Planet Ubuntu

Planet Ubuntu - http://planet.ubuntu.com/

Updated: 13 min 52 sec ago

Dennis Kaarsemaker: Titlebar button position

1 hour 44 min ago

I hate them on the left. I really do. Fortunately, when you hang out on IRC, sometimes little gems of information come by :)

<IdleOne> to change the buttons layout from left side of the window to the rightside , hit the alt-F2 keys then type gconf-editor, then apps > metacity > general > button layout > menu:minimize,maximize,close

Happy π day :)

Categories: Technical

Martin Owens: New Business Card

12 hours 44 min ago

I got a request from ubuntu member Chris Johnston about a new look business card using the new style/branding and to give you all an example of what what would look like I give you this quickly put together design (it’s not that good I admit):

You can download the source svg from deviantArt and don’t forget to install the LMMathSymbols10 font in the texlive package for the name text.

Categories: Technical

Thorsten Wilms: Ubuntu Manual Title Page

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 20:26

I worked with the Ubuntu Manual Team to refine the mission statement, define the audience, tone/message, to have a solid, documented and shared base for the design of not only the title page.

Much of that has its roots in a single IRC meeting. It’s documented in the wiki (link to the latest revision at the time of writing).

Summary:

The mission is to create and deploy a document that is suitable as first point of reference regarding the use of Ubuntu by beginner-level users.

The main target audience are pragmatic novice computer users. They want to get things done, they don’t see using the computer as an end in itself. We expect a peak of potential users in the range between 30 and 60 years of age.

The tone should be friendly, respectful and serious. From everyday people for everyday people. There should be an aura of competence and being goal driven. The message regarding Ubuntu shall be that it is solid, secure, trustworthy, capable, easy to use, empowering, about community (altruistic and pragmatic aspects), about FLOSS and not a clone of another system.

This all started before the announcement of the new Ubuntu identity design. The old logo-type encouraged me to me go for a slight handmade/organic touch. The community side of the new identity seems less suitable to hit the desired tone than the commercial side in my eyes, but we should not signify involvement of Canonical where this is very much a community project (see Mark Shuttleworth’s post about this dualism). So there’s one variation using lots of Aubergine, but it’s use would be problematic.

The following thumbnails link to PDFs, so you can judge the variations in their full scalable glory:

SVG source

In any case, some last tweaks will be required, including adjusting the margins based on the internal layout and using the right orange, once there’s an official and final definition.

Many thanks to David Nel for his idea to use icons and a mouse pointer and to Vish for helping with the icons.

Filed under: Icons, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Manual Project

Categories: Technical

Ddorda: ‫New theme and RTL languages‬

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 19:49

Hey all,

Recently Ubuntu got a new theme, which (IMHO) looks awesome. Some people complain about the close button change, some doesn't like the theme at all, but I want to show a completely different problem in the theme.

Few days ago a good friend, IsraeliHawk, complained about the way the new theme looks in RTL languages.

In the new theme the title is in the left side of the window, which might look great in LTR mode, but in RTL it's seem to look a little buggy.

For that reason Uri opened a bug report, which explains quite good what is the problem.

So if you're an RTL user, or even just some who care, please have a look and see what you can do

Thanks,
Dor.

Edit: Thanks for Haggai Eran who commented another RTL bug with the new theme.

Categories: Technical

Lucas Nussbaum: RC bugs of the week

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 19:36

I just couldn’t resist… I joined the game, but did it the other way around.

I could only file 51 new FTBFS (Fail To Build From Source) bugs this time. Looks like Squeeze is getting closer!

I’ve also been doing rebuilds of Ubuntu lucid. There are currently 561 packages that fail to build from source in lucid/amd64, versus 430 in sid/amd64 (I will start rebuilding squeeze instead of sid after the freeze). Surprisingly, only 131 packages fail in both. I would have expected that number to be much higher.

Categories: Technical

Alan Bell: Fun with Gwibber themes

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 18:44

In order to be fully buzzword compliant, all conference type gatherings in this web 2.0 social media age now have a compulsory twitter tag and live twitter projected display. Oggcamp (which, I would just like to mention, The Open Learning Centre is sponsoring) is no exception to this rule, but being all about Free culture needs to incorporate identi.ca (or status.net) dents alongside the tweets. The best way to do this is to leverage (I have a buzzword for every situation) the existing technology and make Gwibber fit for the purpose of projecting a continuous stream following a hash tag at a conference. The first thing it needs is a full screen mode. I have hacked one in, but it needs a bit of improvement, some more bits really need to be hidden when in presentation mode. The next thing I wanted to do was give each of the various hashtag pipelines (or “hash pipes” as I like to call them) it’s own theme. This bit was tricky as the search query isn’t currently available to the theme engine. I asked the upstream developers for a bit of guidance at this point and within 15 minutes of me explaining what I wanted to do I was given a new patch by segphault that exposes the search query to the theme.

So now I have a nearly finished Oggcamp theme which adapts when it sees you searching for #oggcamp, #ubuntu, #lo, #shotofjaq or #uupc. If I missed out any interesting hashtags then do let me know. Screenshot below is it running fullscreen on my 2048×1152 monitor. In reality it would be tracking two of them on a 1024×768 projector, but this shows all the hash pipe themes together, click to go large.

I will be pushing up a bzr branch of all this so you can play with it in the comfort of your own home or your own conference. If you have further suggestions, or want to help tweak it a bit more, then give me a shout in the comments.

Tell Someone Else!

Categories: Technical

Laudeci Oliveira: APTonCD and Themes.

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 18:15

After a long time without being able to add any new functionality or improve something already done, decided to resolve an issue that bothered a lot users, the visual behavior to using different themes.

To illustrate the problem, a brief introduction: APTonCD uses a color scheme to highlight the status of packages on it’s list.

They are:

Installed with newer version;
Not installed but with newer versions;
Installed but using an old version;
Not Installed but using an old version;
“CUSTOM” packages, using the ‘add’ button or by draging’n droping from nautilus;
BAD Packages, packages that was not correct loaded by APTonCD;

The most common problem was to show packages with older versions using a color that aware the user for an old package, the development team chose the insensiteve color used by themes in the background color of a Label to show an item that does not respond to events mouse or keyboard. The result can be seen in the figure below:

Notice how difficult is to see informations of adduser (3.110ubuntu7) and adobe-flashplugin (10.0.42.34-2karnic1) packages.

After change it, the theme color used is the STATE_ INSENSITIVE for text and not backgrounds. The result is much better.

Now it’s using the new Python-apt API.

There’s much more coming, fasten your sit belts!!!

Categories: Technical

Thorsten Wilms: Ubuntu Manual Project Logo

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 13:21

Logo/header variations for the Ubuntu Manual Project.

This work is primarily meant to be inward facing, not necessarily for the audience of the manual. I decided to focus on the project being a collaborative (several sources) process to build a document.

The font is Biolinum, to be used for titles in the manual, in combination with Libertine for body text.

The CoF in an orange circle looked too aggressive in this context.

Filed under: Logos, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Manual Project

Categories: Technical

Amber Graner: Call for input on Lucid Lynx Beta 1 - Technical Overview

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 09:53

Over on the Ubuntu Marketing Mailing list earlier today, Steve Langasek issued a call for input, below is what he had to say:

The first beta of Lucid Lynx is coming up next week, on March 18. It would be good to have a refresh of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/TechnicalOverview leading up to this with more input from people who can say what's great about Lucid instead of just people like me who spend our time enumerating all the things that are wrong with it. :-) What's great about the Ubuntu 10.04 beta that you want our users to know?
Take a look at the wiki and see if you can help answer slangasek's question -"What's great about the Ubuntu 10.04 beta that you want our users to know?"

Categories: Technical

Aaron Toponce: Irssi Handling JOINS/PARTS/QUITS

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 04:46

Irssi, as blogged extensively throughout this site, is one solid client. The flexibility never ceases to amaze me, and tonight was one of those times.

Hanging out in the amount of channels I do, I see a lot of activity in my statusbar for all of my joined channels. This can be overwhelming for some, but I don’t mind it. What I do mind, however, is when I check in on a specific channel, and see pages and pages of scrollback that is nothing more than people joining and leaving the channel. I’ve tried blatantly ignoring JOINS, PARTS and QUITS, as they’re called, but I always disable it, because I usually want to be kept abreast of when someone leaves a channel that I’m having a conversation with. I don’t want to look silly continuing to chat to someone, long after they’ve left. So, I need a way to keep on top of when people are joining and leaving the channel, but not have that information in the channel itself. Thankfully, Irssi meets this need.

The concept is simple. A JOIN, PART or QUIT is what is referred to as a “level”. There are a number of different levels that Irssi supports, all of which can be found with “/help levels” in Irssi. With Irssi, it is possible to ignore, or even redirect, levels. In my case, I want to redirect these three levels to another window, if possible. So, digging through the settings in Irssi, I found “window_check_level_first”. By default, this setting is “OFF”, which means that Irssi has a global setting for levels, and how they’re handled. Enabling this setting, means to follow the levels that have been assigned to their respective channels. However, if you turn this on first, without doing some initial setup before hand, you’ll notice everything going to your status window by default, including chat. This isn’t what we want, so let’s get setup.

The first thing we need to do is set our levels for all of our currently open windows, as well as any future windows that we open. We can accomplish this with two commands in Irssi:

/foreach window /window level ALL -JOINS -PARTS -QUITS /set window_default ALL -JOINS -PARTS -QUITS

Now, the next thing to do is to create a new hidden window that will be the new home for all your JOINS, PARTS and QUITS. So, from Irssi:

/window new HIDDEN

Navigate to that window, wherever it is placed, and give it a name. For me, I called it “junk”. Of course, this isn’t necessary, just optional, but I prefer that each of my windows have a name:

/window name junk

It will have picked up the -JOINS -PARTS -QUITS from our default setting we just applied, so we’ll need to reverse that. Easiest way is to just apply the converse of what you did earlier:

/window level -ALL JOINS PARTS QUITS

Sweet. Our window is finished. Now, we can turn on the setting that will tell Irssi to look for each individual window level setting:

/set window_check_level_first ON

Wait a bit, and you should see all the JOINS, PARTS and QUITS going to your new hidden window, rather than each respective channel. You’ll also notice that it doesn’t print the channel where these are originating. I don’t know of an easy way to set that without a script, so if you know of such a script that exists, or want to write one yourself, sharing that would be appreciated. In the meantime, this is better than nothing.

Don’t forget to save:

/save

Also, you may not want to make your “junk” window hidden, but rather make it sticky, and split Irssi, putting the junk window on the top. I’ve done this with my highlight window, so it would make sense here. In that case, just:

/window stick on /window show (number|name)

You can then size the window as needed if you decide you split your Irssi.

And, there you have it. Now, when people are joining and quitting, rather than filling your scrollback where precious chat exists, it’s all being forwarded to a window of your choice. If eventually, you like this setup, and you find that you’re not checking your junk window for joins and quits, then you may be able to get away with just ignoring JOINS, PARTS and QUITS altogether Irssi-wide. Which means, if for any reason you want to reverse this setup, it’s rather trivial:

/set window_check_level_first OFF /foreach window /window level ALL /set window_default ALL /window close /save

And that would back you out of this configuration, and get you back to default.

I should mention that I’ve heard that WeeChat has a feature that only people you’ve recently chatted with will show when they quit, or there is a setting for setting this. I personally think WeeChat is a solid client. However, in this case, I don’t want to see any quits, even with those I’m chatting with, in that buffer. However, I would like to see it in another buffer, and Irssi makes this painless. So, while I’m sure WeeChat can also meet similar needs, Irssi meets my needs best.

As with my other Irssi tutorials, I hope this one was helpful. I find that I personally benefit from my own writing, and that’s the major reason why I blog. I have searched for doing solving problems in the past, only to stumble upon my own blog post, outlining the very issue I’m faced with again. So, if it won’t benefit you, at least it will benefit myself.

Categories: Technical

Martin Owens: Ubuntu Art: March

Sat, 13/03/2010 - 00:58

One of my many jobs in the community is to bring you lovely Ubuntu planet readers some of the wonderful art works that are created using Ubuntu and the FOSS tools we have in the repositories, all these works come from the Ubuntu deviantArt group. These are my picks for the month of march:

If you or someone you know is a good artist and would like to show off their work in our featured gallery. Do join up at our deviantArt group’s front page and start submitting work to the favourites and the galleries.

Categories: Technical

Andres Rodriguez: Call for Testing: Cluster Stack – Load Balancing

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 21:44

Continuing with the Ubuntu Cluster Stack testing, it is the time now for Load Balancing. During las UDS, we discussed that we should based the Load Balancing as part of the Ubuntu Cluster Stack using Keepalived due to its speed. However, since the main Cluster Stack is based in Pacemaker, we decided to do Load Balancing with Pacemaker/ldirectord too.

The wikipage showing the procedure is THIS ONE. If you find any bugs in the documentation, please let us know by leaving your comments at the END of the wikipage in preparation for the Documentation that might be included in the Ubuntu Server Guide.

All the packages are now in the archives. So please test the configurations and if you find any bugs, please report them in LP .

Categories: Technical

Thorsten Wilms: Fitts’ Law Misunderstood

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 19:26

Fitts’ Law is being thrown around quite often. Some people seem to think that it is all about how the edges of the screen and especially the corners are easy/fast to hit with the pointer. We have to thank Tog for that This is at least not entirely wrong, but I also saw claims it would have to do with targets becoming harder to hit if you place other targets in close proximity.

It really only covers: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. It has to be noted that this does only refer to linear movement, so the size of the target has to be measured along the axis of movement.

Here’s a nice article with pictures (and the actual formula).

Filed under: Planet Ubuntu, Thoughts

Categories: Technical

Duncan McGreggor: Some Thoughts on the Mobile Device Interface

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 17:52

Smartphones: Yesterday's News

As some of you know, I started 2010 by working in a new position at Canonical: Ubuntu Project Manager. I've been having an absolute blast; working my butt off has never been more fun, challenging, or interesting. I'm finding that nearly every side-interest I've had in the past several years is coming to the forefront in my project management work.

There were all sorts of adjustments I needed to make before PM'ing again, and one of those was catching up on communication technology. I now live by email, calendars, IRC, Skype, and phone conversations. Gone are the days of going heads-down into some code for a week or two. I need to stay connected, 100% of the time. I needed to get a smartphone.

What I really wanted was a Nokia N900. Sadly, T-Mobile's not offering one, so I got an Android phone with a physical keyboard instead: a new G1. Yeah, out of date, but considering that I was still using a Razr, the G1 is cutting-edge ;-)

I gotta tell you, this little phone has changed my life. The craziest thing is not the apps, the Market, the features, etc.; it's the touchscreen that has made me a believer.

You Can Touch This

I can't believe how radically the touchscreen phone has changed my computing habits and preferences. When I sit down at my laptop or desktop to do something quickly, I don't want use the keyboard or mouse. I want to point, swipe, and tweak with my fingers. When I'm on the phone, my brain has my speaking and text-processing faculties tied up. To easily multitask while talking, I need to be able to use a different part of my brain: that part involved in motor control.

I like using the touchscreen so much that I will often use my G1 for tasks that are better suited for my laptop, merely because of the joy I get from using the interface.

Touch, tap, drag, push, swipe. I love it. Can't get enough of it.

The best thing of all? This is really silly: I love the virtual desktops and being able to navigate between them with a swipe. Whose idea was this? That designer or engineer needs to be promoted! I have never experienced a more intuitive way of switching virtual desktops. I didn't even know how much this was important to me until I used the G1. I want this for my laptop!

Having such a positive bias towards tactile technology, you can imagine my joy when I saw this Ubuntu blueprint. And then when I was asked to work with Bryce and Andy on the PM portion of multi-touch support, I was quite delighted. This will give application developers and device engineers what they need in order to start creating new exciting stuff for the Ubuntu world. You will be able to have an iPad-like experience on your Linux devices (that have the proper hardware).

The thing is, as much fun as tactile interfaces are, I want way more now. I've been given a taste... now I want the banquet.

An Interface for the Future

So the iPad has been getting lots of press. It's bigger than a phone, I like that: I could replace my pen-and-paper medium-sized Moleskine with one. The thing I like the best though? Yeah, you guessed it: the interface. Curling pages and apps that have been re-worked specifically for the new format/size. I love it when a device lets me use it in a way that is natural and intuitive, and provides visual (or other sensory) feedback on my use.

Apple has made, in my opinion, a good and interesting product. But certainly not a revolutionary one. It's a natural progression from what folks are already doing with smartphones and netbooks.

So let's talk about revolutionary :-)

Imagine you've got a crazy new shirt, one whose fibers convert your movements to electrical current and can power your devices. Perhaps it comes with a "battery net" for literally flexible power storage. Now imagine that some clever sod has equipped your shirt with sockets for micro-SD cards (or something similar). If you've read my "After the Cloud" posts, then you probably know where I'm going with this :-)

Now add some embedded micro-controllers, and bluetooth, a smart phone with cloud-controller software, and you've got a personal S3 with potentially terabytes of light-weight, wearable storage. And your phone controls the nodes, redundancy, failover, etc. Maybe your phone runs Ubuntu and you're pushing backups of your personal cloud onto your U1 account.

But how do we interface with all this great storage? Here comes the banquet I mentioned :-)

I want to be able to reach "into" my phone, grab an icon (application, file, contact, whatever) and put it where I want. But I mean really put it: I can pick up some data off my desktop, and throw it over my shoulder or at my feet. With appropriate sensing equipemnt on the power shirt's sleeves, my arms and hands are now the perfect "mice."

In fact, there's no more virtual desktop (that's old skool). One of the new primary functions of your mobile device is to peer "into" the halo of data that surrounds you now. You can either spin your virtual storage space around you like an inverted, 3D lazy susan, our you can physically move your phone around, like a diving mask peering into the water.

Closing Thoughts

The more data I have, the more I feel that I live in it. The problem is that our current tech forces us into tiny sardine cans and we have to consume our data with the equivalent of a single chop-stick. If I'm going to live in my data, I want to have the best possible experience of immersion that I can. I want an interface that can handle my future.

I could go on and on... I love this sort of thing. The important thing to know now is that the community is working on the building blocks for our technological future. The first steps are being made in open source software that will allow us to take giant, insanely cool steps in the not-to-distant future.

Categories: Technical

Matt Zimmerman: QCon London 2010: Day 3

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 17:14

The tracks which interested me today were “How do you test that?”, which dealt with scenarios where testing (especially automation) is particularly challenging, and “Browser as a Platform”, which is self-explanatory.

Joe Walker: Introduction to Bespin, Mozilla’s Web Based Code Editor

I didn’t make it to this talk, but Bespin looks very interesting. It’s “a Mozilla Labs Experiment to build a code editor in a web browser that Open Web and Open Source developers could love”.

I experimented briefly with the Mozilla hosted instance of Bespin. It seems mostly oriented for web application development, and still isn’t nearly as nice as desktop editors. However, I think something like this, combined with Bazaar and Launchpad, could make small code changes in Ubuntu very fast and easy to do, like editing a wiki.

Doron Reuveni: The Mobile Testing Challenge

Why Mobile Apps Need Real-World Testing Coverage and How Crowdsourcing Can Help

Doron explained how the unique testing requirements of mobile handset application are well suited to a crowdsourcing approach. As the founder of uTest, he explained their approach to connecting their customers (application vendors) with a global community of testers with a variety of mobile devices. Customers evaluate the quality of the testers’ work, and this data is used to grade them and select testers for future testing efforts in a similar domain. The testers earn money for their efforts, based on test case coverage (starting at about $20 each), bug reports (starting at about $5 each), and so on. Their highest performers earn thousands per month.

uTest also has a system, uTest Remote Access, which allows developers to “borrow” access to testers’ devices temporarily, for the purpose of reproducing bugs and verifying fixes. Doron gave us a live demo of the system, which (after verifying a code out of band through Skype) displayed a mockup of a BlackBerry device with the appropriate hardware buttons and a screenshot of what was displayed on the user’s screen. The updates were not quite real-time, but were sufficient for basic operation. He demonstrated taking a picture with the phone’s camera and seeing the photo within a few seconds.

Dylan Schiemann: Now What?

Dylan did a great job of extrapolating a future for web development based on the trend of the past 15 years. He began with a review of the origin of web technologies, which were focused on presentation and layout concerns, then on to JavaScript, CSS and DHTML. At this point, there was clear potential for rich applications, though there were many roadblocks: browser implementations were slow, buggy or nonexistent, security models were weak or missing, and rich web applications were generally difficult to engineer.

Things got better as more browsers came on the scene, with better implementations of CSS, DOM, XML, DHTML and so on. However, we’re still supporting an ancient implementation in IE. This is a recurring refrain among web developers, for whom IE seems to be the bane of their work. Dylan added something I hadn’t heard before, though, which was that Microsoft states that anti-trust restrictions were a major factor which prevented this problem from being fixed.

Next, there was an explosion of innovation

around Ajax and related toolkits, faster javascript implementations, infrastructure as a service, and rich web applications like GMail, Google Maps, Facebook, etc.

Dylan believes that web applications are what users and developers really want, and that desktop and mobile applications will fall by the wayside. App stores, he says, are a short term anomaly to avoid the complexities of paying many different parties for software and services. I’m not sure I agree on this point, but there are massive advantages to the web as an application platform for both parties. Web applications are:

fast, easy and cheap to deploy to many users
relatively affordable to build
relatively easy to link together in useful ways
increasingly remix-able via APIs and code reuse

There are tradeoffs, though. I have an article brewing on this topic which I hope to write up sometime in the next few weeks.

Dylan pointed out that different layers of the stack exhibit different rates of change: browsers are slowest, then plugins (such as Flex and SilverLight), then toolkits like Dojo, and finally applications which can update very quickly. Automatically updating browsers are accelerating this, and Chrome in particular values frequent updates. This is good news for web developers, as this seems to be one of the key constraints for rolling out new web technologies today.

Dylan feels that technological monocultures are unhealthy, and prefers to see a set of competing implementations converging on standards. He acknowledged that this is less true where the monoculture is based on free software, though this can still inhibit innovation somewhat if it leads to everyone working from the same point of view (by virtue of sharing a code base and design). He mentioned that de facto standardization can move fairly quickly; if 2-3 browsers implement something, it can start to be adopted by application developers.

Comparing the different economics associated with browsers, he pointed out that Mozilla is dominated by search through the chrome (with less incentive to improve the rendering engine), Apple is driven by hardware sales, and Google by advertising delivered through the browser. It’s a bit of a mystery why Microsoft continues to develop Internet Explorer.

Dylan summarized the key platform considerations for developers:

choice and control
taste (e.g. language preferences, what makes them most productive)
performance and scalability
security

and surmised that the best way to deliver these is through open web technologies, such as HTML 5, which now offers rich media functionality including audio, video, vector graphics and animations. He closed with a few flashy demos of HTML 5 applications showing what could be done.

Categories: Technical

Brian Curtis: 2 reasons not to use when claiming Lucid changes are bad

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 16:17

This blog is in response to http://humphreybc.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/its-the-little-things-that-count/

1: Ubuntu users aren't used to the change
I'm getting pretty sick and tired of the Ubuntu users out there that revert to saying that all changes that canonical has made to Ubuntu for 10.04 are bad "because Ubuntu users aren't used to them". I don't really see how you can consider anything change unless something has ... well ... changed. Yes, these same people that are making those claims are the same people that are out there complaining about there being no changes.

What's wrong with there being change for the sake of change? I learned Ubuntu not by someone telling where every little button is, but by playing around with the UI and seeing where everything is for myself. Even the typical egghead when it comes to computers knows that there will be a close/maximimize/minimize button somewhere in the top of a window. Just because it's magically been moved to the other side doesn't mean Ubuntu's gone to the crapper.

2: Windows users will get confused if they want to switch
I'm kind of expanding on my last statement here, but it's not exactly rocket science here trying to find out where things are on the Desktop GUI. I would imagine that most people that want to make the switch to Ubuntu aren't going to go crazy and get depressed because things "aren't where they should be".

I don't see the macintosh users out there going "hmm, I'm not sure if the windows users who switch over to macintosh are going to like that the title bar menu options are now right next to the window title" or "oh gosh, windows users are going to spontaneously combust when they see the close/maximize/minimize buttons on the left hand side".

The ability for the new Ubuntu user to use their common sense is something that too many people are ignorant of. There is no reason that a single change made so far by the team at Canonical should be seen as something any new Ubuntu user can't get a grasp of with the use of a little common sense.

I for one am happy that Canonical has finally decided to make some decent UI changes to Ubuntu, because thats something that I get to look forward to on a constant basis as I test of the newest versions of Ubuntu. There are too many lazy users out there that just aren't willing to accept the changes because IMO they have gotten into such a routine with their daily computer lifestyles that any and all changes are the straw that broke the camels back.

Categories: Technical

Amber Graner: You-in-Ubuntu: When will Ubuntu 10.10 get a name?

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 14:26

You-in-Ubuntu: Checking out the history of the "Funky Fairy" naming system!

As the Ubuntu Community is gearing up for the release of Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, there are those, myself included, who are anxiously awaiting the announcement of the code name of Ubuntu 10.10?I went looking around the wiki's to see what I could find out about how each release gets it's name. I found a greatDevelopment Code Names wiki. Here's what I found out.
To read the full article please visit: You-In-Ubuntu.image is by Olivia Galbraith and is available for download @https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Karmic/Backgrounds/Extra_Abstract

Categories: Technical

The Fridge: Ubuntu as project in Google Summer of Code 2010

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 12:17

I’m very excited to announce that Ubuntu has applied as participating organisation in the Google Summer of Code 2010!

We submitted an organisational application, along with suggested ideas for potential projects for students. We also encourage students to come up with their own ideas.

If you’re a student interested in Open Source (or if you know students who are), now is the time to act to get involved in Google’s wonderful Summer of Code program.

Also, if you are thinking about becoming a student’s mentor please visit:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2010

Make sure you read all the necessary information carefully and join the IRC channel and mailing list for more discussion.

The timeline is as follows:

The list of accepted Mentoring Organisations will be announced on March 18, 2010 at 12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC and will be posted on the Google Summer of Code 2010 site.
The student application period begins March 29, 2010 at 12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC and ends April 9, 2010 at 12:00 at 12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. Please see the Google Summer of Code 2010 timeline and FAQs for further information.

[Discuss Ubuntu and the Google Summer of Code 2010 on the Forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list by Daniel Holbach on Fri Mar 12 09:59:16 GMT 2010

Categories: Technical

Jonathan Carter: Purple vs Orange

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 11:23

Scottie posted an entry earlier about the new Ubuntu branding. I’ve been meaning to make a very similar post, but I’ve had lots more important things to do the last two weeks.

For those who have missed it, Canonical announced the new branding and artwork on the day of the User Interface Freeze for the Lucid development cycle. The decisions around the new branding have been met with some controversy, and as Scottie pointed out, some awkwardness around it. I’ll try to sum up my views about it in this post.

Purple / Aubergine

One of the major changes in the artwork is a change from the yellowy-brown colours to purple and orange. Most of the highlights are in purple, so is the terminal background. The aubergine (purple) is supposed to signify the corporate and the commercial aspects of Ubuntu, while the orange represents community.

I love the way the background is slightly transparent by default. The compositing capabilities in Ubuntu is powerful and should be showed off. The amount of transparency is also just subtle enough that it shouldn’t bother people who usually prefer a solid background. I think the colour is horrible though. I’d go as far as to say it’s offensive, I can write that off to personal taste though. The really bad thing about it is that it changes your default profile to the so-called “Ambiance” theme automatically without any warning. At least it was easy to delete and my older, much more aesthetically pleasing terminal was restored.

Button Positions

The button positions have been a bit more controversial than the actual colours. Personally, I didn’t like it at first but it only took a few hours to get used to it. It was the same when I used OSX for the first time, the positions feel weird at first but they grow on you fast. I don’t think the button positions will be a problem for users who use Ubuntu pretty much exclusively. Not all my machines are on Lucid yet, so it’s been a pain to move between machines that have the controls on the left and that have them on the right. I can imagine that having the controls on the left may be a major annoyance for someone who uses the one system at home and another at work.

Besides that, many applications are set up to have the close button at the top right, and it’s usually not configurable. Scott mentioned something similar with regards to tabs, here’s an example in an OpenOffice document:

Font / Logo

Besides the announcement on the day of UI Freeze, the new Ubuntu font is still not complete either. This means that some derivatives (Edubuntu, for one), doesn’t have a new logo yet since the “e” and “d” letters haven’t been finalized yet. We’re also waiting for a new logo from Canonical, it’s a bit painful that this couldn’t have been better communicated or planned in advance.

Scott wonders why few other people have talked about this, but it’s not the first time Canonical has made big changes on or just before a freeze. It’s probably not the last either. I don’t think people are comfortable providing feedback, especially at the risk of being labeled as a bad apple that just wants to complain about stuff and especially if it won’t change anything.

Changes

Having said what I have so far, I’m all in favour of making big, bold changes. If Canonical puts this much effort into the design of every release, and if they can find a way to involve the community as well (turn their cold purple hearts a bit more orangy), then I think Ubuntu will make major strides in usability and design that ultimately, everyone else would want to copy.

Categories: Technical

Ubuntu Release blog: Archive frozen in preparation for Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1

Fri, 12/03/2010 - 09:43

One week away from the first Ubuntu 10.04 Beta release, the archive is now in hard freeze for preparation of that Beta.

During the freeze, all uploads to main must be approved by a member of the
release team, so if you have fixes which are important to get in, please get in touch as soon as possible (and preferably, get your packages uploaded in parallel!). Uploads to universe require a manual push through the queue, but are not subject to release management approval.

Full details can be found in the mailing list archive.

Categories: Technical

Planet Ubuntu

Dennis Kaarsemaker: Titlebar button position

Martin Owens: New Business Card

Thorsten Wilms: Ubuntu Manual Title Page

Ddorda: ‫New theme and RTL languages‬

Lucas Nussbaum: RC bugs of the week

Alan Bell: Fun with Gwibber themes

Laudeci Oliveira: APTonCD and Themes.

Thorsten Wilms: Ubuntu Manual Project Logo

Amber Graner: Call for input on Lucid Lynx Beta 1 - Technical Overview

Aaron Toponce: Irssi Handling JOINS/PARTS/QUITS

Martin Owens: Ubuntu Art: March

Andres Rodriguez: Call for Testing: Cluster Stack – Load Balancing

Thorsten Wilms: Fitts’ Law Misunderstood

Duncan McGreggor: Some Thoughts on the Mobile Device Interface

Matt Zimmerman: QCon London 2010: Day 3

Brian Curtis: 2 reasons not to use when claiming Lucid changes are bad

Amber Graner: You-in-Ubuntu: When will Ubuntu 10.10 get a name?

The Fridge: Ubuntu as project in Google Summer of Code 2010

Jonathan Carter: Purple vs Orange

Ubuntu Release blog: Archive frozen in preparation for Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1

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