Attention Ubuntu One administrators / Canonical Server Staff

When your service over a period of several days is unavailable (or at least very flacky) for a number of users, it would really be appreciated if you would at least give some kind of acknowledgement of the problem, and a time frame for when you would expect the problem to be fixed.

A Twitter account that has last been updated July of last year and a wiki Status page that states “Service information available“, with latest updates from March last year is not good enough.

I enjoy my Ubuntu One file storage, but when a problem is happening for four days, without any information given to the users, I start looking around for alternatives. We all know they are out there…

(Yes, I did file a bug report…)

UDS Blog-o-Rama: My first UDS

So, I’m attending my first UDS in my hometown of Copenhagen.

As a non-developer my primary focus has been on the community track, but in general it has been exciting just to be around all the great people who make Ubuntu happen.

I think the most important thing I will be taking with me from this UDS is the use of Launchpad Blueprints for team-management. My understanding is that so far Blueprints have primarily been used by development-teams to track and manage their work, but there is no reason for LoCo teams and other teams to not use Blueprints.

Thanks to Randall for organizing this blog-sweatshop-o-rama :)

Photo by: Will Scullin

Ubuntu Global Jam i København 2010

Så er det igen tid til Ubuntu Global Jam.

Endnu engang mødes Ubuntu og Fri Software entusiaster for at arbejde med at forbedre Ubuntu. I weekenden d. 27. – 29. august går det løse over hele kloden – og vi er også med i Danmark.
Vi mødes i København i Labitat, men det er også muligt at være med hjemmefra med en internet forbindelse.

Man bestemmer selv hvad man har lyst til at arbejde med, men Bugs og oversættelse er de mest oplagte kandidater – det er lige til at gå til.

Så hvis du har lyst til at være med, så kom forbi H. C. Ørstedsvej i weekenden, eller log på vores irc kanal og lad os snakke om hvad du har lyst til at arbejde med.

Der er også en Facebook begivenhed man kan tilmelde sig, så vi har et gæt på hvor mange der deltager.

Og så har Mark i øvrigt annonceret at Ubuntu 11.04 får kælenavnet Natty Narwhal (hvilket kan oversættes til Fikse Narhval). Det var i hvert fald gået hen over mit hoved – men jeg har også haft travlt med mange ting de sidste par dage…

Late Global Jam in Copenhagen

Better late than never… due to some scheduling problems we didn’t manage to run a Global Jam last weekend, as the rest of the Ubuntu community did.

However, luckily we managed to run a jam yesterday, Saturday 10. If it could be called a part of the Global Jam, or if it was just our Local Jam is really just a matter of words. The five of us ended up working primarily on bug triaging. However we also had a quick look at the features of Empathy (the new default instant messaging client in Karmic Koala), and the Ubuntudanmark Podcast guys did a quick segment for their next podcast.

All in all I think the jam was a success, and I think we are ready for similar events in the future.

LoCo teams around the world

If you have been following the loco-contacts mail list you may have seen the recent hint that the coming LoCo Directory will be using the ownership of loco groups on Launchpad as a source of information about who is the LoCo contact for that group. This got me thinking.

How do different teams around the world organise themselves?

The assumption that the loco contact is always the same as the owner of the Launchpad group seems a bit simple. As teams evolve beyond a certain size, tasks get split, and the administration of the Launchpad group and the task of being Loco contact don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
So I’m curious – how do other teams get around delegating tasks and assignments?

In the rest of this blog post I shall try to give a short introduction to how we are currently doing things in the Danish team. I hope people from other LoCo teams will share their experience and ways of doing things as well. And of course pointers as to how we may organize the Danish team even better are very welcome!

Danish Team

Twice a month (except during holiday season) we have an IRC meeting. Everyone is welcome at the meeting, and this is where we discuss our future plans and events. If need be and we can’t come to a consensus on a topic, we have votes. One person, one vote. In essence, this is how the Danish team works currently.
ubuntu-dk-big

To take care of financial issues we have a board of trustees, including a treasurer. This makes handling money issues and making agreements with third parties a lot easier. Most people here (sponsors to make an example), will feel much safer donating money to an association, as opposed to some private person.

One a year (during spring) we have a general assembly, where we elect the board and the LoCo contact.

Of course this adds a bit of bureaucracy. We had to write some by-laws and we have to go through the entire hassle of having elections once a year. But it also secures that the board and the LoCo contact have a mandate from the community, and it makes it easy for the community to replace a LoCo contact or a board member, if they themselves can’t seem to realise that it’s time to step down.

That is how it works for us. Needs in other teams may be different, but I like the idea that once a year the position as LoCo contact is brought to debate and a vote, to make sure that (hopefully) the best person for the job is actually doing it.

So, how does everyone else do this?

Launchpad endelig Open Source

En af de ting Ubuntu og Canonical (firmaet bag Ubuntu) er blevet kritiseret for gennem tide har været at Launchpad ikke har været udgivet som Free Software. Launchpad er den tekniske platform hvor Ubuntu (og efterhånden også rigtig mage andre Open Source projekter) bliver udviklet. Her er kode, blueprints, bugs og en masse andet for hvert projekt samlet.

I dag er Launchpad så blevet udgivet under AGPLv3. Launchpad er mange gange blevet lovet udgivet under en fri licens, men jeg tror mange har været lidt skeptiske og har ville se det først.

Det bliver spændende at se hvor mange nye Launchpad installationer der kommer til at skyde op rundt omkring eller om der i realiteten vil blive ved med kun at være en Launchpad, nemlig Launchpad.net.

MOTD with commercial links?

I know Planet Ubuntu might not be the best place to bring this up, but I feel that the bug report for bug number 268447 is not the right place for the more abstract discussion that seems to be needed. If there is already a discussion on a mail list somewhere that I have missed, please point me in the right direction.

The bug report in short points out that a link to the commercial service Landscape is added to the Message Of The Day by the landscape client. However, Landscape is not a free service.

There seems to be (at least) two sides to this bug. The first is who gets to modify the MOTD? As a client user logging in to a server, information about Landscape is completely irrelevant to me. Information about Landscape might be relevant to the server administrator, but not to every user of the system. So maybe the link should not go there? Imagine what would happen if every program go to modify the MOTD. The size of the MOTD could easily balloon to a point where the MOTD becomes useless.

The other issue is what kind of commercial services can be advertised in general.

How long until we see adds about new Firefox plugins or Crelm Toothpaste in the MOTD or somewhere else?

‘Ubuntu Wanted’ wants you!

Mads Rosendahl points out (in the Danish forum) that the Ubuntu Wanted project needs help. The idea of Ubuntu Wanted is to be the place to go if you have some time and skills that you would like to contribute to the Ubuntu community, but don’t know where to use your skills. Then you go to the Ubuntu Wanted website, and they list all sorts of tasks ready for you to start working on.

wanted-logo

To put the project into perspective Ubuntu Brainstorm provides the great ideas, Launchpad is our common work platform and Ubuntu Wanted aims to turn all these great ideas into reality.

More info at the wiki page, discussions at the websites mailing list or drop into the #ubuntu-website irc channel at Freenode.

PS. WordPress 2.7.1 is out, and upgrading is as easy as one click in the web interface. Love it!

Working webcam

Finally my webcam is working! Up until recently there was no working Linux driver for my webcam, but that seems to have changed.

Reports indicate that the driver is included in the Linux kernel from version 2.6.28. Until that version hits your system (should ship with Ubuntu Jaunty) installing the driver is still possible. See this guide:

http://m560x-driver.wiki.sourceforge.net/testing_m5602

The webcam (or the chip to be more accurate) is located in a lot of laptops. The Launchpad Bug report mentions Asus, Acer, Lenovo and Zepto. I have a Zepto 6615WD myself.

To find out if your webcam is a m560x model, open up a terminal and type

lsusb

if you see a line like this:

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 0402:5602 ALi Corp. Video Camera Controller

you are in business. You may have to activate your webcam somehow. On my system there is a button with a camera icon on it that I have to press before the camera turns on.

The quality is a bit grainy and far from the best – hopefully this can be solved as the driver matures.
hue-lille

However me being (and looking) tired in the morning is properly beyond the scope of some webcam driver. (Yes I cheated and used a regular camera for the Get to know a LoCo post a few weeks back.)