Well, I finally made it to a Ubuntu Developer Summit. It’s been great to put some faces on the names I interact with on mailing-lists and read in changelogs.

I don’t really have much to pontificate on so this will be quick, but there are a couple things to share.

My roommate ending up being Daniel Fore, designer of the elementary icon set that the Humanity icons are based on. So I was able to help get them up on a PPA.

You can grab packages based on the latests Bazaar trunk for Karmic.

I mostly focused on attending sessions on bug management and distributed development today. I saved copies of the gobby notes for each session I attended:  http://people.ubuntu.com/~andrewsomething/uds-l/notes/

The plenary session demoing Quickly made me excited to dive back into python. The videos aren’t up yet, but there are previous screen-casts showing it off.

One of the things that I’ve always loved about bzr is that it is a powerful yet intuitive solution for version control. Now Bazaar Explorer, a wonderful cross-platform Qt-based GUI front-end to the Bazaar VCS, is making it even easier. Whether you’re just getting started with DVCS or you just prefer a graphical environment, you should really check it out. (You can take a tour here.)

There’s been a Windows installer for Bazaar Explorer for awhile, and of course the source code is over there on Launchpad. Even though Bazaar’s plugin system makes it simple to install it on Linux from source, it just doesn’t feel like it’s keeping with the theme of making things easy. So I went and packaged it for Ubuntu!

You can now grab it from the Bazaar Explorer PPA. It should be entering Debian Unstable and Ubuntu Lucid in the near future, but we want to give you PPA users the chance to kick the tires first. Just add ppa:bzr-explorer-dev/ppa to your system’s Software Sources.

There are packages for Karmic, Jaunty, Intrepid, and Hardy in the PPA, but please note that as bzr-explorer depends on bzr (>= 1.14) and qbzr (>= 0.11), users of Ubuntu releases before Karmic will also need to add the PPA for Bazaar Developers.  Also be aware that Hardy users might have some issues as parts of Explorer (e.g. the Preferences dialog) depend on Qt/PyQt 4.4.  (See: Bug #429549). That said, every thing should be working smoothly in Karmic.

Well, not really….

For some reason, my spam folder doesn’t contain the usual Viagra, porn, and Nigerian prince emails.  The most frequent spam I receive generally is letting me know that I just won £1,000,000 in the U.K. National Lottery. As I’ve only been in the U.K. once, and I certainly never played the lottery while there, I assume they are a scam. (Although, there might actually be some lottery official out there who doesn’t understand why I don’t want to collect my money.)

Well, the other day I opened an email from a British company that began: “Congratulations!” This time I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a scam. The good folks at Canonical accepted my sponsorship request for UDS Dallas! As this will be my first UDS, I’m incredibly excited. I just booked my tickets, and can’t wait to finally meet you all in meatspace.

See you in Dallas!

As I’m sure you all know by now, Ubuntu (and friends) 9.10 Beta images were released yesterday. What you might not know is that the countdown banners have also been released. You can grab them here.

Option 1 – “Stars” by Thorsten Wilms (thorwil)

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.ubuntu.com/files/countdown/display.js”></script>

Option 2 – “The spotlight” by Andrew Higginson

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.ubuntu.com/files/countdown/display2.js"></script>

Option 3: Simple image (for those who can’t use javascript)

<a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/"><img src="http://www.ubuntu.com/files/countdown/static.png" width="180" height="150" alt="Ubuntu: For Desktops, Servers, Netbooks and in the cloud" border="0" /></a>

P.S. Dear lazy web. How does one go about properly posting code on a free wordpress.com blog where you can’t install any plugins?

The week of September 14-21, 2009 is Mozilla Service Week, brought to you by the good folks behind Firefox and Thunderbird. They’ve partnered with Idealist.org, a non-profit jobs listing site, to link service-minded techies with non-profit organizations in need to their help.

We’re looking for people who want to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering their time and talent to local organizations and people who need their help.

Mozilla believes everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they’re online. By utilizing our community’s talents for writing, designing, programming, developing, and all-around technical know-how, we believe we can make the Web a better place for everyone.

Spread the word:

• Put a badge on your blog.
• Post a flyer at your school or workplace.

The Ubuntu NGO Team is also working on making Ubuntu a great platform to help non-profits. Check out Daniel’s recent post for some updates on our work, including efforts to make life with Ubuntu easier for organizations working in places with out cheap and accessible Internet.

I am sure you’ve all seen this already, but I just wanted to add my congratulations every one involved in the open sourcing of Launchpad!

After the friendly and inclusive nature of the Ubuntu community, Launchpad and Bazzar really are responsible for deepening my involvement in development. I find LP much more welcoming and user-friendly than Debian’s BTS (though I really love and depend on PTS), Bugzilla, or Trac. It’s cross-project intregration is really a killer feature. Bazzar both introduced me to DVCS and convinced me of its supriority to Subversion. I also just find it so much more user-friendly than other solutions such as GIT (although admittedly I have no experience with Mercurial).

I’m glad that the platform that has encouraged me to contribute to open source has finally become open source itself (soyuz included!).

Am I the only one scared by the new meme over on Planet GNOME?

I mean, once the code starts writting people on its own, we’re only a hop, skip, and jump away from some sort of Terminator-like dystopia!

GNOME-Colors

With hundreds of thousands of downloads on GNOME-Look, GNOME-Colors (and its friends Shiki-Colors and Arc-Colors) is with out a doubt one of the most popular themes around for the GNOME desktop. It’s no surprise with  six different color themes and the ability to match you icon theme, GTK+ theme, GDM theme, and wallpaper. Victor (aka perfectska04) has put together a wonderful set, and it’s about time that they are in the Ubuntu archives.

I’m pleased to announce that they are now all just a simple apt-get install away in Karmic.

The meta-packages gnome-colors, arc-colors, and shiki-colors will pull in all six color variations. For those with low bandwidth or expensive connections, you can also just install single variations: gnome-{brave, dust, human, noble, wine, or wise}-icon-theme, shiki-{brave, dust, human, noble, wine, or wise}-theme, and arc-{brave, dust, human, noble, wine, or wise}. There’s also a Xfwm/Xfce4 theme: shiki-colors-xfwm-theme.

For those still running Hardy, Intrepid, or Jaunty, we’re also running a GNOME-Colors PPA where you will always be able to grab the latest versions.

So much thanks to Victor for the themes and being so open to making changes upstream that made things easier for us to package and Benjamin Drung for all his work to make this happen.

Ubuntu NGO will be having its first meeting this Friday, 26th June 2009, 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-ngo on irc.freenode.net

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A little over a month ago, Daniel Holbach asked who was using Ubuntu in their NGO? In the time that’s passed, a group of Ubunteros has coalesced around the idea of making Ubuntu a great platform for NGOs, non-profits, and charities. Whether they’re using Ubuntu in their back office, their web server, or giving out refurbished computers loaded with Ubuntu, we want to focus on the specific needs they face and how Ubuntu can help meet them.

I’m especially excited about this new initiative as over my life I’ve been involved with a number of non-profit and advocacy organizations. I see this project as a way to tie together two things I’m involved with that seem separate but come from similar motivations, making the world a better place and give back to community. It’s a natural fit for the Ubuntu community as well. The same things that motivate so many of us to contribute to Ubuntu motivate others (and some of us) to work for and volunteer at NGOs.

There are a lot of possibilities with this, and it’s just starting to take shape now. It’s a great time to join in and help shape the group and our goals. Come to the meeting. Join the team. Check out the wiki page and see some of the things we’ve already started working on.

Some of the things we’re interested in are:

• Finding out about NGOs that are using Ubuntu right now and sharing their stories.
• Studying different use cases.
• Documenting of best practices.
• Looking at work that some LoCo teams have already done and encouraging connection between NGOs and LoCos.
• Investigating ways to deal with regions without Internet access.
• Packaging a CRM solution for non-profits.

That last point is something that I’ve already begun working on. We’ve started packaging CiviCRM, an open-source constituent relationship management solution designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. Our packaging branch is host on Launchpad: lp:~ubuntu-ngo/civicrm/ubuntu If you’re interested in pitching in, there’s a TODO file in /debian and a watch file to pull the upstream source. I’d be particularly grateful if someone with experience packaging with dbconfig-common took a look.

This is a great opportunity to get in a the beginning of an important project! Our first meeting is this Friday, 26th June 2009, 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-ngo on irc.freenode.net

Got any ideas? Let me know in the comments!

Awhile back I hacked up a few Ubuntu releated scripts for Ubiquity. No, not the Ubuntu installer. The Firefox add-on.  Now that I have one of these fancy blog thing-a-majigs, I figured I’d share them with all of you. Hopefully some one else will find them useful.

To make a long story short, Ubiquity is GNOME-Do for your browser.

I’ve got a number of simple scripts that you can use with it to do Ubuntu related tasks in Firefox:

• AptURL – Install a package using AptURL. If you’re reading a post about a package, just highlight the package name and call Ubiquity. No need to open a terminal or package manager. Usage: apturl [package]
• Debian Package Search – One of the sites I end up using the most in my MOTU work is http://packages.debian.org/ This brings it just a keystroke away. Usage: debian-packages [package]
• Launchpad Ubuntu Package Search – You guessed it. Search Ubuntu packages on LP. Usage: lp-packages [package]
• Launchpad Team and People Search – What do you think it does? Usage: lp-team-and-people [team or person]
• Launchpad Ubuntu Bug Search – Simular to the two above…  lp-ubuntu-bug [bug # or description]
• Ubuntu Man Page Search – Read the man page! Usage: ubuntu-man [package]
• Ubuntu Package database searcher- This one searches packages.ubuntu.com It was written by David Futcher (bobbo), and it was what inspired me to make all the others. Usage: ubuntu-packages [package]
• Report Ubuntu Bug – Report a bug in a Ubuntu package on Launchpad. (Although, chances are you should really be using Apport.) Usage: ubuntu-report-bug [package]

You can grab them with:

bzr branch lp:~andrewsomething/+junk/ubiquity-commands