ubuntu

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.