Giving Unity Another Go

Yesterday I installed Unity5.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by some of its new features:

• I can set the panel background colour. By default, the Unity panel adapts itself to match the wallpaper colour. This doesn’t always work out, and with certain background colours it looks really horrible with the icons on it. I set mine to a none-harsh, dark grey and can now see my icons without any desire to fork out my eyes.
• I can set the launcher panel to be ever present. I have plenty of horizontal screen space and I find it annoying not having a window list present on my display. When I have to hover my mouse to the left edge and wait a few hundred milliseconds before I even see the list of open apps and where they are positioned, it just annoys me. Having them always on-screen is just so much easier.
• It’s fast and more stable. Unity 5.0 is noticeably more snappy than it’s predecessors. It also feels less buggy. What drove me away from Unity on Oneiric was that the window placement snapping got horribly confused now and again and the only way out of it was to kill Compiz or otherwise restart Unity. My session is 24 hours old already and still going strong

Some Areas that could do with Improvement

Update: I thought it’s worth mentioning that removing the Gwibber lens removed close to *500MB* of that extra 1GB RAM that was used. There also seems to be an issue where gdbus and dconf worker are way more busy than they should be (at least on my machine). I’m figuring it out and will file bugs if I can confirm them. When they behave better then memory usage in Unity and Gnome Fallback shouldn’t be that far apart.

• Global menus still get confused about running apps. Sometimes I’d get a Thunderbird title in the menu space and Thunderbird has already been closed. This is kind of weird when you’re not aware of the bug.
• Memory usage is high. I’m currently using around 1GB more memory than I typically would when using the Gnome 3 Fallback session with the same software running. I’m hoping that it stays there and that it won’t continue to rise due to memory leaks and other memory issues. This is a deal breaker on application servers.
• The Dash isn’t very pretty or user friendly. I guess the dash didn’t get much work or research done due to the focus on getting bugs fixed, so it’s probably not all that bad. At least you can right-click on the Ubuntu icon now and get a list of installed Unity lenses. The Dash home should really be customisable, and I’m not sure how users are supposed to do some rudimentary tasks like connect to a network share.

Overall Thoughts

Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

Last weekend I spent some time with the LTSP folks at the annual LTSP hackfest called “By The Sea” (or BTS for short). This was my second BTS. It was well attended and these were some of the items that were covered:

• Migration to new NBD
• Bootable chroots
• libpam-ssh
• Epoptis
• Local window manager
• Improvements to ltsp-build-client
• Migrate LDM to GTK+3
• LDM login speedup
• Try to do something about the default LDM theme

 

 

Other than that it was a great time for LTSP enthusiasts to get together and socialize a bit. For the next few months, the focus is on fixing bugs and getting LTSP in a good shape for when Ubuntu 12.04 LTS arrives, since everything that is done now should be supportable for 5 years. After that there will most likely be some push to move from LDM to LightDM, which will allow us to have much nicer (and more useful) login screens for all kinds of remote sessions. It was great seeing everyone there and I hope to be there again next year!

Some updates form the world of Jonathan…

• LTSP BTS2011: Yesterday Marc, Stéphane and myself drove down to Southwest Harbour in Maine for the LTSP By The Sea 2011 hackfest. It wasn’t a long road trip, but it’s been fun, we picked up 4 other people at Bangor airport and the minivan we’re hiring was like a party bus from the airport to the harbour. The hackfest itself has also been really fun so far and productive, I’ll blog about that some time.
• UDS Precice: On Sunday I’m off to Orlando, Florida for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04. It will be my first time in Orlando, and the first time I get to attend a UDS in the US. Previously my visa got approved too late so I couldn’t attend, this time I received a 10 year visa so I should be fine for a long time, I’m really happy and relieved about that.
• Holidays and stuff: The week after UDS I’m back in Canada for a week to organise some things and report back at the office about what happened at BTS/UDS and then I’m off to South Africa for 3 months. I’ll be working from there for the period and also taking most of my year’s holidays during the end of December and early January. I’m the best man for a wedding and will be organising a road trip for the bachelors party, my friend in South Africa also got my motorbike fixed so we might end up going there by bike, the weather should be really good around then.
• Back in Sherbs: On 15 February, just after my 30th birthday, I’ll be back in Sherbrooke. I’ll probably end up having some form of birthday party in both countries. After that… the adventure continues!

I’m spending my day at the Ubuntu Global Jam in Montréal. What surprised me most is that after all these years, it’s the first global jam I’ve actually attended. Canonical provided the venue and some yummy refreshments. I managed to be somewhat productive, but even better was being able to put some more names to faces with the local Ubuntu crowd.

Looking forward to the next one already!

 

 

Now and again, someone asks me “Why do you use Debian?” or “What’s so great about it? Why don’t you use (insert any other Linux distribution here)? I never quite know what to say. I’ve gotten so wrapped up in why Debian is great that it has become hard to imagine how someone else couldn’t see what I admire in it.

So.. what IS so great about it?

It’s great for similar reasons as Wikipedia. Wikipedia builds this huge collection of free articles, pictures and videos and assimilate it by making sure the content is free, that statements are properly backed, that there are proper links between articles and probably a few dozen really big things I haven’t even  ever thought about.

Great community. Debian has some parallels to Wikipedia. It’s almost like a Wikipedia but for software instead of articles. It assimilates free software and makes it easy to use on a very wide variety of systems. It does so better than any other system that exists (at least IMHO, I list just some of the reasons for saying that below). Packagers are like editors on Wikipedia. They integrate all kinds of free software into the system, making sure it meets the project’s quality standards and that the licensing is sound.

Operating system support. You can run Debian with a Linux, FreeBSD or GNU/Hurd kernel. FreeBSD and GNU/Hurd is admittedly not as rounded as Linux in all situations, but just the fact that you have a choice of operating system kernel and that the project supports 3 of the most well known ones is amazing. I can’t even think of one other system that actively works on supported different kernels.

Desktop support. Some systems focus on Gnome, KDE or in the case of Ubuntu, Unity. Debian supports a really wide variety of desktop environments. Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox and more are all fully supported and in the main archive.

Architectures. It runs on a really amazingly wide range of hardware. It runs officially on i386, amd64, armel, sparc, powerpc, ia64, mips, mipsel, and IBM/s390, but you can also run it unsupported on alpha, armhf, avr32, hppa, m68k, powerpcspe, sh4 and sparc64 architectures. Debian scales from some of the tiniest computers that can run an operating system to the world’s most powerful super computers.

The Debian Social contract. Many distributions exist to make profit. There’s nothing wrong with that and I fully support that people use free software to make a living (I’d be a hypocrite if I said otherwise). Unfortunately, many distributions also base their choices on their profit motives. Decisions are often made based on “What’s going to make us profit right now” as apposed to “What will be best for our users now and in the long term?” (I’ll stay away from specific examples for now because this blog post is about Debian and not Oracle, Novell and similar companies). Debian exists for its users. It’s mission is defined in the Debian Social Contract. Decisions are made based on what’s best for the user and not to maximize benefits of the project sponsors.

If I don’t stop here I’ll go on all night. And I haven’t even started talking about how great APT is yet or that Debian has pretty much the largest collection of high quality packages available. Or how reliable upgrades are. But this blog entry isn’t about convincing people to use Debian, it’s about expressing why I like it so much and I’ve probably expressed that sufficiently already.

But.. But…

Oh yeah, I get some uphill from people for liking Debian, I can deal with it.

What about Ubuntu? There are some shortcomings in Debian that can’t really be fixed due to its public commitments, or at least, fixing them would break things in Debian. Apple has created a huge eco-system around the Apple App Store. It’s how people buy applications now on most Apple systems. It’s been so successful that Google has used the same concept on the Android Marketplace. Many other systems are doing it too, Ubuntu is promoting free software and non-free software alike in it’s Software Center. Ubuntu will be making it easier for people to buy and install non-free software. Some critics might say that Ubuntu is promoting non-free software that way, but it’s a good experiment and it’s great that it can happen without having to be part of the Debian project. There are more things that Ubuntu does that would be really difficult to get into Debian, but I don’t want to focus on that because Ubuntu is really a *great* Debian derivative. It has delivered Debian (in some form) to more users than Debian itself has by relentlessly working on making it as easy to install and maintain as possible. On top of that, Ubuntu does a great job of submitting their fixes and improvements back to upstreams and to Debian itself. I use Ubuntu on my home desktop and some servers and support it at clients on a daily basis. I think it’s a worthy project and it’s great that it exists. So why do I sometimes use Debian instead of Ubuntu? On servers, stable releases of Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases are quite close to each other. Debian provides more testing before releasing and only releases when the system is ready, where Ubuntu sticks to a committed release time. Ubuntu’s release cycle also has it’s own benefits, but recently I’ve come to prefer Debian Squeeze on my own machines (I don’t even have to use Plymouth!) and I know many people feel differently about it and that’s fine. On my laptop I’m a bit more risky.. I want new, cutting edge, I don’t mind if there’s some problems now and again and I’m happy to fix it when it does pop up. I run Debian Unstable on my laptop with packages from Experimental. It works great for me. I’ve been running it again (used to do it before Ubuntu started) since late last year and besides a transition to /run that caused dbus to break and gdm not to start for one evening, I haven’t any problems worth mentioning. On development versions of Ubuntu the ride is typically much more bumpy. That’s not a problem for most Ubuntu users since users usually stick with with stable releases, and Ubuntu releases often enough (way more than Debian) so that they could still have newest software on a regular basis. There are many views on Debian and Ubuntu, in my opinion Ubuntu is an important and relevant derivative and even though it’s goals are somewhat different, it compliments and promotes many of the Debian ideals.

It’s old!  Debian’s release cycle isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. I’ve mentioned some of the benefits of releasing when ready above. On top of that, Debian has also made its backports repository an official resource, which makes it easier to get newer software on stable releases. There are also micro-sites like mozilla.debian.net where users can get some specific backports for certain types of packages. I guess Debian could really benefit from  something similar to PPAs for this. Unfortunately Launchpad.net doesn’t support Debian builders (understandably so since waiting times on Ubuntu packages can already be quite high). The concept of another PPA implementation has been bought up on the Debian lists before and I have a lot to say about it, but that will be another blog entry. Also, Debian has something in between stable releases (which can get quite old on desktops) and unstable/experimental (where all the active development is taking place). When a package has been in unstable for a while and doesn’t do harm to your system, it’s promoted to an repository called ‘testing’. In testing you get a good combination of stability and new software. Admittedly you probably don’t want to deploy testing in large corporate environments since it’s officially unsupported, but for personal machines and for the typical hacker, it’s known to work great.

Choose 10 completely random numbers! 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. 4. (I never claimed that Debian is perfect)

In Summary

Debian has a large and vibrant community with a big eco-system around it. It has many derivatives, some of them extremely high-profile and special in their own right. The whole effort is spectacular and awesome- and it’s all from a completely distributed world-wide self-governed community project. Sure, it’s not perfect, but I can’t help to look at it and admire it as one of the wonders of the age of information.

And now I have something to point to when people ask me, “Why do you like Debian?”

This is a blog entry about Ubuntu membership, and some tips for applicants.

The Membership Concept

The Ubuntu project accepts many kinds of contributions from people all over the world. After time, many contributors develop a sense of belonging and ownership of the project. When someone has been with the project for a long time and have made significant contributions to the project, then they may apply for membership. When you become an Ubuntu member, you become an official part of the project. You become a representative. You get an @ubuntu.com email address, an Ubuntu cloak on Freenode. You even get to vote on who serves on the Ubuntu Community Council, the top-level community governance committee in Ubuntu. For people who are serious about Ubuntu, membership is a big deal. Many people consider Ubuntu membership one of their biggest achievements.

Technical and non-technical contributions

People who become involved on a technical level will typically get membership based on their packaging and bug fixing/triaging work. If you’ve done a significant amount of technical work, you can apply to become an Ubuntu contributing developer via the Developers Membership Board (DMB) . The expectation is that an Ubuntu contributing developer will eventually grow into bigger Ubuntu developer roles (PPU/MOTU/Core-Dev) after time.All MOTUs and Ubuntu Core Developers are Ubuntu members. A technical contributor who contributes significantly to Kubuntu or to Edubuntu can also become members via the membership boards of those projects.

Technical contributions are greatly appreciated, but in Ubuntu we also recognise many other type of contributions equally. Work done inside your LoCo team (organising install fests, Ubuntu hours, setting up booths at local conferences, marketing, release parties, etc), support (on IRC, forums, askubuntu.com, etc), doing translation work, documentation (wiki, yelp, help.ubuntu.com, etc) are just some of the other type of contributions that are also recognised.

Ubuntu greatly benefits from upstream contributions, however, Ubuntu membership is only granted when a person is active within the Ubuntu project itself. If you’ve contributed to upstreams such as the Linux kernel, Gnome or even in Debian significantly but have never done any work in Ubuntu, then it’s probably unlikely that you’ll qualify for Ubuntu membership. Upstream contributions are certainly counted as a positive, it’s just that it’s not enough on its own.

Things to keep in mind when applying

The type of contributions that someone can provide is vast and is sometimes hard to quantify, because of that there’s no simple checklist that someone could just tick off and provide someone with membership. Because of this, a candidate will apply to a board which typically consists of at least 5 people. Board members are often community members themselves. Some boards consist of members with many varying views on many different things, this is often beneficial to candidates since board members can challenge and question each other on decisions that were made. I serve on the EMEA Regional Membership Board. Sometimes after a meeting we ask each other “Why did you give that -1? Wasn’t that a bit unfair?” or “Why did you give a +1 vote for this applicant and a +0 for a similar one last time?”. Discussing this after meetings (outside of the ubuntu-meeting channel) sometimes helps us in being more consistent on the voting process in the future.

Having said all of the above, it’s important to also realise that a membership board *wants* to give you membership. However, the Ubuntu community is ever growing with now thousands of contributors. It’s impossible for the board members to know all the people who contribute.

When applying, a candidate must prepare a wiki page listing their work in the Ubuntu project to date. Even a terse description of future plans is usually not a bad idea (but don’t let it dominate your wiki page, it’s past and current contributions that count). Some work are really easy to quantify and list. It’s easy to point to a launchpad package summary page and say “Here are 128 uploads I’ve made to Ubuntu in the last year!” or a forum page or launchpad questions or askubuntu.com page summarizing how many support questions you’ve helped getting resolves. Or saying how many release parties you’ve organised, how many translation strings you’ve provided and so on.

Gray areas with upstreams

Some contributions are much harder to quantify. IRC support is one of them. Improving documentation or doing marketing as well. Because of this, we don’t rely purely on numbers to judge membership. On your membership application page, you should have the people you have worked with comment on it and let the membership board you are applying to know about the great work that you have done. If someone is well known and respected in the community already, then their comments on your wiki page will go a long way. I’ve seen many members get approved just on reputation and good feedback by existing Ubuntu members alone. Comments from lesser well known contributors also count, but comments from people who are already trusted just counts so much more. Feedback from peers are also invaluable when we encounter gray areas. Above I mentioned that upstream contributions on their own don’t count. Recently things have become more complicated. There has been membership applications where an applicants main contributions were to upstream contributions such as Unity or Launchpad. These are tough because they’re tightly integrated in Ubuntu. An even tougher situation would be if someone who is a contributor to mainly Landscape or Ubuntu One would apply. These are also tightly integrated in Ubuntu but are seperate upstream projects. On top of that they are also non-free. Since membership was originally defined the lines between Ubuntu and what an upstream is has certainly become more complicated, and there are a lot of apposing views covering all the shades ranging from “Give all Debian Developers Ubuntu Membership” all the way down to “Only give membership to people who have strictly contributed to projects that are managed as part of the Ubuntu project!”. Because this has been a tricky issue, I’ve added it to the next Community Council meeting so that we can perhaps have some guidelines regarding upstreams, how we view them and how we look at contributions to those projects.

Closing words

I was only planning on a two paragraph blog entry and I haven’t said everything I want to yet. But… if you’re thinking of applying for membership:

• Read this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership
• Maintain your Ubuntu wiki page as you contribute. It’s like a resume, it’s easier to keep it up to date than to update it when you actually need it. Get the people who have worked with you to comment on your work. If they can attend the IRC session when your application is reviewed, even better.
• Be patient. It might be a good idea to attend a membership meeting first before you apply just to get a general idea of how its run. Also, if you don’t get membership the first time, don’t stress. It happens. Many Ubuntu members got it only on their second time. The membership board will also give you advice on what’s lacking or things you can improve on for the next time you apply. Don’t waste that valuable advice, use it!
• The process isn’t perfect (like anything), but it’s evolving and improving. If you have an issue, don’t be disgruntled about it. Bring it up in the right forum, I assure you that the right people will pay attention to the issue and work towards a solution.
• If you’re still with me, wow, thanks. I’ve probably made a lot of typos and grammar mistakes. If I tried to get it right before posting it would just end up with my 50+ other blog drafts. Thanks for reading

Something I’ve heard way too much this week at UDS is something like “Sorry for not being able to contribute to [insert some subproject of Ubuntu here] over the past development cycle! I feel horrible and I hope there’s no resentment!”

Everyone goes through stuff sometimes, and no one will hold it against you if you need to take some time to sort out stuff. Just be careful not to block anything and if someone steps up to run with something, let them! Have fun kids!

Last month was the first month in 6 years that I haven’t blogged. It’s been a busy period but I’m taking a few days to relax with family in Switzerland and get psyched for the Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place in Budapest next week.

I’m checking the schedule to see what’s interesting and started writing it down, but thought that I might as well post it publicly, since I’ll be writing some summaries from my perspective and posting them to Planet Ubuntu.

Sessions marked in bold are sessions I 100% want or have to be at, either because they affect things we work with at Révolution Linux, Edubuntu, Debian collaboration or otherwise packaging things and membership. I’m flexible on other sessions and might change my mind, especially if someone would like me to attend anothe session for whatever reason.

Monday

Monday’s Schedule: http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-09/

09:00 - Plenary - Introduction and Keynote
10:00 - Kazincy - Community Roundtable
11:00 - Petofi - Feedback on Natty cycle
12:00 - Krudy - Improvements and ideas for WebLive
14:00 - Plenary - Qt
14:15 - Plenary - Ubuntu Server motivations
14:30 - Plenary - Linaro Topic (TBD)
14:45 - Plenary - The future of the universe, continued
15:00 - Undecided
16:15 - Mikszath - NGO Team Oneiric plans
17:05 - Jokai - Network boot prototype for Linaro

Tuesday

Tuesday’s schedule  - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-10/

09:00 - Kazincy - Community Roundtable
10:00 - TAS - Server Install Experience
11:00 - Kond - Edubuntu Plans for Oneiric
12:00 - Dery - Debian Health Check
14:00 - Plenary - Linaro Platform Challenges
14:15 - Plenary - Linaro Validation - LAVA
14:30 - Plenary - Linaro and Android
15:00 - Dery - DEX - Improving cross-distribution collaboration with Debian
16:15 - Dery - GTK 3 / Gnome 3 in Oneiric
17:05 - Undecided

Wednesday

Wednesday’s schedule - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-11/

09:00 - Dery - Maintenance of the Mozilla packages in the new world
10:00 - Dery - Natty Tech Board, DX, Desktop, and Release Team retrospective
11:00 - Kazincy - Possible use for application sandboxing with containers
12:00 - Kond - LibreOffice Packaging for Oneiric
14:00 - Plenary - The Magic Behind WebLive
14:15 - Plenary - Delicious Recipes
14:30 - Plenary - Wine as a Performance Metric
14:45 - Plenary - Building Applications with Ubuntu One
15:00 - Undecided
16:15 - Mikszath - Ubuntu Development Bottlenecks
17:05 - TAS - Ask Mark (Q+A with sabdfl)

Thursday

Thursday’s schedule - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-12/

09:00 - Kazincy - Community Thursday Roundtable
10:00 - Kond - Ubuntu Membership behavior and Code of Conduct outside Ubuntu.com community
11:00 - Arany - Main inclusion requests from Canonical's corporate partners
12:00 - Dery - LightDM for Display Management
14:00 - Plenary - Linaro showcase and prizes
14:15 - Plenary - Intro to Openstack, LXC
14:30 - Plenary - What's wrong with UDS and how we can fix it
14:45 - Plenary - Group Photo
15:00 - Huba - Summit development plans from UDS-O
16:15 - Petofi - Ubuntu Server Puppet Integration
17:05 - Kond - Collaboration between Debian-Edu and Edubuntu

Friday

Friday’s Schedule - http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-13/

09:00 - Kazincy - Community Friday Roundtable
10:00 - Krudy - App Review Board Review and Assessment
11:00 - Jozsef - debdelta support
12:00 - Jozsef - Redefine membership policy for Ubuntu Bug Control
14:00 - Plenary - Lightning talks
15:00 - Krudy - LXC improvements
16:15 - Kazincy - Governance Roundtable
17:05 - Plenary - UDS Wrapup

It’s going to be a big week! I’m excited to see everyone who will be attending!

Some people seem to just love talking about history. I prefer making it! Here’s something a bit more light to distract you from all the history lessons currently on Planet Ubuntu…

Current Edubuntu Wallpaper

The current Edubuntu wallpaper has served us well now for a few releases. It’s simple and powerful and works across a wide age group.

In Edubuntu 10.10, we had a bunch of Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy easter eggs to coincide with the 10.10.10 release, which I partially blogged about before. A small change was introduced to the wallpaper in this release; if you look really closely in the top right hand corner on the Edubuntu login screen, you’ll notice that it has the words “don’t panic” written on it. This was my favourite easter egg in the maverick release.

New Default Edubuntu Wallpaper

Martin Owens has done a great job of putting together a new wallpaper for us. When I first uploaded it to the Natty archives I thought that we’ll probably get some people who say that it’s too “cartoonish” (which we did in the meantime), but if Debian can get away with having the Space Fun theme for a universal operating system then the ‘cartoon’ critics can at least give a bit of leeway for Edubuntu here.

It was originally called “Perspective” when the first concept was put together. It’s a little bug on a little leaf with a view of a valley and a whole galaxy behind it. Even though it is somewhat cartoonish, the perspective theme is probably something that the older crowd will understand a bit better. I’ve tried it on Edubuntu for the last week and it works really well. It might still go through some tweaking so the final version may be a bit different than the picture above. Thanks to Martin for all his efforts so far!

What happened to the artwork competition?

Most of the submissions we received didn’t quite align with the specification we set out (some of them included text (hard to translate, doesn’t like scaling), some pictures of books or world maps (clichés)- things that we specifically wanted to avoid) and we were approached by Martin who said that he’d be willing to do a wallpaper and work it through various iterations. We notified the artwork team about this, there were some mixed feelings on both sides, especially considering that the submissions were still really quite good despite not being quite suitable as defaults. So what we’ll be doing instead is include the wallpapers that have been submitted to the competition as alternative wallpapers in the system. There aren’t many of them so at least they won’t take up too much space. I’ll do another blog entry especially for them when they hit the archives.

Via LWN I came across the news that Canonical is making it’s list of certified hardware components open to the public and I think it’s really good news and there should probably be more noise about it. The list contains the names of popular hardware manufacturers and which hardware is certified. You can also browse by category.

This should help make decisions when buying new hardware somewhat easier for pretty much everyone. You can even build up your own machine now with all its components being certified with Ubuntu, that’s pretty nice. The database also contains vendor and device ID’s, so it’s quite possible that there may be tools in the future that will give you a report on your hardware and how much of it is certified, which could also be useful for resellers who need to check whether their hardware supports Ubuntu when a client requests it.