Adopt-an-Upstream, Ubuntu Classroom session planned for next week Comment
Upstreams are very important to Ubuntu. Really quite very a lot of much important. So of course we would like to be very good friends with the projects responsible for so much of the awesomeness you can find on the Ubuntu LiveCD and in Ubuntu’s Software Centre. If we cannot be friends, then at the very least we want a good working relation.
You improve your relation with a project if you invest in it, and that is good for the quality of the project and Ubuntu. I would like to make you aware of a great way of being nice to upstreams: Adopt-an-Upstream. Slick name! But what is it? It is part of something a group of people from the community team lead by Jorge Castro have been working on ince the last UDS. The goal was to make it easier for upstream developers to find out how Ubuntu works and to improve the relations and synergy between up- and downstream.
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Indicator Application PPA for Karmic, this evening UODW session on AppInd 6 Comments
UPDATE: I made a mistake. You actually want to use ppa:indicator-applet-developers/indicator-core-ppa and not my PPA since that causes dependency problems with the other indicators.
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Launchpad Code Hosting on Ohloh.net Comment
Some of you are already on Ohloh.net, a website that imports code repositories for projects and analyses it. You can register an account to collect all your commits and get a nice overview of your experience.
When code is imported all contributors are not coupled to registered accounts by default, you need to manually claim a contributor’s role. Our beloved bot Launchpad Code Hosting frequently appeared in the list of contributors, but always remained unclaimed. I thought it would be interesting to collect all work the poor bot has been doing day in day out, night in night out.
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Dutch cabinet falls Comment
After 16 hours of discussing the future of its coalition the Dutch government finally announced at 4am this morning that the members of the PvdA — the Dutch Labour party — had resigned over what started as a disagreement on the future of the Dutch military presence in Uruzgan, Afghanistan.
I’m not going to repeat the various news articles on this event, but I would like to point you to the English article of the renowned Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Many foreign news papers don’t seem to fully comprehend the (little) rules and nuances of the Dutch political system — we’re a small country after all — so the article from the NRC could be interesting for those of you who would like to know more about it; at the bottom of the article you’ll find a short explanation of the formal and informal consequences of the move.
nrc.nl -International – Dutch kabinet, Balkenende’s fourth, collapses
(This was the fourth cabinet of prime-minister J.P. Balkenende and the fourth that didn’t make it to the elections.)
Giving Transmission the Indicator Application 1 Comment
Have got an application? Add an Application Indicator to it! Jorge explains why.
We keep track of applications that need support for Indicator Application on Launchpad with the bug tag ‘indicator-application‘: the list of bugs against applications that need Indicator Application support. There are code snippets on the wiki page of Application Indicator but in this blog post for those who would like to use it in their application.
I recently added support for Indicator Application to Lernid, Bzr-Gtk and Transmission and am now working on getting it into Banshee. How do you help Ubuntu with adding support to existing applications? I’ll try to make that clear in this blog post.
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Users think differently 8 Comments
Maybe you’ve already knew about the hilarious case of the ReadWriteWeb article “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“. By a stroke of luck this article became the #1 result for ‘facebook login’ on Google. Immediately after this had happened thousands of Facebook users started to flood the blog, thinking that this was their Facebook login page. They didn’t look at the banner, they didn’t read the post, and the later visitors didn’t read the notification that was put on the website to warn visitors that the blog wasn’t Facebook, they just wanted to login.
When they found the first thing with the words ‘login’ and ‘Facebook’ in it they pressed it and ended up in the comment section. There are now hundreds of comments of angry and frustrated users demanding the old Facebook back with the use of Caps Lock and ugly language.
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Do something good for the world, adopt a package! Comment
Have you always wanted to do something good for the world, but did you never know what to do? Here is your chance: adopt a package and help making Ubuntu rock where you want it!
Every day a lot of new bugs are reported on Launchpad, adding to the number of open bugs reported against Ubuntu. Currently there are 81259 open bugs in Ubuntu, of which 43775 are in the ‘New’ state. This means that roughly 54% of all open bugs in Ubuntu are not or were barely touched and when this post will have been published the number is already larger. When handling such large numbers of bug even the omnipotent BugSquad can’t keep up. How can we make sure the important bugs don’t get lost in this superabundance of support requests for writing good defect reports?
If you’re working with something — in the case of Adopt-a-Package an application — you like, you’re more productive. If you work on something you can keep an overview of, work is easier. Continue reading… »
Introduction to Planet Ubuntu 2 Comments
Hello! I’m Sense Hofstede. Yesterday I was approved as an Ubuntu Member during the Ubuntu Membership EMEA regional approval board meeting. I’m very happy and the support I received was heart-warming. You may not know me, so let me introduce myself first.
Activities
Most people know me as a member of the Ubuntu Bug Control team, which I fist applied to in 2006, first joined in 2007 and then rejoined in 2008. That last year was the year I started to really contribute significantly to Ubuntu and slowly started to show my face at more and more different places. I’m a bug triager, foster-parent of Nautilus, and a Brainstorm Idea Reviewer.
Ubuntu Wanted is also a project I’ve started, but it’s really behind schedule for something that was discussed during UDS-J in Barcelona. Continue reading… »
Tiny little BugSquad tool: AdoptionStats Comment
In order to make fetching a the number of bugs in each status against a certain package easy I’ve written a small script called AdoptionStats. We’re currently working on the Adopt-a-Package project for the Ubuntu Bug Squad and if you want to be able to keep track of how a package is doing you need data: information about the current status and information about past statuses for comparison.
AdoptionStats generates a data list and constantly returns it in the same format and therefore the results can easily be manipulated by other scripts, e.g. for generating graphs.
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Lucid on Lynx, Alpha 1 Comment
It’s still a bit too early to confirm the statement of the title — if you’d have a look at the release schedule (Where did the artwork drops go to?) you can see Alpha 2 is not going to be released until 14 January — and it is probably not wise to switch to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx already, but I still risked the chance and upgraded my production environment to the development release.
So far everything’s going quite fine actually, booting has become a lot less scary now the “Segmentation error” message that was the first thing you saw on boot is gone now and I found a way to solve the issues with the NVidia drivers.
Currently the package ‘nvidia-glx-185′ in Lucid is incompatible with the Xserver — ‘nvidia-glx-185′ provides the virtual package ‘xserver-xorg-video-5′, and that conflicts with ‘xorg’, which wants ‘xserver-xorg-video-6′. Fortunately Collin Pruitt came to rescue with his blog post “Problems With Xorg and the nVidia Drivers“, which explains that you need to use the PPA ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa to get newer versions of the NVidia driver, nvidia-glx-195 is the latest release available from this repository, but legacy drivers are also available and should work on Lucid.
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