Ubuntu

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....

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)....

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....

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....

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....

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 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!

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....

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)....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....