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I've been pretty happy with the way Intel has supported their hardware in linux over the past few years. Today's release of documentation confirms that choice.
If only they made discreet cards. I know it's in the works, but in the meantime, a discreet PCI-E/AGP i965 card that can drive dual panels would do the trick. :)
Alexander Sack put out a call for testing for network manager .7 in his ppa.
In this pic we have Sebastien Bacher (in the back) trying to fix his networking. Next to seb128 is Alexander Sack, also trying to fix his networking. I am taking the picture, because ... my networking was also broken.
Basically, we got owned by Chuck Norris. Thanks to all the volunteers out there willing to take a kick to the face by Chuck Norris; I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone! My jaw hurts.
We took some time during the distro team sprint to go hang out with the folks from debian-uk.
Adam Barratt needed his key signed, which caused about 80% of the people there to reach for their keysigning gear in their wallet. Yes, they brought it with them, to the pub. This is apparently normal. :) A great bunch of people, I'm glad we had the chance to drink beers and hang out.
Everyone knows that NetworkManager is the new Chuck Norris. I am happy to report that Alexander Sack has gotten NM .7 in a decent enough shape in Ubuntu for larger testing.
The packages are available via asac's PPA archive. NOTE: This is pure distilled Chuck Norris. This can break your networking, so you should be familiar enough with networking to be able to fix it when you get a roundhouse kick in the face from Chuck.(ie. you should at least know how to use ifconfig, heh.)
Report bugs in launchpad as normal, but PLEASE PLEASE make sure you explicitly mention that you're using the version from asac's PPA. Happy hunting!
EDIT: We will use a forum thread, I'll update as soon as I have a link.
EDIT: Report bugs in this thread.
David Siegel writes in ...
Would you mind spreading the word that we need some help lifting eggaccelerators.c and tomboykeybinder.c to C#? I'm convinced it's possible, because I tried it a few weeks ago and sort of got it working. It's a straightforward port of a couple hundred lines of C, but it does some delicate X stuff which is where I failed to make progress. Also, it requires that the author knows his/her way around mono's managed-to-native infrastructure.
Currently GNOME Do uses libtomboy for keybindings, but it's not ideal because libtomboy is going away soon and it would be The Right Thing To Do(tm) to have GNOME Do manage it's own keybinds. You can find the code here:
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/tomboy/trunk/libtomboy/If anyone out there wants to take a crack at it and help Dave out then let me know, or just start hacking.
I've always liked how coaches in American Football have a "cheat sheet" for calling plays and whatnot. The camera usually shows them with their trusty strategy guide inhand in between plays:
I've always thought it would be a good idea to have these sorts of things but for software. So I created a generic one, focusing on "How to get started" becoming a MOTU. The PDF is here: Playbook.pdf
So the idea is we hand these out at Packaging Jams, FOSSCamp, conferences, and generally any place where geeks tend to hang out. The intent for these is that they are modular, so you can create custom Playbooks for nearly anything. (Bug Stuff, QA, etc.) This could also be helpful for derivatives, something like "The Ubuntu Studio Audio Editing Playbook" sounds awesome. People can then remix the Playbooks for all sorts of combinations.
The steps and bullets are purposely simple (sorry about the blur), you can hang it on your wall and use it as a reminder when you're packaging. If you're an existing MOTU or interested in the MOTU process I'd like to hear from you in the comments on how you feel it can be improved. Also, if you're planning on running a Packaging Jam, I'd like for you to try it out and have your members follow along through the workflow diagram.
So do you guys think things like this are useful? One of the reasons for making this was that I found myself repeating the same things to upstream developers and them asking the same questions about Ubuntu-specific things (What's a MOTU?), so if you're an upstream maintainer you might find this sheet useful.
Just wanted to show off how awesome the new GNOME clock is:
Pay no attention that it's 1:29 in three places thing, I'm pretty sure that's just a bug. :p
Alexander Larsson has been working on gvfs, which will replace gnome-vfs. His blog is some good background on the work he's been doing. You can also check out the ToDo for more information. In their quest to bring all things awesome to Ubuntu users, Sebastien Bacher and Loic Minier are pushing this new Nautilus into hardy:
What I'm doing here is copy three files from a remote ssh share to my desktop. Check out how it queues up the file transfer windows. It's currently pretty rough, for example, the "Network" and "Connect to Server" doesn't work in the Places menu, and there currently is no ftp backend. You can test it by hitting ctrl-l and typing in an sftp url. I have found the performance to be quite good vs. gnome-vfs. The most notable advantage over gnome-vfs is that I don't feel the need to kill myself every time I do a network transfer.
Since this is a pretty new feature Sebastien is looking for brave bugtesters to pound on Nautilus and start filing bugs. Please start reporting bugs to Launchpad. Alexander Larsson, for the win.
I say this way too often; but the Ubuntu Community never ceases to amaze me.
Last night the Michigan LoCo team had a "bug jam". Basically, Wolfger has been involved in triaging bugs and wanted to let people know how that works. So, the Michigan Local Team decided to have a "Bug Jam".
About ten people showed up, which given the weather was a pretty decent turn out. Rick Harding documented the event, which is ironic, because he wasn't there, but as an active member he ended up with the emails.
Wolfger really wanted to do the bug jam, especially after the success of the Packaging Jam that the LoCo had executed. He covered triaging bugs, and really just gave a general overview of Launchpad and how easy it is to get involved in bug work. I am hoping that wolfger repeats this talk at Penguicon in April.
I would like to extend my thanks to the Ubuntu Michigan Local Team. It is really fantastic to have guys like Wolfger, Richard Harding, and greg-g push the team forward. Originally the Michigan loco was myself and Jim McQuillan, and the idea of a "team meeting" was hitting up a bar for each release every six months.
During the last year the Michigan LoCo has been rocking and rolling (thanks to greg-g). I'm really proud to say that during the last six months that the Michigan LoCo team have done a Packaging Jam and a Bug Jam; it sure beats people just drinking at a bar.
With Penguicon coming up in April, and Ohio LinuxFest coming up in the fall, we have ubuntu chicago, michigan, and ohio getting together twice a year. Like I mentioned in my 2008 predictions, I think that this will rock. I am convinced that our area will become a hot point of OSS -- it's only a matter of time. Thanks to the midwest LoCo's who are making this a reality.
I've spent the second half of this week in Colorado Springs, CO, visiting my brother. We took some time to head up to Denver to go out. Of course, we had to pay homage to Detroit's favorite goaltender, Patrick Roy:
I'm looking forward to coming home though. I've been following the "hp laptop" thread on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. I just don't get it. I have an hp 2510p and it works great. The Thinkpad X40 I had before worked great, and the Dell I had before that worked great. What was common between all three of those? Intel wireless and Intel video.
I just don't understand how an OSS advocate/developer can end up buying a laptop with a Broadcom wireless card. I can see people who aren't familiar with linux and don't know any better get stuck with one though.
But you can at the very least buy hardware from a company that supports OSS drivers. It doesn't take much effort to choose Intel video and wifi on any vendor's website when you're buying a laptop, even on the crap consumer grade laptops.
