Yes, that’s right  - after a couple of months and many, many delays, we can finally release the first translated version of Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 in Greek. Hopefully this will pave way for some more translations to be available in the next few weeks, such as German, Galician and English UK which are almost completed.

The setbacks in translated editions being released was something we wanted to avoid, but unfortunately translation takes time and editing takes just as long, if not longer, to keep the translated editions up to the same standard as the main English US version of the manual. Coupled with a short 6 month cycle where we have to write, get screenshots, edit, translate and release a near 200 page book – it’s tough work.

We’re also all volunteers and have day jobs or are studying – I know in my case I have been neglecting the project for the last few weeks as I have been tied up with University starting for the new semester and all of the work that’s happening with OMG! Ubuntu! and its sister sites.

Anyway, enough talking – here’s the download link and the link where you can purchase this in print for under $10 USD. Please download the PDF even if you don’t read Greek just to see how much effort has gone into this and just how amazing it looks – huge congrats to the Greek Translation Team and Kevin Godby on our team who has helped pull it all together in LaTeX – forever battling with foreign typefaces

Download: http://ubuntu-manual.org/download/10.04/el/screen

Buy in print: http://ubuntu-manual.org/buy/gswu1004e1/el

At the Launchpad EPIC, Leonard gave a lightning talk indicating that we should use the latest version of launchpadlib as it contains some performance improvements. As a heavy user of the API, I followed up with him and discovered that these performance improvements are only available in the Maverick version of the package which doesn’t help everyone. He gave me a set of patches, which really affect python-lazr.restfulclient, that contained the fixes so I could work on getting them in Lucid. With the upcoming point release of Lucid it won’t be possible to get the new package in -updates right away. Subsequently, I’ve created made the package available in my PPA. If you are using python-launchpadlib a lot I recommend using the updated lazr.restfulclient. If you have any issues with the package please comment on the SRU bug.

Age: 23
Location: Novosibirsk, Russia
IRC Nick: LucidFox

Maia Kozheva

Desktop

Desk

How long have you used Linux and what was your first distro?
My first attempt to use Linux was back in 2001 or 2002, called something like WinLinux 2000 – it was a version of Linux that ran from under Windows, with very old software like KDE1. But I prefer to count my Linux experience from 2004, when I first installed Debian Woody into a dual boot to test-build Colonization Too (an open source 2D video game I was contributing to, now dead).

By then, many of the distribution’s packages were very outdated, and, not knowing about testing and unstable releases, I started manually compiling and installing many core components. I ended up with quite a mishmash of a system, more LFS than Debian, with software from old .debs and manually from tarballs, and it was a pain trying to make the system do what I wanted, but I was so excited at having a working GUI environment that was not Windows, and having a working C/C++ compiler, that I was willing to forgive it many major flaws. Plus all the tweaking, up to and including building custom kernels, taught me a lot of knowledge about Linux internals that came very useful in the future.

How long have you been using Ubuntu?
Since late 2005. Ubuntu Breezy was my first Linux distribution to Just Work (although even it required a considerable amount of tweaking by modern Linux standards), so I never installed any other OS on my home machine except on virtual machines, and deleted Windows shortly thereafter.

When did you get involved with the MOTU team and how?
Like many open source involvements, it began with an attempt to scratch a personal itch, in August 2007. I wanted to update the Psi instant messenger, which was then outdated in Ubuntu. I was curious about the process of creating .deb packages to begin with, so I read the packaging guide, read about uploading to REVU, and uploaded my first package. (Don’t do this at home, kids – REVU is not for updating existing packages!) My first packaging attempts were really ugly, but quickly improved thanks to both the packaging guides and the feedback from MOTUs.

What helped you learn packaging and how Ubuntu teams work?
Mostly the packaging guides on the Debian and Ubuntu websites, and first-hand experience with contributing new and updated packages to Ubuntu. When I needed to learn about some obscure packaging features, I usually looked at packages where they were already implemented.

What’s your favorite part of working with the MOTU?
The knowledge that you have achieved something. Watching the changes land in the archive, and knowing that in the span of a few hours, they will be there on mirrors around the whole world, for the benefit of thousands of Ubuntu users.

Any advice for people wanting to help out MOTU?
Be bold. The developers aren’t a cabal cult worshiping the Dark God of Ubuntu, they’re friendly people willing to help. If you have questions and a web search doesn’t answer them, come to IRC and ask! Along the way, you can learn something new from the conversations that go there all the time.

Learn by example, learn the typical solutions to your problem and try to follow the conventions. Don’t forget that Ubuntu gets most of its packages from Debian, and consider also contributing to Debian so that your effort benefits two distributions at once.

Are you involved with any local Linux/Ubuntu groups?
So far, my involvement has been limited to one presentation I gave at Ubuntu Global Jam here in Novosibirsk, at the request of one of the LUG organizers. I explained how Ubuntu development worked, some technical details about packaging, then logged onto Launchpad, wrote and uploaded a bugfix for a package in front of the eyes of the interested ones.

What are you going to focus on in Maverick and Maverick+1?
In Maverick, I have been mostly focused on patching software to interoperate with the indicator menus, including the still-in-development global menu, and pushing my non-Ubuntu-specific changes into Debian. In Maverick+1… Well, I’d like to get Pinta into a condition when it can go into the default install, since I think it neatly fills the niche of a general-purpose image editor, a “GIMP for casual users”. The final decision is with the desktop team, though.

What do you do in your other spare time?
Watch movies with my sweetheart, contribute to other open source projects, try my hand at speculative fiction. Occasionally post bileful rants about $personal_annoyance in my blog. But that’s rare. Sort of.

[Discuss Maia Kozhev’s Interview on the Forum]

Originally posted by Daniel Holbach here on July 23, 2010 at 08:30 am

I’ve you’ve ever struggled to get the support answers you need from the Ubuntu community, this guide may help you, it’s a pdf download, don’t forget to favourite if you can:

Revision 05, 2010-07-23: Download Directly

If you are tempted to go ask similar questions of the Dell online chat thing then go right ahead with the following conditions:
1) You must take a credit card out of your purse/wallet, rest it on your keyboard and be totally prepared to use it, if they find you a suitable laptop.
2) Do it once, don’t repeatedly bother them.
3) Be polite and respectful, the Code of Conduct applies.

Edition 2: Summer time edition!

Another busy week in the world of the Canonical Design Team and we start with a bit of someone else’s news (although we helped!)

Stoked about The Stack!

Regular blog readers may remember Evan from a week ago. He was asking you to support his stack exchange experiment.

You guys responded magnificently with a drive to lend support and we’re thrilled to say that we’ve got a 100% commitment from community members so the next steps are a beta site which will be built for us. We’ll let Evan update us on when this might happen but thanks to everyone who committed and we’re looking forward to creating something great with you. If you don’t know what on earth we’re talking about then head over to our earlier Stack Exchange post.

Ubuntu development

This week was the distro sprint. A middle-ish milestone in the development process for our 10.10.10 release and an opportunity for the desktop members of the design team to get together with the developers implementing our designs. Canonical’s distributed nature means that we try to get together regularly through the cycle to enjoy some high bandwidth collaboration. This is especially valuable when working on interactions and visual treatments as it allows us to work out the important details while we’re together. It’s been a great week and you should see the fruits in a future Alpha release.

The Ubuntu font

Work continues a pace with the development of the Ubuntu font and as Ivanka was saying in her post earlier this week the next steps are to open this up to wider groups and start testing in other languages. If you’re an Ubuntu member you already have access to the new font so if you’re not using it get switched over and tell us what you think.

More information on the project can be found here and you can get on and submit your feedback and issues at fonttest.design.canonical.com.

Guidelines

We’re releasing another round of updates to the Ubuntu guidelines this week. You can view them by visiting the toolkit section of the site. From here we’re looking to move to a three monthly cycle of updates which we’ll publicise and publish here.

We’re also looking to get your feedback on what’s in these guides. They should help you to create using the new assets and identities. If you have questions or ideas leave us comments or find us on Freenode in #ubuntu-artwork.

And finally, on an insane note …

Could you walk for 24hrs?

We didn’t think it was possible until Ivanka, Design Team Lead, did it last weekend for charity!

Ivanka, pictured here on the right, completed 100km in 24 hours and 39 minutes. An amazing achievement which briefly resulted in her raising £1010.10 – see what they did there? You can add to this total and help provide Oxfam with some much needed funds by going to her donations page. An enormous round of applause for Ivanka and thank you to all who’ve donated so far!

It would be great to have a theming engine that exposes basic drawing operations to theme authors. Instead of having a number of options per widget, you would deal with primitives like lines, rectangles and gradient fills.

Let me just say that I know of 2 developers who are on it

Now if you want to draw a button that way, it appears to be simple enough. Just a usually rounded rectangle with one or several outlines (stroked rectangles), with gradient fills per outline and one for the body. If you assume light straight from top, vertical gradient fills with 4 stops for the outlines are sufficient for a somewhat realistic look.

Not so if you assume lighting from the top left. What I would like to have for such a case is one gradient per outline, with 8 stops placed exactly between the segments (= curves in the corners and straight lines on the sides). Extra points for the ability to add stops between the 8 fixed ones.

In Inkscape, you have to take the rectangles apart to get to that level of control, making it rather laborious and inflexible, as you can’t change the corner radius in a single step anymore, afterwards.

Example construction of a button:

1. Outlines. It would be most comfortable to define the corner radius once, for the outermost rectangle. It should be possible to add up to at least 4 outlines, defaulting to 1 px strokes and inset.
2. For each outline, there should be the option to have 8 gradient stops between the segments. The implementation could treat the segments separately, each with a simple linear gradient, just like I had to construct it in Inkscape here.
3. Just a vertical linear gradient fill for the body.
4. Plus a horizontal fill with 34 % opacity. It should be possible to layer linear and radial fills, with alpha per gradient stop.
5. A shadow. This button doesn’t gain much from it, but it illustrates that drawing and layering rectangles with offsets would be useful.
6. A plain black label.
7. Gradient fill for the label. This can reduce legibility, but if handled with care, it makes button and label appear more like a whole.
8. Luxury feature: sunken or raised (see 9.) look for the label. I used a crude approach with stroked and offset duplicates here, which works only on small scale. A clever implementation would take the angle of the character stroke and the lighting direction into account to render a smooth surrounding.

I think it would be fun to add an achievement system to the Ubuntu Desktop, like is done on Steam and XBox.

The tricky part is tracking various events and finding amusing correlations. For example, if your screen-saver kicks in 40 times in a single 24 hour period, you could earn the “Alternating Current” achievement, indicating that you’re being repeatedly interrupted all day long:

There are all kind of things to track and correlate. Miles moved with the mouse, clicks taken, keys pressed, files opened, applications installed, buddies added, IMs received, sent, etc. There are all kinds of achievements that could be designed that could be used to help people discover how to use Ubuntu, or for just plain humor. “Achievement Unlocked: Application Deficit Disorder” when you uninstall 100 applications you installed in the prior week.

I’ve been told this might all be very easy to implement with the Gnome Activity Journal (Zeitgeist), but I haven’t had a chance to investigate further.

UPDATE: I can easily imagine this being tracked in CouchDB, synced between systems via UbuntuOne, and could be linked to any other remote APIs that people could dream up, including Launchpad, Forums, REVU, Identi.ca, etc.

I am wanting to monitor what processes perform IO on a couple of files. Unfortunately there appears to be a big lack of ability to do this under Linux.

There’s inotify which I can use to watch the files and see when IN_OPEN and IN_ACCESS (read) events occur, but inotify doesn’t tell me who (PID) did them.

There’s debugfs which I can use to monitor the open operations (do_sys_open) but not the read events, so I can see who opens it, but not how often or how much they read.

Is there any way to join this all up, and get the info I want, or is Linux not currently capable of that level of tracing?

Yours frustratedly,

Daniel.

Update: SystemTap was a nice idea, but it needs a custom kernel. I need this to work on “stock” kernels ideally.

Lately, I’ve been interviewing Launchpad users to learn more about how they work with Launchpad and what they think of new features we’re proposing.

Until now, this has been mostly face to face, either at the Ubuntu Developer Summits or Canonical’s London office. Talking in person seems to be the best way of doing this: as the interviewer, I can see exactly which part of a proposed page the person is looking at when they pull a certain face, for example.

However, doing it this way greatly limits who I get to speak to. Not everybody who uses Launchpad attends UDS or is within easy travelling distance of central London during the work day.

So, I’ve been looking at ways of doing this remotely. There are some important constraints:

• pretty much anyone should be able to take part
• no special equipment should be needed
• it should cost nothing, or very little, to conduct.

As it seems to meet my requirements, I’m going to give Skype video calling a go. And I say “Skype”, rather than anything else, for reasons that I’ll now explain.

I’ve spent quite some time trying to find a straightforward way to record video calls in Ubuntu. I’ve come up with nothing, so here’s one way that seems to work:

• capture the audio using Skype Call Recorder
• capture video using GTK-RecordMyDesktop (apt-getable)
• splice the two together in a video editor.

Test calls have worked. I’ll post again with a report on how it worked in practice.

The last of our Server papercuts iterations will soon start, so it is now your last chance to nominate that annoyance that hindered your Server experience ! Nominations for the beta iteration will end on August 1st. Remember the steps:

1. If nobody filed a bug about it yet, just file one.
2. Look up the bug you want to nominate as a Server papercut, then click on “Also affects project”
3. Click “Choose another project” and type in “server-papercuts”, click “Continue”
4. Click on “Add to Bug report”

Remember the guidelines:

• Bug affects a server package
• Bug has an obvious and easy fix
• Bug makes the life of the sysadmin more miserable
• Bug is not a new feature (since we’ll be after Feature Freeze at that point)

As of today we only have 3 candidates for 12 open slots. So there is plenty of room for yours ! Thanks for your help in making the Ubuntu Server experience more (fit and) polished.

I’m pleased to announce that Ubuntu Maverick is now open for translation:

Remember that according to the release schedule translatable messages might be subject to change until the User Interface Freeze on the 26th of August.

During the Maverick development cycle, language packs containing the translations are generally released twice per week. This way you can see and test the results of the translations more frequently.

That’s it, happy translating!

Do you have any questions about translating Ubuntu? – Ask! – Did you find a bug in translations?  Report it!

No, not the bzr switch… rather the book : http://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752

Read it, its solid.

Les Vieilles Charrues had their festival on the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th of July this year, and invited us to hold a webcafe on Ubuntu. It was a pleasure to take over from olive who had organised everything but couldn't attend this event.  We took over in the webcafe with the valued help of kinouchou, Lust, Snip and spineaker, and with the two Eric from Infothema, Didier from Linux MAO, and Julia, Sonny and Kevin from Mozilla. Olive was with us all the time online to monitor the computers and guide us.

This webcafe for the festival-goers was the space where they can check their mails, their facebook account, twit or do everything they want on internet. We haven't put any restrictions, only no saving of the history and the passwords on firefox. For the same reasons, we haven't configured Ubuntu to let people try it. We only made a custom start page for Firefox.

We have been received like princes by the whole team, Stéphane and Arzhel answered all our needs and much more. We discovered on our arrival that a prime location and a huge hexagonal pavilion was here for us. We arrived on Thursday, planted the tent in the vonlunteer's camping already full. Then we took sandwiches for the dinner outside, took a tour to found the booth, tables, boards and breezeblocks to make the counter. Then we went to see Muse concert under a pouring rain.

First night under the rain, but when we woke up to a bright morning we were able to unload the car. We put everything in place but the wiring and configuration of the computers took us more time, and we only had few sets available at the opening. We were ready with all the computers sets one hour later. Pleasant first day at the webcafe, the people like this internet point and ask gladly some informations. Facebook is everywhere. The tatoos are very popular and after some licks, we put in place a mug with water and wipes to put them on.

The sun shone on Saturday, it was hot, we take the way to the webcafe to put everything in place. The computers power up without difficulties, we verified the configurations, and are we're ready for  the opening. People came rapidly, the webcafe was full all the day, we had a live feed via a webcam also. Mozilla joined us at the opening, they displayed their goodies which sold out in one hour. Sonny put on the Firefox suit and go offer some free hugs. At the end of the afternoon, I went with spineaker to the Geek Charrues, it's a walk througt the place with the sponsors. Time to discuss and share with all the organisers of this great event, and to discover the wings of the festival.

Last day, we woke up tired. Power up, ready to open one hour before the opening. It was great because we had already had people invited earlier by one of the sponsors. We also had the visit of the technical chief and the director Loïc, it's was an opportunity to present our webcafe to them and to thanks them for the warm welcome. Like the other days we had a lot of people. We were tired but relaxed. The festival-goers are great also. We finished the day at 21h30, loaded the car and took a break for a drink. Monday it's time to leave with great memories.

Awesome festival, my first one, i wish it's only the fisrt of a long series. Thanks to everyone.

More photos on the forum and at infothema and on their forum.

We didn’t ship Tomboy in 10.04 with support for Application Indicators because the experience wasn’t quite there. We lost things like the ability to pin notes, etc. The Rhythmbox and Banshee indicators were the same way, which is why we’re going to be using the Sound Menu.

Now we allow people to apply the same great technology (thanks KDE!) on the application’s icon in the launcher to create quicklists:

This is literally the Tomboy app indicator patch applied to the launcher with a “hey, this time you’ll be in the launcher” flag turned on, so it’s just the beginning.

Pins and all sorts of cool stuff can go in there. I’m looking forward to seeing what upstream application developers build. For example I’d love to have my favorite playlists in my banshee icon, or my incoming items in my Boxee queue, etc.

EDIT: Pretend the little arrow is pointing to tomboy and not cheese. ;)

People have been doing awesome work lately:

• Cody Russell and Neil Patel have been rocking Unity.
• Paul Hummer and Aaron Bentley have been doing amazing work fixing tons of bugs so that we can offer people an easy way to offer daily builds.
• Happiness is seeing the LoCo council working with individual teams through reapproval and the level of detailed work going on there.

Three examples.

In the first I forget Ted Gould and the rest of that team. Daily builds wouldn’t be such an oft requested feature if it wasn’t for the great work Fabien Tassin has done in this area. And the last example involves so many people I don’t know where to begin. 

I’m going to make an effort to stop blogging about “what I am doing” and talk about the people who are enabling me to do stuff because I can’t catch them all, but if we think about our team members more we can collectively tell our story.

Lately I think we’ve gotten in a collective funk of “here’s what I think about this.” followed by “Oh yeah, well here’s what I think of that”, and “Allow me to retort!” and then getting stuck in a rabbit hole of distractions.

So screw that, let’s share some stories Like this. And this. And talk about the people that are inspiring you that enables us to deliver this stuff to people.

Age: 23
Location: Novosibirsk, Russia
IRC Nick: LucidFox

Maia Kozheva

Desktop

Desk

How long have you used Linux and what was your first distro?
My first attempt to use Linux was back in 2001 or 2002, called something like WinLinux 2000 – it was a version of Linux that ran from under Windows, with very old software like KDE1. But I prefer to count my Linux experience from 2004, when I first installed Debian Woody into a dual boot to test-build Colonization Too (an open source 2D video game I was contributing to, now dead).

By then, many of the distribution’s packages were very outdated, and, not knowing about testing and unstable releases, I started manually compiling and installing many core components. I ended up with quite a mishmash of a system, more LFS than Debian, with software from old .debs and manually from tarballs, and it was a pain trying to make the system do what I wanted, but I was so excited at having a working GUI environment that was not Windows, and having a working C/C++ compiler, that I was willing to forgive it many major flaws. Plus all the tweaking, up to and including building custom kernels, taught me a lot of knowledge about Linux internals that came very useful in the future.

How long have you been using Ubuntu?
Since late 2005. Ubuntu Breezy was my first Linux distribution to Just Work (although even it required a considerable amount of tweaking by modern Linux standards), so I never installed any other OS on my home machine except on virtual machines, and deleted Windows shortly thereafter.

When did you get involved with the MOTU team and how?
Like many open source involvements, it began with an attempt to scratch a personal itch, in August 2007. I wanted to update the Psi instant messenger, which was then outdated in Ubuntu. I was curious about the process of creating .deb packages to begin with, so I read the packaging guide, read about uploading to REVU, and uploaded my first package. (Don’t do this at home, kids – REVU is not for updating existing packages!) My first packaging attempts were really ugly, but quickly improved thanks to both the packaging guides and the feedback from MOTUs.

What helped you learn packaging and how Ubuntu teams work?
Mostly the packaging guides on the Debian and Ubuntu websites, and first-hand experience with contributing new and updated packages to Ubuntu. When I needed to learn about some obscure packaging features, I usually looked at packages where they were already implemented.

What’s your favorite part of working with the MOTU?
The knowledge that you have achieved something. Watching the changes land in the archive, and knowing that in the span of a few hours, they will be there on mirrors around the whole world, for the benefit of thousands of Ubuntu users.

Any advice for people wanting to help out MOTU?
Be bold. The developers aren’t a cabal cult worshiping the Dark God of Ubuntu, they’re friendly people willing to help. If you have questions and a web search doesn’t answer them, come to IRC and ask! Along the way, you can learn something new from the conversations that go there all the time.

Learn by example, learn the typical solutions to your problem and try to follow the conventions. Don’t forget that Ubuntu gets most of its packages from Debian, and consider also contributing to Debian so that your effort benefits two distributions at once.

Are you involved with any local Linux/Ubuntu groups?
So far, my involvement has been limited to one presentation I gave at Ubuntu Global Jam here in Novosibirsk, at the request of one of the LUG organizers. I explained how Ubuntu development worked, some technical details about packaging, then logged onto Launchpad, wrote and uploaded a bugfix for a package in front of the eyes of the interested ones.

What are you going to focus on in Maverick and Maverick+1?
In Maverick, I have been mostly focused on patching software to interoperate with the indicator menus, including the still-in-development global menu, and pushing my non-Ubuntu-specific changes into Debian. In Maverick+1… Well, I’d like to get Pinta into a condition when it can go into the default install, since I think it neatly fills the niche of a general-purpose image editor, a “GIMP for casual users”. The final decision is with the desktop team, though.

What do you do in your other spare time?
Watch movies with my sweetheart, contribute to other open source projects, try my hand at speculative fiction. Occasionally post bileful rants about $personal_annoyance in my blog. But that’s rare. Sort of.

We should have released the source for the iphone client right after we did the upload to the appstore, but a bunch of bureaucracy and crazy work deadlines postponed this until now.
We’re going to be doing some work for the Ubuntu 10.10 release on the iphone client as well as on a new Android client, both clients are going to be open source, like all our other Ubuntu One clients.
We’ve created the projects on Launchpad, pushed the initial source code for the iphone client, and will start pushing Android as soon as we get out of the exploration stage.

The projects are available at:

iphone:  https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-ios-client
android: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-android-client

Stay tuned for more on our new mobile services!

It went ahead even if it was a miserable wet and windy… Summers day! At least the rain held for the time we all met up and had some lovely food from the farmers market.  Well worth going to if you are in the area.  1st Sunday of the month there is a farmers market in people’s park  in Dun Laoghaire.

Thanks to those who came along and braved the cold it was nice to meet some new folks as well and exchange some ideas and thoughts on Ubuntu and Open Souce and what people were doing.  Big thanks to Jeffrey to organised the Geeknic also!  More photos here