nixternal

Wow, what a day! Jorge Castro did a smashing job getting the OpenWeek setup this time around. I was totally impressed and intrigued with today’s talks and watched everyone of them. The participants were amazing! I saw some of the most thought out questions, comments, and ideas today that totally blew me away.

I gave the Kubuntu Development talk today that had the greatest participation I have ever had in my previous OpenWeek talks. Great questions and interaction by everyone present! Thanks for making today such a success and I hope you all continue checking the talks out this entire week. On Wednesday, April 30 at 20:00 UTC, I will give an introduction to KDE 4 and its future and on Friday, May 2 at 21:00 UTC, I will give a talk about the Ubuntu Documentation Project. If you are interested in either talk, I sure hope you show up! For those of you who have been wondering how to contribute, I urge you to really check out the Documentation talk, as it is one of the easier ways for you to get involved.

Once again, a huge thanks and a hug to Jorge as well as a big thanks and hugs to Jono Bacon, Lars Wirzenius, Brian Murray, Pedro Villavicencio, Leann Ogasawara, and James Westby…You all did a smashing job!

Tomorrow there are even more great talks lined up, so make sure you check out the schedule and get involved! Thanks again everyone for making OUR community rock!

night · mare [nayht-mare]

1. a terrifying dream in which the dreamer experiences feelings of helplessness, extreme anxiety, sorrow, etc.
2. a condition, thought, or experience suggestive of a nightmare: the nightmare of his years in prison.
3. (formerly) a monster or evil spirit believed to oppress persons during sleep.

That is the definition of nightmare according to Dictionary.com.

How many people had those feelings expressed in the definition? Well, from looking at the bug report, forum thread, mailing lists, and IRC, I think some may agree it was a nightmare. I am here to tell you that it was nothing more than a bad dream however.

A bad dream? Rich, you have got to be out of your mind! True, but I am always out of my mind, nothing new here.

Lets think about it for one minute. This libc6 issue didn’t occur in Dapper, Edgy, Feisty, or Gutsy, it occurred in Hardy. Hardy is currently in, what we like to refer to as, a development cycle or unstable release. Did it render our systems useless? Of course it did, but guess what? We have these great things called Live CDs, not only so you can test out Ubuntu or Kubuntu, but so you can also fix breakage that comes your way. Think about other operating systems where you don’t have this option. Sure, they may have a rollback option (which I am sure we will see eventually in Linux), or you may be one of the lucky ones where selecting “repair” from the installation CD fixes your problem, but most of the time with those other systems, you have to do some R&R, and I don’t mean rest and relaxation, I mean reformat and reinstall. Thank goodness for those Live CDs though, as I have seen more people fix their Windows machine with a Live CD more so than they have with the Windows CD or DVD that they paid hundreds for.

But still, MY SYSTEM DIDN’T WORK AFTER THIS UPGRADE! THAT’S RIDICULOUS! No it isn’t, you are using a distribution release that is meant for developers and for those who are not faint of heart.

OK FINE! BUT WHY WASN’T THERE TESTING DONE ON THIS!?! There was, it broke your system didn’t it? You tested it, now the developers know it didn’t work. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Pre-releases of Hardy are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, I was just as pissed off as many of you were, and actually on a couple of occasions spoke before thinking when this happened last night. We are human, we make mistakes, and we learn from our mistakes. With this being the only major issue I have seen come across during the Hardy development cycle, I have to say, we have learned a lot over the past few years if only one nightmare, or really a bad dream, occurred during a development cycle.

So remember, before you go off saying “I thought Ubuntu had a QA process”, or “Why wasn’t this tested?” Remember, in a development cycle, the people using and working with the OS are the QA process and they are the same people testing it.

The FIX took me no more than a few minutes in order for me to get my system(s) back up and running, probably less time than it took for me to bitch on IRC last night, or more time than it took some of you to bitch in an email, a bug report, or a forums post. I was always told that cooler heads prevail, and I seen that first hand. The people in the forums last night with the cooler heads, they had a quick howto on fixing the problem in a matter of minutes, they didn’t flip out claiming their company went out of business or something dramatic because an unstable version of their OS broke.

So with that said, this was nothing more than a bad dream

After working on some bugs, testing Alpha 5, and playing around with the new Alpha 5 CDs in Windows Vista, I ran across quite a few things that could be listed as “The good, the bad, and the ugly.” So lets start off with the good.

The Good
Wubi. Wubi is a new addition to the desktop CDs that allows you to easily install Kubuntu (and the other *buntus) from within Windows. I was skeptical to say the least, but decided to go ahead and give it a shot in Vista. What Wubi does is it creates a virtual drive, similar to what you would see with VirtualBox or VMware, and installs Kubuntu in your Windows partition. The good is that it doesn’t mess with Windows, doesn’t require you to repartition your drive, and can be done by anyone, even your great-great-grandma with ease. The nice thing is that if you get sick of having Kubuntu installed, which we know you won’t, you can uninstall it just like you would any other application in Windows. Now that was impressive. Oh, and you have access to your Windows partition too, I just couldn’t access what would be “My Documents” I guess. Oh, and read the Ugly below, Wubi is in there too unfortunately.

Another good thing I have seen today is the amount of people involved in the 5-A-Day stuff is increasing, and the amount of work is insane! Great job to everyone involved!

The Bad
Going through Launchpad today I became annoyed by a couple of things, some deal with Launchpad directly and some deal with the bug reports I have been coming across. For Launchpad, searching through the bugs doesn’t pick up on any of the Apport traces that are attached, heck it doesn’t even pick up on anything attached to the bug reports. This makes it kind of a pain when trying to search for duplicates. Oh, and duplicates, there are a lot! Tracking them down though by going through each report and reading the attached crash traces is very time consuming and annoying.

Another thing that I got annoyed by were bug reports that simply had no more information than “Program X Crashed.” Hey, I (we) would love to help you get that fixed, but how did it crash, what were you doing when it crashed, what versions of everything are you running, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Gnome, KDE, Xfce, what? Try and add as much information as you can to these bug reports, as it helps us help you. Otherwise you will get some people coming through, setting the bug as Invalid or Incomplete, and never hearing anymore on it. When you get a nice crash report and file the bug, as you should, comment on the bug and tell us exactly what you were doing when it crashed. The crash reports are great, but it makes it difficult for us to try and reproduce the crash. Take a bit of time when filing a bug report, take 15 or so minutes and make sure there isn’t already a report for the same exact thing.

And for those of you triaging bugs and setting yourself as the Assignee, don’t just comment, set to invalid, add yourself to the report, go ahead and do some work on the bug. I am used to going through various bug tracking systems, and when I see someone assigned to a bug report, I pass it on by thinking they are doing work. I found bugs from 2 and even 3 years ago with someone assigned that hasn’t done anything on LP since they assigned themselves to a bug report. All of the reports I went through today and yesterday where I assigned it to myself, pretty much everyone who filed the bug commented, allowing the process of getting the bugs fixed. I know there are quite a few bugs that I have already fixed release in the past 24 hours because we were able to communicate back and forth. I see a lot of reports where a triager commented or asked a question, the person who created the report replied, but there was no follow up after that except for a lone gunman who comes in and says “Hey! I am closing this report since there hasn’t been activity on it in over a year.”

One more thing, make sure you assign the bug to the correct package. All of the crash traces people are putting into the bug reports tell you which package it is. I have seen some that said “Package: X-this” yet it gets filed against package Y.

The Ugly
KLauncher crash reports. KNotify isn’t any better. Both of these are elements of the new KDE 4 system. I must be one of the lucky ones or something, because I don’t see the majority of these bugs at all. It seems a majority of these bugs are from those of you who have both the Gnome desktop installed as well as the KDE 4 desktop. I was expecting a little of this, but not the amounts I have been seeing. It seems like every time I work on 15 of these reports, there are already 15 new ones. Insane!

The really ugly though goes to Wubi that I put up in the good. However, with this little mention, we can probably move this portion of Wubi up to the bad section. When you go through the installation in Windows, you eject the CD and you restart. Then right as Windows starts, you get the Windows version of Grub asking you if you want to boot into Windows or Kubuntu. The first time through, when you select Kubuntu, you will see at least these 2 things. The first is this:

There was an error setting up inter-process communications for KDE. The message returned by the system was:
 
Authentication Rejected. reason: None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed
 
Please check that the "dcopserver" program is running!

No big deal, click OK and move on. Well after you click OK, you have no idea if you are going on or you are locked up. You see a black screen with the X mouse cursor. You can see your hard drive working overtime, but nothing else happening. Read my lips, DO NOT PRESS THE RESET BUTTON! Let it go through, eventually the screen will flash and you will see that what was happening, is it was installing Kubuntu. Whew, I was joking about this on IRC and almost gave up. Thankfully I didn’t, as after the reboot, Kubuntu was working just great, even if it did say on boot up ‘Filesystem: LTFS.’ That was kind of funny, but all worked out.

So you Wubi devs, great work by the way, but document Wubi a tad bit better, or you Ubuntu people who decided on this, lets tweak up some documentation so we don’t have baffled users staring at a black screen with the X cursor. Better yet, have some sort of pop-up or something that tells the user, “HEY! Don’t do anything until it tells you to, we are installing Kubuntu for ya, just hold on to your shorts!”

</the good, the bad, and the ugly>

A cool thing I learned today, the ‘Thumbnail Aside’ composite feature in KDE 4 and watching videos in a small little box. If you use this feature, make sure under the composite settings, click the advanced button and set the top check box to keep thumbnails updated. One of my reports I worked on, the reporter told me how he has streaming videos on one of his workspaces, but it shows up in the ‘Thumbnail Aside’ box in the bottom right hands side of the desktop when enabled. That is pretty cool!

Great job everyone squashing bugs and creating some coolness for us geeks to enjoy!

Dictionary.com defines five as:

1. a cardinal number, four plus one.
2. a symbol for this number, as 5 or V.
3. a set of this many persons or things.
4. a playing card, die face, or half of a domino face with five pips.
5. Informal. a five-dollar bill: Can you give me two fives for a ten?
   –adjective
6. amounting to five in number.
   —Idiom
7. take five, Informal. to take a brief respite.

Really, Five is the amount of bugs YOU, yes YOU, will work on today. This is a new promotion by Daniel Holbach, called 5-A-Day. What it breaks down to is this…You will pick 5 bugs per day to work on. Whether you are a developer or not, there is much fun to be had for everybody! And the great thing is, Daniel even created a nice utility to help you show off the work you are doing. It is super easy to get involved with and requires only the amount of time you want to give. If you aren’t a developer, pick 5 bugs marked as New, and see if you can recreate the issue at hand, if so, mark the bug as Confirmed and add you comments. If you can’t confirm it, mark the bug as Incomplete and add your comments. If you are a developer, fix some bugs, create some patches, or upload fixes that are already available.

Requirements? Yes, there are a couple that I can think of.

1. Have a Launchpad account
2. Upload your SSH key to Launchpad
3. Make sure you have the bzr package installed
4. Make sure you have a few minutes to provide in order to work on the 5 bugs you selected

That’s really it, and when you get up and going, you can use the update-signature utility to let everyone know what you are working on by adding the signature to your email, or by exporting the signature to HTML and attaching it to your blog post, like this:

–
My 5 today: Bug 185407 (kdenetwork-kde4), Bug 183266 (kdegraphics-kde4), Bug 42048 (kdebase, firefox), Bug 74653 (poppler, kdegraphics), Bug 114772 (kdenetwork)
Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

So take five, come back, select five, complete five, then gimme five!

P.S. I am so glad that my coaches could only count to 2 during my football career, could you imaging 5-a-days? /me passes out

OK, I wasn’t going to do this, you know jump in on all of the “Kubuntu is treated like a second class citizen by Canonical” posts, but I have had enough time to let off some steam, and even joke around a bit with it. So here is my take…

I am actually 50/50 on the entire “2nd class citizen” outtake for a couple of reasons. I would be wholeheartedly into saying that Canonical is indeed treating us Kubuntu people like a second class citizen, but there are factors that permit this feeling.

Factor 1: Would hiring one more developer for Kubuntu really help Kubuntu lose this 2nd class feeling? The answer is simply no. I know some of you just flipped your lid on that one, but it is true. Think about it. If Canonical does decide to hire a second paid Kubuntu developer right now, where would they pull that person from? More than likely from our current pool of community developers. So that means we have 2 faces to Kubuntu from Canonical, that’s pretty much it right now. Another paid developer isn’t going to help us, Kubuntu, from pulling in the slack. There will still be the same exact amount of people working on the project, except instead of one person being paid, we now have two.

As you can see, it is factor 1 that prevents me from saying the whole “we are treated as 2nd class citizens.”

Factor 2: When the Gnome side of our community, whether they are Canonical or not, come up with an idea such as bullet proof x, printer configuration, Compiz support stuff, and so on, they never come to the Kubuntu people and say, “Hey, we are working on project x for Ubuntu and was wondering if you all thought that something like this would be good for Kubuntu, how about lending a developer to the project so we can work side-by-side.” In the past two years of contributing to this project, I can’t think of one time where this has happened. If it did, I never seen it, and the Kubuntu community is about as transparent as they get in terms of communications. This is something that definitely needs to be worked on.

As you can see, it is factor 2 that makes me want to say “yes, we are treated as 2nd class citizens.”

Ooh, damn almost forgot about Factor 3!

Factor 3: Marketing. I am sorry, the type of marketing I have seen coming from this entire community has been lackluster. Ubuntu has some marketing, thanks to all of the websites who “ooh and ahh” over us, but this type of marketing only goes so far. It goes as far as the people who read those websites. Maybe there is marketing going on over in Europe for Ubuntu, but in the states, all I have seen are LoCo teams busting their asses just to hit a very small target. This doesn’t work, and isn’t going to work. Gorilla, grass-roots, word-of-mouth type marketing advances only go so far. Linux has been around now for more than 14 years, but I am willing to place my money that the word “Linux” means absolutely nothing to say, 50% of the Windows users in the world. So that means even less could tell you what “Ubuntu” is. Why is that? Marketing is lackluster. But guess what, it is lackluster for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, and anything else you can tie to the front of buntu. So this here makes me think we aren’t such a 2nd class citizen, as our marketing sucks just as much as everyone else.

Damn, I almost published this without Factor 4, and I am free of any type of legal or illegal medication right now

Factor 4: Kubuntu 8.04 will not be LTS. This screams 3rd class citizen to me honestly. KDE 4 wasn’t the alleged reasoning behind this decision from Canonical. They were uncertain about just how long the KDE community would continue supporting KDE 3. Is this Canonical’s fault though? Yes and no to be honest. Yes, because transparently I never heard of, nor seen, any type of communication from Canonical to KDE asking for explanation. No, because transparently the KDE community never said much about the future support publicly, until after Canonical’s decision. Of course those of us who work with both KDE and Kubuntu already knew that KDE 3 wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t work for Canonical, so what behind the scenes communications they had or didn’t have, I cannot speculate on it, but I will say transparently, the ball was dropped, unfairly.

Like Jono said, “Canonical pays for thousands of free Kubuntu CDs to be produced, all via ShipIt” (notice my link to ShipIt actually goes to Kubuntu ShipIt and not Ubuntu’s ShipIt like Jono did, conspiracy anybody?).

Kubuntu is extremely glad that Canonical stepped up and offered us this service. It is a wonderful service and we truly are happy to be apart a part of it. Now with that said, seeing as I was once a LoCo team leader, I used to get my typical LoCo team ShipIts. And wouldn’t you know, less than one-fourth were actually Kubuntu. I could go through my emails and give you the exact breakdown, but I don’t need to be that big of an ass The Ubuntu Chicago guys will all tell you, Kubuntu CDs were our #1 request. #2, well that was reserved for Xubuntu. People never had to request Ubuntu CDs because we had them falling out of every orifice possible. There is definitely mistreatment here, and it is something I hope gets addressed for the next LoCo ShipIts that go out.

So what have I proven here today? Absolutely nothing! WHAT? Ya, absolutely nothing. We can all sit here and bitch about this in our blogs, on IRC, in email, or whatever communication protocol we can complain on next (anyone up for Skype, Twinkle, Gobby…?) Nothing is getting done in order to fix this “2nd class citizenship” we keep hearing about, for like a year now. If there is a bitch or complaint that is the same for a year, don’t you think it is time our community comes together and attempts to fix this? Gnome vs. KDE, Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu, boohoo this isn’t fair…this shit has to stop, it isn’t healthy, and nothing is being done to fix it.

So what do you propose Mr. Smarty Ass Pants? Simple, why don’t all of us (Canonical, Ubuntu, Kubuntu) sit down and figure out how to work together for a common good. Lets create competition, coopetition, and a much healthier environment, especially if we want to attract new users. Hell, if Microsoft and Apple can do it, then so can we. Who knows, maybe we can truly benefit our upstreams by this, only one way to find out.

Tristan, I will have to agree to disagree on this one for various reasons.

First of all, Ubuntu needs to solidify its public image as much as possible.

As does Kubuntu. This isn’t a one pony show and it isn’t always about Ubuntu, at least that’s the way I feel, how others feel, well I can’t speak for them.

As for the whole LTS moniker, ya I think quite a few of us in the Kubuntu community would love to have LTS as well. It is obvious that people really want that LTS moniker I guess before doing business, however the French Parliament nor the Canary Islands chose that moniker, and instead went with what was fresh, so they went with Kubuntu 7.04, and they rolled it out big time. What we really need, is to see the results from Dapper upgrades before any of us not officially with Canonical, who I would guess would have such results, can stop assuming the whole LTS thing. I can see LTS being a hit in the server market for sure, but I would love to see the desktop results.

I understand why Kubuntu wants to delay their LTS release.

Actually, Kubuntu doesn’t want to delay “our” LTS, we would be happy making everyone else happy, but obviously the powers-to-be made a decision. I would really think that Canonical had some background information in order for people to make such a decision. As for Kubuntu 8.04 we are sticking with KDE 3.5.8, or if it happens, KDE 3.5.9, but we are also going to offer KDE 4.0. This was the plan from the beginning, since UDS, and if you look at the OpenWeek logs you will also see the transparent communications of such a plan.

The unfortunate timing of a moving KDE 4.0 release date is a problem that can be corrected. Mark Shuttleworth suggested at the last aKademy conference that KDE should change its release process to a hit a regular schedule. You can view the video of Mark’s keynote address on the web. The idea is a simple one: Set a hard date and modify your goals (features) to match that timeline.

This is the one that really hits a nerve really, and obviously it hit the nerves of many who were present at aKademy. First off, Mark is great, he has done so much for Free Software, Linux, and definitely Ubuntu. Ubuntu may be one of the top dogs in the Linux world, but it is still an infant in respect to both KDE and Gnome, and I have been one to always respect my elders. If KDE had a regular release schedule, I am sure someone would find it in themselves to say they aren’t doing it right, or it isn’t good for us. As it stands, KDEs release schedules have always worked well for Kubuntu. We were always able to get the latest release in for each one of our releases. Don’t know how much more regular you can get than that. I don’t believe a project should have to modify their goals just so another project can meet theirs, unless of course there is a contract involved, and I haven’t seen one of those floating around yet.

I believe that it would tremendously benefit KDE to create a regular and predictable release schedule. See the benefits that this has had for Gnome and Ubuntu.

I can honestly say I haven’t seen the benefits only because I don’t follow it. The benefits I have seen is that Ubuntu brought a lot of new users to Gnome, but Ubuntu isn’t to be thanked for all of Gnome’s success. Recently the Gnome Developer’s Kit was released, and the distribution they use is Foresight, which is also helping along with Novell, Red Hat, and many others. I don’t think Ubuntu has popped out of the ground beating its chest just yet, so I don’t think it is fair to tell another project to hop on board and follow our release cycles. I don’t think it would be fair to tell KDE to follow our release schedule either, especially since a lot of the developers are volunteers, just like every other community. There are times of the year where development is slower because of the lack of people. Honestly, Ubuntu doesn’t have the power, no matter how awesome it is, to attempt to even direct that. Would it be great if everyone had a regular release cycle, sure, and just think about how great the competition will get. It will be a market or get owned community, and with the likes of Novell and Red Hat, that is some stiff competition to out-market.

A predictable release allows external parties to prepare and plan for the release. If KDE does this, they too will reap the rewards that Ubuntu has seen.

Who is to decide the predictable release? Surely not Ubuntu. And it also goes to show, that since KDE didn’t follow Ubuntu’s predictable release schedule, they sure as hell have been very successful and continue and strive to be excellent, with or without Ubuntu.

People leaving Debian, well that was more than just a predictable release cycle. There was that whole community thing as well, which it has been the community that has made Ubuntu excel, as well as it has been the community that has made Gnome and KDE excel.

Ubuntu is great, but it isn’t a God, and honestly has no right trying to tell another developer community how they should go about doing their releases. If Kubuntu was to sit back and not focus on KDE 4, well come time for the next release we will have this same problem with people upset because we are far behind, and we will have to hear things like “we need to catch up with Ubuntu.” I have been tired of hearing that and I appreciate the fact that Kubuntu will work now for what can only make us stronger in the future. Do I want an LTS release for Kubuntu 8.04, you bet I do. Can Kubuntu do both? I believe we can, and actually we have implemented a great majority of the blueprints that were proposed for UDS Boston. We may be a small community, but damn it we are a strong community.