Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’

What a month

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Lots of cool things going on. I’ve been name dropped by bkor and jcastro. A few weeks back I went in to York and met pvanhoof, learning much about Belgian politics :-) The following Monday I met robtaylor. We talked about Git, libgitcore, wizbit and Conduit. A few days after that sabdfl called me! He tells me a lot of people have been talking about the Bazaar mirror of GNOME that i set up (bzr-mirror.gnome.org) and he wanted to talk about it.

Woot for meeting new people, and some of my heroes to boot, within GNOME and Ubuntu :-)

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    It’s been too long…

    Friday, April 25th, 2008

    It’s been far too long since I last blogged. I’d always think of what I wanted to say when I couldn’t get to my blog, and then forget. Bah. So here is a catchup post.

    Upgrades. I moved servers! Everything has been moved over to a dedicated server from RapidSwitch. After 1 year of excellent service, my VPS will soon get switched off for good. I’m still a big fan of RimuHosting, but I needed a bit more power (OK, I needed lots more power..). Isotoma use RapidSwitch a lot, and we get an excellent service from them so I figured i’d try them out. I now have 2.2Ghz Core2 Duo, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive and 4,000GB traffic. Really pleased with it so far.

    Wordpress also got upgraded, and i’m really loving the new control panel. Good work guys!

    BuildBot. I’ve joined the Build Brigade on their quest to bring continuous integration to GNOME. My own efforts can be found here. The current solution needs to open up a port for each project, and we are trying to get it down to a single shared connection for all projects. When this is working I hope to set up continuous integration of the Debian/Ubuntu GNOME packages too.

    I’m hopeful we can bring the same solution to the KDE and XFCE teams too.

    Summer of Code. I will be mentoring 2 students for GNOME in this years summer of code:

    • John will be implementing SyncML support in Conduit. His deliverables include python bindings of libsyncml, conduit support of SyncML clients and servers, simplified discovery and configuration of those devices and a demo of sync between EDS and a SyncML device.
    • Alexandre will be implementing full support for the iPod in Conduit, and also improving integration with Rhythmbox. His deliverables include improved media transcoding, using GStreamer were possible, full dataproviders for audio and video support and work to provide a smooth, rounded “plugin and sync” experience for the user.

    This is my first time mentoring in the summer of code, and i’m really looking forward to it.

    Hardy. GNOME 2.22. I’ve just upgraded my work machine to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, after running the alphas since nearly the beginning on my main development laptop. Very pleased with both so far. The upgrade on my laptop was smoother as it has Intel graphics.

    Conduit. We are proposed for inclusion in GNOME 2.24. Exciting times. It seems clear so far that the biggest problem we have in acceptance will be a UI that really “works”. I’ve become quite fond of our current UI, but new users just can’t understand it at all. Anyone got any suggestions?

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    JHBuild and Debian

    Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

    So mysteriously around the same time as John is working on JHBuild for Windows, i’ve set my sights on something a little easier. There is a variant of JHBuild for Debian users wanting packages of SVN versions called JHDebuild. (If you search for it now, you’ll find about twice as much because Google has indexed my tweets and launchpad entries).

    I spent a week fighting with JHBuild. It was quite annoying, and I ended up making a script to set up a chroot that I could guarantee /would/compile. But just as I was finishing that I found out about the stuff that Ken was working on. After drooling a little while I decided I wanted to get a few things out of my Debian development environment. I want to be able to easily get a .deb of any GNOME project. And I want to be able to get debs of the whole suite. JHDebuild seemed to fit my needs. Unfortunately its proving more difficult to get going than JHBuild :-(
    So far my patches have been for properties that seem to be missing for some of the repositories and their branch classes. I patched the reprepro support to support more archs. At the moment i’m just trying to get my head around the “get debian/ folder” business - i think i’ve found some duplicate code. Then its back to figuring out why so many packages won’t build. Right now, I think I won’t be able to proceed until I resolve the make dist GNOME Goal…

    I’ve set up a branch on launchpad to hold my changes for now, with the hope of pushing most, if not all, back upstream when i’ve gotten things working a bit more.

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    Finally fixed mysql

    Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

    Took my sweet time but i finally fixed my mysql problem - at some point when I set my mail server up i screwed up the debian-sys-maint account. This meant that the init script kept failing and apt-get upgrade wouldn’t work.

    If anyone else hits a problem with their debian-sys-maint account, you can find its password in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf. You can then mysql -u root -p and do something like:

    USE mysql;
    UPDATE users SET password=PASSWORD('password-from-debian.cnf') WHERE user='debian-sys-maint';
    FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

    Solved.

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    I was wrong

    Thursday, April 12th, 2007

    Feisty+1 now has a name. And that name is “Gutsy Gibbon”… And the repo should be open for general upload on release day. I wonder if that means I can upgrade to Gutsy the second Feisty is released?

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    Feisty+1

    Friday, April 6th, 2007

    Just wanted to share with you my prediction for the next major release of Ubuntu after Feisty. I reckon it shall be known as the “Giddy Goat”….

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    Sponsor a bug

    Friday, January 26th, 2007

    This is the beast in question. I’m pretty sure no one able to fix that reads here, but hey.. it’s worth a shot…  Without this package fitted and working then getting anything other than minimal iPod support for Conduit in feisty is going to be an unbelievable pain in the backside  (relative to the kind of ease of use we are targeting!)

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    Feisty 7.04: My journey so far

    Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

    Ubuntu Feisty is shaping up to be a nice release. I’ve been running it on my main machine since the start of the year and am relishing in the daily updates. I ran edgy from the first beta and it was great watching the new updates gradually mold Edgy into the release it became. And now that is happening in Feisty.

    Yesterday, for example, we got the new GNOME Control Center.

    The new control center

    Gorgeous isn’t it. Right now though.. it sure is annoying for me because i’m programmed to go in a sub menu and down a bit to get to synaptic! I think it would be cool if all of the applets were integrated into here. So that they had the same feel to them.. It feels kind of wrong that yet another window pops up. So then the control system would be like the “Manage my Computer” option on Windows, but way way way better.

    I reported my first bug on launchpad, the python-gpod bindings in feisty don’t actually provide any bindings! (#79221) Someone beat me to it.. so it got marked as duplicate :-( irksome that there is a package that is purposefully disabled like this… Grr. This and my general tiredness stalled my work on the iPod stuff for Conduit. It was made worse by the fact that I had the wrong versions of libglib-dev and couldn’t figure out how to get the right ones :-( It seems the UK mirror is lagging a bit behind the “main” server? But hey, it’s only an alpha :-)!

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    Looking back

    Sunday, December 17th, 2006

    It’s now 6 months since i switched to Linux. I don’t know the exact date, but i do remember the feeling of excitement i had from Dapper. It was such a great experience, things just worked. No faffy installers and drivers. I just plug in my camera and it appears. Sure, there are rough edges. But this time it was different. Everything i needed from an OS was there - and it wasn’t a pain in the butt to get working.

    Now it’s approaching Christmas and i’m getting ready to switch from Edgy to Feisty. Who could ask for more for christmas? If you haven’t checked out the specs you should. There are some very interesting things planned for improved integration and its shaping up to be a great next step :]

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