Lucid popey day -1

My friends sometimes ask me what happens at UDS, so I thought I’d write a little summary each day of what’s happened. I’ll try to keep it fairly short, although I appear to have failed so far with this particular post.

Firstly I guess I should explain what UDS is to those who don’t know. Every 6 months the Ubuntu project puts out a new release. We just released Ubuntu 9.10 (code name Karmic Koala) and the next release is due in April next year. It’ll be called Ubuntu 10.04 (code name Lucid Lynx). UDS is the Ubuntu Developer Summit where a couple of hundred people get together and work on plans for what will be in the next release. Some of that is already known, but much of it gets blueprinted in this week.

There is a publicly accessible schedule outlining what specifications will be discussed where and when. There are separate colour coded ‘tracks’ to follow, and I’ll probably spend most of my time in the Community one although others do look interesting too. It’s always a tricky thing to pick and choose which sessions to go to, and so I always miss out on something. I’d rather it was that way than loads of sessions I’m not interested in though!

UDS-L (L for Lucid) takes place from 16th to 20th November 2009 at the Renaissance Hotel, Dallas, Texas. Canonical (who sponsor the Ubuntu project and organise the summit) kindly sponsored my attendance here in Dallas which includes flight, hotel accommodation and food.

It’s a fantastically busy, exciting and enlightening week every six months, and this will be the 5th I’ve attended (the 4th I’ve been sponsored to). Canonical ask us to book the cheapest flight where possible – which I have no problem with (I’d rather Canonical spent money on developers, artists, designers, documentation people than pay for people like me to have an expensive flight) – which meant I arrived on Saturday, two days before the summit starts.

I said goodbye to the family on Saturday morning and was kindly given a lift to Heathrow airport by my father in law. Once checked in I met up with a bunch of other people heading to the summit and we boarded the American Airlines flight. The weather in London was pretty awful which I suspect contributed to us having over an hour delay in taking off.

During the flight I had chance to chat to a couple of Canonical developers who were conveniently sat nearby. I chatted with Colin Watson about some of the plans for Lucid, and we discussed some of the issues with the Ubiquity (graphical Ubuntu installer). I asked Colin (as I do every 6 months) whether this time around Ubiquity would get support for installing on RAID and/or LVM and he seemed more positive than he has previously, although didn’t go as far as to commit to it for this cycle.

We also discussed some new potential features in Ubiquity including a self-updating installer. This would enable a new Ubuntu user to get a CD and fire up the graphical installer which would (under instruction) attempt to connect to the net to check for new versions of itself, which it would install whilst the system is running off the CD. This would enable the developers to fix issues with the installation program after the final release CDs have been pressed. A neat idea which I think should be discussed at UDS this time around, and implemented if possible.

I also had chance to chat to Jamie Bennett – a new developer at Canonical. He had a Nokia N900 mobile phone / internet thingy with him which I had a play with. I’d previously hankered after an N900 but now I’ve actually played with one, I’m glad that I went for the HTC Hero (Android) phone instead. Phew!

This will be Jamie’s first Ubuntu Developer Summit and he had some interesting concerns which we discussed with Colin briefly. Canonical developers sign non-disclosure agreements which may prevent them talking about products that Canonical’s partners may (or may not be) developing. Jamie works with mobile devices and ARM based platforms which generate considerable excitement and some rumours in the community, he wanted to be sure he didn’t say anything he “shouldn’t” at the summit.

It’s a tricky area given that Ubuntu is developed by a mixture of Canonical employees and community members (who will likely not have signed NDA’s) which could put developers in sticky spots trying to figure out what can or can’t be said during open discussion at the summit. It would be a shame for developers on one side to feel that they have to hold back from discussion with the community, and for the community members to feel that they’re not getting the whole picture. I hope this works out okay for all of us.

Also on the flight was Chris Jones of Terminator and Lifesaver “fame” . I didn’t get chance to talk to Chris on the flight because he’d managed to wangle himself a seat away from the rest of us (non intentional) which had a power socket (intentional) so he could watch movies on his laptop during the flight. However once we arrived at the hotel in the evening Chris and I managed to catch up and over a beer and food.

We did a bit of “nostalgising” (his word, not mine) about computers of yore, how we got into Linux and argued over whether upgrades on Red Hat ever worked or not. Chris works for Canonical IS department and so usually when he attends UDS it’s to help setup and support the infrastructure used at the event. This time Chris is here as an attendee, so he gets to follow tracks and contribute to the discussions rather than sit on the sidelines as he has in previous summits. Given Canonical themselves use Ubuntu extensively internally (as you’d hope and expect) he’ll have quite a bit of experience to bring to the Server track.

I also bumped into loads of other people in the bar and had a great time attempting to overcome jetlag. More later..