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Poking Purple Popups

By popey | Published: March 5, 2010

Seriously, I can’t be the only person who does this?

Incoming flash blob (or HTML5 video if you have a decent browser)

Combining this with my compulsion to watch -n 0.1 cat /proc/mdstat, I clearly need help. Is there a support group for people like me?

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged aubergine, notification | 19 Comments

Bye Bye Brown

By popey | Published: March 3, 2010

Time for a change..

The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.

Back in October 2008 at the Ubuntu Intrepid Release Party in London we celebrated the release of Ubuntu 8.10. It was a great party with loads of Canonical and Ubuntu Community representation present. In the UK the London release parties are usually an opportunity to kick back, have a beer or five and celebrate. One or two laptops can usually be seen, but most hands are tightly grasping glasses of ale than CD-Rs.

I was lucky enough to have a chat and couple of beers with our sabdfl Mark Shuttleworth. We talked about the latest release, video editors and the default theme. I just want to say:-

Ubuntu 10.04 was my idea.

Ok, not really. One thing that Mark did talk about was the need for long term plans for the desktop look and feel, and how he envisaged the Ubuntu Desktop in the years to come. Being impatient I wanted to know what was going to happen, and I wanted whatever it was to happen now! He didn’t say anything specific about the detail at all. When I pressed him I think his exact words were an incredulous “I’m not telling you that!”.

One thing we discussed in detail was the user experience, and how we (the Ubuntu project) need to raise our game. He was keen on the prospect that users didn’t see Ubuntu as an 2nd class citizen when compared to the alternatives like Windows and OSX. He said he wanted people to actively “choose Ubuntu” because of its features and how beautiful it is. He wants to show new users that we’re better than the competition, rather than people just considering us an also-ran.

I came away from that evening with my head spinning.

I was very, very drunk.

Almost exactly a year later I attended an event setup by BT, IBM and Canonical called Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software along with The Alans from The Open Learning Centre. The event itself was a great idea, but didn’t quite get the attendance we’d hoped for.

Photos © Paul Sumner Downey

Mark took part in some open discussion moderated by Glyn Moody, and gave a keynote speech. In it he focussed on cloud computing, the underlying technologies and convincing businesses of it’s advantages. However he introduced the keynote with a little story.

He told of how he’s keeps getting people approach him saying “Love Ubuntu, but dude! brown!?”. This of course caused a ripple of laughter from members of the audience familiar with the brown desktop some of us have come to know and ~~hate~~ love. He continued “more recently my design team have approached me and said ‘Mark! Aubergine!’”. He highlighted that he was wearing an aubergine coloured shirt and then pointed to me (in the front row) and said “popey! shush!” which I thought was amusing, but which also left me perplexed.

Well, with todays announcement that ‘aubergine’ comment makes sense.

The new brand has been announced and documented which shows the significant work that has gone into the Ubuntu brand refresh. Canonical have put together a world-class design team to come up with these changes. It’s no secret that over the last few releases Ubuntu has been changing, with some of those changes making it through to the release already. The new notification system, a brighter default desktop background, changed update manager behaviour and multiple delivered backdrops to choose from are all stepping stones towards something bigger. It’s alll change for the font, logo, colours, brand and textures.

Whilst the fact that Canonical have been working on this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone close to the Ubuntu project, today it’s become public. With the announcement just released we can now talk about the new Ubuntu brand, and start working on integrating the proposed changes.

Canonical reached out to the governance boards of the Ubuntu project to gain feedback and ensure they approached this in the best possible way. Numerous key members of our community were invited to Canonical in London to learn how the decisions had been made, and the current plans for the project. In the past I think Canonical might have just dumped this on the world with no consultation, so this is a great step towards more openness and helps dispel the myth that Canonical don’t engage.

The refresh covers a lot of ground. One of the most notable (prompting this blog title) is the move away from brown to orange. Personally I’ve never really had a problem with the brown. I quite like it in fact. I realise others don’t though, and whilst I’m a little sad to see us move away from the human, earthy colours of our heritage, I’m also happy to embrace the new look and feel. It’s fresh and polished, just as it should be.

The colours from the circle of friends logo will be missed, but some might argue it’s time for the logo to mature. Perhaps the old logo looks too child-like, which has suited Ubuntu for over 5 years now, but now we’re a big 6 year old, it’s time to move on, put away the crayons and grow up.

The new logo at the top of this article has a new typeface called ‘Ubuntu’ and whilst it’s nowhere near finished (last count I think they had about 15 characters done) it will eventually replace the old Ubuntu Title font.

Canonical are looking to get community involvement in helping develop this font – which looks like it will become the default at some point. Clearly the first characters to be done were “ubnt” for Ubuntu and “CANOIL” for the Canonical logo – which borrows a person from the Ubuntu circle of friends and sticks her in the “O”.

Indeed there will need to be a lot of community involvement across the board. From desktop developers to community website contributors and everyone in between.

I’m loving these themes.

What do you think?

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged aubergine | 54 Comments

Ade Bradshaw vs Reading Comprehension

By popey | Published: March 3, 2010

In which Ade blogs about how massively complicated and onerous the Ubuntu One Music Store sign up process is when compared to Amazon.

Ade, I’d reply to your blog but I’m not about to sign up to yet another system just to leave a comment, and I’m certainly not giving your blog my twitter password, or encouraging the use of Facebook as a single sign on. Maybe you should look at getting an Ubuntu One account, I hear they are implementing Single Sign on.

“Maybe its just me, but am I missing something?”

You are. You’re missing the bit of my blog that you copied and pasted into yours which reads:-

“Right now the process by which a new user to the Music Store is walked through the sign-up process is in flux. It could be a popup application which prompts for an email address, account name and password, or something embedded within Rhythmbox. Alternatively a browser could be spawned which sends the user to the sign-up process at login.ubuntu.com. Once Ubuntu Lucid releases in April, this process should be sorted out, but for now I’d recommend signing up to Ubuntu single sign on before using the Ubuntu One Music Store.”

In which I explicitly detail that this process isn’t the final one, and that there is still some work to do on the whole sign up process. The reason for the blog post was so that people could be ready for when the open beta of the music store starts – which is apparently real soon now.

Those of us who have already been using Ubuntu One to sync files and notes won’t have to do any of the stuff in that blog post because we’re already set. The store merely requires the file sync setup to be working, and my blog post aims to cover all the bases of making sure that’s the case. Yes it’s long winded, yes it’s comprehensive but as I previously said – its not finished.

What’s also important to note is that your friend Stuart is keen to get this finished and doesn’t have a massive amount of time to do that between now and Lucid release at the end of April. So I thought I’d do the ‘nice’ thing by creating a blog post which gets potential testers (who could be very useful to Stuart in terms of finding bugs) ready to get going with no delay. It also (as mentioned in the blog post) serves to reduce the amount of time Stuart has to spend triaging bugs, marking duplicates and basically ‘not coding’.

Leading on to where you asked “Really?? What a pain in the arse !! Why would anyone prefer the later?”.

You’re sat in a hotel on a business trip, bored with the TV and you left your ipod at home. So you spark up the music store and purchase some music. But disaster, on your trip the laptop gets mashed/lost/stolen and you lose the valuable data, work, emails – and your music. If you’re lucky and have the presence of mind you might be able to get the tracks from Amazon up to a certain number of days after purchase. With Ubuntu One, your music (and potentially your data, address book, email, notes) will all be safely backed up in the cloud. That’s quite a compelling reason to use the store for me.

There’s also the fact that the Rhythmbox plugin is open source, supported by Canonical and in the repositories. Compared with the binary-only 32-bit only Amazon deb which isn’t any of those things.

Of course there’s also the benefit that Ubuntu One gives me file sync as well as music download, plus Tomboy notes sync and whatever else they’re cooking up for the future which helps me to keep all my stuff backed up.

Maybe my blog post wasn’t clear enough, if so, I apologise and hope this one clears it up.

Also hotlinking is bad mmmkay.

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged musicstore, ubuntuone | 8 Comments

Getting Ready for Ubuntu One Music Store Beta

By popey | Published: March 2, 2010

I’ve previously blogged about the Ubuntu One Music Store. Since then along with a few others, I’ve been helping privately beta test the store. Very shortly it will enter an open beta phase. In this blog post I’ve outlined some preparation you can do to be ready for the beta test.

In the default install of Ubuntu Lucid, the music store will be found in Rhythmbox. Other music players (such as Banshee and Amarok) may also get the functionality later, but right now the first and only delivered client for the store is the default player, Rhythmbox. To access the store, simply open Rhythmbox and click “Ubuntu One” under “Stores”.

Note the open beta has not started yet but it will do very soon. So right now you won’t see the store in Rhythmbox. In the meantime, you can get yourself ready for testing with the guide below. To do this you’ll either need to be running an up to date Ubuntu Luicd on your machine, or in a virtual machine such as VirtualBox or kvm. Testdrive is a great way to test Lucid on a previous release of Ubuntu.

Before we go on, some important notes:-

The music store is not finished yet, so if things break, or the store eats your music, your money, your credit card or your cat, then act appropriately
The look and feel of the store may change between these screenshots and the final release
Not all music is available in all regions/countries. This is pretty much out of control of Canonical and the Ubuntu project

The world is carved up into ‘UK’, ‘US’, ‘Germany’, ‘Rest of EU’ (i.e. not UK & Germany) and ‘Rest of World’ (i.e. excluding all those previously mentioned territories)

It’s possible that purchased tracks may not immediately download/sync to your computer. This may be a bug or due to server-side maintenance during the beta. Patience helps here
Some of the 5 regional stores (see above) contain some free (of cost) music, so if you would like to test the store without spending any money on tracks, you can do that. Unfortunately this only applies to ‘UK’, ‘US’ and ‘Germany’ store, not ‘Rest of EU’ or ‘Rest of World’
Bugs can be filed against the Rhythmbox plugin or Ubuntu One Client tools as appropriate
I’ve shown screenshots of the Ubuntu File Sync service however note that you will not be able to see your music through that web interface. I have shown these only to illustrate getting file sync working which is a pre-requisite for using the music store

So with that said, if you’re unhappy about any of the above, I’d recommend you don’t use the store until Ubuntu 10.04 is released. If you’re okay with testing, filing bugs and don’t mind if the store breaks (which it could) during the period leading up to release, then crack on!

These are the steps I went through to prepare for the Ubuntu One Music Store Beta. As with the store itself, some of these screens may change between now and release time. The process by which a computer is authorised will certainly change, but the main bulk of this is valid and still will after the release.

Ubuntu One Account

In order to buy stuff in the store you need an Ubuntu One account. You can connect to Ubuntu One using an Ubuntu single sign on account (confusingly).

Historically this was your Launchpad.net account, so if you already have one of those, you can use that. New users who have not previously signed up at Launchpad.net or login.ubuntu.com will need to create a new account.

Right now the process by which a new user to the Music Store is walked through the sign-up process is in flux. It could be a popup application which prompts for an email address, account name and password, or something embedded within Rhythmbox. Alternatively a browser could be spawned which sends the user to the sign-up process at login.ubuntu.com. Once Ubuntu Lucid releases in April, this process should be sorted out, but for now I’d recommend signing up to Ubuntu single sign on before using the Ubuntu One Music Store.

You need to confirm your email address by clicking the link in the mail.

Clicking the link takes you back to the Ubuntu One sign up process.

Click continue.

Enable File Sync

The second step which needs to be setup before the Music Store works is file syncing with Ubuntu One. Music purchased in the store is delivered directly to your Ubuntu One synchronised folders, so this has to be working or you’ll never actually get the music you buy. Configuring Ubuntu One is detailed at one.ubuntu.com/support/installation although for Lucid there’s very little to do other than activate as the components are pre-installed. That documentation should be updated before Lucid is released.

In these screenshots I subscribed to the free 2G plan. The screens are slightly different if you choose the 50G paid plan.

Confirm you agree to the terms and conditions..

Now you’re signed up to Ubuntu One.

At this point there are no files in the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder, in fact it doesn’t even exist yet..

Activate a Computer

To enable the file sync on this laptop I needed to add/authorise this computer. When Lucid releases there should be a graphical ‘control panel’ for Ubuntu One which allows you to press a button to connect a machine to your Ubuntu One account. You can of course connect multiple machines to one account in order to keep them all in sync. That tool doesn’t exist yet, so I had to run the following to trigger the process below.

u1sdtool -c

Once the system has been connected to Ubuntu One once, there is a ‘Connect’ icon in nautilus file browser, but in a typical chicken/egg problem, that ‘Connect’ button doesn’t appear until you have connected at least once.

Pretty soon after that the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder should appear.

Which is of course initially empty. There is another special folder in which stuff appears that has been shared with you by other people. It too is initially empty.

Testing File Sync

It’s a very good idea to test the file syncing service, because if it doesn’t work the music won’t download, no matter what else you do. It could save time during bug triage if users ensure this file sync works before filing bugs in the music store.

A simple test of the file sync is to create a folder or upload a file via the web interface and wait for them to appear in your ~/Ubuntu One/ folder on the local machine. Alternatively create files on your local PC in ~/Ubuntu One/ and go to the website to see if they appear.

Here I’ve created a file on my computer in the ~/Ubuntu One/ folder

If I then go to the Ubuntu One web interface I can see the file has arrived.

So at this point you’re ready to test the Ubuntu One Music Store. All you need now is some disk space and some taste in music. Neither of which I can help with – as my friends and family can confirm.

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged musicstore, ubuntuone | 21 Comments

Ubuntu One Music has No Watermarks

By popey | Published: February 28, 2010

This is just a short blog post to note that Matt Griffin has updated the FAQ for the Ubuntu One Music Store that I previously blogged about.

Most notable is probably this update:-

There will be no embedded ‘watermarks’ of any kind on the MP3s in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Which is of course good news. This came up in a recent bug filed against the Ubuntu Community and later the Rhythmbox Plugin. In it Ryan expressed concern that music files purchased in the store might be tagged or watermarked. This would be to enable back-tracking should the files be copied contrary to the license under which they were distributed.

This pre-dates the edit Matt made to the wiki, so at the time of the bug comment nobody really knew the answer. I asked around a few fellow beta testers to see if we could compare songs and identify if the files were indeed watermarked. The theory being we could each use a tool like sha1sum to generate a fingerprint of the file and see if they were the same or not.

Luckily I found one beta tester online and he provided me with a sha1sum of a file he’d bought from the store. Unfortunately there was a bug in the store today which prevented me from buying the same track! Foiled! I did however find a friend on IRC who wasn’t a beta-tester of the Ubuntu store, but was a 7digital store customer. I convinced her to buy a song from 7digital that I already had purchased from the Ubuntu One store.

As it turned out she didn’t need much convincing (even refusing my offer to pay her back the £0.59 in costs ) and bought an Amy MacDonald song which we compared sha1sums on. As you can see in my comment on the bug report (reproduced below), the files seem identical.

20:54:17 <@popey> alan@wopr:~/.ubuntuone/Purchased from Ubuntu One$ sha1sum Amy\ MacDonald/This\ Is\ The\ Life/This\ Is\ The\ Life.mp3 20:54:17 <@popey> b576a6695cce410521c862301f74deeb3ced22e4 Amy MacDonald/This Is The Life/This Is The Life.mp3 20:59:38 <+Dee> [dee@jane Dropbox]$ sha1sum Amy\ MacDonald\ -\ This\ Is\ The\ Life.mp3 20:59:38 <+Dee> b576a6695cce410521c862301f74deeb3ced22e4 Amy MacDonald - This Is The Life.mp3

We’ll set aside the statistical unlikely-hood that both files were fingerprinted but still came up with the same sh1sum. While friends still pointed out to me that the sample size of one wasn’t exactly comprehensive proof, now we have Matts wiki edit I think that concern can be put to bed.

Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged musicstore | 5 Comments

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DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM!!

Poking Purple Popups

Bye Bye Brown

Ade Bradshaw vs Reading Comprehension

Getting Ready for Ubuntu One Music Store Beta

Ubuntu One Account

Enable File Sync

Activate a Computer

Testing File Sync

Ubuntu One Music has No Watermarks

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