DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM!!

I’ve been reading with great interest the blog posts from Michael Hall highlighting all the activity in the Ubuntu Touch developer community. It’s exciting to see people have started poking at our fledgling SDK and have already created some cool applications. Likewise, internally at Canonical developers are working hard on the infrastructure, platform and SDK to make it easy, fun and robust to create applications for Ubuntu Touch.

We’re keen to keep lines of communication between the developer community and platform developers wide open, while allowing everyone to get on with their work. From the Canonical side we’ll shortly be publishing more details of our plans for the platform so developers have a better understanding of our roadmap and can set their own expectations accordingly.

On the flip-side we’re also keen to get feedback from developers. We’ve scheduled regular check-up meetings with developers of the Core Apps which are listed on the wiki. Everyone is welcome to attend and join in, but the primary goal of each is to allow us to help Core Apps developers.

It’s great to see that new contributors, hackers and people just having a play with Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview are coming to #ubuntu-touch at all hours of the day and night to get and give help and discuss what they’re doing.

We have noticed though that sometimes people aren’t getting answers to their questions, usually because they ask when many core contributors are asleep or just busy doing other things. This is the nature of IRC, and we’re not looking to force people to only come to the channel at certain times.

We do though want to improve our communication by having a specific time when developers and other experts will actually be around, and if we can’t get an answer immediately, make a note of it so we can get back to people later.

So every Wednesday we’re also holding a regular open “Ubuntu Touch Weekly Clinic” in #ubuntu-touch on freenode IRC at 13:00 UTC. Feel free to ping myself (popey) or Michael Hall (mhall119) on IRC to get our attention

We picked a time when it seems most core contributors are available, covering European afternoon and American morning. Everyone is of course welcome at any time in the channel, this gives us a focal point for our users. This isn’t a formal “Q&A” like the Ubuntu On Air sessions, but simply an accessible-for-most slot when we can guarantee people will be around.

So come along on Wednesday to the “Ubuntu Touch Weekly Clinic” in #ubuntu-touch on freenode IRC at 13:00 UTC

A friend from my local Linux User Group has an old Samsung P28 laptop which he wanted to install Ubuntu on. Due to PAE issues he had to use the mini.iso image to install from rather than the Live or Alternate CDs. Post-install he did sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop^ to add the desktop task, which worked fine to install Unity and all the other standard desktoppy bits.

However booting with the network cable unplugged would hang for ages waiting for the network. It would eventually time out and boot okay to the logon screen, once logged in wired or wifi could be used. Booting with the network cable attached would boot fine as expected.

The issue is that when you install using a wired network using the mini ISO you end up with an “eth0″ stanza in /etc/network/interfaces. This is all well and good for that part of the install. When you add ubuntu-desktop^ which pulls in Network Manager is when it goes awry slightly.

Network Manager will ignore any network interface listed in /etc/network/interfaces. So the laptop worked when plugged in, and would boot normally, but when unplugged some service sat waiting for the network (eth0) to come up, which it wouldn’t because eth0 was being ignored by Network Manager. Once it timed out and booted the wireless network worked okay because /etc/network/interfaces had no reference to wlan0, no Network Manager was able to manage it, and get the wifi up.

The solution was to remove the “eth0″ stanza from /etc/network/interfaces and reboot to test. All works fine now.

Now, the question is, is that a bug in Network Manager, or something else? I mean, it’s working as designed, but the use case of “installing from mini-iso then adding ubuntu desktop subsequently” is one I expect a few (not huge) number of people to do, so he won’t be alone in experiencing this..

I’m in a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit about the Ubuntu Manual http://ubuntu-manual.org/ which you may remember was started some time ago with the goal of producing a high quality pdf (and printed) manual for Ubuntu desktop.

They are looking for new blood to help author and edit the manual for 12.04 to be released around the time of 12.04.1 (July 19th). However we’re trying to figure out why we don’t have more contributors and what may be holding people back.

So my question to you is:-

“If you have considered contributing to Ubuntu Manual, but haven’t, what’s stopped you?”

Some reasons might include:-

• Lack of time
• Lack of motivation
• Lack of skill
• Difficult to use tools

Or something we’re missing. We’d really like to know in case it’s something we can fix. If you’re interested in contributing, please do let us know, and we can help you get involved.

We’re close to releasing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and one crucial part of the desktop is Unity. We’re keen on getting some final Unity testing from the community over this weekend so the developers can work on polishing things up for a rock solid release. I just wanted to draw attention to a blog post from Nicholas Skaggs – QA Community Coordinator at Canonical.

In Unity 5.10 – What’s new and a call for testing Nicholas (balloons on IRC [don't ask]) details some of the changes in the latest release, and also explains how community members can get involved in testing. If you’ve got some time over the weekend between fun with friends & family and eating chocolate, we’d love for you to get involved.

Testing Unity is super easy, and to show how you just how easy it is I made a little YouTube video about Unity Testing which shows how to test and also briefly how to file bugs.

We’d appreciate the help!

We’ve got an enhancement to Ubuntu Unity in 12.04 which we’re looking for some community testing on. The Unity Files Lens has been improved so it’s more likely to find the things you’re looking for. In the current release we query Zeitgeist to find files matching what you’ve searched for, in this new test version we’ve improved the search so it doesn’t just look for things via Zeitgeist.

Here’s an example of what’s changed. My current 12.04 system is a fairly clean install with most of my data having been synced down using Ubuntu One or Dropbox file sync tools. As I’ve not opened many files on this machine yet, Zeitgeist doesn’t know about them.

Here’s the initial view of the Unity Files Lens when I press [Super]+F:-

Searching for my curriculum vitae (cv) results in only one hit which is a friends’ CV I downloaded from my email a little while back. My own CV is buried somewhere in a folder and I have no idea where it is, neither does Zeitgeist.

Here’s what it looks like when we test the new version of the Unity Files Lens.

Great! Now it shows the original results from Zeitgeist and any other files that match. It’s a simple change, but most welcome, and in need of testing!

If you’re on Ubuntu 12.04 please consider installing and testing this lens from this PPA:-

https://launchpad.net/~unity-team/+archive/lenses-testing

To install:-

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-team/lenses-testing
sudo apt-get update

Then get the great new stuff with either:-

sudo apt-get install unity-lens-files

or:-

sudo apt-get upgrade

Then logout and back in or reboot to restart Unity.

If you discover any bugs, file them here:-

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity-lens-files

Make sure you mention that you’re using the new PPA if you do!