I have updated the NVIDIA driver 177.67 (still a beta) in Intrepid (a special thanks to Timo Aaltonen who sponsored the upload).

If you still have 2D performance issues, you can have a look at this post (a special thanks to nullack for suggesting this link).

NOTE: this driver won’t be available on Hardy until a final release of the driver is available.

Dear LazyWeb,

AFAIK Ubuntu is using http://security.ubuntu.com to provide security updates for its packages. What about security section under http://archive.ubuntu.com ? It will be dropped if favor of http://security.ubuntu.com ?

I’ll apreciate any information about that.

Thanks!

Ok, so when Ryan Paul (from Ars Technica) started working on gwibber as a twitter client I was mildly interested. It wasn't until identi.ca was launched that I moved wholesale and needed a good client. (Twhirl and Spaz are good too but the Linux Adobe AIR alpha is holding them back).

gwibber was kind of Ryan's playground application where he could mess around with things like webkit and GTK stuff. However, people wanted an identi.ca client, and started using it. Ryan wanted to do the packaging himself to learn it (and hopefully write it up for open.ended) so we specifically avoided packaging it. Well, it became more and more popular, and it was time to make packages, it was already in bzr and on launchpad, so it would be heresy to not leverage the awesome power of Personal Package Archives.

This evening I registered the gwibber-team and set up a PPA. Instructions are here. Note that it depends on the webkit PPA, so you need both sets of sources. gwibber uses webkit to make the cool layout you see in the screenshot, complete with reflections and rounded corners!

Before anyone asks, no, I won't be putting these up for Intrepid proper, gwibber is still fast moving and needs work. Branches are popping up all over the place and people are Doing Great Things(tm), but it's just too fast moving to maintain in the distro, which is why we have PPAs! With webkit coming in a future version of GNOME it should start to settle down. You'll find my packaging branch at the previous URL, if you want to jump in and help out then let me know!

You can follow me on identi.ca using gwibber, I am @jorge, and you can follow Ryan too, @segphault. Come join the other bunches of Ubuntu users on identi.ca!

Installation notes for our openSUSE friends are here. If someone wants to throw these into Debian post-freeze then please let me know, and of course feel free to steal my packages!

As promised, here’s my desktop (click for larger view)

XFCE with compositing, Conky and Avant Window Navigator

Hi,

Today we have updated the Launchpad Terms of Use. Specifically, the section on Automated Querying was updated and extended to reflect the addition of our Public APIs. Please take a moment to inspect the changes.

Thanks,

Joey Stanford

Wade brought me a new Mini-ITX motherboard for a demo machine we used to have in the boothbox (but which had one minor issue: No X, not even after lots of driverfoo.). So I've replaced the VIA Epia board with an Intel Atom one with integrated 945 graphics chip. KWin's compositing now works nicely on this machine, it's swift and I see no graphical glitches. The machine has a 1.6 GHz Atom CPU. One problem now is that the slot-in DVD drive doesn't fit nicely. I can squeeze it in, but as soon as I screw the cover onto the small desktop case, the DVD doesn't eject the disc anymore, caused by a slightly squeezed top of the drive. So I'll need to find a way to gain a couple of millimeters of space in that box (or stick a note under the case that you need to open the case to use optical discs ;-)). Also left to do is testing multimedia. I might need to install a couple of plugins there, and I didn't check yet if sound works at all. I'll see if I can bring it to Froscon this coming weekend (depends if the boothbox will be there, or someone to take it to the KDE office in Frankfurt. (Drop me a note in that case :).)

Otherwise, we have a nicely working demo machine, with KDE 4.1 and exampla data on it that should also be easy to maintain for some time. I've installed all the interesting things from KDE4, so we don't end up with not finding all kinds of applications and need to install them on slow fairground connections.

Yesterday, I tried to reinstall my desktop machine, a rather nice dualcore with lots of RAM and fast disks. It's got two 17" displays connected. Lately, Nvidia's drivers have caused me some headache there, making it just no fun to work on that machine. So I've been mostly using the laptop lately. I do miss the comfort of a good desk and chair though, so I've hooked up the laptop with one of the TFTs. I need to try the latest nvidia beta drivers, a posting on the NVNews board sounds promising, at least. Can't wait to try ...

People on #suse have been rather helpful in getting me better acquainted with the system. I found out that's it's apparently quite helpful to people guiding you to tell them in how far you need guidance ("I'm an advanced linux user, but just don't know the distro very well") helps to avoid a couple of unnecessary questions ("did you restart X after trying the driver?").
Ereslibre has apparently fixed the Konqueror toolbar issue, I've been seeing for some time, I'm rebuilding everything as we speak.

So, I was romping around a little bit today, and I noticed this page on the Ubuntu Wiki talking about Fontconfig. There is, posted there, an example for a file ~/.fonts.conf, which makes little fix-ups to font rendering all over the place.

I removed a decent chunk of the file (pretty much all the aliases), but I am rather happy with it. Before now, I didn’t know it was possible to have some fonts render themselves in an anti-aliased fashion. Quite awesome.

Great news today!

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – August 18, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Canonical has become a member of the Foundation.

Here available the official announcement.

Don't you just love learning random new commands? I learned two commands in the last week, which is pretty good, because after your first couple months, the rate of learning new commands kind of slows down. Anyway, here are the two commands I learned: tr - This is the translate tool. You give it two sets and an input file. It then substitutes one set for the other throughout the input file.

While we were at Debconf Jono and I tweaked the 5-a-day page to be simpler and less confusing. One list of possible targets we added is the list of unlinked upstream bugs. These are lists of bugs where people have pasted in bug reports in comments but have NOT linked to it via Launchpad's "Also affects project..." feature.

Why linking bugs upstream is important

Just mentioning a bug report that is upstream is only one aspect - sure it's useful, but linking it allows us to query Launchpad for these bugs, and more importantly track these bugs programmatically so they get on the right person's radar to fix it. Instructions for doing this are here. Now, let me show you an example on why this is important.

Example bug

Bernhard Schmidt reported this bug on rdesktop on February 8th. Basically, he wanted rdesktop to be compiled with IPV6 support. Bernhard also opened up a bug in Debian. Three days ago Laszlo Boszormenyi reported that it was fixed in Debian with the upload of rdesktop 1.6.0-2.

Ok so now what? The bug just sits there right? Well, that depends. As it happens, I was doing my 5-a-day and stumbled across this bug - and I thought "This bug is fixed in Debian already, it should be on someone's hit list to fix, right?" Wrong. Or am I? No way to tell for sure, and short of Bernhard chasing someone down or having someone else who can actually fix it find it isn't very efficient. If only there was a list of easy, low hanging fruit ... like say Harvest!

I linked the bug to Debian bug in Launchpad. The next time the bug watch is updated Harvest will find it, and it will show up in Harvest automatically. Now as people trudge through Harvest the bug is listed as a possible fix and they can fix it.

Oiling the machine

So, what needs to happen for this to be as efficient as possible?

• Bug reporters - Do continue to report bugs upstream like Bernhard did in this case. Well done Bernhard! Instructions for filing bugs in upstream trackers are here.
• Bug reporters and triagers - Don't just throw a URL in the comment box, link it via Launchpad (instructions).
• Bugsquad / Experienced Bug Triagers - encourage people to link bugs during Hug Days.
• Ubuntu Developers - Keep monitoring Harvest for easy "sync-from-Debian-or-upstream" bugs.

Lessons Learned

As you can see, linking bugs upstream helps get bugs moving in the process, and eventually end up in things like Harvest or the "bugs fixed elsewhere" pages. People write tools and scripts to find these bugs, especially if they're resolved upstream, which makes it easier for people to find so that the fixes can be shipped to users, which is what this is all about!

Now let me put my Jordan Mantha hat on: "But Jorge, getting it on Harvest is one thing, that's only half the solution. Getting someone to find it and fix it on the other hand ..." Yes, absolutely. If you think as this entire Harvest workflow as one big machine, then upstream linkages are feeding the machine, but at the end of the day it needs to spit out bushels out the back.

So we need developers to fix these bugs - which is why we have things like Ubuntu Developer Week, MOTU mentorship, sponsorship, Harvest, etc to grow the developer community. This is a tough area to grow, but we are making progress, and tools like Harvest are making things easier I think, in the meantime, keeping the machine well fed is still better than a bug sitting in Launchpad all by itself ...

I tried terminator (thanks go to Nicolas Valcarcel for asking me to sponsor a Debian upload, thus forcing me to try it, and Asheesh Laroia for doing a lightning talk at debconf about it), but I’m not convinced.
- More keybindings are clearly missing. You can only switch terminals using Previous/Next keybindings.
- More features would be great, like the ability to switch the position of two terminals (so you could reorganize them).
- It has some small usability problems, like the fact that the config is text-based, not using gconf, that it’s not possible to change the config without restarting it, that the title bar doesn’t display anything useful most of the time, since it prefixes the current terminal’s title with “Terminator: “, etc.

So, is there any other tiling terminals manager I should try, before filing tons of feature requests on terminator? My other requirement is that it mustn’t reinvent the wheel, but use the gnome-terminal widget.

Thank you.

Hi,

Days ago members of our LoCo team noticed that a Chilean consulting company is using part of the Ubuntu logo (the circle of friends)

It’s look familiar … or not? What we should do as LoCo Team?

We’ll appreciate any kind of help.

Cheers!

UPDATE: This post had a good efect from Convoca guys. They changed its logo into

Thanks to everyone who gave me ideas to solve this conflict.

I am looking for someone to give me a hand with roughly 500 hours of work in the Cincinnati, Ohio area.

If you are language agnostic (ie can switch from python, php, perl, c), and have linux system administration experience, please send me your resume. Position can start almost immediately. We primarily work with Novell SLES right now but are pushing to transition to Ubuntu.

You can find my email on launchpad.

So this semester I'm taking

• Data Structures
• Logic Circuits and Microprocessors
• Theoretical Foundations
• Intro to psychology
• Intro to statistics

I'm really looking forward to these classes. Here's hoping I make an A.
Not to forget however that the Android phone is due to come out October/November.

I'm pretty psyched!

with your HDTV and not paying a dime to a cable or phone company.
It is available in 1080i on digital broadcast TV. My family has actually gone back to broadcast to get it.

What channels can you get (in Cherry Hill, with a really bad antenna)?
Note: Channels 6.* came back to not being flaky and some of the higher numbers are flaky again.

Oh, and Hello Planet Ubuntu!

So I've been privy to, and sometimes involved in, many conversations about the Linux ecosystem. How it evolved, how it is now, and where it will go from here. The most important factor has been how Linux kernel development has been funded over the years and what needs to happen to ensure it remains funded.

Given that Linux is not owned by anyone (not even by us, the developers) it is hard to say who should and will fund its future. The tides of money are constantly shifting as companies involved in this ecosystem decide where they fit in, what they want from it, and ultimately, how much they are willing to spend and for how long.

So let's go through some history. I'd like to remind people that I am not an expert on Linux kernel history in this sense. This is all from my recollection over 10+ years of being involved.

In the beginning (the past)

Well, there wasn't much. Let's face it, in the start, it was a hobby for most everyone. No company took it seriously. The device vendors that did write drivers did so out of free will, and usually poorly. Volunteers still had to munge it and cram it into the main kernel tree. It was a much simpler time. Folks did things for vanity and sheer enjoyment.

We can relate this time to when things got done because some individual wanted it done. Corporations were still on the sidelines waiting to see what happened (if they were even looking at all).

At this point, people were working on the kernel in their free time. Lots of them were in college, which means no families to support, no mortgage, no worry about retirement. I'm sure a lot of people (including myself) thought "This looks good on a resume, plus I get to do things I like".

The corporations emerge (still the past)

So at some point, people decided they wanted to make a living off this thing called Linux. Everyone knew that for the hardwares vendors to care about Linux, it had to have a corporate entity to talk to and users demanding. The boom of venture-capital-backed Linux vendors emerged (aka distributions). We know they have come and gone over the years, with only a few emerging in the black.

These companies positioned themselves in many different ways. Some trying to become service oriented, while others relied on licensing to make their money. I wont delve into this topic much, but let's look at how these Linux vendors advanced.

Remember, we are just coming out of the previous stage. No corporations are yet seriously funding development in Linux. It, in itself, is still a long ways off from having all the features that users really want in an OS. How do these distributions get these features? Easy, they hire developers that have been doing this all along.

This is the initial way things get done. You pay someone to do it.

So how did this fall on the distributions? Simply because the corporate distributions required it in order to compete in the market. The OEM's and hardware vendors didn't care. Their stuff was selling on Windows and Unix platforms without problems. They had no financial requirement or user demand to worry about supporting Linux at this point. If their hardware was popular enough with Linux, someone would write a driver for it.

Enter the hardware vendors (sort of past and up to now)

Now that Linux is starting to be a commercial "thing", hardware vendors are taking notice. Not only because of the press around it, but because their own customers are starting to demand it. Big customers.

In addition, companies are starting to see a way for them to piggyback on all the hype and press coverage. If you're "Linux Friendly", you've got a whole bunch of geeks with purchasing leverage behind your company.

Large hardware vendors are starting to take notice. Companies devote whole groups of engineers at supporting Linux. And not just in some odd way, they are doing it our way. Open, and in the community. They work with distributions to get early adoption of drivers. They work with upstream to integrate these drivers and features into the kernel. They participate in steering the process, and drive a lot of what we do. OEM's can finally lay down the requirement "Must be supported in Linux" to their ODM's.

Where did these engineers come from? Right from the Linux kernel community. Most people hired to work on the Linux kernel by a company, cut their teeth for zero money in the community. Some of them have also been hired away from the distributions.

As a previous hiring manager for Ubuntu's kernel team, I can tell you personally, I generally skipped the CV and went straight to the kernel commit logs and linux-kernel mailing list to verify someone. The CV was just a backup.

This is one of the beauties of our process. On a CV, most people look good. Even their references (which they choose) are all likely to tell you what you want to hear. But nothing can tell about a persons personality like the thread from 6 months ago where this person tried to get a feature accepted upstream on lkml. You wouldn't have seen how this person either defended themselves valiantly, or wussed out just because Alan Cox had some harsh words. You wouldn't have known about how they worked for months to take their original idea and rework it to suit the issues brought up on submission, or whether they let the idea die because they couldn't handle the criticism.

Back to the topic though...I'll repeat, these hardware vendors are hiring kernel developers. But it isn't just the hardware manudacturers. You also have companies like Oracle, Google and VMWare hiring them. Some companies even have enough cashflow that they can hire a high level upstream kernel developer for pure bragging rights, or a consortium sponsored by many companies hiring people to just keep doing what they were doing for nothing.

This is definitely where the shift comes in. More and more, we see hardware vendors developing Linux drivers that are released at the same time the device goes public. This development is occurring in-house, and not out in the community. Sure, the community still integrates it, and goes through the code review process, but how many new drivers are coming from someone not associated with the vendors that made the device? Fewer and fewer.

The road ahead...(now and into the future)

So as things move ahead, there will be less for the distributions to do for hardware support. Most vendors will produce the driver, and community+distributions will play a big part in integrating these drivers. New subsystems will emerge to support new ranges of devices. It's not too hard to see vendors working together in the community to solidify features and API's that their drivers need (e.g. mac80211, GPU, other wireless technologies, multi-core features, memory management, etc).

Most developers will cut their teeth on helping to integrate and enhance these things from the vendors. The community will revolve around major restructuring of the kernel to ease development and improve stability.

So where does that leave the distributions? With the majority of the kernel work being handled by vendors, the distributions will fall into a level of consumption. Let's face it, distributions are best at integration (which is part development, so let's not get confused). Distributions are also good at noticing trends, which are fed upstream. Yes, they will still drive new ideas, and possibly even develop these ideas in-house, but they wont be the ones driving the the bulk of the work because they wont be the ones creating the new hardware that will require it.

The idea that distributions should ultimately be responsible for the kernel funding is not possible to sustain. In the current ecosystem, it is not required for a distro to invest heavily in upstream kernel work. Because Linux is open and free, there is nothing forcing them to do so. If this company instead invests heavily in integration and usability, they will produce a better product for the masses, beating the other distributions in the end, and leaving the kernel developers hired by those other distributions without jobs.

In the end...(entirely made up)

If a distribution is popular enough, the hardware vendors will want it to run on their goods. OEM's and hardware vendors who work together to help bring support for their hardware to the kernel will ultimately beat out competitors. The age where Linux is in-demand enough to create this ecosystem is close at hand, and in some ways, already exists.

Nothing is written in stone. No one can predict what will happen, we can only speculate. However, we can probably be assured that the funding to keep Linux around will come from many places, maybe even ones we haven't thought of yet.

I, for one, look forward to what's ahead.

This week we’re releasing Launchpad 2.1.8! During code roll-outs we allow a down-time window of a couple of hours. This week, we’re making the release in the early hours UTC of Thursday 21st.

Going offline: 00.00 UTC 21st August 2008
Expected back before: 02.00 UTC 21st August 2008

I’m sorry for the inconvenience this down-time will cause. I’ll post details of what’s new in 2.1.8 here after we’ve made the release.

Me: you know what would be cool?
Me: an mp3 player that could connect to wifi so you can stream music
Me: fitness places could offer free wifi
Someone: i have that
Someone: the ipod touch or the iphone
Me: that doesn't cost 200 dollars
Me: well, I am not sure what the touch costs
Me: but even a hundred dollars
Someone: so apparently you want something that's not cool enough to be worth $200
Me: it shouldn't cost 200 bucks for something like that
Me: maybe a hundred
Me: and that is a big maybe
Me: like, if apple made one that they didn't try to cram every feature ever into and make it only compatible with iTunes, I would certainly buy it
Me: just a simple Wifi-enabled MP3 player
Me: simple LED screen, nothing fancy
Me: I don't want an MP3 player that can also do my taxes
Someone: that sounds like a really crap device
Someone: wifi with an LED screen?
Someone: you are misunderstanding the prereqs
Me: how so?
Someone: how are you going to connect to APs? how are you going to type in keys? find internet radio stations?
Me: you would put the m3u's on beforehand
Me: like an mp3
Someone: something tells me you would never buy this hypothetical device, even if it existed
Me: and yeah, I guess having a slide out qwerty would be ok
Me: that would make it worth 100
Me: the LED on my current MP3 player has more than enough space to find your AP
Me: I probably wouldn't buy first gen
Me: let the bugs get worked out
Me: but if 2nd gen was really what I was looking for, I would certainly by it
Me: buy*
Someone: so you're saying someone should produce a device for less than a hundred dollars that has such a spectacularly ridiculous hodgepodge of features that only four or five people on earth would find it useful, that you wouldn't buy it, and that if they put out a second version you might buy it
Me: :-/
Someone: fortunately, apple makes the ipod for everyone with reasonable needs


Uh, what? How did that turn into an iPod conversation?

Some secrets are missing from the last LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin....

A hot summer night in berlin....Danimo <- Video Shooter

 

Jono and Thomas Zander of KOffice / Trolltech fame - The Erotic Dance (Office Compatible)

Jono, aseigo, nightrose and tzander "Gimme Gimme Gimme Some Love After Midnight"

"The Missing Table"-Dance (Aseigo, Jono)

"Waltzing N-A-marok" (Nightrose, Aseigo)

Last but not least...don't shoot Aseigo

 

I'd be bit of the past, Flash just a pirate for compression but it's obvious that is have samba code; and software on our time, in just keep things I also all the ever cared about your own blog post: and you'll be magnified; look bad it let's them to make FOSS users that, you and their profits, actually better than Windows Flash for Linux which is out all, got it yourself?  People and that's you file a choice is the audio systems that.  So far as if I couldn't possibly want; to integrate with difficult.

  Well, it difficult for Kde people others it's called documentation and or pa alsa would be pure!

  I saw had a FOSS users, already called Silverlight and call it is the only to release and another one of making things listed on the Debian over which glibc and thus the software?  Ubuntu?

  Refine that there's not is supposed to get fixed?  Toponce I don't talk of right click the code that the fuck, if you are hurting it spec and it: again, on your rules; respect their customers former freetards sit around a lot of it.  What it well as An OpenMoko Freerunner the market, share: is the case for the software.

  Angry?  Or Ubuntu; is plugin that it's written, a default, for saving children?  Redhat will be inferior, magnified.

  Look at least minutes: after some really, comes down.  One channel click (the Slashdot continues: to bust out of the Michael Phelps of the one more than Windows I had a good place at me the choices they you care about a few guidelines for instant messaging: giving a whole dozen women in window such A non trivial).  Your goals, you don't had a month update my wife but that's not open up on the fuck do.  O try to suck even if that's a spaghetti of the is that figured out that others Ubuntu Masturbating Monkey.

  And Ubuntu Linux that have even try going to FreeBSD or pa Ubuntu are getting closer and the closed IE works, for two.  So much as I also go back to have Notepad and FOSS users.  Hopefully it could not play the comments, but best of configurations that none of you see a few Reasons to understand and testers who knew just have anything on Linux: moves farther and don't like NVIDIA are a stable kernel And what, the winning Flash in a tad busy these guys lets blame Firefox.  Sure the one.

The above was created using dadadodo and recent linuxhater posts.