Wow. Time sure goes quickly. It has been a few weeks since my last blog post but there certainly hasn’t been a lack of things to blog about, just been super busy!

First off, I’m pretty proud to report that I’ve been able to fix a rather unfortunate regression in Xubuntu where when users logged in they’d sometimes (ie. it was an intermittent issue) just see a blue (or some other colour) screen and their mouse - nothing else would happen. This was being caused by a race condition resulting in a deadlock due to architectural issues in libxcb (which should be fixed completely hopefully for Intrepid). It was an interesting adventure and certainly was a tricky bug to figure out (lots of time spent in gdb, lots of research, lots of diagnostic tests, and lots of theorizing).  It turned out that gnome-screensaver was sending a dbus message after it started but the Xfce4 xinitrc script didn’t run dbus-launch until later. When a program attempts to send a dbus message and no session bus is available, libdbus will automatically start one. This resulted in two dbus-launch processes being started and it aggravated libxcb into deadlocking when the second instance of dbus attempted to open the bilateral communication socket with X. I was able to fix the issue by making sure dbus-launch occurred before gnome-screensaver. Big thanks to Bryce Harrington and Scott Remnant for answering my questions  and their attempts to help. Naturally, kudos to Google for being such a good little search engine. And yes, this fix has made it into the point release.

Another tricky bug was figured out by Lionel Le Folgoc. A regression was introduced when the gdm settings shipped in xubuntu-default-settings was synced with Ubuntu’s. This resulted in the proper xinitrc (/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc) *not* being executed. This is the source of the screensaver not starting and about five other bugs. I’ve uploaded a fix to Intrepid as well as an SRU (it is currently awaiting approval to -proposed) for Hardy. Lionel also did a whole truck load of SRUs to fix missing translations in packages due to our migration to universe. Thanks Lionel!

So, we were able to get the first alpha out the door for Intrepid. As you probably could guess, an important part of that process is testing. Currently there isn’t anyone in particular leading up the testing efforts for Xubuntu. If you’ve got some experience under your belt, I welcome you to approach him and we can discuss how you can be a big help to Xubuntu by leading our testing efforts for Intrepid.

Speaking of Intrepid, I’ve been thinking and also bouncing around ideas with Jozmak (the fellow you probably know as the Xubuntu artwork guy. great guy!). I think I speak for Jozmak when I say it would neat if we were able to start building a Xubuntu artwork community. Nothlit (who you’ve probably associated with Mythbuntu before) seems to be moving in just that direction (thanks Nothlit!!): He has created some mockups which you can view here: http://core.joejaxx.net/~nothlit/xubuntu/ - I think they’re looking pretty sweet and I’m looking forward to seeing a SVG. What do you guys think? Any art folk out there who would be interested in getting some art stuff going for Xubuntu? If there is anything I can do to help to facilitate the growth of such a group, let me know

Oh, Xubuntu Strategy Document you say? hehe. We had our final community meetings which went exceedingly well. I was very excited to have several members of the Xfce4 development team present who gave lots of helpful input. It also allowed for us to have an awesome discussion on how to work more effectively with each other which is always a mutual net gain.  So, didn’t I target an earlier date to release the final version of the strategy document? Indeed I did and I assure you the wait is almost over! Keep watching this space.

So, before I jet I’d like to thank a few more folks (like usual).  Radomir Dopieralski for his awesome support work in #xubuntu and help in testing several SRUs. Charlie Kravetz for getting the end of the month team report together. Jim Campbell (naturally) for getting the Xubuntu team meetings going again. Steve Langasek for being such an awesome release manager to work with. Last but not least, everyone else who has helped contribute to making Xubuntu such an awesome, rockin’ distro

Xubuntu meeting is going on in #ubuntu-meeting right now! Come check it out and take part!

Hello Everyone,

Just a friendly reminder of the important Xubuntu community meeting that is scheduled to take place this Wednesday, June 18th @ 2000 (8:00pm) UTC. At this meeting, we will discuss the second draft of the Xubuntu strategy document which is an revised version based on community feedback. This meeting will allow interested parties (Xubuntu developers, Xubuntu community members, Xubuntu users, and anyone interested in seeing Xubuntu being successful) to discuss the document and ways that we can improve it. Suggestions and feedback gathered at this hour long meeting will be used to to produce the final draft.

A second meeting is scheduled for June 21st @ 5:00pm (1700) UTC. At this meeting, we will discuss the priorities and specifications for Intrepid for roughly half an hour to three quarters of an hour. Following, we will all hop on Gobby and work on improving the document collaboratively (particular the standards procedures section). By the end of this meeting, we will have a set of goals for Intrepid and the candidate Xubuntu strategy document.

On June 23rd, I will announce (if all goes well) the official ratification of the Xubuntu strategy document and the official goals for Intrepid. I believe this schedule provides ample opportunity for individual community members to express their ideas, concerns, frustrations, excitement, approval, etc. and will result in a document that is supported and legitimized by its community.

I encourage everyone with an interest in the Xubuntu project to come and participate in these meetings; it is an excellent opportunity to get involved in a great project. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have otherwise I look forward to seeing you all in #ubuntu-meeting on June 18th and June 21st.

Thank you,

Birthday went well

/me notes that it is time for his annual performance review.

I just noticed that there has been a lack of MOTU related posts on the planet lately (or maybe I’m just imaging things, who knows) so I figured I’d blog about the MOTU-SRU team. Unfortunately, we’ll never be able to ship a version of Ubuntu that has absolutely no bugs in any package what so ever. This is why we have a thing called “Stable Release Updates” which allows folks (ie. particularly developers) to make minimally invasive fixes to bugs in a stable (ie. released) version of Ubuntu. Although the process for getting an SRU approved can be tedious and require a bit of work for a number of parties, it is an important process that helps protect the integrity of said stable release. For packages that exist in Universe, a team of MOTUs who are usually elected by their peers review and approve/decline requested SRUs. For Intrepid, I’m happy to report that I’m a member of that team along with Scott Kitterman, John Dong, Luca Falavigna, Luke Yelavich, and Stephan Hermann (Both Stephan and Scott new to the team as well). Many thanks to outgoing members Brandon Holtsclaw and Jordan Mantha.

With two very senior and previously active team members departing and the introduction of three new ones, I apologize in advance if there are any transition issues or delays and that I look forward to helping make *buntu rock even more!

I got a new (to me) laptop that happens to be a tablet pc - LG LT20. works like a charm but I guess I should stop being surprised that stuff works in Linux. In fact, it works better than it did in XP tablet edition except for not working right out of the box - do we need another flavor of Ubuntu?

PS. I’m writing from the tablet in Xubuntu.

PPS. CellWriter rocks hardcore! Best handwriting recognition software I’ve _ever_ used!

PPPS. I do intend to write a how-to in the wiki.

You may have already heard about the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam from Jono but I’m excited to mention that Xubuntu and Xfce4 (the awesome, wicked desktop environment Xubuntu ships) will be participating too!

It is nice to see how the Xubuntu (and by extension the upstream) community has gotten to a point where it can participate in events like this.

Hello everyone,

I would like to announce the second mass Xubuntu community meeting which will be held on June 18th @ 8:00pm (2000) UTC. At this meeting, we will discuss the second draft of the Xubuntu strategy document which is an revised version based on community feedback. This meeting will allow interested parties (Xubuntu developers, Xubuntu community members, Xubuntu users, and anyone interested in seeing Xubuntu being successful) to discuss the document and ways that we can improve it. Suggestions and feedback gathered at this hour long meeting will be used to to produce the final draft.

On June 21st @ 5:00pm (1700) UTC a second meeting will take place. At this meeting, we will discuss the priorities and specifications for Intrepid for roughly half an hour to three quarters of an hour. Following, we will all hop on Gobby and work on improving the document collaboratively (particular the standards procedures section). By the end of this meeting, we will have a set of goals for Intrepid and the candidate Xubuntu strategy document.

On June 23rd, I will announce (if all goes well) the official ratification of the Xubuntu strategy document and the official goals for Intrepid. I believe this schedule provides ample opportunity for individual community members to express their ideas, concerns, frustrations, excitement, approval, etc. and will result in a document that is supported and legitimized by its community.

I encourage everyone with an interest in the Xubuntu project to come and participate. If you’re a MOTU-hopeful, MOTU, or core-dev who has been thinking about contributing to the Xubuntu project then now is an excellent time to do so. Xubuntu is what it is because of who we all are.

I look forward to seeing you all on the 18th and 21st of June later this month.

Thank you,

Cody Somerville

Quick update on the Xubuntu Strategy Document. I’ve made some tweaks and am now looking to organize the next big Xubuntu community meeting. I was thinking June 18th at 1900 UTC. What do you folks think? For the meeting, I’ll have further updated the strategy document and also have our specifications for Intrepid written. If the meeting goes well, I’ll start implementing it all right away.

Thoughts? Feelings? Concerns? Super excited yet?! Woot! I know I am

P.S. Feel free to join us in #xubuntu-devel on freenode

As I reported earlier this week, I’ve been expanding and maturing my skill set while here at UDS to help me help Xubuntu.Today I had the pleasure of fixing a rather large memory leak (depending on your theme and what you’re doing, you could see up to 500mb of leakage in 6 hours!) in the notification daemon (which had been introduced by a Ubuntu patch) and have just finished uploading it to Intrepid (I’ll be doing an SRU for the point release of hardy too) which I think will make a lot of users (especially those who use applications which make heavy use of the notification daemon such as rythmbox) from Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu rather happy. Actually, I imagine most won’t even notice anything… which is this case is probably the optimal situation as users should be able to *expect* that their computers will perform consistently and not get slow and slugish the more they use it.

As I’m sure I’ve already mentioned either on my blog or in my video interview on Youtube (which makes me look weird due to some ratio/pixel issue, hehe), the Ubuntu Developer Summit is and has been an excellent opportunity for myself and the Xubuntu project. Wheres the proof in the pudding? Well, I’m here to show you! It has been half a dozen weeks or so since the hugely successful Xubuntu community meeting led by the community manager Jono. At that meeting, it was decided that I would be tasked with developing a strategy document which participants agreed would enable Xubuntu to overcome some of the difficulties the project had begun to encounter from its ever enduring growth. After yesterday’s Xubuntu strategy session at UDS, where I was able to get feedback from other developers and colleagues, I’m happy to present to the community at large the first public draft of the Xubuntu strategy document. I encourage *everyone* to take a read and send your feedback, comments, suggestions, concerns, etc. etc. to my e-mail inbox: cody-somerville@ubuntu.com

So, when is the next big Xubuntu community meeting to finalize and find consensus? I’ll be announcing the date and time on either Monday or Tuesday of this upcoming week. Please keep your eyes posted!

Xubuntu rocks!! Be sure to join us on IRC in #xubuntu and #xubuntu-devel - woot woot!

Although this one isn’t that exciting, I’ve decided to finally take part in my first “meme ” like Tiago Faria has.

• Firefox 3 with 10 tabs (lucky ducks, I just closed three windows :P)
• Pidgin buddy list
• Pidgin IM window with four tabs.
• Terminal with three tab.
• Rythmbox media player
• XChat window with 2 servers with 21 and 2 channels opened respectively.
• Skype

Well, I need to hit the shower and get ready for the day (Currently 20 after 5am here in Prague and I’m looking out at a beautiful overcast city). We have some very important sessions today at UDS including the reorganization of the archive, the Xubuntu strategy document,  and much more.

XUBUNTU ROCKS! Want to help Xubuntu out? You might want to visit  the Xubuntu Team package bugs overview to see all of the packages that the Xubuntu team subscribes to along with the number of open, critical, unassigned, and in progress bugs for each package. You can then click on the number under open to list all the open bugs for a package and from there you can start doing something we call bug triage. You can find more information about how to be an effective and helpful bug triager by reading the “Helping with bugs” and “How to traige bugs” wiki pages. By getting bugs triaged (ie. in a state when developers can quickly and easily process bug reports to provide the much wanted bug fix) we make Xubuntu that much better!

Got questions? Feel free to ask on #xubuntu-devel

A lot of people have been sad the last few releases because the live cd will not install (ie. it’ll freeze) if you don’t have atleast 192mb of ram. However, I’m happy to see I’m sitting in a session right now and it looks like we’ll be able to finally fix bug #70561 - pretty cool, eh?! No promises though!

Also, in a few hours I’ll be doing a talk here at UDS about Xubuntu. Hopefully I’ll be able to stir up some interest and excitement about the Xubuntu project and also be able to get some feedback about my Xubuntu Strategy document which is getting very close to being a complete first draft (will be ready for tomorrow’s Xubuntu Strategy session for sure).

What else cool is going on? I’ve noticed (although not the first to do so) a memory leak in notification-daemon. I’m going to practice my new valgrind and debugging foo this evening to see if I can fix the issue :).

Oh, and did I mention Xubuntu is wicked awesome? I bet you knew already though! A number of individuals here at UDS (a number of them outside of the direct Ubuntu community) who wanted to congratulate me on my election to team leader and how impressed and happy they are with Xubuntu and Xfce4. So, all of you folks who have contributed to Xubuntu should pat themselves on the back because your hard work is getting noticed.

Woot woot! :]

I’ve really been enjoying myself since arriving here in Prague last Friday. The city is beautiful, the people are great, and the food is delicious. It is a unique experience to finally meet in person numerous people you’ve came to known and work with over an online medium such as e-mail or IRC; sometimes it can bee quite surprising but always a pleasure. So far I’ve had a number of  opportunities to chat with folks about Xubuntu and it has been interesting to see how much people do care about Xubuntu and seeing it be a successful derivative. A number of individuals in particular have taken time to answer questions, give me quick tutorials for certain tools, and have just been generally helpful. With these new skills, an expanded knowledge base, and our efforts to improve and mature our community, I think we’ll see one rockin’ awesome Xubuntu intrepid released in October.

For example, one things that has been constantly requested of Xubuntu is to maintain a light-weight, fast profile. Unfortunately, we’re not seeing the performance we’d like but one thing I’ve been focusing on while here at UDS is learning about ways to profile and slim up our desktop. If all goes well, I think we’ll see Xubuntu lose a few pounds for Intrepid.

Another item that I’m looking at implementing for Intrepid is browsing of Samba shares in Thunar via FUSE; another common request. Although this isn’t guranteed, no feature is in a time based release, I am rather confident this is an enhancement that we will be able to provide on time and one which will most undoubtely improve user’s experience while using Xubuntu.

Finally, I’ll also be focusing on improving integration and general polish on the desktop - always good, eh?

What do you think? What would you like to see in Xubuntu Intrepid?

I got a number of pointed comments to my previous blog post titled “Teach a man to wish…” and I’d like to take a quick moment to follow up on it and to address each one directly.

diff 

No. You are being a subtle troll. If you are talking about forum posts, provide references. Nobody wants unverifiable second hand stories told with obvious biases against distribution. Don’t tell ubuntuforum does not tell people to RTFM. They merely hide it well with fanboyism. Sorry. This is just a cheapstake attack against other distros. We are holier than thou attitude while being ruled by a self proclaimed dictator whose private organization controls launchpad, landscape source code and does not let people outside the company participate in its core technical committee and divides the repository based on its commercial support structure and announces LTS or drops LTS (remember Kubuntu?) on its own whims and fantasies is just pathetic

You bring up a good point diff. I apologize if I came off like I was targeting Fedora’s forum community or suggesting that our forum community is perfect, I simply wanted to contrast two philosophies that seem prevalent in online communities. There are number of incidents that have occurred within the Ubuntu community which I have found very unsettling. As for the remainder of your comments, I question the legitimacy of their relevance to my post. Furthermore, I suppose you’ll be happy to know that you’re not the only one unhappy with the main/universe division and I think you’ll find that we’ll be moving to change that with Intrepid (or Intrepid+1). Canonical is not Ubuntu and that distinction is continuously maturing and becoming more distinct.

Ciarán | mooney.wibbleh.com

At least once the OpenSSH flaw became very, very public it got fixed very very quickly.

Would you rather it have been there since 2006, and remained ignorant?

Of course not. I’d rather the flaw never existed, naturally.

Side note: we have no measurement of how long it took the bug to get fixed since it wasn’t released it until the fix was available.

Erigami | piepalace.ca/blog

This vulnerability existed since 2006 and that flies right in my face because I’ve always talked about the “many eyes” principle and how because everyone sees the source code and people are inherently good, chances are the problems will get fixed before secretly exploited.

I’ve been playing with open source software for over a decade now, and lots of my friends do the same. I don’t know of anyone who makes a habit of randomly reading source code just to see if it’s up to snuff. People will read it when they want to modify it, but if it’s complex, hard to read, or works well enough, chances are that it won’t get reviewed.

As to this code being exploited: crackers are just as lazy as us white hats. Most known attacks don’t occur until after a patch has been released, so chances are, it’s been safe (until know).

Good point.

rusty

e) they see a roll model for how to show others who come after them how to find the answers to their questions as well.

As an observation, universities originated as a place to learn how to find answers, not as a place to start a career. I would much rather go to a structural engineer and describe a problem, and find that she digs out a couple of volumes for reference by a couple of different authors, than that she declares that ‘this is how you do it.’ They may not be actually showing me how to be a structural engineer in the sense of the ‘knows all’ model, but in the ‘I want to know more about this too.’ model.

We do what we do, respond to questions, seek solutions, and more because they are things we want to do.

Agreed. I’m not sure if you’re suggesting the analogy doesn’t fit but I think it still does as the contrast would be “go f*in google it”, no?

So to conclude, I’d really like to emphasis that my previous post was not intended to flame any other forum, community, or distro but to encourage people to take the time to respond to people’s questions effectively.

The recent OpenSSH vulnerability has left me pretty distraught. It really rocked my world… kinda like a “this is actual reality” moments I’m sure we all have every once and awhile where we discover these core ideas or beliefs we had held simply don’t hold up or shatter in the real world. I’m worried about what kind of impact this is going to have on Debian and Ubuntu’s image. What kind of new policies will crop up? What will happen to the credibility of open source software development? Have we shot ourselves in the foot? This vulnerability existed since 2006 and that flies right in my face because I’ve always talked about the “many eyes” principle and how because everyone sees the source code and people are inherently good, chances are the problems will get fixed before secretly exploited. Although I don’t know if this vulnerability has been exploited yet, I certainly don’t mean that big, fat, security issues like this get left in the code for several years when I’m talking to potential adopters of Ubuntu. Another way I relate to the problem is that a debian maintainer made this upload and he or she made a mistake - I’m always paranoid I’m going to make mistakes myself and to see something like this happen on the pretty much worst case scenario scale is rather horrifying to a degree…. Anyhow, I guess we can learn from this and move forward. Lets try and make this as positive as we possibly can, can we?

Anyhow, the real point of my post is to talk about a reply I saw on a Fedora forum the other day. An individual who was obviously new to the software he was trying to use had asked a question and someone replied to the effect “In the spirit of teaching a man to fish…. go google it”. The first question that popped into my head was “When you go to teach a man to fish, do you tell him to go fish or do you go actually show him and help him do it. You’d probably catch the first few fish to demonstrate, no?”. This leads me to believe that our policy regarding not telling people to “go google it” is an excellent one. By giving the answer (and often telling them *how* we got that answer), we provide the user with a number of valuable things: a) the answer they were looking for (which can relieve a lot of stress and anxiety for someone with a question they really want answered), b) a positive experience, c) an opportunity to build relationships with other members of the community, d) they start learning how to start finding and getting that information themselves. I believe if we all made an active effort to ensure we detail how we got our answers or where more information can be found on a topic we’d improve our effectiveness further; we’d be “teaching them to fish” and helping them become better netcitizens. So the next time someone gives you a hard time about how we deal with users, maybe you should point to this post and explain how you found it ;].

Anyhow, I haven’t slept since Tuesday night (so sorry if this post doesn’t make any sense, lol) and I haven’t been sleeping very well the last few days before that (maybe subconscious anxiety about going to Prague?). It is actually 6:30am here and I’m at work finishing up stuff so that I can minimize my anxiety of anything going wrong while I’m away from the office<g>. My flight leaves in 5 hours so I should probably get home ASAP and get to the airport soon. Oddly, I’ve been very calm and collective about the whole trip even though I know I’m eager and excited to be there. However, now that I’m only hours away from boarding the plane, I have to admit I’m starting to feel a few butterflies in my tummy. I suppose it has seemed so surreal thus far that I wasn’t phased but now t… I guess I’m having another “moment”, aren’t I?

Cheers.

Jonathon Carter’s recent post about his recent realization that he needs to make some changes in his life got me thinking about all the changes that have occurred in my life recently.  It was only a year ago that I had the hit lowest point that I have ever hit in my life. It felt like I had lost my job, my family, my friends, and my life to a disease. I’m very much a “goal orientated”, tackle it head on type person and it was very frustrating for me to not be able to apply the same methodologies I usually do to solve my problems. At the time, I thought things would never get better and when your hospitalized for months upon months then it can be difficult to help yourself as much as you’d like to be better. It hasn’t been easy but I can now say that I feel like I’m hit the highest point I’ve ever reached in the last few months and things seem to be continuously improving. Are things perfect? No, never but I’m finally really “okay” and I take solace in that. I have an awesome job, I’m going to Prague in a few weeks, I’ve gotten healthier, I’m more mature, I’m meeting all kinds of awesome people (such as Jonathon) and I can see a future for me. These are all things to be excited about.

What have I learned? Life is is good… it is just that batteries aren’t included.

On a Ubuntu note, I’ve unfortunately been unable to finish the Xubuntu strategy document that I had promised for last Monday due to the flooding. However, I really do hope to have that finished soon. I’ve also realized that we forgot to upload the translations for the Xubuntu docs before the release - I plan to do the upload as soon as I’m done writing this blog post.

On an unrelated note, I’ve started listening to music a lot more now that I’m working. I’ve discovered artists such as Newton Faulkner, Peter Cincotti, Two Hours Traffic, Counting Crows, Damien Rice, Anna Nalick, City and Colour, Eisley, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Junior Senior,  Lily Allen, Regina Spektor, Tegan and Sarah, and finally Sara Bareilles. Some of you might say my taste in music sucks (and maybe it does) but if you’re into the above kind of music (ie. I like soft rock, alternative, indie rock, classical rock, jazz, easy listening, pop, blues, techno, house, etc.) please feel free to share some names with me. Heck, I’ll give anything a listen so feel free to throw names at me. I only currently have 151 songs so I’m starting to get annoyed of listening to the same stuff over and over ;]

My city is flooding! Power is off in most of the city, access to the bridges restricted, and traffic is horrible!