nixternal

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

If you are around today, October 27th, at 19:00 UTC, join me in #ubuntu-classroom on IRC to get an introduction to Ubuntu Documentation. I have a few words to say first about documentation and then I will open the floor up to questions that I can hopefully answer for you. After doing the 2 Kubuntu sessions this week, it seems the popular route is an open forum almost. Seems more productive to me, just as long as 50 people don’t ask a questions at once Hopefully I will see you there, if you can’t make it, don’t worry, we will have the logs up shortly after for your viewing pleasure. Take care and have a great day!

I didn’t want to partake really in this discussion that has been going on, because I remember it occurring a couple of times in the past couple of years with no end result.

My stance, I don’t think it is necessary to unify the names under the Ubuntu Desktop. It seems a large motive that I have seen so far is to answer the question of “What is Kubuntu?” or “What is Xubuntu?”. The examples I have been seeing are similar to this:

User 1:What is Kubuntu?
User 2:It is Ubuntu with KDE.

or if you are me:
ME:Kubuntu is a Linux distribution that utilizes the K Desktop Environment and has a strong base on the number one distribution Ubuntu, of which is created from the greatest Linux distribution ever. Then I go on to explain KDE a little bit.

Now, lets go ahead and unify the name as the Ubuntu Desktop with KDE.

User 1:What is Ubuntu with KDE?
or
User 1:What is Ubuntu and what is KDE?

whoa whoa! We are still getting a question (or questions) that has to be answered the same.

Now, get rid of the questions in whole. Today people use this wonderful tool called the Internet and tend to research before the buy. In our world, they research before they download and install. I don’t know about the rest of the world honestly, but what I do know is marketing in the United States. And the people living here can pretty much all agree that branding is what drives our market. Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Microsoft, IBM, Ford, Motorola and the list goes one. All names everyone pretty much in the world are familiar with. Now imagine Coca Cola unifying their product line as just Coca Cola. No more A&W Root Beer, now you have Coca Cola with Root Beer flavoring. Kind of ridiculous in a way. Now for all of you Jaguar fans, what if Ford decides they want to rename them to the Ford Jaguar X whatever. People who are die-hard Jaguar fans for one aren’t going to go for it. But then again that brings in the old Chevy is better than Ford and so on.

So even if we unify the name, the questions that were asked in the examples, are still going to be asked. By unifying the names as the Ubuntu Desktop with (insert DE here), you are one assuming that the Ubuntu brand is known by everyone, which unfortunately at this time, it isn’t. Even if you start out by saying “Try Ubuntu with Xfce” now you of being be posed with 2 questions, instead of just 1. Now the multi-CD release that would be needed to carry out what openSUSE and Fedora does isn’t all that logical either, seeing that the Ubuntu project is currently comprised of 4 different projects. Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu, all which have somewhat created their own branding in the past couple of years. Asking the smaller projects to unify is almost like stripping them of what they have created in a way. So because of this I understand Freddy’s stance in a way. Og and Tristan also have powerful stances for the unification as well.

We have Live CDs for a reason, and that is so users can get a taste of what each distribution has to offer. With all of the reviews out there about the good and bad of each distribution, and assuming that new users do their homework and study each before installing, there really shouldn’t be that “What is Ubuntu?” or “What is KDE?”. Are these questions asked first of all? I have only been asked one time. That was the first Ubuntu Chicago meeting. We gathered out front of Buffalo Wild Wings for a group photo and asked someone on the street to take the picture. Afterwords we offered the guy who took our picture an Ubuntu CD. And the first words out of his mouth weren’t “What is Ubuntu?” but rather “Cool! I will listen to this on the way home!” HEHE, I still get a chuckle out of it, but after explaining it wasn’t a music CD, he then asked what it was. So far, from all of the LoCo team news I have read and even the Canonical and Ubuntu news, all of it seems to be Linux and Free Software related. I haven’t seen news of a Canonical booth at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) or even an Ubuntu LoCo team booth at such an event. It would be this type of event, that reaches a far larger crowd at this time than any Linux or Free Software even attracts, in which you might be posed with those questions in the first place.

Wow, I have rambled on a bit and I apologize. Feel free to argue these in the comments on this blog. Who knows, you might just get me to change. But at this time I would have to say no to such a proposal, but I am staying open to the option in the future. Thanks!

People tend to go directly to Ubuntu.com, Kubuntu.org, Xubuntu.com and Edubuntu.org to grab the latest downloads. That is fine, but for a day like today, being the Feisty release, you are going to be either downloading forever, or constantly losing connection.

So here is what I would do if I were you. Go to another distros website (i.e. Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, Debian…) and go to their download section. They tend to have a list of mirrors somewhere in there. Find a mirror closer to your location. If the mirror has any of the distros listed, then there will be Ubuntu a directory or two up. Most universities maintain Linux mirrors to the main distributions. For instance on one of my local mirrors here in Chicago, I downloaded all of the ISOs available for final release in less than one hour. 2MB/s to be exact. Now, once you have downloaded those ISOs, be a pal and seed them with your favorite torrent application. Remember to throttle your bandwidth a little bit though if you plan on seeding multiple ISOs.

Other than that, HAPPY RELEASE DAY EVERYONE!

https://help.ubuntu.com & https://help.ubuntu.com/community are two more locations for instant support gratification. This is in response to Michael Stemle, Jr.’s post.

https://help.ubuntu.com is the system documentation that is already installed on your Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and/or Xubuntu system.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community is yet another wiki, this time for the entire community to contribute their documentation to. So if you want to let the world know how you got something specific setup, head on over there and setup a wiki page.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com is more or less the staging area for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu development. You will notice a lot of things specific to development, artwork, specifications and such.

No matter if you work on the Community Wiki or the Development/Staging Wiki, there is a Styling Guide to follow. If Wiki hacking is your thing, you might be interested in the Ubuntu Wiki Team. They are a part of the Ubuntu Documentation Project and communicate on the ubuntu-docs mailing list and on IRC in #ubuntu-doc.

NOW! Calling all documentors! We need your help with content in the Edubuntu Handbook as well as the new Kubuntu System Documentation. The Doc Team utilizes DocBook XML however if plain text works for you, it works for me. You can always send the text files directly to me and after a quick run through I will manually put them to DocBook files. We work from a Subversion Repository so there are only a select group of individuals who can commit,  however anyone can check out, edit, and submit patches to ubuntu-docs(at)lists.ubuntu.com.

If anyone is interested in helping out, try and stop by #ubuntu-doc on IRC (chat.freenode.net | port 8001). Thanks everyone!