, I want us to get better at involving interested Ubuntu users in the development process. We have gotten better and better over the years, but there’s still things we can do better. The fantastic answers in the survey I announced recently helped a lot to see the issues more clearly.

Ubuntu Packaging Guide - we need help!

October 19, 2011

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide has made a lot of progress since its inception and we have a bunch of great articles together already, which make it a lot easier for newcomers to get a sense of direction and find out how to use the tools. Some of us have been filing bug reports about it recently, and it’d be great to get them fixed and out there. If you are new to the packaging world, but still want to help out, just say so in your merge proposal and we give it another fact check.

Getting involved with Ubuntu Development at Ubuntu Open Week

October 17, 2011

It’s time for another fantastic Ubuntu Open Week! From 17th October to 21st October there will be one-hour long sessions on IRC about a huge variety of sessions. Myself I’ll be part of the fun, I’ll speak about Getting Started with Ubuntu Development tomorrow, 18th October from 14:00 UTC - 16:00 UTC. For my session it will be good, if you set up a Launchpad account already. Join in, learn, participate and make friends.

Meeting your Ubuntu friends elsewhere

October 14, 2011

It’s just great how easily you can make friends in the Ubuntu world. When I first entered the IRC channels, it took me a few minutes to get to know people, some of them I’m still in touch with, even 7 years later. The belief that we can make the world a better place together and the excitement about what we’re doing clearly bonds us together. Over the years, I met many of my Ubuntu friends in other places, was it at conferences, holidays or elsewhere - it was always big fun.

Getting involved with Ubuntu Development - how easy is it really?

October 12, 2011

You were always interested in Ubuntu Development and gave it a try already? Perfect! With Ubuntu 11.10 almost out the door, we started the planning of the 12.04 (precise) development cycle and we would love to know how well our documentation is known and working today, so we can see what we can improve. Please give us your feedback in this short survey - it just takes a few minutes (if you’re not trying to write a novel in reply).

Community Council: Nominations

September 20, 2011

Community Council member terms expire next month, we are going to have an election in a few weeks. All Ubuntu Members are eligible to vote. We will announce the details of the election soon. What we want from you now is nominations. If you know somebody in the Ubuntu community, who has been an Ubuntu member for a while is dedicated to the project is well-respected and known for balanced views and good leadership has a good overview over various aspects of the project is organised and has some organisation talent (or you know that this all applies to you), please send an email to the Community Council (community-council at lists.

Mixtape: Feeling inside

July 28, 2011

Innerground 41BP - DJ Marky & S.P.Y. - Mystic Sunset Shogun 044 - S.P.Y. - Pressure Drop Mindtech LP03 - Rregula - Humans Full Force 013 - N-Phonix - Ephyra (Dose Remix) Cyantific 002 - Cyantific - Bounce It Hospital 187DD - Camo & Krooked - Breezeblock Bad Taste 015DD - Blokhe4d - Gutter Queen Hospital 190DD - Reso - War Machine Big Beat 075679968098 - Skrillex - Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites (Dirtyphonics Remix) Shady Brain 004 - Rregula - Shit’s Dope RAM 099D - Wilkinson - Every Time Dub Police 053 - Emalkay - The World feat.

Midnight Sun

July 28, 2011

See you in two weeks! I’m off to the North of Norway from tomorrow on, so if you have anything urgent you want to discuss, I’m sure one of these fine gentlemen should be able to help you out. (Picture by Oddbjørn Steffensen (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/oddbjorn/32041309/)

Remarkable people

July 24, 2011

You don’t see me blogging about things outside the Ubuntu world very often. OK, an occasional mixtape every now and then or some holiday pictures, but I generally try to stay away from topics such as politics or things that happen in the world elsewhere. This is not because I don’t care or don’t have an opinion - it’s quite the opposite. I just prefer to not get drawn into huge arguments about who’s right and I try to avoid writing about and singling out particular events and miss to mention others.

I love my team...

July 1, 2011

From left to right: Jorge, me, Jono, Ahmed, David. (Picture by the unstoppable Graham Binns.) Update: there’s more pictures.

Need help: video + screencast + chat

June 29, 2011

To talk about Ubuntu development and what’s going on, I used ustream.tv and was actually quite happy with how it worked without any kind of configuration or meddling. Still it’s not really ideal as it’s hard to show your desktop or a command line to properly how Ubuntu development works. What I like about it: no configuration social aspect of it and seeing somebody’s face followers will be informed of upcoming videocasts functionality to record and store video sessions chat window available What I’m missing is:

Looking for feedback: Sponsorship Process

June 28, 2011

I have written about our sponsorship process loads of times already. When new contributors have no upload rights to Ubuntu yet, this process ensures that we get the code reviewed and included in Ubuntu. In the cases you branch a source package, make changes, push to Launchpad and propose a merge. The other alternative is to add a patch to a bug report and subscribe the sponsors team. Over the last few releases we improved documentation, tools and processes and got more people involved.

Your chance to get involved!

June 21, 2011

Barry just spilled the beans about it: we are going to have a dh_python2 porting jam on 23rd June. Here’s what he says: This Thursday, June 23rd, we are going to have a dh_python2 porting jam. If you know about packaging, and have meddled with Python packaging before, we invite you to hang out and port a load of packages with us. We have some documentation to explain better what exactly we’re going to be doing, and why:

Wanted: Web developer and CSS person!

June 10, 2011

The Ubuntu Packaging Guide is alive and kicking, but we’re looking for some help rebranding it! What we need it discussed in bug 740044. Raoul Snyman put some work into it already, so it will make some sense to check out his efforts first. He makes use of Sphinx ability to define a theme. Ronnie sketched up additional mockups which follow the Web Guidelines. If possible, we’d like to re-use as much of https://launchpad.

Weekly Ubuntu Development Update

June 9, 2011

Ubuntu Development Update Development of Oneiric (Ubuntu 11.10) is in full swing, we just got Alpha 1 out last week and here’s the list of dates that are coming up in the next few weeks: June 30th, Debian Import Freeze which means that packages will not be synced automatically any more, but have to be requested manually. July 7th, release of Alpha 2. July 11th to 15th, Ubuntu Developer Week!

Mixtape: Further

June 2, 2011

Respect DD009 - Rusty K - The Sands Of Time State Of Mind CD002D - State Of Mind featuring MC Woody - The Downward Spiral Samurai 013 - Dose - Reason Being RAM 090 - Wilkinson - Samurai Samurai 013 - Dose - Helpless Red Light 004 - Neonlight & Hedj - Hammerhead Basswerk 029 - Rregula & Dementia - Slicey Melting Pot 016 - Nphonix - Further Flexible 007 - No Money - Goro (Remix) Mindtech LP03 - No Money - Singularity Playaz 016 - DJ Hazard - Food Fight Hospital 186DD - London Elektricity - Yikes!

Development Documentation

June 1, 2011

I’m happy to say that the Packaging Guide project has seen a lot of activity recently, so a bunch of articles have been improved and new articles been added. Thanks a lot to Andrew, Barry and others. You can download it or read it on its preliminary home. (Expect an announcement of its new and lasting place soon.) I got a number of questions about the guide in the last few days and I think it’d make sense to clarify the intention behind the guide.

Getting people involved

May 23, 2011

As part of my job I have often thought about what motivates somebody to get involved with Ubuntu development or more generally with Open Source development in general. There’s a couple of conclusions I came through, both through my own experience and observations and discussions with others. Here’s my Top 3: The project needs to be exciting. The atmosphere needs to be welcoming and friendly. The documentation needs to be clear.

New Harvest release: RSS awesomeness

May 11, 2011

Dylan McCall is rocking Harvest again. We just got Harvest 0.2.8 out the door. Among some great other fixes, we finally added RSS feeds. You can now subscribe to opportunities of certain packages and also subscribe to the last 25 opportunities that came in. This is absolutely fantastic news and a great way to stay up to date. Thanks a lot Dylan for all the awesome work! If you want to help out, check out the list of bugs.

UDS in Budapest: Ask Mark (Q&A with sabdfl)

May 9, 2011

UDS in Budapest is awesome. Not only is the city beautiful, the food delicious and the venue great but also are the people just fantastic. I’m having a great time and will soon blog about my plans for the next cycle. For now I just want to point out that there’s going to be a session with Mark (and the Community Council) on Wednesday, 11th May 2011 at 17:05. It will happen at UDS in room Petőfi.

Ubuntu 11.04 released!

April 28, 2011

Another great release is out. I just had to count through all of the release names and can’t believe it’s actually the 14th release I installed, tested and enjoyed. To almost all of the releases I made modest contributions (I wasn’t that much involved during the first one yet), but what always excited me even more was to see new people get on board, learn, enjoy what they’re doing and take on responsibility in making Open Source software even better.

Shutting down the sounder mailing list

April 20, 2011

The Community Council has regularly been made aware of recurring problems on the sounder list. In the last few months, the tone and atmosphere doesn’t match any other Ubuntu mailing lists or IRC channels - including #ubuntu-offtopic. At one point, Mark reached out to remind everyone how we want to communicate with each other. Still debates kept getting out of hand and were mostly wildly unrelated to Ubuntu. Alan reached out again and made clear that the list had long moved away from its initial focus and welcoming atmosphere.

Fresh Ubuntu Packaging Guide Goodness

April 19, 2011

I just set up a daily build for the Ubuntu Packaging Guide. To get the latest goodness, simply: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-packaging-guide-team/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ubuntu-packaging-guide <point your browser to /usr/share/doc/ubuntu-packaging-guide> Once installed, you get a handy packaging guide in PDF, HTML, Single HTML and ePub formats. If you have any feedback from the guides, please file bug reports. Also can we need some help massaging the old packaging guide into reStructuredText.

DJing

April 8, 2011

I’ve been slacking a bit when it comes to DJing land picked it up this year again. Some of my mixtapes are on a part of my blog that’s not syndicated, but I set up a page with all the posts. I just posted a new one today. If you have no plans tonight and you’re in Berlin, come to the GNOME3 Launch Lounge (Facebook event page) in c-base tonight. I’ll be playing there as well.

Mixtape: Enigma

April 8, 2011

Rubik 017 - Mutt & Calculon (feat. Kevin King) - Easy On The Motion Quarantine 007 - Break - Enigma (Calibre Remix) Full Cycle CDLP09 - I Kamanchi - Training Program Innerground 001 - DJ Marky & XRS - Rotation Innerground 038 - DJ Marky & Makoto - Aquarius feat. Deeizm CIA CINNA002 - DJ Marky & Total Science - Red Kooga Infrared 024 - J Majik & Gil Felix - Capoeira Mau5trap 5020DJ - Deadmau5 - Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff (Sub Focus Remix) (Feat.

Ubuntu Development Guide: Fixing a bug in Ubuntu

March 31, 2011

This is another article of the new Ubuntu Packaging Guide project. Please leave your comments below, or report a bug on it, or start helping out. Just branch the code and get involved. The article below is all about fixing bugs in Ubuntu. Fixing a bug in Ubuntu Introduction If you followed the instructions to get set up with Ubuntu Development, you should be all set and ready to go.

Ubuntu Development Guide: Getting set up

March 24, 2011

This is the second article showcasing what we have in the new packaging guide already. The article this time is about getting your development environment set up. Getting Set Up There are a number of things you need to do in the beginning to enable you to do Ubuntu development. A few of them you have to do locally on your system. In addition to that you also need to inform Launchpad about yourself, so it accepts changes you want to make.

Ubuntu Development videocast

March 24, 2011

Today I’ll do another ****videocast about Ubuntu development at 16 UTC again. If you have any topics you want me to talk about, join in and ask your questions in the live chat.

Ubuntu is NOT part of Google Summer of Code 2011

March 21, 2011

The Ubuntu project applied as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code 2011, but unfortunately we received the following reply: Unfortunately, we were unable to accept your organization's application at this time. We received many more applications for the program than we are able to accommodate, and we would encourage you to reapply for future instances of the program. The announcement of the accepted mentoring organisations says that of 417 applications, 175 were chosen, 50 of which are new to Google Summer of Code.

Ubuntu Development Guide: Introduction

March 18, 2011

To get the new Ubuntu Packaging Guide project some more exposure, I thought I would blog the first few articles, so if you’re interested in helping out or sharing your feedback, that’d be awesome. The guide below is an introduction to Ubuntu Development. Ubuntu is made up of thousands of different components, written in many different programming languages. Every component - be it a software library, a tool or a graphical application - is available as a source package.

Clearing up the backlog

March 16, 2011

Things are looking good in the sponsoring queue. First of all, here’s a quick explanation what the chart is about: to get changes integrated into Ubuntu if you don’t have upload access yet is quite simple: produce the change and get it reviewed by somebody who can upload already. After you’ve successfully worked with the reviewers for a while you can apply for upload rights yourself. In the past we had times where we struggled a bit keeping up with the backlog of reviews.

Mixtape: Shine In

March 11, 2011

Stepping Forward 009 - MSDOS - Passenger 7 Stepping Forward 009 - MSDOS - Lesvos Journey Ingredients 014 - dRamatic & dbAudio - Life Console LDNB DG001 - Stunna & Edward Oberon - Lookin Back Blu Saphir 012 - Bassface Sascha - Sweetest Thang Innerground 034 - DJ Marky & S.P.Y. - The Doppler Effect Hospital 183 - Nu:Tone - Shine In (feat. Natalie Williams) Play:musik 12006 - Beta 2 - Release Sonic 019 - Sonic & Makoto - Tearing Soul Uprising 026 - Concord Dawn & Rido - The Heat Uprising 026 - Rido - Detonate RAM 091 - Mind Vortex - Onslaught V Records 007 - Artificial Intelligence - Three’s A Crowd Hospital 184DD - Nu:Tone - Coming Back (feat.

Ubuntu Development videocast

March 10, 2011

I’ll do another videocast later today, 10th March at 16 UTC. Please sign upat ustream.tv, bring all your questions and make it more exciting. All questions around Ubuntu Development are fine, so if there’s something Ubuntu Developer Week you didn’t quite understand or a patch/branch you want us to look at, let’s do it together later on.

Last day of UDW

March 7, 2011

This cycle’s Ubuntu Developer Week is over. I know it’s unfortunate, but I hope you all had as great a time as I did. Logs are up on the Ubuntu Developer Week page, so if you want to check out what happened during the week, just go and read what happened. Here’s the summary of the last day, Friday: Getting better bug reports: The day kicked off with Brian Murray and Nigel Babu, who explained how to use and extend Apport for packages that you are interested in.

UDW: Day 4 over, last day to come

March 4, 2011

It’s a shame, I know, but unfortunately it’s true: Ubuntu Developer Week is almost over. We rushed through 4 days in no time now and today is the last day. If you couldn’t make it yesterday, don’t despair: we have logs and here’s the quick summary of what happened: Integrating your package with Launchpad Translations: David Planella kicked off the day and gave a sterling session on getting most out of Launchpad’s Translations goodness in a pain-free and fun way.

UDW: Day 3 over, day 4 to come

March 3, 2011

We’re deep into **Ubuntu Developer Week **now. 15 sessions have already happened, 10 are still to come. I don’t know about you, but I had a fantastic time up until now. Let’s zip through yesterday and see what happened: TestDrive: First of the day was Andres Rodriguez who talked about TestDrive and how to make use of it for testing and toying around with various Ubuntu (and other Linuxes’) releases.

UDW: Day 2 over, day 3 to come

March 2, 2011

Time flies when you’re having fun, eh? With day 2 of Ubuntu Developer Week over, we’re all patiently (or less patiently) awaiting what day 3 brings. Let’s see what happened yesterday: How to write a compiz plugin: Sam Spilsbury gave an excellent session about compiz and its plugin structure. Everything you need to get going to write your own plugin was explained nicely. If you want to bring more bling to Ubuntu, go ahead and check out the log, it also contains links to additional docs.

UDW: Day 1 over, day 2 to come

March 1, 2011

I simply love Ubuntu Developer Weeks. They’re sometimes a tad hectic, but they’re just so full of energy, it’s awesome! Yesterday we had 320+ people attending, which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone for bringing so much fun to the sessions and thanks to all the speakers and helpers. You all ROCK! For those of you who couldn’t be around yesterday, we put up logs on the Ubuntu Developer Week page. Here’s a quick re-cap of what happened yesterday:

Ubuntu Developer Week kicks off today

February 28, 2011

Today is a very special day. I’m sure that if you live in the Northern hemisphere you can feel it already: Spring is right around the corner. In addition to that it’s one of the most awesome weeks of the release cycle: It’s Ubuntu Developer Week! The best thing of it is: you haven’t missed anything of it yet. Today is day 1! Let’s have a look at the schedule together and see what’s cooking today:

Ubuntu Development videocast is back

February 24, 2011

I took a bit of a break from videocasts because I got busy with other stuff, but from now on I’ll try hard to be more regular with the shows. :) What I’ll talk about today is the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Week, how to best go about fixing bugs in Ubuntu and lots of other bits and pieces that have been happening in the last few weeks. If you have any other things you want me to talk about, register at ustream.

Mixtape: Overjoyed

February 20, 2011

Soundtrax 036 - Flaco - On A Ride Tupy 012 - DJ Marky & XRS - Rotation (Stress Level & TC1 Remix) Sunrize 002 - Nifty - The Latin Connection Movement 005 - Suv - Suenos Differente (Commix Remix) Innerground 016 - DJ Patife feat. Cleveland Watkiss - Overjoyed (Makoto Remix) Innerground 033 - S.P.Y. - Like A Dream V Records 010 - Savage Rehab - One Shot Soundtrax 038 - dRamatic & dbAudio - Nation One RAM 089 - Wilkinson - Scream It Viper 033 - Camo & Krooked - Shoreless W10 007 - DJ Wire - Saturday Night Fever АГМБ - Всё остальное не имеет значения (Drum & Bass RMX) Grid 038 - Twisted Individual - Gimp Mask (DJ Marky & S.

More feedback from Ubuntu Dev first timers

February 18, 2011

Here’s another story from the land of new Ubuntu Development contributors. I had a conversation with Nicola Ferralis. Nicola had worked on a number of packages and had this to say: Dear Daniel, Thanks very much for your note. If you don’t mind, let me give you my perspective on the Ubuntu development from a user perspective. I started off as a simple user. It took me some time to figure things out, namely, deb packaging.

More feedback from Ubuntu Dev first timers

February 16, 2011

Continuing the story from first timers in Ubuntu Development, here is what Weston Miller has to say: I’d say overall the process was simple and enjoyable. The IRC channels were very welcoming and were where I gleaned the most help for the fix committing procedure and any other snags. The only place that I would say needs improvement is the bug identification process. I was unable to find any simple process to easily identify simple bugs I could resolve except by triaging them myself.

Get ready for Ubuntu Developer Week

February 11, 2011

Go check your calendar… if you have no concrete plans for the time from Monday 28th February until Friday 4th March yet, make sure you add a note in your calendar. It’s Ubuntu Developer Week again. If you haven’t been to an Ubuntu Developer Week yet, no problem. This is how it works: it is a week full of one-hour sessions on IRC, where various topics around Ubuntu development are presented, sometimes in the form of talks, sometimes in the form of seminars, where instructions for hands-on training are given over IRC.

Feedback from Ubuntu Dev first timers

February 7, 2011

Jono sort of stole my thunder on this one, but here’s a bit more detail about what I’m doing and why it’s really exciting. :-) At our last sprint in Dallas, after some discussion Jono gave me the advice to actively start reaching out to new contributors. I set up a list of people who just got their first change uploaded to the Ubuntu archive. I wonder why I didn’t have the idea earlier, but it’s great!

Congratulations, Debian!

February 6, 2011

Debian just released Debian 6.0. Good work everyone!

Ubuntu Packaging Guide

February 4, 2011

If you ever were interested in Ubuntu Development, I’m sure you came across the Ubuntu Packaging Guide. It served us well, but it became harder and harder to maintain. Because some parts are used in other wiki articles as well, we are making heavy use of includes, some other parts are slightly confusing as well. We had a long discussion at UDS and came up with a plan. The idea was to write the articles in a task-based manner.

Interviewing Jani, Michael and Oliver

January 14, 2011

As part of the Ubuntu Development videocast, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jani Monoses, Michael Vogt and Oliver Grawert yesterday. We are all together here in Dallas and I successfully managed to drag them out of meetings and away from work and talk to them about Ubuntu Development and how they got involved. Unfortunately we kind of messed this up. Up until 8 minutes, 10 seconds you will only be able to see us gesturing, there’s no sound.

Dallas Video cast special

January 12, 2011

It’s been a while since the last Ubuntu Development video cast. This week I’m in Dallas with a lot of other Ubuntu developers, so it’s a great opportunity to talk to them, find out what they’re working on and what their take on Ubuntu development and getting involved with it is. If you want to find out more about Natty and Ubuntu Development in general, tune in 13th January, 22:00 UTC ¹ - yep, one hour after the show of Translations mastermind David Planella.

Daily Build awesomeness

December 23, 2010

One of my favourite applications in the Ubuntu and general Open Source world is xwax. It allows me to hook up my turntables using a Native Instruments Audio4DJ device. This way I can use music I bought on the Ubuntu One Music store using my turntables (as a controller). It’s absolutely fantastic. Because I love xwax so much, I just set up an automatic daily build in Launchpad. The process is pretty straight-forward:

Christmas video cast

December 16, 2010

As I mentioned earlier, today I’m working with Ara, Matthias, Michael and Yaiza at Büro 2.0 and we just finished a very funny video cast together. Matthias ‘doko’ Klose made sure to arrive AFTER the video cast was done, but rest assured he can not evade. In recompensation he brought Father Christmas hats, so to you here’s from the Canonical Berlin team: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Video cast Christmas special

December 15, 2010

Normally I would’ve done the next video cast next week, but with slowly approaching Christmas everybody has probably better things to do than watching Daniel rambling on about Ubuntu Development. So we’ll instead do the “Christmas special” this week. Tomorrow, 16th December, 12:00 UTC. This time I won’t be sitting at home in front of bookshelves, but I’ll be at Büro2.0, Berlin’s fantastic Open Source coworking place. I’ve been working from there for about a year now and I love it.

Below the magic 40

December 14, 2010

I’m incredibly happy with how the patch pilot programme is working out. We’ve been making steady progress at reducing the number of items up for review. Looking at the sponsoring queue there are still a few older items that we should clear out. I’m convinced it would make us feel better about the state of things and make it easier for us to stay on top things. Old patches often don’t apply any more, require more work, etc.

"Getting Set Up" videocast

December 13, 2010

In last week’s videocast we talked about “getting set up” for Ubuntu Development. Everybody had a gpg key, ssh key, all the tools, a pbuilder and settings in Launchpad sorted out afterwards, which was great. If you want to have a look at the video again, you can do so. Up until now I didn’t find a good way to show links/terminal output yet. Are there any suggestions to do this in a better way?

Ubuntu development screencast: tune in!

December 8, 2010

Thursday, 9th December at 16:00 UTC* I’ll be online with another installment of “Ubuntu Development with Daniel Holbach”. If you haven’t seen the last session yet, I’d encourage you to do so, it was an introduction to Ubuntu Development. This time we’ll talk about getting set up for Ubuntu development. I’ll show you how to install all necessary tools configure them correctly introduce yourself to the Ubuntu infrastructure On ustream there’s a chat window next to the video, but you can only participate in the discussion if you sign up.

Mixtape: Is Anybody Out There

December 3, 2010

Symmetry CD002 - Break - Heal me Signature LP006 - Calibre - Even If F Communications 083 - Laurent Garnier - First Reaction (DJ Marky & Drumagick Remix) HE:Digital 006 - Makoto & Deeizm - Release The Bird Hospital 149 - Logistics - Eastern Promise Hospital 169DD1 - B-Complex feat. Diane Charlemagne - Rolling With The Punches (Radio Edit) Shogun 016 - Trei - Livewire Uprising 021 - Trei - Mindless Fallout 003 - N.

We need Harvest data sources

December 2, 2010

I blogged about the new Harvest a couple of times already. Yesterday we released 0.2.4 which fixed a bug which was filed more than a cycle ago… it merely said: “import json”. The way Harvest works is that it reads a list of URLs that list opportunities, so Harvest is very easily extensible. It doesn’t need to know about bug reports, merge requests, upstreams, downstreams and the like: it just knows about packages and opportunities.

Pointers to making Ubuntu better

December 1, 2010

So you like Ubuntu, enjoy “making things work again”, like to work with others, don’t mind reading a bit of documentation, you’re exactly the person we need. If you were always wondering “what can I work on?" I suggest you have a look at http://harvest.ubuntu.com/opportunities/. If you have a look at the page you’ll see that it’s divided into two parts: on the left side you can control which kind of development opportunities are shown: you can limit the results to packages (or package sets) and to certain types of opportunities.

Ways to make Daniel happy...

November 26, 2010

I’m very happy with how the “Patch Pilot” programme is coming together: it’s just been a week where in addition to people who do reviews of branches and patches every day, we have patch pilots who spend time in #ubuntu-devel reviewing code. If we keep up the good work, it seems like we can get the number of waiting requests down to 0!

First ustream show

November 26, 2010

So I did my first videocast yesterday. I had a lot of fun doing so and from the comments I got, which ranged from “well done, really informative” to “I didn’t understand the technical bits, but nice haircut” (a friend of mine who’s not really part of the Ubuntu world), everybody else enjoyed it too. The most comical moment was when a friend decided to visit me, rang the doorbell and my dog started barking and I had to rush out to open the door.

dholbach tv

November 24, 2010

Jono spilled the beans already. I’ll be taking a leaf out of his book and start a ustream.tv show called “Ubuntu Development with Daniel Holbach”. The first show will be tomorrow, 25th November 16:00 UTC*. What I’ll talk about will be all kinds of things related to Ubuntu Development: how to get started, interesting new things that are happening, I’ll (try to) answer all kinds of questions, we’ll do some tutorial sessions, and whatever crazy new things we come up with together.

Patch pilot programme starts today

November 22, 2010

We all know how important code review is for Ubuntu. It’s not only about spotting mistakes, but also about teaching new contributors how things are done. There’s always been busier times when we fell back in terms of code review and times where we did better. At UDS we discussed this fairly extensively and decided we want to make code review a more central activity of Ubuntu development. We’d like to borrow an idea from the Bazaar team: the patch pilot programme.

Want to learn Ubuntu development?

November 16, 2010

So you always were interested in meddling around with your Ubuntu installation, you tried to build packages or source code before and you like making things work again? Excellent! This cycle we are actively trying to line up online workshops that explain all you need. It’d be great if you could either leave a comment here on this blog post or on this wiki page about which topic you’d like to see a dedicated workshop or session about.

"What can I do to help Ubuntu rock harder?"

November 12, 2010

I get this question all the time and I’m happy to say we have quite a good answer now. Harvest finds opportunities in lots of TODO lists that are generated by Ubuntu developer and aggregates that information in one place, so you can easily browse those opportunities by package, package set or type of opportunity. If you want more information included in Harvest, please either talk to the author of the script that procudes that data or modify it yourself to additionally produce a list in this format and get it added to harvest-data.

Django App for Team Reports

November 1, 2010

At UDS Natty in one session we talked about our current team reporting infrastructure in the Ubuntu community. Some participants explained that they found it hard to use and set up and that it required the user to be familiar with the wiki markup, etc. There were lots of ideas kicking around like have a nice and small web app that had some kind of wysiwyg editor allow sorting by month/year, team, team category have public and private reports (for boards that report to another governance board) have irc bots feed actions into the web app etc.

Much improved Harvest online again

October 20, 2010

Harvest is online again and available at http://harvest.ubuntu.com I’d like to thank everybody who helped to make this possible, most of all Dylan McCall who worked on this as part of his Summer of Code project. Some things changed: Harvest is now written using Django which makes it much more maintainable and easy to work on. Check out lp:harvest and propose a merge to help out making it better. Harvest now has a proper release procedure, which should help making it more of a community infrastructure than it ever was.

Mixtape: Could this be real

October 13, 2010

Fokuz 039 - Hydro - Ride With Me Bingo 082 - Zinc & Makoto feat. Deeizm - Monotonik Blu Mar Ten 003 - Blu Mar Ten - Overwhelm (Seba Remix) Fokuz LP002 - Mav - God of Speed Product 010 - Craggz & Parallel Forces - Release V Records 010 - Savage Rehab - One Shot Hospital 158 - Subwave - Stars Get Down Hospital 175 - Danny Byrd Featuring I-Kay - Ill Behaviour HE:Digital 005 - Makoto & T-ak - Climbers High Uprising 021 - Dose & Trei - Hot Foot Hospital 169DD1 - Sub Focus - Could This Be Real (Drum and Bass Remix)

Another great Ubuntu release out there

October 10, 2010

Happy meerkats Get your Ubuntu 10.10(.10) here!

Open Source People Appreciation Day, ctd.

October 1, 2010

During my holidays I made it, among other beautiful stops, to the wonderful city of Esfahan. While I was there, Software Freedom Day was being celebrated at the University of Esfahan. I met Ehsan Shahrokhi a day earlier and he gave me the opportunity to give a brief talk at SFD. Like all the other experiences I made in the country, it was absolutely fantastic. Everybody was incredibly welcoming, everybody was extremely friendly, very helpful and just wonderful.

275 invitations to tea later…

September 30, 2010

… I must say I had a fantastic holidays. I had a fantastic time, met supersuperfriendly people and was generally constantly surprised. Pictures are available over here.

Who are your mentors?

September 7, 2010

Jorge and Allison blogged about their mentors and start into the Open Source world and I thought it would be a great way to thank at least some of the people who helped me get started. So I started thinking about who all helped me out in one way or the other in the last few years and I realised that there’s incredibly many people I should’ve been thanking years ago already.

Holidays

September 2, 2010

Tuesday next week is my last working day and I’ll be gone for three weeks, without laptop. If you have anything really urgent, talk to any members of my team, Michael or Ara, they know how to get in touch with me. I’m very much looking forward to this one and happy to meet Mehdi of the LoCo team there! :-) I’ll be back on 29th September.

What I do

August 31, 2010

In the first weeks when I started contributing to the Ubuntu community about six years ago, I was constantly amazed at a number of things: how friendly, encouraging and motivating people were: in a very short time I made lots of friends, people who are always there for me and I’d always be there for (extended family :-) - kind of) how much I learned in a very short period of time (a state of constant “a-ha!

Ubuntu Berlin Jam

August 24, 2010

If you have followed my blog and what I’ve said elsewhere you might have noticed, I’m TOTALLY looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam. :-D The Ubuntu Berlinians will meet in Berlin’s c-base on 29th August from 12:00 to 18:00. Please come and join us! Original announcement below: Freie Software lebt vom Mitmachen und das ist gar nicht so schwer, wie man vielleicht erwartet. Zum vierten Mal ruft Ubuntu zum “Global Jam”, bei der weltweit helfende Hände an einem Tag gemeinsam an der Verbesserung der freien Linux-Distribution Ubuntu arbeiten.

Next weekend: Ubuntu Global Jam

August 24, 2010

If you haven’t registered your Ubuntu Global Jam event yet, do it now! As you all know loads of teams around the globe meet this weekend and do great Ubuntu and Open Source work together. Ubuntu Jams are all about making Ubuntu and the open source world in general rock even harder. No matter which part of it you’re interested, be it Translations, Testing, QA work, Packaging, Docs or anything else, we want you to have fun with your local team!

Ubuntu Global Jam… state of things.

August 10, 2010

Guess who has all registered for the fun already: Berkeley, California, USA Birmingham, UK Novosibirsk, Russia Cape Town, South Africa Caldes de Montbui, Spain Dublin, Ireland Saudi Arabia Managua, Nicaragua Lots of other teams are discussing their events right now. We in Berlin will definitely be part of the fun. András Bognár also worked on new Ubuntu Global Jam badges: Awesome! Let your friends know! Get planning!

Awesome work others have done

August 10, 2010

I wanted to follow up on Jorge’s great blog post for a longer while already. He said: Lately I think we’ve gotten in a collective funk of “here’s what I think about this.” followed by “Oh yeah, well here’s what I think of that”, and “Allow me to retort!” and then getting stuck in a rabbit hole of distractions. So screw that, let’s share some stories[…] Needless to say: Jorge is spot on!

Hugs For Bugs!

August 9, 2010

Next Ubuntu Bug Day will be all about Operation Cleansweep, which as you all know deals with reviewing patches and forwarding them to our Upstream partner projects. Make sure you join #ubuntu-reviews and #ubuntu-bugs on next Thursday (2010-08-12). It will be a great time to get involved in Ubuntu! :-) Stats from last week (we can do a lot better, so join us on Thursday and get involved!): Total bugs with patches: 2286 (-27) Reviewed patches: 379 (-9) --- Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 94 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 163 (-5) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 51 (-2) Bugs with 'indicator-application': 41 (-1) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 49 (-3) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 11 (0) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 16 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 2 (0)

Ubuntu Global Jam… slowly getting there

August 2, 2010

I’m SO looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam. Up until now we have 4 events registered: Berkeley, California, USA Dublin, Ireland Saudi Arabia Caldes de Montbui, Catalonia, Spain and I talked to a number of people already who are planning additional events. This will be SWEET! While there’s numerous activities you can dive into on a Jam event, I’d love to see a lot of work being put into Operation Cleansweep.

Berlin

August 1, 2010

Earlier today I went to a goodbye party of a friend who’s going to Australia for a few months. Great things that happened: Party was outdoors, a few DJs played, great atmosphere, 100+ people at peak times Some of my awesome office mates were there, my sister too The police showed up and instead of shutting the party down, they told us where it was “OK” to have the party We moved all the equipment, the generator, drinks and everything else to the new place, which was nearby, everybody helped I played a 4 hour Drum’n’Bass set, which I (and others) were very happy with, they even collected money for the DJ - glad it was dark, so nobody could see if I was blushing I watched the sunrise by the riverside while the party was still going on I drove home on my bicycle A few guys stopped me to take a picture of them and as a thanks offered me their last beer Oh how I love this city!

Ubuntu Party Weekend…

July 27, 2010

… also known as Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up swiftly, so make sure you put** 27th-29th August** into your calendar and talk your local Ubuntu friends into participating. Ok, so it’s Ubuntu Global Jam. What does that mean? What’s going to happen? Simple. It’s going to happen what you make happen. Whatever your team enjoys doing is great. The only requirements are: it needs to be fun and it should make Ubuntu better somehow.

Ubuntu Developer Week: Day 5

July 19, 2010

And the last day of Ubuntu Developer Week is over now too. It’s a shame, but when can we do… watch out for the next one in half a year. In the meantime, there’s going to be a bunch of Packaging Training sessions as well, and Ubuntu Open Week, so it’s not like you’ll be twiddling thumbs the whole time. Let’s re-cap Day 5: 16:00 - 18:00 UTC: Django And You (mhall119): First up was Michael Hall, who had booked a double session about Django goodness and brings in quite a bit of experience on the topic.

Ubuntu Developer Week: Day 4

July 16, 2010

Day 4 of Ubuntu Developer Week is over and it’s a bit sad to see UDW draw to a close again. On a happier note: all the sessions yesterday were awesome. Let’s recap together: 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly (didrocks): What a great and action-packed session it was! Didier Roche explained how to create apps without a fuss and how Quickly makes clever decisions for you, so you have to worry less.

Ubuntu Developer Week: Day 3

July 15, 2010

Ubuntu Developer Week is not just amazing as always: this time it’s even better. The sessions are great, there’s loads of interesting details that were talked about but what’s even more important: we have loads of people attending who ask great questions and the first are already jumping in there and work actively on Ubuntu. That’s exactly what gives Ubuntu Developer Week it’s unique feel. I LOVE IT! Yesterday was Day 3, so for those of you who did or could not attend, here’s what happened:

Ubuntu Packaging Guide Survey

July 14, 2010

Jim Campbell did a great job in putting together a survey about our packaging guide. If you used the guide in the past, like it, and/or want it improved, please check out his announce.

Ubuntu Developer Week: Day 2

July 14, 2010

Another day of Ubuntu Developer Week has passed and what a great day it was. Let’s re-cap: 16:00 UTC: Packaging Like A Ninja (shadeslayer): Rohan Garg brought a lot of fun to UDW by teaching us all how things work in the Kubuntu team. If I counted correctly he even handed out three orange ninja belts. 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» (dpm): By the looks of it, David Planella managed to resolve the problem of not knowing very very well.

Ubuntu Developer Week: Day 1

July 13, 2010

What a fantastic start of Ubuntu Developer Week. At times we had 350+ visitors and the amount of great questions was simply overwhelming. Awesome. I also noticed the first few participants actively helping out after the sessions. This makes me incredibly happy. So here’s a re-cap of day 1: 16:00 UTC - 18:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development (dholbach): This two-hour session was one of the most action-packed sessions I ever ran.

Like christmas has come early…

July 12, 2010

… it’s Ubuntu Developer Week time! Starting from 16:00 UTC today, we’ll have one week of awesome sessions revolving around development, packaging, hacking and in general making Ubuntu better. I’m very excited for the event to kick off, so let’s see what day 1 has for us: 16:00 UTC + 17:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development – dholbach Description: As always we’ll start the week with a session on how to get you started.

Reviewers Team and Operation Cleansweep

July 12, 2010

Probably due to the soccer championship or the hot weather in some countries we had a slow week last week. Here’s the quick report: Total bugs with patches: 2263 (-1) Reviewed patches: 331 (0) --- Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 86 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 133 (+6) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 41 (+1) Bugs with 'indicator-application': 44 (-1) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 47 (0) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 13 (0) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 15 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 1 (0) … which means: we need your help.

Next week! Ubuntu Developer Week!

July 8, 2010

Only a few days left until Ubuntu Developer Week! I’m really excited and hope you tell all your friends to come there too! :-)

Renewed call for participation: fix an Ubuntu bug

July 2, 2010

I’d like to renew my call for participation: please pick an Ubuntu bug, find docs if you need them, attempt to fix it and explain to me what you did, what you tried, what worked, what didn’t in an email to daniel holbach ubuntu com. I’ll post about the result in a couple of days.

Ubuntu Developer Week is BACK!

June 30, 2010

Ubuntu Developer Week is back again, which means five days of action-packed IRC sessions where you learn more about hacking on Ubuntu, developing Ubuntu and how to interact with other projects. We’ll have a fantastic time from **July 12th 2010 to July 16th 2010, **great speakers, interesting sessions, lots of good questions and great people who get to know each other. If you’re new to Ubuntu Developer Week and what it is, check out the general page, how to join in and how it all works.

loco.ubuntu.com meeting

June 29, 2010

If you haven’t seen loco.ubuntu.com yet, click here. It’s what we call the LoCo Directory and where more and more data of our Local Community teams goes. In the beginning we started with just a simple list of LoCo teams and additional data they can put there. After some time we added the functionality to put events in there too. It’s awesome and the work the whole team put into it is just amazing.

Operation Cleansweep, how it all works

June 29, 2010

Operation Cleansweep is in full swing and we’re slowly but steadily working our way through 2000 patches. You should be part of this! It’s easy and a lot of fun. Join #ubuntu-reviews on irc.freenode.net and just check out our review guide. The process is quite straight-forward. I thought it’d help to have a look at a few patches together and see how the process works, so here we go. Consider these few bugs and what was done there:

Weekly Update from Operation Cleansweep

June 21, 2010

We’re at 14% now, but we need help. Join Operation Cleansweep today. Last week saw these changes: Total bugs with patches: 2270 (-5) Reviewed patches: 310 (+20) Details: Bugs with ‘patch-needswork’: 80 (+3) Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-upstream’: 119 (+11) Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-debian’: 33 (+6) Bugs with ‘indicator-application’: 44 (0) Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-upstream’: 48 (-2) Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-debian’: 12 (0) Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-upstream’: 11 (-1) Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-debian’: 1 (+1)

Field experiment: fix an Ubuntu bug

June 17, 2010

We want to make it easy to get involved in Ubuntu on a broad basis, but also make it easy to just go ahead and do something as a drive-by contribution. At UDS we talked a lot about making it easy to just go and fix a bug that bothers you. We did a couple of improvements to our documentation and some other bits here and there. What I now need is your feedback.

Reviewing 2000 patches

June 7, 2010

… sounds like a daunting challenge, but actually it’s quite doable, because we’ll be a lot of people and we’ll have help from upstream project and the Debian project to make an informed decision about these fixes. The goal of Operation Cleansweep is to have a look at all the bugs with patches in Launchpad and guide them through the** **patch review process. Come, join us in #ubuntu-reviews on irc.freenode.net and help to make all the black go red in the countdown meter below:

NGO Team during Maverick

May 31, 2010

I’m very happy with the plans of the Ubuntu NGO team this cycle. In short we want to: have more regular meetings - once a month get an overview of NGO-related blueprints in maverick (http://hexmode.openweblog.com/538142.html) come up with specific questions for interviews work on stats/feedback from the interviews - find out what works very well for NGO - tools they’ve built on their own put together spec and blog, post to mailing list announcing Manifest and create branch to make it easier for others to contribute document set-up and install for common applications for NGOs create Facebook group investigate if there’s “NGO Planet websites” somewhere find list of groups of websites and list of organisations See if NGOs would consider document their work - best practices If you’re interested in stuff that non-profits, NGOs and charities do, in Ubuntu and making the world a better place.

Archive / Permissions Reorg confusion

May 18, 2010

For a few development cycles we have been working on reorganising the Ubuntu archive and developer permissions. There were a lot of changes that were suggested and discussed and it proved to be quite a bit of work. We completed a huge chunk of it and because there are many misconceptions about it, here’s a list of changes that are implemented today: Ubuntu developers can apply for upload rights for one or more specific packages.

Debian and Ubuntu

May 18, 2010

I was particularly happy that Stefano Zacchiroli, the Debian Project Leader, was at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels. He’s a great guy. Also was I quite happy with the discussion at UDS and the notes we all took from it. Here’s Stefano’s report. While having concrete actions to follow up on are great, we also need more people from both projects engaging with each other and sharing knowledge and their project’s culture so we form a mutual understanding of both.

Want to get involved in Ubuntu Development?

May 6, 2010

I’ll do these sessions today and tomorrow: Thursday, 6th May, 06:00 UTC: Packaging and MOTU Q&A - Ask all the questions about Packaging and/or MOTU you like! Friday, 7th May 15:00 UTC, Getting Started with Ubuntu Development - get a development environment set up, learn to work on a few small fixes The first session is brought to you by the Packaging Training, the second one by Ubuntu Open Week.

Reviewing patches for fun and profit

May 4, 2010

Today’s the day! We’ll get together and review heaps and heaps of Ubuntu patches. If you’re not afraid of looking at code, testing out things, talking to people and enjoy making Ubuntu better and having a lot of fun, this event is just the right thing for you. What you need to do is quite simple: read what the team is about read the review instructions join #ubuntu-reviews on irc.

Ubuntu Open Week starting: today!

May 3, 2010

Awesome awesome awesome! Today, in less than hour Ubuntu Open Week will start. This is an awesome opportunity to learn more about Ubuntu, its teams, its people and what’s going on in the project. If you always wanted to get involved this is the perfect opportunity! Check out the fantastic timetable and the terrific sessions that are going on. The presenters have put a lot of hard work into their sessions and want YOU to be there and will be happy to receive your questions.

Regional Membership Boards need you!

April 30, 2010

Just a quick reminder that you can still nominate somebody (that includes you) for the Regional Membership Boards EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) or Asia / Oceania until 12:00 UTC today.

YES! YES! YES!

April 29, 2010

Another fantastic release out. Loads of great new features and loads of amazing and hard work done by a lot of teams. Thanks a lot everybody! You ROCK! I’m proud to work with all of you! ____ ___ ____ _ _ _ _ ____ _ | __ )_ _/ ___| | | | | | | |/ ___| | | _ \| | | _ | |_| | | | | | _| | | |_) | | |_| | | _ | |_| | |_| |_| |____/___\____| |_| |_|\___/ \____(_)

Sharing knowledge

April 28, 2010

Our community has loads of incredibly clever people. Most of them spent years working in the Open Source world and have a lot of experience solving problems and handling all kinds of tools. We need to get much better at passing on that knowledge. Whenever I’m visiting a friend who does something with Open Source chances are high that I’ll be all “OMG, I didn’t know you could do XYZ so easily!

Summer of Code 2010: Accepted Ubuntu projects

April 27, 2010

Google just announced the projects that were accepted. So what’s next? If your project is on the list, you’re now entering the community bonding period (until May 24th). This means that you’re not expected to hack on the project right now, but get to know the project and how it works. This is how Google puts it: “Rather than jumping straight into coding, you’ve got some time to learn about your organization’s processes - release and otherwise - developer interactions, codes of conduct, etc.

Regional Membership Boards need YOU

April 27, 2010

We are going to extend the nomination period for the Regional Membership Boards Asia/Oceania and EMEA until Friday 30th April 12:00 UTC. (The Americas Board is all set in terms of nominations.) On 2010-05-05 the terms of the following members of the Regional Membership Boards will end: Asia/Oceania: Andi Darmawan, Emmet Hikory, Luke Yelavich, Melissa Draper, Robert Collins, Zak B. Elep, ஆமாச்சு (amachu) EMEA: Alan Pope, Dennis Kaarsemaker, Mark Van den Borre, Matthew Helmke, Stéphane Graber, Szilvester Farkas You can either nominate yourself or somebody else.

Patch Day... Lite

April 26, 2010

Nigel announced it already: Patch Day is going to happen on May 5th, but today we’ll have a test-run for reviewing patches using the new process. We’re very keen to hear your feedback about the process: how it works for you, what kind of documentation we still need and whatever else you can think of. Join us in #ubuntu-reviews on irc.freenode.net.

Bugs with patches, and how to get them sorted out

April 19, 2010

We have a lot of open bugs with patches. There are many many reasons for this: Some of the patches are just random files and not real patches. Some of the patches change huge amounts of code and nobody wanted to make the call “this is good to go into Ubuntu” yet. In some cases it’s not clear where the patch came from. etc. We are going to attack this problem soon and Nigel Babu and others spearheaded the effort by putting the “Ubuntu Reviewers Team” in place and setting up a process how best to handle those patches.

Lucid Parties

April 15, 2010

In just a few days we’ll see another member of the Ubuntu menagerie to the door: the Lucid Lynx. Time for us to celebrate our good work as a team. If you’ve never run a release party before, check this guide out. It should make a lot of things a lot clearer. Once you and your team are clear on where to have the party, who to invite and what to do, head to the LoCo Directory and add the venue and the event there.

Regional Membership Boards!

April 15, 2010

One thing I always loved about the Ubuntu community is that whatever you did to contribute to Ubuntu, you could become an Ubuntu member and be part of the big circle of friends quite easily. In the earlier days of the Ubuntu project the Community Council was handling the approval of Ubuntu membership and I loved meetings where you heard inspiring stories of what people had contributed to Ubuntu. Over time those meetings, inspiring as they were, got a bit long.

Being passionate about some things

April 9, 2010

If you like Open Source software you’ll very quickly find your attention drawn towards certain projects, certain packages, certain tools and pieces that make the Open Source world so great. I guess there’s only a very few people who find themselves attracted to everything and treat everything with the same attention. If you were always wondering, how you can help the Open Source world and help Ubuntu, here’s an idea: there’s millions of users of Open Source software (most use one of the big distributions), there’s thousands of Open Source projects.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: Free Culture Showcase Winners!

March 26, 2010

We have two heroes of Free Culture who will have their pieces of art released on the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS CDs. Without further ado let me present you the two winners of this cycle’s Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase and what they have to say about themselves, their work and Ubuntu: Audio: Colin Ross - Frustration Blues Colin Ross I’ve been playing music since my dad started training me in classical piano at 5, and I’ve been making a living playing music–sometimes just barely–since I was a teenager.

Ubuntu participates in Google Summer of Code

March 25, 2010

A lot of you noticed already that Ubuntu is going to participate in Google’s Summer of Code! This is an awesome opportunity for students learning more about open source development and life in a Linux distribution and for the open source world as a whole. If you want to participate make sure you generally take a bit of time and read the documentation very carefully join the ubuntu-soc mailing list and introduce yourself join the #ubuntu-gsoc irc channel on freenode As a mentor:

Ubuntu Allstars

March 24, 2010

Since the beginning of time… ok since we have UDSes there was the tradition to have a party at the last evening of UDS. At UDS Prague for the first time ever Ubuntu Allstars came together and it ROCKed. If YOU are coming to UDS in Brussels and you play an instrument, and are interested in rocking out, please join the Ubuntu Allstars team and the mailing list so you can join in on the discussion.

Upgrade Jams - made easy!

March 18, 2010

We’re all gearing up towards Ubuntu Global Jam and I LIKE IT! More and more teams are signing up in the LoCo Directory. Once you managed to find a venue, tell a few friends, you’re basically all set. the Jams page has all the information you need. One thing I’d like to point out specifically is Upgrade Jams. They’re probably the most straight-forward way to help out. Just upgrade, test and report what you find.

Lucid's Ubuntu Global Jam in Berlin!

March 16, 2010

I’m very happy the Berlin team is going to participate in Lucid’s Ubuntu Global Jam. We’ll meet on Saturday 27th March at 12:00 in Berlin’s c-base and have a great time working on all the things that make Ubuntu great, so if you like to hang out, test Ubuntu, ugprade Ubuntu, translate Ubuntu, document Ubuntu, hack on Ubuntu, triage Ubuntu bugs or do anything else, we definitely want you there. Also if you are working on Debian, join us so we can learn to cooperate better and learn from each other.

Ubuntu Global Jam - what's it all about?

March 11, 2010

You want to know what the Ubuntu Global Jam is all about? It’s easy. Any of the Ubuntu Jams is a session where people get together locally (yes, in real time and in a real place) and do something to make Ubuntu better and have lots of fun. At the Ubuntu Global Jam we are going to have lots and lots of different kinds of jams around the world for a whole weekend.

Ubuntu Global Jam

March 10, 2010

There’s a lot of people planning their participation right now. If you’re not on the list yet, have a look what others are planning to get some inspiration: Manchester (England, England), UK Montréal, Canada Waterloo region, Canada Budapest, Hungary Århus, Denmark Prague, Czech Republic and there’s lots and lots of others planning and discussing it. Just hop on #ubuntu-locoteams on irc.freenode.net and discuss it there. At 21:00 UTC today (10th March) Jorge Castro will give a session about to run YOUR jam.

Harvest... successfully revived

March 9, 2010

I meant to blog about Harvest a long time earlier already. With the help of fantastic people like Paul Hummer, James Westby and Dave Walker, we got to the point were almost all of the ideas we wanted to have in the new design are implemented: Commenting, marking opportunities irrelevant, package set based information lots of others things It’s going to be online soon, but there’s still a few things that would be nice to have resolved.

Best Lucid Feature: edit-patch

March 9, 2010

Did you ever have to deal with source packages and found the variety of patch systems simply mind-boggling? I certainly have. Enter: the unstoppable Michael Vogt. If you are running lucid and don’t have ubuntu-dev-tools installed, install it now. Forget about all the crazy stuff and incantations you might need for random patch system X, Y or Z (it supports cdbs, dpatch and quilt at the moment), just type: edit-patch <name-of-patch>

Free Culture in Ubuntu

February 22, 2010

If you haven’t heard about the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase yet, here’s what it’s all about: The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to show off high quality free culture content in Ubuntu. At the heart of Ubuntu’s ethos is a belief in showcasing free software and free culture, and with each development cycle we open the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world.

Ubuntu Global Jam - preparations

February 19, 2010

I’m very excited about Ubuntu Global Jam this time around because for many people around the globe it will probably be the first time they get their hands dirty with doing actual work on Ubuntu and actually make Ubuntu itself better. In addition to that Lucid is going to be an LTS, so this time it’s personal! The great thing is we have a number of sessions lined up to share tips and advice about holding jams.

Getting patches into the distro

February 10, 2010

Brian Murray has spilled the beans about it already: we’ll try to put more work into getting patches into Ubuntu. The regular sponsorship process is working well and hundreds of patches get reviewed every month. The problem is that many patch submitters don’t know about the process, so patches or workaround sit there for a longer time. If you have a look at our code review pages, you’ll see that we have a two-step process in which we’ll try to attack the problem:

Ubuntu Global Jam

February 3, 2010

YES! It’s that time of the release cycle again! Ubuntu Global Jam is around the corner and will happen from 26th to 28th March 2010. You’re wondering what Ubuntu Global Jam is? It’s an event where people around the world come together, meet in their cities and experience how great it is to work on Ubuntu together. We have a big ménagerie of Ubuntu Jams already: Bug Jams: you work together on Ubuntu bugs, fix them, triage them, improve them, … Packaging Jams: learn packaging of Ubuntu software, work on some small packaging bugs, Translation Jams: translate software, make Ubuntu usable in lots of languages, Doc Jams: have a look at Ubuntu documentation, fix it and improve it, Testing Jams: put the new Ubuntu version to the test, check it out and test-drive it, Upgrade Jams: upgrade to the newest Ubuntu version and give it a spin!

UDW Summary Day 5

February 1, 2010

Another Ubuntu Developer Week is over and I’m very happy with the outcome. Lots of great sessions, lots of new stuff learnt, lots of new contributors who turned up during the sessions and lots of sharp questions. Let’s review what happened at the last day: Writing Beautiful Code: this session unfortunately had to be cancelled as Paul Hummer couldn’t make it. We’ll definitely repeat the session soon and I’ll let you all know about it.

UDW day 4, Outlook last day

January 29, 2010

Today is the last day of the wonderful Ubuntu Developer Week. As always it passes much too quickly. On the other hand we’ll now all have a bit more time to put our ideas into action and play around with all the new things we learnt… but I’m getting ahead of myself, there’s still one day left! Let’s re-cap yesterday: Adopt-an-Upstream: Jorge and I had a great time giving this talk.

UDW day 3, Outlook Day 4

January 28, 2010

Time flies when it’s Ubuntu Developer Week. 5 days is just too short. Let’s re-cap what happened on day 3, yesterday. Writing good test-cases: this was a top-notch talk by John Arbash Meinel. Not only did he give a fantastic overview of today’s state of the art of proactively testing software, but also did he dive into the theory behind it and managed to get across a good feeling for what to bear in mind when writing test-cases.

Photo Story (for Robert Collins)

January 27, 2010

So Robert doesn’t believe me… there’s only little barriers too far to walk over to the bridge and cross that TADAAAAA! dunno how these got here I wasn’t the only one who had the idea

Mixtape: Follow the Light

January 27, 2010

Random Movement - Scotch Bonnet (Intrigue 004) Calibre - Hold Back - Jah (Creative Source 036) Electrosoul System - Liquid Metal (Kosmos 007) Artificial Intelligence - Crocodile Smile (PLV 003) Calibre - Our Love, Part 1 (Creative Source 002LPSE2) Henree - A New Luv (Soundtrax 015) DJ Marky & XRS - Going Deaf (Innerground 013) DJ Marky And Drumagick - Super Bass (Beatmaster 004) Random Movement - Sabina (Innerground 020) Sub Focus - Follow The Light (RAM 078) Mutated Forms - Storm in a Teacup (Allsorts 015) State Of Mind - Deadzone (SOM 001) Electrosoul System - Doom Star (Kosmos 006)

UDW Day 2, Outlook Day 3

January 27, 2010

This is the fifth time we are running Ubuntu Developer Week and it always makes me a very happy man. The excitement, the fantastic talks, the really sharp people attending the sessions, the great questions and the sense of learning something new and also the sense of starting new projects soon with that new knowledge. Also I got a lot of great comments about Lernid, so if you haven’t tried it yet, be sure to give it a spin.

UDW Day 1, Outlook Day 2, quick announcement

January 26, 2010

HOLY COW… what a first day of Ubuntu Developer Week! Let’s go through yesterday’s sessions one by one. Getting Started with Ubuntu Development: we had a great start in the first session, between 300 and 400 people attended it and we were able to resolve lots and lots of questions around the initial steps of developing Ubuntu. Check out the log if you want to start your journey too. :) Fixing small Ubuntu bugs: I simply love these sessions.

Quick service announcement: Ubuntu One talk and Launchpad Translations swapped

January 25, 2010

The Ubuntu Developer Week timetable has just been updated: the correct dates and times are: Tue, 26th Jan 17:00 UTC, Adding Ubuntu One support to your applications, Stuart Langridge (aquarius) Wed, 27th Jan 17:00 UTC, Launchpad Translations under the hood, Adi Roiban (adiroiban) and Henning Engers (henninge) Please update your calendar. Hope you’re going to enjoy the sessions!

Ubuntu Developer Week - just about to kick off!

January 25, 2010

I’m really really excited for Ubuntu Developer Week to kick off again. We have top-notch sessions lined up where developers will talk from their experience and share their tips for getting started. I hope to see you there later on and that you bring many many friends. The best and easiest way to get connected is Lernid. 16:00 UTC, Getting Started with UbuntuDevelopment – Daniel Holbach (dholbach): The first session of the week is going to get you started with Ubuntu development.

Django and the LoCo Directory

January 19, 2010

If you’re confronted with the task of setting up some kind of website that allows some kind of user interaction, you suddenly have two tasks: first find out which of the many “web frameworks” you want to use and second to implement the whole thing. There was a couple of reasons why I thought I’d try out Django. First I like using python whenever possible, but there’s also been recommendations of friends and coworkers that were far beyond usual fanboyism.

Announcing Ubuntu Developer Week

January 12, 2010

Welcome to the Ubuntu Developer Week! We will have one week of action-packed sessions from Jan 25th 2010 to Jan 29th 2010! Ubuntu Developer Week is a series of online workshops where you can: learn about different packaging techniques find out more about different development teams check out the efforts of the world-wide Development Community participate in open Q&A sessions with Ubuntu developers much more… All sessions will happen on IRC, and the best way to join is to use Lernid.

You're into Free Culture? Share with Ubuntu

December 31, 2009

As part of the Ubuntu community we’re quite used to the concept of sharing our work with others. Not just because we’re all good and selfless people but because we deeply believe that by actively making the fruits of our labour available to others we make the world more diverse and interesting, solve problems and generally make it a better place. There luckily today are countless and successful examples of this and Ubuntu fits perfectly into this world of sharing.

LoCo Directory progress

December 24, 2009

I’m very very pleased with the progress we’ve been making on the code of the LoCo Directory. Lots of ideas, patches, translations and fixes have been pouring in and it has been a pleasure to work with a lot of people from various LoCo teams of the world. 0.1.0 was the first milestone we wanted to release. It was supposed to be “just functional” and help to replace the long list o’ LoCos.

Transparency and keeping everybody on the same page

December 11, 2009

The Ubuntu development landscape and the whole project has grown so much that it gets harder and harder for everybody to follow what’s going on in each and every team and across the board every day. There’s a lot of different cases where this becomes obvious: An announce sent to a team list might be missed by others who it might concern as well. A conversation in a bug report might not get the exposure it actually deserves.

The Ubuntu IRC world needs you

December 7, 2009

The Ubuntu IRC Council is looking for people who are willing to help: If you are interested in the Ubuntu IRC world and in improving and sustaining transparent and healthy governance in this area, we would like to hear from you. The only preconditions for nominees are that you be an Ubuntu member and that you be passionate about improving IRC governance, in particular in the areas outlined by the CC as their principal governance expectations.

Ubuntu Membership: debunking myths

December 4, 2009

One thing I really like about Ubuntu is that all kinds of contributions to Ubuntu are valued and recognised through Ubuntu membership. We have several hundreds of Ubuntu members already who have all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of different areas of expertise. They are united by having made significant and sustained contributions to Ubuntu. There are a number of myths about Ubuntu membership that we want to debunk. If you come across somebody who’s uncertain about Ubuntu membership, tell them:

Rocking hard: Ubuntu Allstars at UDS

November 4, 2009

As you’ve all heard this Ubuntu Developer Summit is going to be in Dallas, Texas and we will have five action-packed days in which we set the goals for Ubuntu 10.04, code-named the Lucid Lynx. The end of UDS is going to be very special, we’ll have an Ubuntu Allstars Jam again. This is how it’s going to work: if you play an instrument, sing or can contribute to a jam in any way, we need you.

Mixtape: Everything's Different

October 29, 2009

DJ SUV - Saharah (Playside 007) Danny C & Addiction - Feel It (Movement EP 003 Pt 1) A-Sides & Makoto - Spacetrain (Eastside 082) Break - Let It Happen VIP (Shogun 028) Zinc feat. Slarta Jon - Flim (Calibre Vocal Mix) (Bingo 015) Calibre - Don’t Mind (Signature 014) Bonobo feat. Andreya Triana - The Keeper (Redeyes Remix) (ZEN 12247) Break - Winter Sun (Shogun 028) High Contrast - Everything’s Different (Hospital 116) Tomahawk - Straw Dogs (Hospital 7005) White label (Tears 01) Lil Louie - French Kiss (RMXS 01) Nu:Tone - Seven Years (Matrix Remix) (Hospital 087)

Koala Parties!

October 27, 2009

I just had another look at the list of Ubuntu 9.10 Relase Parties and it’s AMAZING. There’s tons of parties all around the globe and they all are truly deserved celebrations of all the hard work that thousands of people put into Ubuntu and Open Source more generally. Make sure you add your party to the map. In Berlin we’ll celebrate on Saturday in our favourite hacker-space location: c-base. Caspar already spilled the beans about it: Berliner Fenster, heroes of Berlinian metro TV make sure Ubuntu and our party get a mention:

Perfect timing

October 13, 2009

Cities of the World

September 30, 2009

What do Kuala Lumpur, Vienna, Banbury, Berlin, Pristina, Sheffield, Thessaloniki, Prague, Hull, Isfahan, Hampshire, Bogota, Vancouver, Kitchener, College Station, Cleveland, Chicago, Colorado, New York, Raleigh, Gainesville, Orlando, Tallahassee, Lakeland, Dublin, Lleida, Århus, Bern have in common? These cities are full of awesome and know how to party! They either have fully planned their release party already or are discussing it right now. Ubuntu 9.10 is planned for October 29th, so start planning a release party and add yours to the list of awesome cities.

Ubuntu Global Jam: Berlin

September 23, 2009

We are only one-and-a-half weeks away from bringing together awesome people to do awesome things across the globe - it’s time for the Ubuntu Global Jam. The Ubuntu Berlin team is one of the lucky teams that are participating and I thought I’d talk a bit about what we’re going to do. The Venue I’ve been in touch with a lot of other LoCo teams and some told me that they had trouble finding a venue.

Mixtape: It's Jazzy

September 21, 2009

Hobzee & Zyon Base & Brother - 125th Street (Fokuz 037) Alix Perez feat. MC Fats - Down the Line (Break Remix) (Shogun Audio 027) Zinc feat. Slarta Jon - Flim (Calibre Vocal Mix) (Bingo 015) Mathematics feat. Alison Crockett - Drowning (D.Kay Remix) (Social Studies 003) High Contrast - Full Intention (Hospital 034) Syncopix - Together Again (Logistics Remix) (Syncopix 004) Logistics - Digital Love (Hospital 7005) Bebel Gilberto - Aganjú (Commix Vocal Mix) (White label) Rony Size - It’s Jazzy (Liquid V 008) Atlantic Connection feat.

Ubuntu Global Jam Preparations in full swing

September 15, 2009

The preparations for the Ubuntu Global Jam are ticking on very very nicely. In case you haven’t heard of it yet: teams around the world are going to meet up on the weekend of October 2nd-4th and make Ubuntu better by doing whatever they do best: work on bug reports do packaging or development test Ubuntu translate Ubuntu document Ubuntu It really doesn’t matter what you or your team are good at, as long as you meet somewhere, have fun and improve Ubuntu in some way.

Wanted: Ubuntu Presentations

September 14, 2009

You gave a presentation about Ubuntu somewhere? You still have the presentation lying around somewhere? Perfect, please head to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Presentations and add it there! Thanks! :-)

Iceland pictures

September 14, 2009

It took a bit, but I uploaded pictures of the Iceland trip a few days ago. One photo I wanted to share here: Seems like Reykjvavík loves Ubuntu! :-)

UDW: Summary Day 5 - Thanks!

September 7, 2009

So Ubuntu Developer Week is over for this year. It’s been amazing as always, just a little bit better. It was just incredible to see 420 people following the sessions at times and so many good questions coming in. Here’s the summary of the last day: Translations for developers: Danilo Šegan, David Planella and Martin Pitt gave an almost complete overview over what’s happening in the translations world. Language packs, Launchpad Translations, how to mark strings as translatable, etc.

UDW: Summary Day 4 – Outlook Last Day

September 4, 2009

Day 4 of Ubuntu Developer Week was amazing - lots of people, lots of fun, lots of great new things learned! Let Mago do your Desktop testing for you: Ara Pulido kicked off Day 4 with a very nice overview of Mago and an excellent example of how to test-drive gedit. It’s really simple to start test-driving your application in an automated way, so get involved today. Paper cutting 101: David Siegel held an excellent session about Paper Cuts and how to fix them.

UDW: Summary Day 3 – Outlook Day 4

September 3, 2009

Wow, I had a fantastic time in yesterday’s sessions and reading the logs afterwards. Let’s recap: Getting started with Launchpad development: Although Graham Binns had to deal with a flaky internet connection, he delivered a great session about developing Launchpad. It’s really not as hard as it seems and the process for getting reviews is really thought-out. Help out to make Launchpad kick ass even more! Developing websites with Django: Not only did Łukasz and Anthony explain how to set up your Django application, they also demo’ed how to create a Django Twittering project.

UDW: Summary Day 2 - Outlook Day 3

September 2, 2009

Day 2 of Ubuntu Developer Week was nothing short of awesome! Lots of great people, lots of action and lots of fun. Fixing small bugs in Ubuntu: The first session was mine. I had chosen four Ubuntu bugs beforehand and we managed to go through all of them and find a fix for them easily. We also covered how to get patches included in Ubuntu and a few other packaging-related bits and pieces here and there.

UDW: Summary Day 1 - Outlook Day 2

September 1, 2009

Ubuntu Developer Week is in full swing and we’ve been off to a fantastic start: 420 people in one channel! WOW! So let’s recap what happened yesterday: Getting Started with UbuntuDevelopment: I did the first session myself and talked for two hours about Ubuntu Development, how to set up your development environment, how it all fits together and we even got to building a simple package. At times I was frantic because there were so many great questions, but it was a lot of fun.

Ubuntu Developer Week 4 about to kick off

August 31, 2009

Ubuntu Developer Week (DIGG - brochure) is starting today and I’m very much excited. From 16:00 UTC to 21:00 UTC we will have four sessions (one double session) that will hopefully pave your way into Ubuntu Development, teach you something new, answer your questions and introduce you to many new friends. All you have to do is join #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net to follow the session and #ubuntu-classroom-chat to ask your questions.

Harvest UI and UDW addendum

August 28, 2009

Harvest UI I’m very happy to say that ~jgraeme stepped up to help out with the Harvest UI. I just merged his branch into lp:~harvest-dev/harvest/django and while we’re not at the great new UI yet, we’re getting closer. Thanks a bunch! The current proposals for the new UI look like this: James’ Harvest Mockup Daniel’s Harvest Mockup It’d be great if you would comment on Harvest/NewUI and give us feedback and consider helping out!

Next week = Ubuntu Developer Week

August 26, 2009

Let others know if you are going yourself! I’m very very excited about next week. Ubuntu Developer Week will happen for the fourth time and we’re still not running out of exciting topics. We’ll have twenty-four action-packed sessions where you can learn more, get involved, ask questions, have fun, meet new friends! If you can’t make it to the session, there will be logs available on the UDW page afterwards.

Computers without internet are no fun

August 21, 2009

You probably heard “Computers without internet are no fun” or “Linux/Ubuntu without internet is no fun” before and your might have had the same feeling the last time your DSL provider hat an outage. Fact is that a lot of areas around the world don’t have a chearp, reliable or fast internet or no internet at all. Ubuntu is used in those areas. The Ubuntu NGO team is trying to make life with Ubuntu easier for organisations working in those areas.

Ubuntu Global Jam

August 19, 2009

I didn’t see much news about the Ubuntu Global Jam in the last time and in the Berlin team, we took a bit of a break from regular jams. In a few days the Ubuntu Berlin team is likely to meet again and talk about how we can best accomodate all kind of people who want to work on Ubuntu directly, becaues that’s essentially what an Ubuntu Jam is: working directly on Ubuntu, with a lot of local people, having lots of fun.

Harvest: new UI

August 19, 2009

I blogged about Harvest and its progress a few days ago already. What I requested in there is still true: we need feedback from current and future users and people who are on speaking terms with modern Web UI. I set up Harvest/NewUI on the Ubuntu Wiki which contains mockups and suggested use-cases of the new site. Please leave a comment, help with the integration or draw a new mockup. Let’s make the new Harvest kick arse!

Definitely going...

August 19, 2009

How about you?

Ubuntu Developer Week - 31st August to 4th September 2009

August 17, 2009

I’m incredibly happy to announce the fourth Ubuntu Developer Week! You are excited about Ubuntu, always had the feeling you want to „give back“ in one form or the other and you didn’t know how? Ubuntu Developer Week is the perfect opportunity for you to get involved and get a closer look at what’s happening behind the scenes. Make sure you mark the dates from Monday, 31st August 2009 to Friday, 4th September 2009 in your calendar!

Ubuntu NGO Team update

August 17, 2009

I’m very very happy with the progress the Ubuntu NGO team has been making. Our very basic objective is to make Ubuntu work better for NGOs doing charitable work around the globe. This involves documentation of best-practices, packaging of certain applications, thinking about tools to cope with areas that have no or little internet connectivity, etc. Also do we want to create some publicity for projects that make use of Ubuntu already.

Harvest needs UI Love

August 12, 2009

It’s been a while since Harvest was announced. To many it seems to be a very useful service, trying to aggregate opportunities for Ubuntu developers from various other lists. Some ideas worked out very well (aggregation on a per-package level, categorisation, etc.), only the code was a bit hard to work on. After various discussions with people like James Westby, Brian Murray and others we wanted to explore a framework that makes our lives easier.

I've been busy...

July 16, 2009

…with a number of things recently. I haven’t blogged much about it, so here’s some collective notes. LoCo Directory. I had the privilege of working with great people like Richard Johnson, Efrain Valles, Anthony Lenton, Kees Cook, Christophe Sauthier and the whole LoCo Council on a great Django adventure. It just passed a security review, so I guess we are going to get it online after my holidays. In the 0.

Mixtape: It's Jazzy

July 13, 2009

Alix Perez - Down The Line (Shogun 012) Random Movement & Mixmaster Doc - Rattled System (Integral 012) Baby Origami - Play Around (Advanced 024) Subverse - Moving On (Sensor 005) Cyantific feat. Dianne Charlemagne - Don’t Follow (Hospital 091) Trei - Sound Down (Commercial Suicide 046) Henree - We Got Sound (Walnut 003) Makoto - Sentimental Moods (Creative Sound 059) Rony Size - It’s Jazzy (Liquid V 008) Commix - Faceless (Marcus Intalex Remix) (Shogun 018) Agent Alvin - Drift Away (Hospital 154) Eveson - Food For Thought (Good Looking 067)

Summertime

July 10, 2009

Guess where we’re headed… :-) We will leave on 18th July and get back 8th August. Two fantastic weeks of hiking and travelling in a marvellous landscape. I’m so looking forward to it. Afterwards we’re going to be one week in Austria to attend Mimi’s sister’s wedding.

Community Council: Nominations

July 8, 2009

In order to get the Community Council from four to eight members again, we are going to have an election in a few weeks. All Ubuntu members are eligible to vote. I will announce the details of the election soon. What we want from you now is nominations. If you know somebody in the Ubuntu community, who has been an Ubuntu member for a while is dedicated to the project is well-respected and known for balanced views and good leadership has a good overview over various aspects of the project is organised and has some organisation talent (or you know that this all applies to you), please send an email to me (daniel.

LinuxTag 2009 Ubuntu Berlin Barbecue

June 25, 2009

Date: Saturday,June 27th 2009, beginning 18 pm Location: c-base, Rungestr. 20, Berlin-Mitte On Saturday, the Ubuntu Berlin Team invites everybody to participate in our third LinuxTag-Barbecue. We will provide free food (also vegetarian), and drinks are sold at the bar. c-base is a famous computer club right in the heart of Berlin, near Jannowitzbrücke. To get there you can take the S5 (direction Strausberg), S75 (direction Wartenberg) or S9 (direction Flughafen Schönefeld), all three are leaving from the station “Messe Süd”.

Ubuntu NGO team set up - it needs your help!

June 22, 2009

It’s been five weeks since I started some research around the topic and I’m quite happy with the comments and the subsequent discussion at UDS. Ubuntu has become a much broader movement than just being a great operating system. There’s thousands and thousands of people who united behind “I am what I am because of who we all are"; who believe in helping out, sharing, being a good neighbour and enabling people generally.

Change

June 17, 2009

What is happening in Iran right now is absolutely incredible. Behdad did a great job at summarising what happened up until 15th June. Andrew Sullivan’s “The Daily Dish” is blogging non-stop about what’s happening right now.

Free Culture in Ubuntu

June 16, 2009

You’re involved in Free Culture? You want to get your music, video or picture out to millions of people? Check out the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase! Every Ubuntu Karmic CD might include your piece of art. Participate! :-)

Want to learn more about Ubuntu Development and Packaging?

June 4, 2009

So you’re interested in helping out? Making Ubuntu better? Learn something new? Fix problems in Ubuntu for millions of users? Let me know what kind of training sessions you would like to see, what kind of videos, what kind of recipes. Thanks in advance for your comments.

You're using Ubuntu in your NGO?

May 14, 2009

When Ubuntu was first announced, I was intrigued by what Ubuntu meant and the explanation “I am what I am because of who we all are” describes best what my whole Ubuntu experience has been like since then. It very much was and very much still is the spirit of helping and sharing. At UDS in Barcelona I want us to have a session about the use of Ubuntu in NGOs to think a bit more about what is needed from Ubuntu and what further ideas we can think of.

Ubuntu Berlin Jaunty Release Party!

April 30, 2009

Thanks to the fantastic organisers team of Ubuntu Berlin we had a great release party at c-base. As some of you already know we had adverts in the Berlin’s metro TV system again, so we had a bunch of new people who had never heard of Ubuntu before but were curious about what it was. We had a barbecue there, more than 200 visitors, sold 70 CDs and 20 USB sticks, we copied Ubuntu on lots and lots of USB sticks and some nice music afterwards.

Hug-alicious

April 29, 2009

daniel@miyazaki:~/.xchat2/xchatlogs$ grep "dholbach hugs" * | wc -l 4645 daniel@miyazaki:~/.xchat2/xchatlogs$

Mixtape: Ashram

April 29, 2009

Electrosoul System - With You (Innerground 027) ? (Panties 001) Seba & Krazy - Finola (Innerground 026) Big Bud - Kiki (Soundtrax 027) Calibre - Don’t Mind (Signature 014) Drumagick - So Far Away (Innerground 027) Bungle - Be Like This (Critical 036) Bungle - The Need Of Being Alone (Soul:R 036) ES9 + Sonic - Constantly Warm (06S 003) Sonic & Makoto - Tearing Soul (Sonic 019) Klute - Ashram (Commercial Suicide 045) Redeyes feat.

It's Ubuntu 9.04 Release Day!

April 23, 2009

Ubuntu 9.04 will be out real soon now and it’s a fantastic release. It’s the tenth time the Ubuntu community pushes out a release and having used every single one of them the thought that what you’re downloading and installing is the combined work of dozens of thousands of Open Source contributors doesn’t cease to amaze me. My overall feeling of the Jaunty cycle is that we as the big Ubuntu Development team have matured a lot.

Audio Endeavours

March 29, 2009

I blogged about my funny audio problems before. In the end I got the Ubuntu-related problems figured out, but still I got weird noise in the recordings; the recording process even picked up radio. Some friends told me that their guitar amplifiers in some cases picked up radio too, others thought I was kidding. You could imagine: Drum’n’Bass mixtapes with radio announcements and classical music in them would suck slightly. :-)

Time to Party!

March 19, 2009

I was just thinking today “How many releases did we do already?” and I realised 9.04 is going to be our tenth release! Don’t believe me? Let’s count them through: Warty Warthog, 4.10 Hoary Hedgehog, 5.04 Breezy Badger, 5.10 Dapper Drake, 6.06 Edgy Eft, 6.10 Feisty Fawn, 7.04 Gutsy Gibbon, 7.10 Hardy Heron, 8.04 Intrepid Ibex, 8.10 Soon to come: Jaunty Jackalope, 9.04 Holy cow, it’s too easy to forget at which mad pace we together are spreading Ubuntu - sounds like we should have some HUGE celebration!

Packaging Training

March 10, 2009

Nicolas Valcárcel and I just had a quick discussion about regular Packaging Training sessions. Based on the experience with the past MOTU Q&A sessions and Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week sessions, we’d like to propose the following idea and invite developers who are keen to train and help getting new developers started. Have weekly one-hour sessions in #ubuntu-classroom that consist of a short demonstration and offer plenty of time to ask all kind of questions.

We Stand Together

March 6, 2009

At Boston’s airport Jono and Jorge just couldn’t resist. :-)

Two great reads

March 1, 2009

The tagline of today’s issue of the Full Circle magazine reminded me a lot of the book below. Make sure you read them both!

Audio Help Needed

February 27, 2009

Some people might have realised the lack of new mixtapes in my blog already. The good news: I still like music, I still like Drum’n’Bass and I still like DJing. The bad news: recording got more difficult. Up until now I used a small python I script I wrote to record the mixtapes. It basically just wrapped around gst-launch-0.10 pulsesrc ! queue ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=<somefile>

Global Bug Jam - Berlin - ROCKING!

February 21, 2009

Cold Weather? Check! (No interesting outdoor activity.) Fancy location - Check! Laptop, cookies, tangerines, internet? Check! Great people? CHECK! The first participants have already arrived and we’re having a great time going through bugs. For more info check out GlobalBugJam - it has a section with possible bug targets! :-) Add your Global Bug Jam stories to GlobalBugJam/Stories.

5-A-Day is back

February 18, 2009

Couldn’t be bothered to use the old 5-A-Day tool or the applet and didn’t participate because of that? I’ve good news for you: join the 5-a-day-participants team. The rest will be taken care of for you. Updated stats will be available just in time for Global Bug Jam! Don’t know what 5-A-Day is yet? Check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day Do me a favour: spread the news. Let your friends, loco buddies and everybody else know!

Half a year of Jamming in Berlin

February 17, 2009

Just send this mail to ubuntu-event-planners (Sign up here) and loco-contacts (Sign up here): with the Global Bug Jam coming up at the end of the week, I thought I’d share the experience we made in the Berlin team, where we had Jams every two weeks for about half a year now. The obvious aim of all Ubuntu Jams is: make Ubuntu better and have fun in your local team. To answer the question “When is a Jam a success?

Wanted: more Balkan Beats

February 14, 2009

I’ve not been asking the Lazy web a lot yet, but I hope to get some good recommendations here. I’m looking for “Balkan Beats” music on vinyl. Inspired by the legendary Bucovina and Balkanbeats parties and compilations, I’ve been looking for that kind of music for a bit longer now. I already have: Balkanbeats, Part 3 Shantel, Disko Partizani Shantel, Bucovina EP Shantel, Bucovina Vol. 2 EP Let me know if you found more.

LoCo Docs Day aka "Rock the Docs"!

February 12, 2009

I’m totally excited the LoCo community is taking matters into their own hands and do work that you normally get little credit for: fixing and improving documentation. The Ubuntu LoCo world is just amazing. It’s the people who take Ubuntu out there, it’s the people with whom new people often first get involved with. Show them how awesome they are and lend them a hand: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoDocsDay has a list of things that need improvements and fixing.

Ubuntu Fanclubs

January 27, 2009

Up until today the Ubuntu community did not strike me too much as a Fanboy community. OK, you can thank people on the Hall of Fame, but that’s not really obsessive. What’s obsessive is this: one, two, three. Update: four and five. Let me know if there’s more. :-)

Global Bug Jam Preparation

January 27, 2009

A lot of people are busy organising their participation in the Global Bug Jam event. Which, as you all know, is going to be awesome. So I gazed into my crystal ball and this is what’s cooking at the moment: The Irish Team is busy planning. The Loco Forums are on the same page too. Denmark is thinking about participating too. THERE’S A GLOBAL BUG JAM PROMO VIDEO! Philadelphia is in on the fun.

In preparation of Global Bug Jam

January 26, 2009

As you all know already, we have the Global Bug Jam coming up soon and in preparation we’re going to have a few “How to run a Bug Jam” sessions in #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode IRC: 1/30/09 1200 UTC Daniel Holbach 1/31/09 0000 UTC Jorge Castro 2/13/09 1200 UTC Daniel Holbach 2/14/09 0000 UTC Jorge Castro Make sure to tell your Loco and all your friends. Our “Material” section about Bug Jams is looking quite already, but we could do with a bunch more screencasts and videos!

Week of Awesome - Last Day

January 26, 2009

The 3rd Ubuntu Developer Week is over and thanks to the tireless work of the Scribes team all the logs are available here. Let’s do a quick re-cap of what happened on day 5: Lars Wirzenius talked about Testing your .deb with piuparts. It was a fun session, where major features of piuparts were discussed. Use it as a health-check for your package’s installability and upgradeability. Thanks Lars! The unstoppable Michael Vogt talked about Fun with python-apt.

Week of Awesome - Day 4

January 23, 2009

What a day… what a day! Day 4 was interesting, impressive, fantastic. Let’s have a quick re-cap: Ara Pulido started the day with talking about Automated Desktop Testing. she shared a secret during her session, it’s a very simple truth: “testing software is FUN - not boring, not tedious, but FUN”. The session was very interesting, take a look at it, find out how it works and you can make Desktop Software rock even harder.

Week of Awesome - Day 3

January 22, 2009

With day 3 behind us the majority of sessions have already been held, unfortunately, but what an exciting day 3 it was. Let’s re-cap what happened: Sebastien Bacher was the first on that day and he talked about Pushing out GNOME releases to millions of users. I was particularly excited to see this session happening as I had been part of the fun for many months and I learned so much from this great French man, Mr.

Week of Awesome - Day 2

January 21, 2009

What a fantastic day 2 it was. Lots of excited people, lots of great sessions and lots of new participants in the Ubuntu landscape. Yoohooo! Let’s recap day 2: First up was Tom ‘intellectronica’ Berger, who talked about Launchpad Bug Tracking. He had a nice approach to finding out how experienced everybody was with our bug tracker, nicknamed ‘Malone’: he asked everybody to rate their experience on a scale from 0-10.

Week of Awesome - Day 1

January 20, 2009

Holy cow, this was a very exciting start for a Ubuntu Developer Week. We had lots and lots of attendants and I was surprised how many really great questions we got and how awesome the atmosphere was. Everybody is really thrilled about getting started with Ubuntu Development. WOW! We kicked it all off with a two hour session called Getting Started. For the first time we had the session in English, Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Week of Awesome ... soon to begin

January 19, 2009

The Week of Awesome is about to begin real soon now and I for one am very excited. We’ve been working hard on getting a fantastic line-up of Ubuntu rockstars together and I think we’ve succeeded. We have a very diverse set of sessions this time and I’m sure there’s something in there for all of you. How to join in? Just join #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net to follow along the sessions (if you can’t attend, read the logs here afterwards).

Mixtape: Old Times

January 14, 2009

Calibre - Don’t Mind (Signature 014) Redeyes feat. Sweed - Poetry In Motion (Spearhead 019) Redeyes feat. Deeizm - Luv & Haight (Spearhead 019) Furney - Pipez (Good Looking 069) London Elektricity - Cum Dancing V.I.P. (Hospital 056LP) Cookie Monsters - Keep It Coming (Infrared Spectrum 003) London Elektricity - To Be Me (Hospital 056LP) Bungle - Be Like This (Critical 036) _Shy FX & T Power - Feelings (Nu:Tone Remix) (Digital Soundboy _17) Peyo - Old Times (Good Looking 070) London Elektricity - Fast Soul Music (Hospital 056LP) The Funktastics - Wild Willy (Good Looking 070)

Ubuntu Berlin Jam Team in 2009

January 12, 2009

The new year has started and tomorrow 17:00 - 20:00 we’re going to meet at c-base again to kick off a great new year for Ubuntu Jams. In some ways it’s going to stay the same as last year: there’s going to be an awesome bunch of people, we’re going to work on bug reports, packaging problems and we’re going to have a lot of fun making Ubuntu even better.

Get to know a LoCo

January 12, 2009

Via Paul Mellors. How to replicate: Get Ubuntu, get a webcam and get cheese Create a sign (which LoCo you’re from) Blog :-) My 5 today: #315769 (last-align), #315535 (ubuntu), #315881 (nautilus-sendto), #309684 (exiv2), #316026 (imlib2) Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

Ubuntu Developer Week is back again!

January 9, 2009

I’m absolutely excited to share this piece of news: the Ubuntu Developer Week is back again. From Jan 19th to Jan 23rd we’re going to have loads of awesome sessions where Ubuntu developers share their secret of success, spend time answering all of your questions, help you to get involved. It’s an awesome opportunity to get started, get to know a lot of people and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

It's cold in Berlin

January 6, 2009

Hardly surprising - it’s winter. Funnily enough my panel applet said it was 4°C for some weeks now. This surprised me because the ice and snow outside, the freezing canal nearby and my chattering teeth when I was walking the dog definitely felt a lot lot colder. It looked like the 4°C in the applet were stuck somehow. It struck me yesterday: I had set the applet to Berlin Tempelhof airport (since it was closest to me), but as it was closed down a few weeks ago, the 4°C stuck.

Thanking people

January 5, 2009

Now that christmas is over and you had lots of quiet days with your family in front of the fireplace (or something similar), didn’t you sometimes pause and think: “I need to thank X for the great work."? If you did, please head over to the Hall of Fame, click on “Nominate Somebody” and tell us why you think X is doing so much great work. I’m sure X will appreciate it.

No More Holy Cows!

December 22, 2008

Debian and Ubuntu have great packaging tools and a great build process. If you never got involved into packaging and distro development, but just care about the distro itself and its quality, here’s why it is so great: We have one build process that applies to all kinds of open source projects, being it C or C++ autotools projects, Python modules using distutils, a set of PHP scripts, something involving CMake or using scons, etc.

Why I believe in Ubuntu

December 19, 2008

In response to Jono’s excellent blogpost about the Ubuntu Ethos here’s why I believe in Ubuntu. For me Ubuntu is very very much about the people. From the first second (in the no-name-yet days) on I enjoyed being with the Ubuntu people. I felt very welcome by everybody and it was instantly clear to me that everybody deeply believes in “I am what I am because of who we all are”.

Ask MOTU

December 19, 2008

Q: I want to get a patch / an updated package into Ubuntu - what do I need to bear in mind? A: Make use of our Sponsorship Process. What does that mean? Basically you either file a bug report or follow up on an existing one, attach your patch (or the new source package - you can link to it too), subscribe ubuntu-universe-sponsors or ubuntu-main-sponsors and our team of reviewers will check it out and give you feedback - once it’s all good, they’ll upload it for you.

Sharing The Secret Of Success

December 18, 2008

Hello my friends, we’re gearing up towards another Ubuntu Developer Week in January. Again we’ll have a week worth of IRC sessions where you can jump right in, participate, learn and ask all your questions. Ubuntu is all about the people and we have a bunch of very sharp people in our community you can learn from. Did you ever wonder how Magic Seb manages to package an entirely new version of GNOME in just 24h what Martin Pitt‘s breakfast consists of to get so much stuff done during the day (interesting for this lot) how Pete Graner manages to mass-test the Kernel which kind of tea helps Michael Vogt to produce bundles of awesome every day what kind of black Ninja suits you get once you join the Ubuntu QA team You get the idea: we want to make Ubuntu Developer Week ROCK, therefore we need to know what you like, what you want to learn, what would excite you and help you get started.

Alberto Milone

December 12, 2008

We have a new featured contributor on the Hall of Fame: Alberto Milone! Congratulations! Make sure you thank him for his great work. :-)

FOSSCamp

December 3, 2008

I’m very excited to be at FOSSCamp on Friday! Are you going to be there as well? We should have a Packaging Jam there - who of you will join in? :-) My 5 today: #304570 (swfdec-mozilla), #304538 (gucharmap), #304606 (memcachedb), #304642 (gnotime) Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

Celebrating Ubuntu's Unsung Heroes

December 3, 2008

What I like best about the Hall of Fame is definitely the “featured contributor”. There’s so many people in our project that do awesome work in so many different ways. Some of them are not very vocal about the awesomeness they put into Ubuntu and don’t get the credits they deserve, being it as a developer, artist, forum person, wiki writer, documenter, LoCo organiser, system administrator, etc. etc. The “featured contributor” helps to give an insight into what people are doing in the Ubuntu project and gives us all a chance to stop for a moment and thank them.

Google Juice

December 2, 2008

It seems that my mixtapes turn up very early in the results when you’re searching for “drum’n’bass mixtapes". I just hope the listeners are as happy as the page rank suggest. :-)

If you REALLY want to share a taxi at UDS...

December 1, 2008

… please mention WHEN you arrive and WHERE! There are a lot of entries with no data about the arrival departure at all no information if you’re going to land at San Jose or San Francisco A minor point is probably that everybody uses a different format for specifying date and time, which makes it very hard to spot who arrives when. (It’s probably just me, but I prefer something like “2008-09-12 15:45” … local time.

Mixtape: Through The Gate

December 1, 2008

Atlantic Connection feat. Kemst - Touch This (Westbay LP001-S1) Calibre feat. DRS - Hustlin (Signature 012) DJ Honda - Travellin’ Man (Remix) (Jacked 001) Kjell - Dunnshine (Creative Source 054) London Elektricity - All Hell Is Breaking Loose (Hospital 142LPX) DJ Marky & Bungle - No Time 2 Love (Innerground 015) London Elektricity - Round The Corner (Origin Unknown Vocal Mix) (Hospital 026) Seba & Krazy - Arsenic (Innerground 026) Artificial Intelligence - Through the Gate (V Records 047) Marcus Intalex - Out of Touch (Revolve:R 008) Seba & Krazy - Finola (Innerground 026) Apex - The Yearning (Horizons 028)

Berlin Packaging Jam

November 27, 2008

I simply love this postcard. Loosely translated it says something like “The Berliners are unfriendly and inconsiderate, opinionated and gruff, Berlin is repulsive, noisy, dirty and gray, clogged roads and construction sites everywhere - but I pity everybody who can not live here!” Who knows me a bit, knows that I absolutely agree with what it says. For those who do live here: today is another Packaging Jam in Berlin’s c-base from 17:00 to 20:00.

Ubuntu Interviews

November 25, 2008

I just created https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Interviews and merged in all the Developer Interviews that I knew of. It’s just great to be able subscribe to the page and learn about exciting stuff people in our community have pulled off. Please add more interviews of Ubuntu members to it, I’m thinking of adding a box with the latest interviews to the HoF. My 5 today: #301724 (gimp), #301895 (openocd), #301009 (portmap), #70566 (usplash, casper), #111021 (minicom)

The HoF

November 21, 2008

<insert 'The Hoff' joke here> I’m very pleased the Ubuntu Hall of Fame is announced. It’s been great to work with Stuart Langridge: he’s a rockstar himself and his Web skills are simply phenomenal; on top of that he didn’t even mind my stupid questions. :-) The HoF is great in many ways: it serves as a window into many parts of our community: translations, bug work, development, work with upstream, but also showcases dedicated members of our community in areas that are probably less measurable.

Combining Bug Jams and Packaging Jams

November 11, 2008

Today is another Bug Jam day in Berlin. Hope to see you all at c-base later on. At some of the last Bug Jams, Berlin’s release party and other conversations I’ve had, there were lots of of requests for coupling Bug Jams and Packaging Jams. The “Fixing a bug in Ubuntu - it’s easier than you think” session at Ubuntu Open Week last Friday showed me how much excitement there is and that it’s probably a good idea.

3rd Free Software Congress

November 4, 2008

I’m going to give a talk at the 3rd Free Software Congress in Alicante, Spain on November 6th. It’s going to be about “Ubuntu Development in the bigger picture”: how Ubuntu development works, what’s planned for the future, challenges we face and what’s so exciting about it all. I’m looking forward to talking to everybody interest in Ubuntu, free software development in general and our awesome community. If you’re going to be there yourself and want to chat with me or have a beer, drop me a line.

Berlin action

November 3, 2008

The Berlin release party was excellent. Lots and lots of people, very likely due to the great support of “Berliner Fenster” (the company that runs the announcement/news screens in the Berlin metros) Thanks a lot, dear supporters at Berliner Fenster. So what was the party like? We met in Berlin’s c-base (the sunken spaceship) and around 150-200 people showed up. There was a very busy schedule of interesting talks and lots of chatting on the hallways.

Another special day in Berlin

October 23, 2008

It’s another Bug Jam day in Berlin. As all of you know we meet in Berlin’s c-base (did you see the video from the people who decided to have Maemo Summit there?) every 2nd Tuesday in the month and every 4th Thursday in the month from 17:00 to 20:00 local time and have fun working on bugs. This time we’re going to pick a like 10 bugs off a couple of lists each and make sure we work through them as a team.

WANTED: Help with Interviews

October 21, 2008

James Westby, Jorge Castro and I were just talking about Ubuntu Developer Interviews. Wouldn’t you just love it to learn quickly and regularly about new exciting features that are happening? Learn more about the developers themselves and maybe even how you could get involved and join in on the fun? I have just a very few, very quick questions to you, please add a comment to the blog if you have an answer:

https://launchpad.net/~5-a-day

October 16, 2008

I just made the ~5-a-day team in Launchpad restricted and removed everybody but the people who worked on the 5-a-day tools in the past. Since version 0.43 joining the 5-a-day in Launchpad is not necessary any more, as everybody pushes to their own branches anyway. The 5-a-day team was not renamed to “5-a-day developers”. Here the instructions on how to join in on the fun: add the 5-a-day PPA to your sources list sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install five-a-day bzr launchpad-login 5-a-day –add So don’t consider yourself “thrown out”, this is a security measure, since up until now everybody on the (formerly open) team could just have uploaded to the PPA.

Bug Jam in Berlin!

October 14, 2008

It’s time for another Bug Jam again. Today we’re going to meet again at c-base and have a great time triaging bug reports and help fixing some issues in intrepid. If you can’t make it this time, no problem. Since last month we meet: every 2nd Tuesday in the month and every 4th Thursday in the month from 17:00 to 20:00 local time. Never triaged bugs before? No problem, we’ll show you how.

Regular Bug Jams in Berlin kicked off!

September 26, 2008

Rock and Roll! There are no other words for it! Yesterday we had the first of our regularly happening Bug Jams and it was awesome. ~15 people showed up, most of them very new to Bug Triage, but very excited. Thankfully holding bug jams is not very complicated any more. The Material section on the wiki has lots of good stuff, including a great presentation about getting started with Bug Triage.

Putting Ubuntu to the Test

September 19, 2008

Unfortunately the unstoppable Ara Pulido is not (yet) on Planet Ubuntu, so here’s the announce of Ubuntu Testing Day: We are pleased to announce the first Ubuntu Testing Day, that will be next Monday, September 22nd. The Ubuntu Testing day is a special day where the Ubuntu Community comes together with a shared goal of testing an specific set of ISO images (Alpha, Beta, RC, Gold or Point releases). Taking the idea from the Ubuntu Bug Day, we want to apply the same concepts to ISO testing.

Getting Started...

September 12, 2008

You all know there’s MOTU/GettingStarted and it links to great places to get documentation, videos, bug lists and explanations of all kinds of things from. I’m very happy that James Westby added an instructional video about bzr and distributed development to the list. In addition to that, I’d like to announce that Ubuntu Berlin from now on is going to have regular Bug Jams! Starting from September 25th, we’ll meet

Ubuntu In Popular Culture

September 9, 2008

Yesterday we watched “Berlin am Meer” - not a world-changing, but nice movie filmed in Berlin. As in all other modern movies which happen to be shot in Berlin, I enjoy the sensation of recognising where the scene happened (“Nice, that’s like 5 minutes from here.” or “We’ve been at that spot last weekend.") The movie did not disappoint us in that regard, lots of scenes were shot in Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Treptow.

India

September 8, 2008

Short version: I uploaded pictures of our trip to India. This is the route we chose in the end: Delhi Agra (Fatehpur Sikri) Jaipur Delhi McLeod Ganj Amritsar Chandigarh Shimla Delhi Parts 1-5 are also known as the “Golden Triangle” and is where most tourist offices are likely to send you… although the ones in Delhi tried to send us to Kashmir a couple of times, which looked absolutely fantastic but we didn’t feel safe doing.

Packaging Jam Videos

September 8, 2008

The unstoppable V for Vortex has done it: now we have videos of the Packaging Jam that happened in Berlin earlier this year. Please note: they’re in German, so if you don’t speak the language, better check out the other MOTU Videos instead. Part 1 Part 2 We had a great time there! If you intend to run a packaging jam yourself, don’t hesitate, we have instructions. If you still have questions, just ask me.

Ubuntu Developer Week - Last Day

September 8, 2008

Unfortunately Ubuntu Developer Week is over, but I think I speak for a whole lot of people when I say: it was big fun! Thanks again to all speakers, all participants and the Scribes team who put up logs of the event. Awesome! Let’s re-cap what happened at day 5: Matt Zimmerman kicked off with “Ask Matt". He answered myriads questions about Ubuntu Development plans, syncing of upstream and distro schedules, distributed development, Canonical partners and ltos of other interesting things.

Ubuntu Developer Week feedback

September 5, 2008

I’d like this comment to go out to everybody who held sessions, helped organising Ubuntu Developer Week, participated and helped to make this an AWESOME event: I was able to make Monday’s sessions, since it was Labor Day here in the US, and all the sessions were absolutely awesome. I had to work the rest of the week, but I’ve been faithfully refreshing the #ubuntu-classroom logs every hour (no IRC at work).

Ubuntu Developer Week - Day 4

September 5, 2008

Day 4… and what a great day it was, here a blow-by-blow recap of what happened yesterday: Ara Pulido kicked off the day with “Automated Testing of the Desktop". Ara showed us what amazing stuff she was working on. Check out this fine example: it shows how easy it has become nowadays to test the integral parts of our Ubuntu Desktop. The audience asked lots of interesting questions any everybody left the session with a much better idea of what’s happening in #ubuntu-testing.

UDW2 - Day 3

September 4, 2008

Day 3 is over already. If you didn’t manage to attend the sessions, here a little recap of what happened yesterday: James Westby started off with “BZR for packaging". The atmosphere was great and James demonstrated very very well, why bzr for packaging makes the world a better place and yourself much more productive. Cesare Tirabassi took over and explained “How to update a package properly". There was lots of MOTU participation in the sesion, so lots of questions could easily be answered.

Jono at his best

September 3, 2008

Jono on the phone: “<long-winded explanation> … essentially bollocks."

UDW2 - Day 2

September 3, 2008

Ubuntu Developer Week is definitely the epicenter of awesomeness. Let’s take a look at day two: “How do I fix an Ubuntu bug?” was a lot of fun. Lots of sharp questions and lots of really good fixes by the end of the session. We used Harvest to find some low-hanging fruit, verified the bug, tested the fix, test-built it and came up with a collection of good debdiffs. Yeeeehaw!

UDW2 - Day 1

September 2, 2008

Awesome awesome awesome! The vibe at Ubuntu Developer Week is just great and we had ~200 people in #ubuntu-classroom yesterday. Thanks to the unstoppable Jeremy Austin-Bardo we have meetings logs available from the main page. So let’s re-cap the sessions we had yesterday. “Packaging 101” was packed with people and although we just had one hour to go through the bare-boone structure of the hello-debhelper package, we had a great time and the participants were a very sharp bunch asked very clever questions.

Are you ready?

September 1, 2008

Only a very few hours left until we start a fantastic week of Ubuntu Developer action. So let’s take a look at the schedule for today: I’ll have the first slot at 16:00 UTC. The session is called “Packaging 101” where I’ll be accompanying you on a trip through the basics of Ubuntu / Debian packaging. Jorge Castro is up next, talking about “Upstream Bug Linkages”. Find out why they’re important, what we gain by using them and how to get involved there.

Mixtape: Soul Patrol

September 1, 2008

Human Factor - Japan Delight (Sunrize 003) David WS - Dona do Primeiro Andar (Sunrize 002) Calibre - Drowning In You (Liquid V 002) Lynx & Nu:Tone - East To West (Brand Nu Recs 008) Brother - Grace (Sonorous 003) Saburuko - Love Sensation (Sonorous 004) Syncopix - Disc Go! (Syncopix LP001) Danny Bird - From Bath With Love (Hospital 141) Klute - Halloween (Commercial Suicide 041) Klute - Come Back 2 Me (Soul:R 019) Total Science feat.

Second Ubuntu Developer Week!

August 27, 2008

I’m extremely pleased to announce the second Ubuntu Developer Week! From Sep 1st to Sep 5th we’re going to have a great time in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net. Digg It! There are Wiki docs, MOTU Videos, MOTU Interviews and we’re seeing more and more contributors each day. This is all good and well, but there’s nothing like talking to real people, asking real questions in a real-time environment. The Ubuntu Developer Week is designed to give you an overview of what’s going on in the Ubuntu Developer world.

Ask MOTU

August 25, 2008

Q: Can I modify Ubuntu bugs (in Launchpad) by email? A: Yes, https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/EmailInterface is an extensive guide about modifying bug reports via mail. As long as your mail is signed, you can to almost anything. Q: What do I need to bear in mind when requesting a sync? A: A sync request will effectively overwrite all changes that were made in Ubuntu. Therefore you not only need to make sure, that the new Debian package builds, installs and runs nicely, but also:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Debian!

August 16, 2008

15 years of freedom, 15 years of awesomeness. Debian is the project that never ceased to amaze me: so many people, so many aims, so many ideas, so many packages, so many voices and the outcome is brilliant: a technically robust distribution that runs on almost everything. That’s quite an achievement, especially considering that the Debian team always remained true to their values: freedom, freedom and universality. Of course I’m referring to the “free software”, but I’m also referring to the freedom to contribute and shape an aspect of Debian you care about.

Global Bug Jam - Retrospective

August 13, 2008

WOW! We had people in twelve nations and in 20+ locations meeting for this event and I’m proud of each and everyone who organised and parcitipated in this. That’s amazing. Thanks a lot Nicolas Deschildre for whipping up the script to generate this image. 846 bugs. That’s quite a lot of bugs, especially if you consider that lots of newcomers attended the bug jams, but to quote Emmet Hikory who put it so well: “Even if the attendants just touched one single bug, if they enjoyed the bug jam and learned something that’s more important than the raw number of bugs.

Berlin was part of it (GBJ report)

August 11, 2008

On Saturday we met in Berlin’s c-base to get all excited about bugs, bug triage and making Ubuntu better in general. I gave a quick presentation (thanks Chuck :-)) first, then we dived into bugs together. Weather is not so great - great conditions to work on some Ubuntu bugs! View on the Spree river, c-base building. __ Caspar Clemens Mierau (ccm) and Paul Sladen (sladen) at c-base. We were around eight people there during the Jam and after some initial problems with the network and the projector (thanks a lot c-base people for fixing everything so quickly) we got started with basic questions about the process and what is expected from somebody who does bug triage.

Global Bug Jam... Get Ready!

August 7, 2008

Digg It! Are you ready and all set for the Global Bug Jam? Your team part of it? Venue organised? You let you friends know? EXCELLENT! Here’s what you can do if you reall can’t wait to get started: Triage a few bugs already. Check out Bugs/HowToTriage. If you like images more than pictures, check out Bugs/HowToTriage/Charts and learn about bug statuses and bug workflow. (Thanks to Brian Murray and Henrik Omma for their great work on this.

Global Bug Jam Countdown!

August 5, 2008

Digg It! The countdown to the first ever Global Bug Jam weekend is running. For Berlin it’s just 96 hours left until we meet at c-base to squash a bunch of bugs and have a lot of fun. The list of participating city and country teams has been rising in the last days and I’m glad that the Berlin team is part of it. The following teams have Bug Jams organised locally: Chile, Ecuador (Quito), Nicaragua (Managua), Perú (Lima), Puerto Rico (Mayagüez), USA, Venezuela (Maracaibo), Thailand, India, Germany (Berlin), France (Toulouse).

New Videos!

August 5, 2008

Nicolas Valcárcel is the hero of the day! He translated the MOTU Getting Started video into Spanish! Nicolas is the first who took on the challenge of doing his own MOTU Video. Great work! Can’t see it? Click here. It’s also available on videos.ubuntu.com. I’m absolutely excited about more MOTU Videos. If you have requests or did your own, please add it at MOTU/Videos. My 5 today: #204704, #254827, #254690, #254829, #251919 Do 5 a day - every day!

Y'all have been quite busy...

August 2, 2008

while I was away. On top of the myriads of mails this seems to have happened in the meantime: Launchpad 2.0. Hugs to the LP team. Lots of applicantions for Ubuntu Universe Contributor. Congratulations to Nicolas Valcárcel (nxvl) Christophe Sauthier (huats) David Futcher (bobbo) Onkar Shinde (slytherin) Andrea Gasparini (gaspa) New Teams on the Global Bug Jam list! Chile! Ecuador! Nicaragua! Perú! California, US! Chicago, US!

Back From India!

July 31, 2008

We’re in Berlin again and once I feel fully at home again (and got through most of the x thousand emails), I’ll blog some more about our India trip. Also I’ll upload a bunch of pictures we made. India has been an awesome experience - it’s been very different to everything else I experienced up until now. We’ll definitely return to India. This Tuktuk driver expressed very well what I feel after the trip.

The Harvest Season has begun!

July 11, 2008

The very short version: Go to http://daniel.holba.ch/harvest/ - find low-hanging fruit, it will make your life (and Ubuntu) better. The short version: Check out http://daniel.holba.ch/harvest/ - it’s the successor to “really-fix-it”, much more improved, more extensible, just a lot better. Its aims are: Make finding opportunities among all packages easy. Figure out which packages are in a good shape and which are not. (Notice the “Score".) Easily extensible. Lots of different views (planned).

Global Bug Jam Awesomeness - more teams!

July 10, 2008

Digg It! More awesomeness in the jamming parts of the world! Your country / state / city is not on there? Find out how to run a bug jam! Mail a bunch of friends. Add yourself to the list. Participate! I talked to Dereck Wonnacott of the Ubuntu Michigan team. Like a lot of other good people, he decided to run a Bug Jam in the time from August 8th to August 10th too.

"Fixing a bug" videos!

July 9, 2008

I’m very happy about the comments I got about the MOTU Videos (youtube, videos.ubuntu.com). They’ve been very well-received and it’s just awesome to know that the time Jono and I spent in London to shoot those videos made a difference to a lot of people pondering contributing to Ubuntu. We spent two days in a conference room in Millbank Tower and I’m very glad that Jono never got tired of doing yet another take - in the end things got a lot more fluent.

Unsung Heroes… the Sponsoring Queue 4

July 7, 2008

We’re at part 4 already - WOW! The main reason for publishing these interviews is that I think sponsors get far too little pats on the back, hugs and free ice cream, also there’s a lot of people who don’t know about it yet and should because it’s their entry point to making Ubuntu better, improving their packaging skills and getting in touch with the awesome people that are in the MOTU team.

Global Bug Jam preparations in full swing

July 4, 2008

I just talked to a few teams who are organising the next biggest Global Hug Fest. Among them Nicolas Valcárel of the Ubuntu Perú team and Leandro Gómez of the Ubuntu Nicaragua team. They’re both very excited and in full preparation mode for the Global Bug Jam. Here’s what Nicolas had to say about his team, the event and the preparations: Daniel: Who are you and which LoCo do you represent?

Reminder: "Running Bug Jams" Sessions

July 3, 2008

Digg It! Don’t forget! If you’re interested in participating in the Global Bug Jam with your team, it’s easy: just join the IRC Session either on July 4th or July 5th in #ubuntu-meeting Friday, July 4th 16:00 UTC with Caspar Clemens Mierau and myself Saturday, July 5th 19:00 UTC with Wolfger and Greg Grossmeier These teams are on the list of heroes already: Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Perú, Chicago, Michigan (Detroit, Sault Ste.

Unsoung Heroes… the Sponsoring Queue 3

July 3, 2008

I’m constantly amazed of what people in the Sponsorship Process get done on both sides: patch contributors and sponsors do amazing work to make Ubuntu better. I talked to Iain Lane who has been doing some awesome work in the last months. He seems to be busy all day and night working on merges. dholbach What has your sponsoring experience been like up until now? Laney I have found all of the sponsors I’ve worked with to be really quite helpful.

Ubuntu Java team meeting

July 1, 2008

I’m particularly excited to send out the following announce. Thanks to some unsung heroes Java support in Ubuntu was always great, but now we’ve brought together a bunch of people that will form the Ubuntu Java team and make Java in Ubuntu rock even harder. We’re going to have a meeting at Thu 3rd 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting to plan the roadmap for the Intrepid release. If you like Java, want to improve Java or just listen in, make sure you’re there.

Unsoung Heroes... the Sponsoring Queue 2

June 30, 2008

Unsung Heroes... the Sponsoring Queue

June 27, 2008

In Open Source we have lots and lots of unsung heroes. If my mom (using Kubuntu at work) won’t notice some awesome piece of work somebody achieved that’s one thing. As far as I know she doesn’t even check Ubuntu’s press releases. But we have folks in our community who are much more in the loop than my mom. Most of them won’t know that somebody spent hours improving our compiler or made the bug workflow easier or spent hours improving some detail.

You can too!

June 27, 2008

Luckily being “Master of the Universe” is about something far greater today. My 5 today: #243171 (libdb-je-java), #243323 (gfax), #243358 (ogdi-dfsg), #243125 (vym), #243398 (mixxx) Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

Jammin'

June 25, 2008

I still didn’t write about the Bug Jam we had in Berlin. We had 10-15 people at Berlin’s c-base and a great time. Caspar who is a member of c-base (the people who believe that it is actally a sunken space ship) organised the event and we got the workshop room which has ~10 Hardy machines in it. So far so good. In the first hour I talked about: what makes a bug report a good one, Bug statuses, other important properties of the bug.

Ask MOTU

June 23, 2008

Q: I get a lot of Bug mail - what do I do about it? A: Launchpad Bug mails contain the X-Launchpad-Message-Rationale header. Check out Bugs/HowToFilter to see how to best filter it. Q: I tend to often answer roughly the same when replying in bug reports. Did nobody ever think of using something like stock replies? A: We did. Check out Bugs/Responses also try using Séb’s greasemonkey script.

How to run a Bug Jam?

June 18, 2008

Digg It! Global Bug Jam, full steam ahead! Some bug jams are scheduled already but there’s far more potential: what about YOU? Don’t you want to have the fun of your life at a Bug Jam nearby? I have good news for you. We’ll have a bunch of “How to run a Bug Jam” IRC sessions in #ubuntu-meeting in the next few weeks. The main aim of these sessions is going to be to

Only 27 days to go...

June 16, 2008

…and we’ll be off into our holidays again. Guess where we’re headed: right! India it is! I’ve been looking forward to this for ages and we prepared for the trip by: having lots Indian food (always the best way to prepare ;-)) watching Indian movies reading Indian books checking the map etc etc etc I know this is going to to be awesome and I’m quite sure that this won’t have been the last time, we’ve been to India.

MOTU Videos

June 12, 2008

Most of you are aware of the Ubuntu Developers youtube channel already. The comments I got up until now were really great and I hope it’s interesting and useful to all of you. We also revived videos.ubuntu.com - check out the first MOTU Video on there in .ogg format too. I’d like to hear some more feedback from you and hear more suggestions for videos that you’d like to see: be it an interview you’d like to see, a packaging technique or whatever else.

The Global Bug Jam

June 11, 2008

I’m sure you all know about the next big thing already: the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam is going to happen on the weekend of the 8th August to 10th August. Make sure to contact your LoCo about it in case you’re interested. We have a lot of documentation prepared on how to run a Bug Jam and any help on the way to making it happen is appreciated: If you know a good venue where your LoCo or LUG could do the event, coordinate with your local friends and book it.

Musica

June 10, 2008

I was very excited to see Jono finally announce Severed Fifth (digg it). He had mentioned the idea to me before and I’ll be sure to check regularly into what’s happening in the project. I listened to the .ogg announcement and besides Jono’s sexy narrator voice I realised that the part about how culture evolves and how we need to be free to be creative reminded me a lot of the Amen Break documentary.

Mixtape: Lustrous

June 10, 2008

Brother - Junction (Influence GB 001) Duo Infernale - Feeling Blue (Soul:R 033) Redeyes - When Will It Ever End (Bingo 056) D-Kay & Lee + Anytime, Anywhere (Advanced 020) A-Sides - Lustrous (Spearhead 016) Muffler - Under The Sun (NIR 12032) SKC - Social Studies (Social Studies 012) SKC - Semi-Bluff (Hospital 098) Dub Tao feat. Vybz Kartell - Breathe (Remix) (Pathologic 002) The Future Sound Of London - Papua New Guinea (Wicka Remix) (Papa 002) Sonic + ES9 - Accelerator (Hospital 117) Noisia & Teebee - Shower For An Hour (Subtitles 056)

Thanks for the Hugs

May 27, 2008

It’s not just about the flash hug, but more general: UDS and FOSSCamp have been absolutely brilliant - the best we ever had. It was great to meet lots of the brilliant people of various communities and have fruitful discussions all day and all night. Lots of hugs too. If I disregard the dose of Ubu-flu I got myself, I feel completely powered up and ready to get new efforts started during the Intrepid cycle.

5-a-day alive and kicking

May 7, 2008

One quick glance at the statistics page says it all: our 5-a-day community is alive and kicking. What’s been happening behind the scenes? Lots! Hug Days make use of the –add-tag / –remove-tag feature and are listed in the statistics now, which is just great. We have a bunch of translations now. Thanks so much to our restless translators! daniel@lovegood:~/bzr/5-a-day$ grep Last-Translator po/*.po | cut -d':' -f1,3 | cut -d'<' -f1 po/ca.

5-a-day spricht jetzt Deutsch...

April 30, 2008

… but it should speak many many more languages. Since the last upload 5-a-day finally is translateable: five-a-day (0.32) hardy; urgency=low * 5-a-day, 5-a-day-applet, data/5-a-day-applet.glade, fiveaday/bzr.py, fiveaday/files.py, fiveaday/lpteams.py, fiveaday/parser.py, fiveaday/signature.py, fiveadayapplet/controller.py, fiveadayapplet/view.py, po/5-a-day.pot, po/POTFILES.in, setup.cfg, setup.py: make 5-a-day translatable. * debian/control: Build-Depends on python-distutils-extra. * debian/five-a-day.install: install translations. * po/de.po: added german translation. -- Daniel Holbach Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:43:06 +0200 If you’re interested in translating it, please head to its translation page in Launchpad.

Ask MOTU

April 25, 2008

Q: To contribute do I need to run the current development release? A: It’s the only way to guarantee your fixes and packages build and work as expected in the development release that is currently being worked on. UbuntuDevelopment/UsingDevelopmentReleases explains how to do this in a safe way. Q: I’d like to meet with a couple of friends to have a go at fixing a few bugs. Do you have suggestions how to best do that?

Release Party: Berlin

April 22, 2008

I wasn’t involved a lot in this year’s release party planning, but what the Ubuntu Berlin team came up with is amazing: CD Burning station Talk: What’s new in Hardy? Talk: Gobuntu - Why we need yet another Ubuntu Talk: How to get Ubuntu Support Talk: KDE4 Talk: Going to sleep and waking up with pm-utils Talk: Cool Features of Compiz Fusion Talk: FFII - Free Software Without Patents Gig: Samba Band!

Mixtape: Drifting On An Aspect

April 22, 2008

Alix Perez - Inferno (Soul:R 033) Naibu - It Took A Long Time (Creative Source 053) Gen - Catcha (Fokuz 007) Noisia And Shanodin - Angel Eyes (Engine Music 002) Mathematics - Quran (Social Studies 008) Calibre - The Water Carrier (Soul:R 016) Makoto - A Different Story (Advance//d 025) Nifty - The Latin Connection (Sunrize 002) High Contrast - Racing Green (Hospital 076) Unknown - You Don’t Know My Name (Smooth 001) Nu:Tone feat.

Events Galore!

April 18, 2008

Make sure you get your calendar out and put these dates in: April 24th - Hardy Release! What could be better than celebrating the latest and greatest Ubuntu with your friends. Find out if somebody near you plans a party already. April 28th - May 3rd - It’s Ubuntu Open Week again. So after we’ve all partied and celebrated the release, it’s the perfect time to see what’s going on in our community, see what’s planned for Intrepid, talk, listen, ask questions and have a good time.

Finding a good name...

April 11, 2008

… can sometimes block the whole operation. Just think of good bands that never formed, events that were never launched, startup companies with brilliant ideas, they all didn’t happen because people gave up after two evenings of “How are we going to call the baby?” This case is less melodramatic and everything is already in place, we’re just lacking the good name: the MOTU Council will approve ubuntumembers for their good contributions to the MOTU team.

5-A-Day tags!

April 11, 2008

If you check out the 5-a-day statistics you will notice the last table at the bottom: tags! “What are tags good for?” you might be asking. You can tag bugs you worked on during Bug Days or Bug Jams. In fact the last Bug Day already had instructions for how to do it. Find out more how to contribute with 5-A-Day. In other news we’re at 7691 bugs now, 91 people who actively use 5-A-Day each day.

Mixtape: Just A Little Bit Closer

April 10, 2008

Chino - Jade Sunrise (Blu Saphir 006) Makoto - Open Your Eyes (Good Looking 006LP) DJ Patife feat. Cleveland Watkiss - Overjoyed (Makoto Remix) (Innerground 016) Bungle feat. Darrison - Just A Little Bit Closer (CIA 037) Submorphics - Revisions (Blu Saphir 006) Cyantific feat. Dianne Charlemagne - Don’t Follow (Hospital 091) Commix - Faceless (Shogun Audio 012) Axwell feat. Max’C - I Found U (High Contrast’s Berlin After Dark Remix) (Positiva 261) Wickaman & Hoodlum - Seville (Red Spider 001) Drumsound - Let The Good Times Roll (Bingo 067) Danny Byrd - Shock Out (Hospital 132) London Elektricity - Electric D-Funk (Hospital 017)

Party On

April 7, 2008

It’s just awesome to see so many Hardy Release Parties being announced. I’m particularly proud to see how much work the Ubuntu Berlin team has put into organising Berlin’s Hardy Release party. Hardy is going to be excellent, so let’s celebrate all our good work. Party On! :-) My 5 today: #190737 (autofs, tracker), #211785 (pixman), #211791 (cairo), #139412 (a2ps), #204988 Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.

Your shipment of awesome...

March 31, 2008

… has arrived. Fixing Hardy and tidying it up is fully underway and lots of fixes get in by the minute. If you want to help out, excellent! Joining 5 A Day is fun and helping to really fix those bugs a great way to get started. Talking of 5-A-Day:we’re “Updated to revision 2719” already. I never would have dreamed of that energy and commitment. :-) In other news Siegfried Gevatter and Jonathan Patrick Davies delivered the first ever Catalan Packaging Jam!

Paris... hmmmmmm!

March 31, 2008

A few days in Paris were just awesome! Thanks Christophe Sauthier for the tip about the ‘macarons’! :-)

5-A-Day Action!

March 19, 2008

Holy cow! Looks like we’ve been doing fantastic work: Some statistics: Now on revision 2041. 4688 bugs touched by 5-a-day’ers total. 71 contributors. Brian’s 30-days graphs underline that: New Bugs: While the bugs have been consistently getting more: Join 5-A-Day today! My 5 today: #198599 (xserver-xorg-input-aiptek), #203276 (zekr-quran-translations-en), #190744 (libgdamm3.0), #202227 (freedroid), #201494 (ubuntu) Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

test

March 16, 2008

test

Packaging Jams

March 13, 2008

How many times have you heard “I’d really like to help make Ubuntu better!” in your LUG or LoCo? I heard it a fair few times. Of course you can tell people to just read the Packaging Guide but there’s something that’s a lot more fun than that: run a Packaging Jam together! What do you need for that? a venue (LUG, University, some place with network and power for everybody, a projector) a time and date a tutor (I’m sure you have somebody in your LoCo or LUG who played around with Packaging before and knows how to present this material) session material (HA!

Mailserver up again

March 11, 2008

For a few hours today my mail was inaccessible. I’m glad Stefan fixed it quickly. If any mails you sent to me bounced back, please resend them.

Bug-O-Meter is live

March 10, 2008

We’re seeing the fruits of the success of http://daniel.holba.ch/really-fix-it/ already: Let’s try to get the Bug-O-Meter (maybe Patch-O-Meter would be the better term?) filled to the brink for Hardy release and all those bugs REALLY fixed. :-) My 5 today: #200056 (ifrench-gut), #71778 (time), #199944 (compiz), #200362 (seahorse), #196239 (bluez-gnome, gvfs) Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

Joining 5-a-day

March 7, 2008

I just noticed that 110+ people have joined the 5-a-day team. Well done everybody! The unfortunate thing is, only 60+ have actually committed their 5-a-day using the add-5-a-day tool or the five-a-day-applet. Maybe the instructions are not easy to be found? Here they are again: Join the team. For hardy, add deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/5-a-day/ubuntu hardy main to your /etc/apt/sources.list - for Gutsy add: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/5-a-day/ubuntu gutsy main deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bughelper-dev/ubuntu gutsy main deb http://ppa.

Really Fix It!

March 6, 2008

I wrote a script that sets up this list of bugs: http://daniel.holba.ch/really-fix-it/ As you might gather from the name of the page: these are bugs that are ‘almost’ fixed and just have to be fixed for real: Bugs fixed elsewhere (upstream or in a different Distro) Bugs have a patch attached Bugs that are in the Sponsoring Queue It’d be nice to get as many of these fixed as possible for release.

5-a-day goodness

February 28, 2008

Jono spilled the beans about it already: we have a 5-a-Day applet. Check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day#Log to see how to use it and how it works. Thanks so much Markus Korn! This is one of the things I love so much about the Ubuntu community: start a good effort, make it public and see others picking up the ball and improving bits and adding more awesome-ness to it. ROCK! The digg post received 912 diggs up until now, the team has 93 members and we have 50 people who committed their bugs by following these instructions.

Cities

February 25, 2008

) What do the cities Maracay (Venezuela), Brussels (Belgium), Berlin (Germany), Glen Ellyn (Illinois, USA), Clarkston (Michigan, USA) have in common? More than 50 inhabitants? Right… Not in UTC +0800? Yep, right too… Uhhh… Yes, they had Packaging Jams there! What Packaging Jams are you might ask? It’s a great way to get the people of your Loco Team (and LUG) involved in packaging. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/RunningPackagingJam has instructions and useful tips to started and https://wiki.

End of UDW

February 25, 2008

Boy, what a great week it was! Here the last day in retrospective: We started off with another round of “Patching Packages” of Martin Pitt. This session seems to become an institution in Ubuntu Open Week / Ubuntu Developer Week and that’s for a good reason: 95% of all uploads are changing a package and in a lot of cases you will have to apply patches. Martin is well experienced and delivered a great session.

UDW - day 4

February 22, 2008

Yeeehaa! What a day it was! Alexander Sack explained how to package Firefox 3 Extensions! The session was very busy, let’s see how many extensions come up soon… :-) Lars Wirzenius introduced us to the joy of Writing Scripts For Automated Desktop Testing - loads of questions all around Python, the Accessibility framework, etc were asked and answered. Thanks a lor Lars for taking the time! Bughelper and python-launchpad-bugs Rock stars Markus Korn and Brian Murray gave a session about how Bughelper can make Bug Work Easier - they found a lot of interested new users, testers and hackers it seems.

5-A-Day

February 21, 2008

It has been mentioned in a couple of places before, but it’s LIVE now: 5-A-Day! It’s your ultimate chance to make a difference. See here how to participate and spread the word at the same time. I’m so excited! :-) Digg the story! If you’re totally up for 5-a-Day don’t forget to these two session later today: 18:00 UTC - Bughelper leads Brian Murray and Markus Korn are there! Bughelper and python-launchpad-bugs are used in lots and lots of places in the Ubuntu Development landscape already and as someone who worked on bughelper and python-launchpad-bugs previously I appreciate the “Bughelper - Making Bug Work Easier” session a lot, because these tools are the best thing since sliced bread.

UDW - day 3

February 21, 2008

Ubuntu Developer Week is coming on nicely! What a busy day 3 it was! The day started with my second presentation on MOTU Processes. Although the topic and my presentation was roughly about the same topic as on Thursday the questions were quite different - lots of good stuff and a high interest in getting started. Excellent! Next up was Tim Penhey with Hosting Code on Launchpad - although he said so be gentle

UDW - day 2

February 20, 2008

Awesome awesome awesome! I had a great time yesterday and so did another 200 people in #ubuntu-classroom. Yesterday we started off with Søren Hansen‘s session about Virtualisation - not being much into Virtualisation myself I didn’t know what to expect. What happened was amazing: we had a bunch of experts in the room and lots of questions were fired ar Søren, who did quite well to stay on top of things.

Not intended

February 19, 2008

Aristotelis Grammatikakis just let me know that the hand gesture in my last blog entry is deemed highly offensive in Greece. To my readers in dear Hellas: this was not intended at all and I’m thankful to learn about differences in our cultures. Even if this incident was a bit unfortunate, it’s something I love about the Ubuntu community: being in touch with so many people in so many different countries and learning a bit more about them every day is just great.

Mimi's Five

February 19, 2008

My 5 today: Bug 193011 (lintian), Bug 192310 (hyphen, openoffice.org-hyphenation), Bug 191556 (hamradiomenus, ubuntu), Bug 192974 (ipe), Bug 51774 (openssh) Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

UDW - day 1

February 19, 2008

WOW! I never thought it’d be possible, but we got ~230 people into #ubuntu-classroom all interested in Ubuntu Development! I had a great time! Martin Pitt’s “Patching Packages” session was a treat, even if there were some hiccups around missing build-dependencies etc. but we figure it all out in the, no problem. Being a developer sometimes means doing detective work and the satisfaction of getting it all up and running in the end is great.

Guess what day it is today?

February 18, 2008

It’s the start of the Ubuntu Developer Week! (Digg it.) So what’s going on later today? 16:00 UTC - Patching Packages (Martin Pitt) 17:00 UTC - Launchpad PPAs (Celso Providelo, Matthew Revell) 18:00 UTC - Packaging 101 (Daniel Holbach) 19:00 UTC - MOTU School - Working With Debian (James Westby) 20:00 UTC - Introduction to the Server Team (Mathias Gug) It’s an excellent day to get started developing Ubuntu!

Five

February 17, 2008

Jorge is right: It absolutely will!

Re: PackagingJam Berlin

February 15, 2008

So last week we had the first Packaging Jam in Berlin. It was brilliant! The people at the NewThinking store were great and we had everything set up in just a few minutes. 20-25 people showed up who asked loads and loads of questions, we had a great time. The topics ranged from creating a debdiff over how best to collaborate with Debian to how bits and pieces of library packaging works.

Ubuntu Developer Week

February 11, 2008

Mon 18th Feb - Fri 22nd Feb @ #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode! Digg It! Welcome everybody! I’m very very pleased to announce the first ever Ubuntu Developer Week . What this means? We’ll have one week full of action-packed IRC sessions where you can: learn about different packaging techniques find out more about different development teams check out the efforts of the world-wide Development Community participate in open Q&A sessions with Ubuntu developers and much much more… I’m absolutely excited to have such a diverse programme and thrilled we have so many excellent speakers in the first ever Ubuntu Developer Week.

Ask MOTU

February 7, 2008

Q: I have written a patch for Ubuntu, how can I forward it to Debian too? A: Take a look at these two pages: _Make sure that it really applies to Debian too: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuPackagingChanges has a list of changes that are deliberately different in Ubuntu. _ _Check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/ReportingToDebian and find out how to use submittodebian (in the ubuntu-dev-tools package) to forward it to debbugs. _ Q: What do Ubuntu developers look like?

MOTU Logs

February 6, 2008

I’m so excited! Francisco Calderon, Chris Brotherton and Effrain Valles have started a new trend: MOTU Logs. The titles of their logs refer to their aim of becoming MOTUs as adventure or journey. One thing is obvious: all of them are having big fun and enjoy the ride. :-) Get started too.

Mixtape: Out Of This World

February 5, 2008

Syncopix - Footage (Integral 005) Utah Jazz - Done And Dusted (Liquid V 009) Soul Mozaics - Burning (Sidechain 002) DJ Andy + Danny L - Rock Me Baby (Nemesis 003) Henree - We Got Round (Walnut 003) Jericho - Redeemed in Dawn (Santorin 022) Laroque - Vishnu (Walnut 001) Q Project/State Of Mind - Tears (Marky & Bungle remix) (Advanced Sektor 007) J-Majik & Wickaman - Minali Cream (feat.

Xubuntu moves to Universe - a clarification

January 29, 2008

So Xubuntu was moved to Universe. This means: development will be much easier in the future: no main inclusion reports have to be written any more, developers can be in the MOTU team and don’t have to ubuntu-core-dev. Up until recently the CD build process did not allow packages that were in universe/multiverse, but that’s possible now. The authors of posts like this one and this one did not check their facts:

Mixtape: Movin On

January 29, 2008

Electrosoul System - Moonlight Land (Subtitles 056) St. Cal - Losing Ground (Soul:R 018) Utah Jazz - Runaway (Liquid V 016) High Contrast - Racing Green (Hospital 076) DJ Patife feat. Cleveland Watkiss - Overjoyed (Makoto Remix) (Innerground 016) CLS & Wax - The Race Is On (Future Retro 001) Total Science + Marky - Tunnel Vision (CIA Innerground 003) Q Project - 19 Inch Rimz (CIA 035) Artificial Intelligence - Movin On (DJ Marky & Bungle Remix) (V Records UK 014) Marcus Intalex - Temperance (Soul:R 015) Marcus Intalex - Afrikaa (Revolve:R 004) Marcus Intalex - Zumbar (Soul:R 015) State of Mind - Rise And Fall (CIA 036)

listadmin

January 28, 2008

After having received a bunch of complaints about not sharing the information earlier, I’m writing this blog post. listadmin ROCKs! If you’re moderating one or more mailing lists, you will absolutely want to use it! Just sudo apt-get install listadmin and add the following to .listadmin.ini adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}` default skip log ~/.listadmin.log password yadayadayada somelist@lists.ubuntu.com password yadaaaaaaaaaaa someotherlist@lists.ubuntu.com password arghargharghargh thatotherlist@lists.ubuntu.com Now run listadmin and enjoy. Thanks to Loïc Minier for showing it to me in the first place.

Hardy Sprint

January 28, 2008

There’s been a lot of real good stuff going on at the Hardy Sprint in Millbank Tower (Jorge already reported.) I personally had loads of sessions with the other horsemen, discussions with the QA folks (Help close basically fixed bugs!) and found all the hallway chats to be just great: it’s so easy to resolve issues if you have everybody around. Unfortunately I got a serious dose of the ‘plague’. I heard some ominous coughing on another desk and thought: “Oh no, please not the plague again.

Ask MOTU

January 24, 2008

Q: Somebody told me that I’m not allowed to change the .orig.tar.gz tarball and that it should be identical to the one that is used upstream. I have a real need for it, how do I do it right? A: Check out this chapter in the PackagingGuide. It has extensive information on how to do it right including side-cases and solutions. Q: Do you have some kind of example package that I can try to learn from?

Packaging 101 Session!

January 14, 2008

If you want to have “Master of the Universe” on your business card as well, join #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net on Tuesday, Jan 15th from 16:00-17:30 UTC We’ll be covering a bunch of things there, including the process to become a MOTU how to use the packaging tools and how to get patches included in Ubuntu how to update packages to a new upstream vesion all the questions you might have And of course we’re going to have a GREAT time there!

Packaging Jam in Berlin

January 11, 2008

Der erste deutsche Packaging Jam ist da! Nach dem Erfolg des Events beim Ubuntu Michigan LoCo Team ist das Ubuntu Berlin Team stolz heimischen Ubuntu Fans dasselbe präsentieren zu dürfen. Was wird beim Packaging Jam passieren? Daniel Holbach, Berliner Ubuntu-Entwickler und Canonical-Mitarbeiter wird die ersten Schritte in Richtung Ubuntu-Paketierung erläutern. In den Tutorials zeigt er die wichtigsten Handgriffe für die Arbeit als Ubuntu Entwickler, beantwortet Fragen und wird in zwei Stunden sein möglichstes tun alle Anwesenden zu bespaßen.

Ask MOTU

January 10, 2008

Q: I know about Packaging myself, but want to show others in my area how cool it is and how it works. Is there any material available? A: _We call these events “Packaging Jams”. Organisational information is available on the wiki, also find Hands On Material on the wiki (derived from the PackagingGuide). Take it away to your university, class, LUG or some friends on your block. Enjoy! :-) _

MOTU Q&A session

January 8, 2008

The MOTU Q&A sessions are back! We’ll meet again at 13:00 UTC on Friday in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net Today I heard an interesting proposal for the next session: dholbach, one suggestion for your MOTU Q&A sessions would be to go through how to NOT make a debian package` In fact that’s a technique we horsemen use every now and then. Instead of asking ourselves “Ok, how do we do this right?

Ask MOTU

December 18, 2007

Q: I want to maintain a package, what do I need to do as the maintainer? A: Quoting from UbuntuDevelopment/FAQ: You will take care of the package’s bugs. It makes sense if you are bug contact for that package in Launchpad. You will liaise with upstream. You track what’s going on upstream. You will try to build a good communication to the upstream developers. You will find out how to fix bugs appropriately.

Yeeeehaw!

December 12, 2007

See you tomorow! :-)

Mixtape Sleepless

December 10, 2007

Electrosoul System - List (Allsorts 004) Bassface Sascha & Frankse - Take Over (Beatalistics 006) London Elektricity - Rewind (Makoto Remix) (Hospital 106) Mathematics - Mirrorball (Social Studies 014) Commix - Faceless (Shogun Audio 018) ES 9 + Sonic - Constantly Warm (O6S 003) Sonic & Silver - A Side (The Return Of?) (Space 017) High Contrast - Metamorphosis (Hospital 126) Dub Tao - One Drop (Film 021) High Contrast - Sleepless (Hospital 126) Submorphics - Revisions (Blue Saphir 006)

The Drum'n'Bass diaries are back

December 4, 2007

The Drum’n’Bass diaries are back. It took me from June 14th to December 3rd to post a new mix tape and in the meantime a lot happened: there was my road trip to Greece, the release, UDS, AllHands, etc. I never really gave up on Drum’n’Bass, I even bought new records, but I didn’t record as much in the evenings. Some weeks ago I bought a new Hi-Fi System and some days ago new cables and everything, so I’m all set again.

Mixtape Back Like Dat

December 3, 2007

Lynx feat. Ciah - Wonder (Creative Source 052) Duo Infernale - Feeling Blue (Soul:R 033) Makoto - Eastern Dub (Pt. 2) (Good Looking 067) Random Movement & Focus - Shattered Dreams (Innerground 022EP1) DJ Marky & Artificial Intelligence feat. Ben Westbeech - Shame (Innerground 022EP1) Bungle - 25th Floor (DJ Marky & Bungle VIP Mix) (Innerground 022EP2) Random Movement - Ruthless Machine (Innerground 022EP2) DJ Marky, Makoto & A Sides - Tonight (Innerground 022EP2) Makoto & Akira - The Way Of The Warrior (CIA Deep Kut 008) Sonic & Makoto - Tearing Soul (Space 019) Unknown - Back Like Dat (Ghost 001)

MOTU Q&A sessions!

November 29, 2007

MOTU Q&A sessions are now going to happen regulary! Mark it in you calendar: Every Friday 13:00 UTC in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net. Check out MOTU Getting Started and start becoming an Ubuntu Developer today. Bring questions and see you on Friday! :-)

Ask MOTU

November 29, 2007

Here goes another round of “Ask MOTU” questions and answers. Q: I want to build , but don’t have to have lots of useless development packages on my system. What do I do? A: Checkout PbuilderHowto or DebootstrapChroot. pbuilder is a tool that will build a minimal environment for every source package you give it, just containing build-essential plus the packages specified in Build-Depends. Also it’s a great way to find out if you got the Build-Depends right.

More Q&A!

November 20, 2007

Get ready for more MOTU Q&A action on Friday at 13:00 UTC in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net! Things we’ll do there: Ask questions! Learn something new! Get to know each other. Until then: Why not take a leaf out of Efrain Valles’ book and start MOTU diary? Get Started! Update: I moved it to 13:00 UTC, to not clash with the MOTU meeting.

Ask MOTU

November 15, 2007

More MOTU Q&A sessions coming up

November 14, 2007

Get ready for another MOTU Q&A session on Friday, November 16th, 12:00 UTC. We’ll meet in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net and answer all your questions around MOTU and Ubuntu Development processes answer all packaging questions have a good time If you’re running into problems, make notes and bring them to the session and we’ll get you back on track. Click here and stay on top of upcoming MOTU Events!

Cool stuff in MOTU land

October 18, 2007

Great news everybody. First of all, our bearded friend, Jono Bacon is working towards MOTU-ship. Also, we’ll have a MOTU Q&A session, on Friday, 19th Oct on 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-classroom. One of the key things I wanted to get working on was MOTU Documentation; it had been growing to a degree where it confused a lot of new contributors. The plan was to remove a few pages (done), merge a bunch of pages into http://wiki.

Ubuntu Open Week Is Back!

October 11, 2007

Seraphidian drummer and Bottle dance pioneer Jono Bacon just announced it: The Ubuntu Open Week is back! The schedule is amazing: 42 action-packed sessions that let you dive directly into the places where Ubuntu is happening. You always wanted to dive into packaging and never did? This is exactly the right time for you to get involved. Why? We will have 7 sessions all about packaging and MOTU at Ubuntu Open Week.

Gutsy Release Party!

October 11, 2007

It’s already on the wiki but still I thought I’d share the news that the Ubuntu Berlin team is going to celebrate Gutsy’s release **October, 26th 19:00 ** c-base, Rungestraße 20 in Berlin Mitte, S+U Jannowitzbrücke German Press text: Zur Feier der Veröffentlichung von „Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon“, der neuen Version der beliebten freien Linux-Distribution, veranstaltet die Gruppe „Ubuntu Berlin“ am 26.10. ab 19 Uhr in den Räumen des Kulturprojekts c-base eine Release-Party.

Becoming an Ubuntu Developer is easy

October 9, 2007

The Gibbon will land in just a few days and everybody’s quite excited about it. If you always wanted to get involved in Ubuntu and didn’t know how: this is the perfect time to get started at becoming a MOTU. The Hardy cycle will be all yours What is MOTU? It’s the “Master Of The Universe” - the team that takes care of the biggest chunk of packages in Ubuntu and the best way to get involved in packaging and making Ubuntu rock even harder.

MOTU Q&A session

October 2, 2007

After the success of our last session we should have another session on Friday, maybe 8:00 UTC this time, so we get a different group of people than last time. Where: #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net When: Fri, Oct 5th, 08:00 UTC What to bring: Questions How to prepare? If you haven’t played with packaging tools yet, check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Recipes - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/TODO and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Bugs lists a couple of easy bugs you might want to start on.

Car stolen

September 29, 2007

Our beloved car was stolen last night… :-( It’ll be sorely missed. To make matters worse, I had a test computer in that car, so I had to revoke my GPG key. Revoked: A94050AF, new: 059DD5EB.

The Gibbon Is Nearing...

September 27, 2007

Final Release - We’ve just a few days left. The Ubuntu Developer are putting all their efforts into testing and fixing bugs wherever they can. If you want to help with that, this is your chance to get involved: the Desktop Team has a TODO list of their own: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/TODO the MOTU Team has its lists available over here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/TODO and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Bugs ‘bitesize’ bug tasks: probably very easy to figure out

For those who like cooking...

September 14, 2007

If you always wanted to help out developing Ubuntu we have a great set of recipes to get you started: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Recipes The MOTU Recipes contain series of simple steps that will give you a feeling of the development tools you use as a developer every day and will show explain a few concepts that are worth knowing. We had really good feedback on the recipes, so be sure to check them out.

The Big Wiki Cleanup

September 12, 2007

One thing that has been agreed on in the MOTU team for lots of times and something I always wanted to get working on is cleaning up the Ubuntu MOTU Wiki. The MOTU team has grown in size and processes and direction and into lots of interesting ideas since the team was started around three years ago and so has its wiki namespace. The Ubuntu wiki’s title search finds 222 pages.

Contributing patches, becoming a MOTU

August 22, 2007

Becoming an Ubuntu Developer was never easier. Just start playing around with packaging tools and reading about our starting points. After that you best get in touch with friendly people who’ll help you, when you get stuck somewhere. Then it’s time to get cracking on real-life bugs and problems; we categorized some of them on this page. You’ll surely find something easy. We finally reviewed our review process for new packages / patches and we have much less latency there now.

Celebrating GNOME's 10th birthday

August 20, 2007

Happy Birthday GNOME! Thanks for all the goodness you bring to us all the time! In an attempt to make GNOME even better, we’ll celebrate its birthday properly, we’ll have a Celebratory Hug Day! So on 22 August 2007, in all timezones, we’ll be meeting in #ubuntu-bugs on irc.freenode.net for a very special Hug Day. If you’re interested in helping to improve Ubuntu and GNOME, please join us. Feel free to ask pedro, bdmurray, heno and the rest of the team for ways to help out.

I guess we'll have to stay here...

August 13, 2007

Holidays

July 27, 2007

Finally the days has come… I’ll make the trip I looked forward to for a long time. :-) If you see these two in this vehicle somewhere on this way and want to show them your favourite * city * country * bar * place to be * etc. please make frantic arm movements from the side of the road. I won’t be checking my email, so if you have something really urgent, let Seb or Michael know, they’ll know how to reach me.

Desktop Team interview: Sebastian Heinlein

July 4, 2007

This time we present you Sebastian Heinlein, who’s been doing amazing work in the last months. If you want to know more about the Desktop Team, check this page. We have lots of places to get involved in. Short info: Bavarian local patriot IRC nick name: glatzor City: Vierkirchen (near Dachau), Germany Age: approaching 30 next year Website: http://www.glatzor.de Photo: When did you join the Ubuntu Desktop Team or for how long have you been involved with Ubuntu?

Desktop Team interview: Fernando Ribeiro

June 27, 2007

This time we present you Fernando Ribeiro, who’s been doing great work in the last months. If you want to know more about the Desktop Team, check this page. We have lots of places to get involved in. Short info: I’m an open source enthusiast. IRC nick name: fernando **City: ** Brasília, Brazil Age: 26 Website: http://www.nerdgroup.org/fernando/ When did you join the Ubuntu Desktop Team or for how long have you been involved with Ubuntu?

Community News

June 22, 2007

The last weeks in Ubuntu’s Development community have been absolutely awesome. The Ubuntu Development family is growing and growing. Lots of good stuff is happening in the MOTU team: * Our MOTU Wiki General [Emmet Hikory](https://launchpad.net/~persia) has worked his way through the whole MOTU wiki namespace and came up with what he modestly calls ["some review notes"](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/WikiCleanUp/SomeReviewNotes). Together with our new [MOTU Wiki Guidelines](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/WikiCleanUp/) I'm sure we'll make good progress at making more sense out of the MOTU Wiki.

Desktop Team Interview: Martin Pitt

June 20, 2007

The Desktop Team has been kicking ass lately. Over the coming weeks we’ll introduce some key members of the team to you. We’ll start off with security master and king of language-packs Martin Pitt. Short info: Automated problem feedback/i18n/Utopia/Security IRC nick name: pitti City: Dresden Age: 27 Website: http://www.piware.de/ (not maintained for ages) When did you join the Ubuntu Desktop Team or for how long have you been involved with Ubuntu?

Let The Good Times Roll

June 14, 2007

Going with the ‘Holy Holbach’ theme, my brother made another kick-ass picture. 1. _Ben Westbeech & Die - Get Closer (Lover's Mix) (Brownswood 009)_ 2. _Utah Jazz - The Only One (Liquid V 019)_ 3. _Electrosoul System & Subwave - One (Phuzion 008)_ 4. _Nu:Tone - Beatnik (Hospital 120)_ 5. _Kabuki - Speed Of Sound (Makoto Remix) (Precision Cuts 027)_ 6. _SKC - Pain (Brookes Brothers RMX) (Critical 024)_ 7.

ubuntu-dev mentoring

May 24, 2007

I’m extremely proud of the new way MOTU is going to approach new contributors. Thank you everybody for contributing ideas to it. The only thing before we get started is: we need more mentors. (Thank you: Reinhard Tartler, Emmet Hikory, Luke Yelavich, Brandon Holtsclaw, Sebastian Dröge, Raphaël Pinson and Sébastien Bacher for mentoring already.) If you know your way around in packaging and development processes and know who is who in the Ubuntu Community, want to guide somebody through the initial steps as a Ubuntu developer, have some small tasks (like easy merges, easy bugs, easy package updates, etc.

Moments Of Lust

May 4, 2007

1. _High Contrast - Brief Encounter (Hospital 077)_ 2. _DJ Andy & Danny L - Rock Me Baby (Nemesis 003)_ 3. _Drum Magick - Easy Boom (Cuadra 511042-1)_ 4. _Nu Balance - Bounce Back (Bingo 057)_ 5. _Nu:Tone - Millie's Theme (Hospital 074)_ 6. _Tomahawk - Straw Dogs (Hospital 7005)_ 7. _Kabuki - Speed Of Sound (Makoto Remix) (Precision Cuts 027)_ 8. _DJ Marky & XRS - Moments Of Lust (Makoto Remix) (Innerground 014)_ 9.

Team news

April 25, 2007

A lot of exciting things have been going on lately… Take the BugSquad for example: lots of contributors started off doing amazing work. I’m very grateful for that. One thing I observed though was that newcomers didn’t really know where to start. Who can blame them? There are around ~28000 bugs open at the moment. Therefore we started off the BugSquad diaries where the more experienced members can share their knowledge explain which bug lists you can look at explain the tools you use Bughelper has been a pet project of mine for quite a while now.

In the morning

March 29, 2007

Going with the name people gave me my brother decided to take some pictures in Lithuania to go with it. 1. _Electrosoul System - In The Morning (Grid UK 010)_ 2. _Redeyes - When Will It Ever End (Bingo 056)_ 3. _Random Movement - Love Nights (Innerground 011)_ 4. _High Contrast - Everything's Different (Hospital 116)_ 5. _CLS & Wax - The Race Is On (Future Retro 001)_ 6. _Nu Balance - Bounce Back (Bingo 057)_ 7.

Fox in Berlin

March 23, 2007

I live in Berlin, not quite the middle of it, but surely not the outskirts. I saw the fox on a couple of evenings already and I’m glad my friend Martin saw him too in one of the evenings, so it’s not a figment of my imagination. This morning I was out for a dogwalk and just crossing Reuterplatz, when Murphy started barking madly and ran in one corner of the park.

L.U.X. again

February 27, 2007

I’ll play in Berlin’s L.U.X. again on Friday. I look forward to it quite much and the line-up looks quite promising. Seems I was wrong about one thing…

Data privacy

February 25, 2007

Daniel Holbach Glasower Straße 40 12051 Berlin E-Mail: Internet*: http://daniel.holba.ch/ Inhaltlich Verantwortlicher gemäß § 10 Absatz 3 MDStV: Daniel Holbach (Anschrift wie oben) Haftungshinweis: Trotz sorgfältiger inhaltlicher Kontrolle übernehmen wir keine Haftung für die Inhalte externer Links. Für den Inhalt der verlinkten Seiten sind ausschließlich deren Betreiber verantwortlich. Privacy policy My website address is: https://daniel.holba.ch. What personal data we collect and why we collect it Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

Did you just say "Pants off"?

February 22, 2007

Among lots of cool things, Mimi and my sister gave me this for my birthday: I decided to not further think about it.

Shower For An Hour

February 11, 2007

1. _Funktastic - Honey (Shogun Ltd 003)_ 2. _Beta 2 - Fool In Your Eyes (Horizon 013)_ 3. _St. Cal - Losing Ground (Soul:R 018)_ 4. _Jaheim - Put That Woman First (Calibre Remix Vocal) (Warner Bros 612 TX)_ 5. _Alex Phountzi feat. Xantoné Blacq - Another Way (M.I.S.T Remix) (Funk Of Fury 002)_ 6. _Ben Westbeech & Die - Get Closer (Rockers Mix) (Brownswood 009)_ 7. _Total Science feat.

Pictures...

February 1, 2007

Since I finally managed to get hold of a scanner, I thought I’d share some pictures with you. Does this look fair too you? The pic above: moderate picture quality professional Gangster (or Blues Brothers) look 20 km/h too much 30,00 € And this one: abysmal picture quality WTF? 23 km/h too much 62,93 €

Holy Cow

February 1, 2007

Since Matthias ‘doko’ Klose and my brother have been good at leaking the story, here my few words on it. Michal, the organiser of the “Cargo Cult” parties in Berlin’s L.U.X. called me some days before my birthday party and told me who’d be around on that night, as he’d be on vacation and told me gigglingly, that they had chosen a “birthday DJ name” for me. Of course I asked what the name was… all he said was “You’ll find out soon enough.

New Category

January 7, 2007

I started a new category in my blog (which is not aggregated), so 1. I don't annoy random Planet readers with names of Drum'n'Bass tracks, 2. [my provider](http://www.net-lab.net/) doesn't kill me for transferring gigabytes of mixtapes :-)

First Mix

January 7, 2007

Having heard “You never gave me one of your mixtapes!” from friends once too often, here’s one I made yesterday. I personally think there are quite some things to improve, but as my test audience didn’t spot “any mistakes”, I’m sure I can start putting them online now (as opposed to waiting things to be perfect). Enjoy! :-) 1. _Electrosoul System - Fun (Blue Saphir 004)_ 2. _Utah Jazz - Runaway (Liquid V 016)_ 3.

Test Post

January 7, 2007

Let’s see if this doesn’t end up on planets…

Birthday party

January 4, 2007

I’ll have my birthday on January 16th and since it’s in the middle of the week, I’ll have my party on January the 20th in Berlin’s L.U.X., where I’ll also be playing that night. If you plan to come, please drop me a quick line.

Back in Berlin

January 4, 2007

The time in Vienna was incredible. It wasn’t exactly quiet, but it was most relaxing to me. Thomas and I stayed with Christina and the girls she shares her flat with for nearly a week. Random things we did: * On New Year's Eve Thomas got a 'at home' haircut, * I cooked on two evenings (cheese fondue on one evening and duck in red curry on the other). This is something I really missed and greatly enjoyed, * I met an old friend I got to know on a train ride some years ago, * I bought records: apart from the usual Drum'n'Bass records, I managed to get hold of two [Bucovina](http://bucovina.

Vienna, Follow-Up

December 28, 2006

Of course I meant: Friday, Dec 29th at 21:00.

Vienna

December 26, 2006

Tomorrow early in the morning my brother, my sister, my dog and I will leave towards Vienna. I’m really looking forward to see the city I last visited some twelve years ago, also to see where my sister worked, partied, lived and loved for more than a year now. I thought it’d be nice to meet some Ubuntu and OpenSource folks down there, so my sister suggested to go out on Friday, Dec 30th at 21:00 and meet in “Kantine (Museumsquartier)".

My first time

December 2, 2006

Last night I played (as a DJ) in a club for the first time in my life. It was bloody brilliant. L.U.X., the venue is a cozy place with a nice atmosphere. Some weeks ago I asked the owner if I could play there and he pointed me to the organizer of Drum’n’Bass parties at his place. Michal, a friendly, dreadlocked Drum’n’Bass fanatic didn’t ask many questions but said “Sure, how about in two weeks?

Yeeeeehaw!

October 26, 2006

Check it out.

Ubuntu Teams

September 27, 2006

It feels like years ago, when I started this page on the Ubuntu wiki - still I think that most of it is still valid and a good start to gather people around an idea and to get going. I didn’t think much about it, when I started the Telepathy team some days ago. For me it was more of a try to get as many people involved as possible and get Telepathy packages for Edgy.

Waterproof

September 26, 2006

My laptop, a second-hand X40 has had a tough time until now. I take it with me a lot, use it everywhere and I’m not the kind of user taking it out of a fancy bag and putting it only on a specially covered kind of table. I loved the laptop for bearing with me and being just as robust and forgiving as I expected it to be. I replaced some parts of it already and when I called the IBM support guy the third time, he wondered if I took good care of my laptop.

Lithuania

June 21, 2006

I had the big pleasure to visit Lithuania (and some parts of Latvia) with my family last week. My brother seems to have had the time already to write a few things done about the trip and post some photos. After the conference in Paris and GUADEC, I’m going to sort all the pictures I have and upload them as well.

The Amen Break

June 13, 2006

I just found an incredible documentation about the “Amen Break” - a nearly 40 year old sample almost everybody knows and recognizes. For me as somebody who’s crazy about Drum’n’Bass it was most interesting to hear about the history of 6 seconds of music that changed today’s Pop music. It’s not only about the sample, but also about intellectual property as it’s seen and legally enforced today without caring about stifling creativity and enrichment of culture.

Dapper Release Party in Berlin

June 9, 2006

I’m delighted to see that Chris Wilson stepped up to write about the Release Party we had last week. I only have to add, that I very much enjoyed having ~30 Ubuntu lovers here and partying and chatting about this and that until 6 in the morning. My brother surprised me with his visit as well as Stefan Himpich, an old friend of mine from Frankfurt. I’m glad to see the Ubuntu Berlin team in action and look forward to be part of more events in the near future.

g-s-t in Ubuntu

June 9, 2006

I never wanted to be part of a blog debate, especially if it contains ranting. I would have very much preferred to see some action on the spec, which is nothing more than a spec skeleton - it doesn’t mean anything at all at the moment. I proposed this spec because in the months of GNOME maintenance in Ubuntu I noticed that: * normal users really do need the system tools, * we faced a lot of bugs, * I personally had problems trying to fix them, the reasons for this seemed to be to me: * the code has grown a lot over time, * Perl (for the backends) and C (for the frontends) seemed to be not to be the easiest solution for the problems g-s-t is trying to address.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 6.06

May 21, 2006

The “To do the upgrade, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list, …"-game is over. Finally! Michael Vogt worked very hard to make upgrading to a new release the overall pleasurable experience that Ubuntu in general is. Let’s have a look how it works. 1. Run gksu “update-manager -d” and type in your password afterwards. 2. Find out there’s a new Ubuntu release to upgrade to - click the “Upgrade” button! 3. Read the release notes and find out about all the shiny new stuff that the Ubuntu developers worked so hard on.

Crash-o-rama

May 2, 2006

If you know this picture too well or you read “This application has quit unexpectedly." once too often or you thought of a pet name for bug-buddy, gdb or valgrind already make sure you visit us. We’ll be fixing, triaging and examining Crashers and Segfaults and hope you’ll join us in #ubuntu-bugs on irc.freenode.net tomorrow.

Nobody prepared me for this

April 29, 2006

Having read this (don’t have the original link) in my early OpenSource years, I never questioned it and took it for granted. You could say that it formed my views on how KDE and how GNOME developers are. However yesterday’s night showed me how far from the truth that was. Ellen Reitmayr took me to Bar25 - a lovely place to hang out all night outside or as somebody pointed out, even the whole weekend.

Ubuntu cakes...

April 19, 2006

Ubuntu cakes are so yesterday: look here.

Laptop Love on Friday

April 19, 2006

Go here.

Berlin nights

April 14, 2006

DJ Patife paid a visit to Berlin and to celebrate the looong weekend, I really wanted to go there. So I met up with Matthias and had a good time at Il Casolare - an amazing pizzeria just right at the Planufer in Kreuzberg. After being watered and fed, we brought home Murphy and went straight through the Görlitzer Park to the Watergate. Having been there before, I really looked forward to it - it’s a nice location with a very nice view on the Spree and when the big Universal logo on the other site is lit in different colours on the night, it reflects on the water - I need to take a picture of that.

Samba de Futebol

March 26, 2006

It was just unfair: after looking forward to a show of Brazilian Drum’n’Bass DJs, I was tortured by the head ache of Doom on Friday. Matthias ‘doko’ Klose insisted on going out for something to eat and have a drink - it was a good idea. The food at the Greek place (somewhere around Bergmanstraße) was very good and the Cocktail bar was crowded by 16 year old (at least it seemed so), but it was fun.

Xubuntu!

March 22, 2006

On Jani Monoses’ last visit to Berlin he saw an old 350 Mhz, 160 MB RAM box in the corner of a room. It was my old router, which I didn’t need anymore and always watched out for a purpose to use it again. I didn’t know that the instruction already existed, but I roughly did the same. It didn’t take long and I was impressed: * It looked nice * It was snappy, even on this old box * the choice of default applications was a good start Daniel T.

Ubuntu vserver and the holba.ch domain... finally

March 2, 2006

I always wanted to register the domain holba.ch and now it’s there. Finally. I’m so glad nobody in Switzerland had the crazy idea to register it. Stefan Himpich, an old friend of mine suggested to talk to the guys at net-lab.net, a company where he had worked for quite a while. I mailed them and they made me a remarkable offer, were absolutely friendly and helpful. They even installed Ubuntu Breezy on the box and I’m delighted, everything just works now.

Dreamteam

February 19, 2006

Everybody knew that mdz and jdub were a good team in the open source world. But this is just cool: