Karmic UDS and other events

I still have an hangover from the last week. I was at Barcelona from Monday to Friday at the Karmic UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit).

This is a great event for all those who are interested on knowing how Ubuntu works, but it’s basically oriented to those who are Ubuntu developers or from any of its derivatives distributions (like Guadalinex, which is my case). I think the event is interesting, in general, for any hacker and developer from upstream projects or just people nearby the Ubuntu world, because there is a lot of interesting people from Ubuntu, but also from upstream or derivative projects sharing knowledge and experiences to improve the next version of Ubuntu.

One topic that is always on the table (in many ways) is how to be better FLOSS citizens. I mean, how to do the things in the better way to give back to upstream projects all the improvements they do. And also to give the merit from each thing to its real author, from upstream, from Ubuntu or from the community.
I know (they know as well) that it isn’t always like that and some people from different project complain about that. But I truly believe this is an issue that is very important to them and they try to do their best. But to drive this is not very easy task and take some time.

I’ve been in four UDS (Mataró, Sidney, Seville and this one in Barcelona) and is getting better. The thing I like the most is that after the UDS you know there is a lot of work already done and almost every discussion and conclusion written down. You have a very clear concept about what is going on in the next release, how is going to be approached and who is going to be involved in the task to get them done.

I’ve been in a lot of different kind of FLOSS congress, seminars, summits and so for more the seven years and this is one that I like especially. Mostly because I feel it very productive. In a lot of congress, talks and workshop somebody talk about something you already know (or likely you don’t) everybody feel that could be interesting they talk a lot but when everybody come back to their homes (or a week later) everyone come back to their projects, work and real life and that it. In the UDSs, at least, you got after the event has finished a bunch of specifications, already discussed, with good feedback from different people, tasks in order to get it done and people with those task assigned.

I don’t know. The event is not perfect, it’s not the only way to do the things, but IMHO is very pragmatic and good way to do the things.

I really hope the next GCDS (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit) leave me the same good feeling after it’ll have finished. I know the GCDS is going to be great, but I hope after the event we have some real tasks and aims to follow to get the best for our free desktops.
Anyway, I know the event is going to be great. People form the both desktops (GNOME and KDE) are working hard for it. Also local teams and people are giving all they can (as Luis would say: “dandolotodo” ;-P ) to get the better cross desktop event ever.

Well, thanks to Canonical and the Ubuntu comunity and developers to give me the opportunity of participate in such of event and try to be useful for Ubuntu and Guadalinex. Also thank to the Junta de Andalucía and my company, Emergya, for cover my travel for being there.
I was especially happy to meet again with Daniel Holdbach and Jorge O. Castro, which are really great persons and very hard workers who push and work a lot for all developers and the community. I’m very sorry for not being able to say good by to them. I left in a hurry and I couldn’t say good bye to a lot of friends.

I also was happy to see to a old good friend and amazing GNOME hacker, Rodrigo Moya, which is now working at Canonical and I hope him the best in this new cycle of his life. Good luck Rodigo! 😉

Another person I met there was David Planella, which is new in Canonical as well, but he isn’t either new in the FLOSS world. He is translator in GNOME, Debian and Ubuntu. And now is the head of the Ubuntu Translations. As far I know he is going to be in charge of the coordination of the Ubuntu translations and the infrastructures around (Rosetta, language-packs and so). He is a really nice guy which seems very implicated and with willing of getting the things working.
I’m especially interested in his area because translations ir one of the biggest issues for Guadalinex and the coordination with him and the Ubuntu translations is very important. We also were talking about help from Guadalinex to test the Spanish translations to be sure the updates don’t break any application in the stables releases (as Jaunty in which is based the last Guadalinex version).

Well this post is long enogh, so I’ll save some thoughts for the next ones 🙂

Happy hacking to every one 😉

University Free Software Contest

The last 7th of May I was at the III University Free Software Contest‘s final fase. That event is a really interesting and (IMHO) very important for the free software community world in Spain.

The event takes place at several universities in Spain and have this final fase in Seville. In each university, the student that want to participate, have to start a free software project and follow some rules:

  • The project must be register in a public forge with public Subversion, wiki, maillist and so on.
  • They have to public their progress in a blog, so the people can follow the projects. All the projects’ blogs are syndicated in the contest’s planet.
  • They also have more points if they create a community around their projects.
  • And, of course, the project must have some kind of free software license.

I’ve have the pleasure and honor to be member of the jury to evaluate those projects and it’s really hopeful to see those young students learning how to develop a project with free software tools and methodologies. And some projects are really amazing and are already in few distributions or even OS.

This initiative is very helpful to the people from the universities who have great ideas, but they don’t know how the community works or even the normal developing tools. You know… sometimes at the universities the knowledge is too much theoretically… At least in Spain.

I have to apologize to the organization because in this edition I didn’t do my duty as a member of the jury. The work, my mess with the mail and the chaos inside of my head… But I have no excuses, really and I do regret no to have evaluated the projects, because there were some quite interesting…

Thanks anyway to all the organization and the rest of the jury. By the way, this event is good for me also because some members of the jury are very good friends (and GNOMErs :-P) but living in other places and they come for the final fase so I can meet them 🙂

For example, there are Carlos Garnacho and Alvaro López (alo) 🙂

Well, I do hope this initiative will be replicated in other countries because the students learn a lot and after the contest there are always some interesting projects which are free software 🙂

Some updates

It’s been awhile since the last post. I’ve been a bit busy with Guadalinex and some personal stuff. So here I leave some updates to keep my personal log no so empty…

Parkour:

I’ve got some problems with my back and I had to quit (for a while) with this new passion… Anyway, it was useful because it farce me to go to the doctor make a real check and found old and deeper problems. And what it’s better, it also force me to keep doing some exercise, which is helping me in many ways 🙂

Rock Climbing:

I leave parkour by now, but I’ve started to climb walls again. It sounds kind of weird, but this was a previous passion for me and it’s helping me with my back.

Ok, I’m not climbing like I was doing 8 years ago (that was more or less the last time…), but I’ve decided to start slow. Step by step.

I had to much injuries from my previous climbing period. I don’t want to do the same mistakes again.

I found some artificial walls for climbing but I’m actually doing some boulder in “el Puente de Triana” (the Triana bridge), here in Seville. There are always people climbing and people are very nice and open.

I hope soon I will be able to go to some real rock outside of  Seville…

This reminds me that in Gran Canaria are really good spots for climbing (also fot others mountain activities) so if anyone who is going to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit like to know places, let me know. I¡m from there and I know quite well those places. Just let me know before the summit and we can do some excursion or something 😉

Guadalinex:

There is already the Ubuntu Jaunty, the one we use as base to derive. We were quite busy setting up all the building systems, updating our projects for being working on Jaunty and trying to help Ubuntu a bit with translations, bugs and patches.

No so many patches as I would like, but we are very few people and we spend a lot of time learning how Ubuntu works. There is a lots of procedures, documentation, wiki pages, tools, place from where get info… We are still learning, but I thing the next version and collaboration will be much smoother. And we’ll be more useful for them 🙂

We have alpha already in the streets and we are close to have a beta, which will be more Guadalinex alike.

Ubuntu Jaunty is a really good base. I have to said that for me is one of the best Ubuntu versions in many ways, so I expect Guadalinex be at least as good as Jaunty.

We’ll change some things from Ubuntu, as the notifications stuff. We like the new notifications but we need interaction on them for one of our main projects: Hermes. And the new notification system doesn’t allow to do any interactions.

By now we’ll deactivate this and we’ll use the standard of GNOME, at least, until the new notification implement some kind of solution for those use cases.

Few days off (offline):

I’ll go tomorrow to Vigo (Galician) until Sunday and I’ll be very offline those days. It’s my first time in Galician and I know I will love it 🙂

So many time wanting to go there and just 3 days there… But sure it’s just the FIRST time and not the last 😛

git question

Ok, I’m not really git fan. Actually, I don’t like at all… But I have to use because of some projects and now, that GNOME is moving to Git, more.

Anyway, I use it. But there are some workflows I don’t get well yet. I know the basis and maybe a bit more, but I’m far from a git-poweruser.

There are some docs and interesting threads about git in GNOME, but I have to learn a lot…

The thing is I like to collaborate with some project in which official git repos I haven’t account, so I try to use Github to public and manage my branches.

Although I don’t like git so much, I do like Github. It is a very good web gui for a DCVS and has awesome features…

But here is one of my use cases:

I try to make some changes on a Debian project (live-helper) which uses a git repository. But I work with a friend on some features and changes over the main project.

My first though was: I create a mirror of the upstream project on Guthub, my friend create a “fork” (kind of “git clone” but keeping parent-child relationship on Github) and then he can make so many branches he need and develop the different features and changes.

I like to have one branch where merge all the mature features, but also keeping the upstream mirror. So I create a branch of my mirror and I’m merging there the different features.

I think until here everything is right. If there is a better way, tell me, please.

Keep going… The problem is not all the features are interesting for the upstream projects, so the merged branch is not good place for get patches or merge from. But it is our good branch which we use for our project, so we need keep as is.

But some of our features are integrated in upstream. Which is good and thing we want. The problem is we we pull the changes from upstream, there are some changes identical, but merged or committed in other order. Some times pull a changed we push to upstream make some mess in our history…

And if we like to keep updated the different feature branches from upstream to keep working on this features but with valid and new code, from where we pull those changes?

From our mirror? the merged branch? is there another magic git way?

I know this could be very confusing. I think it’s easy to explain with graphics but my artistic skills are below zero…

But this graph could help (or not…)

I hope some git guru understand some of this uses case and give me some tips to doing better.

BTW, I couldn’t find a way to make more than one fork from one branch on Github, which would have been useful…

NOTE: I have my reasons to dislike git, but it’s now the point of this post. I don’t like flames and I don’t like argue about which DCVS is better, I just like to know how to use better this tool. Thanks 🙂

Guadalinex V6 Alpha is out

The first alpha version of Guadalinex V6 is avaible here.

There is an official note in Spanish where you can learn what it’s new in this early version.

Basically this is an Ubuntu Jaunty (based on the beta version) with some changes:

  • The artwork is different (but not the final one) to see you are in Guadalinex (mostly for the issues reports, so people don’t send us reports from Ubuntu or to Ubuntu from Guadalinex)
  • There is no language questions. The distro boots in Spanish from the beginning. From the boot to the desktop or the installer.
  • The installer is a fork of the Ubuntu one (Ubiquity). In previous versions of Guadalinex we changed the GUI to be easier for our users (at least simpler). So you can see the Jaunty installer but with less questions (all the locale ones, for example) but also with some more explanations and a interesting feature: a disk preview.  The disk preview is a tab on the partitioning step which let you see what you have in each disk and partition before to choose the way of partitioning the disk. This may help you to avoid some awful mistakes.
  • The application list is also different. We put the applications our users tell us in forums, mail lists and events. In some cases there are more applications (because we miss some functionalities in the default Ubuntu desktop) and some times it’s just an application swapped by one we think is more stable, is better translated or our users like more.
  • And there is also some applications or functionalities that were developed for a previous versions and we’ve updated to be able to used in V6/Jaunty. Actually the most of them are already on Launchpad and some are even able to be installed on Jaunty from our PPA

I know the distro is in Spanish, but probably some people here know Spanish. If you like to help, you can download it and give us some feedback.

If you like to report a general issue, probably it’s better to do it in Jaunty (we follow and try to fix issues from there). If you do that, please add tag named “guadalinex“, so we can notice it soon.

Guadalinex upadates

As I said on my last post, now I’m working on Guadalinex v6, but in this new version we won’t try to develop a lot of new things as in earlier versions, we have less time and different goals as well.

Our main goals are:

  • Release as close to Jaunty as we could
  • Have the same features already implemented for Guadalinex working fine (updated to Jaunty)
  • Have a really, really stable version
  • Have all the desktop, applications and documentation well translated into Spanish

There is also a implicit goal about trying to push our improvements  to the international free software community. We do have Spanish community, but no much people outside Hispanic community knows well some interesting and useful projects we have.

I have to thanks to the people from Ubuntu who is helping us with Launchpad and all the Ubuntu procedures so we can move a bit to the Ubuntu world. People like Daniel Holbach and others really care about us and the possibility of collaboration.

Now we have a distro registered in Launchpad:

http://launchpad.net/guadalinex

Some projects registered in Launchpad with the old source code imported from the earlier version:

And also a PPA (Launchpad’s Personal Package Archives) where upload packages built for Guadalinex (ergo Jaunty) so people can use our projects in Ubuntu Jaunty. By now there is just a couple of packages recently upgrades to Janty and with some fixes:

Our intention is get our distro ready for our schedule and start to put software we think is useful or needed for our users into next Ubuntu versions. We are just making the foundations.

But there is a lot of interesting and useful software already in Ubuntu or other upstream projects with some internationalization problems, so we must take care of them. We are reviewing the applications and mostly the installer or live system to be sure there is no non translatable parts.

Currently we are working on the Ubuntu live system (casper) to bring some i18n support on some messages the user see and probably doesn’t understand.

In the other hand our projects were made by Spanish developers for Spanish people and they haven’t much i18n support. And we are also working on that.

And for all those Spanish speakers who find hard to search and read documentation in English we are trying to set up a developer documentation wiki in Spanish for all the people who like to collaborate with Guadalinex. This is easier step for a lot of non-English speakers to get involved in any kind of free software community. And with that knowledge they can just collaborate with Guadalinex (but this makes them collaborate indirectly with upstreams projects…) or Ubuntu, Gnome or any project.

At least, I hope so…

Something similar helps me years ago… 🙂
Anyone who want help us or is interested on the project can contact with me or with the rest of the team here, in the irc (channels: , -devel or #guadabuntu) or , if you can read/write Spanish, at the Spanish mail list.

Thanks for reading so boring history I should turn off the verbose mode 😛

Guadalinex is getting close to Ubuntu

Well, the new project I was going to join was Guadalinex v6 🙂

If you don’t know, Guadalinex is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu made by La Junta de Andalucia (Andalusian regional Government) for the citizens. It’s one of the main distributions in Spain and has a large amount of users. There are over 300.000 pcs on schools and over 600 internet centers in rural areas running Guadalinex.

This is very exciting for me because, although I’ve already participated on 3 versions of Guadalinex and I’ve helped to create the system in which was based the others first, this is going to be developed in another way.

The previous versions were developed by a few small companies working together. The way those companies were chosen was by a public tender.

This was a good way, I think. Letting to small free software companies work, learn and grown doing software useful for the people around. And the whole process was open. It wasn’t that kind of project that one company develop for few months and then put in a public server. It was always open from the beginning. Open and public wiki, mail lists, subversion, forums, bug tracking and so on. Which sadly is no very common on free software project from governments…

Anyway, this time it was also a tender, but not for making the whole distribution by the companies, just hiring separated groups of people for doing different tasks (design the distro, maintain the mirrors, take care of the users and forums, create a manual for human beings….) from inside. I mean, from the public installations.

Well, my company won the tender for leading part of the technical side of this project. So my coworker and friend Roberto Morano and me are working on Guadalinex v6 since the last Monday 🙂

Guadalinex always has been trying to collaborate with the upstream projects, like the distribution on which were based (first Debian, now Ubuntu). But it wasn’t easy at all.

We have our schedule, few resources, usually we start to work on an already stable version (which means we can not add or fix things for that upstream version) and too much burocracy some times. Also the upstream distro side was never clear and we couldn’t find a middle point to collaborate.

We actually did collaborate with Ubuntu with the first version of the live installer (Ubuntu Express, now Ubiquity), some fixes, translations and few things more. But there was a lot of interesting stuff we created for Guadalinex and never arrived to Ubuntu. That’s sad.

Also, since we got a huge amount of computers running Guadalinex and we must assure those computers work fine (because the child and teachers need them for the classes, for example), we have a lot of bugs and hardware issues notificated and we already have fixed lots of different kind of problem (hardware support, 3g support, digital certificates support, etc).

I know very well that all the people behind the project would like to push all those improvements to upstream and give to more people. But the time, the tools, the language and things like that didn’t let us doing properly.

But, good news, now we are getting close to a better collaboration. We have started to integrate subprojects from Guadalinex on Launchpad, so we can show to the Ubuntu community (and nearby ones) all the things we do. We are creating the projects on launchpad and importing the subversion repositories into bazaar branches registered on lp, as well.

We also add our bug tracker to the list of bug tracker connected to launchpad, so we can connect the bugs we share and give feedback from each other or even close our bugs and notificate the fixes to the related bugs or software in Ubuntu.

People from the launchpad team are helping us with this because the bug tracker we use since more than 3 years (mantis) is not the better supported by launchpad, so we are figuring how sort this out. We’ll see.

Also there is a Guadalinex distro registration about to finish, so we can manage the releases, milestones and subprojects as a normal distro in launchpad.

We are asking to the launchpad and ubuntu people how to doing better so they can take our work and we are open to any idea or recommendation.

Our initial goal is release the stable version between 30 and 60 days after Jaunty and for this version we don’t plan add much new features, like on earlier versions. Instead, we’ll try to help to fix bugs, improve translations, documentation and hardware support, so we can get a better, more stable and more secure upstream distro.

As said before, any help, advise, recommendation will be more than welcome.

I’ll keep posting about our progress and I hope it be just good news 🙂

Gwibber working on Guadalinex v5 and Ubuntu Hardy

I’ve just discover Gwibber and I found it very nice and useful. It’s a microblogging client for GNOME which support twitter, identi.ca, facebook, fickr, rss and much more. It use webkit and is quite eye candy.
The problem is webkit is not very well supported on Ubuntu Hardy, which means neither on Guadalinex v5.

But you can get it for those systems by adding to your sources.list:

# Gwibber
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gwibber-team/ubuntu hardy main

# Webkit
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stemp/ubuntu hardy main

And then install the package Gwibber.
Don’t add the ppa from Webkit team on Launchpad because those packages are not working right now.

Well, enjoy this nice piece of software 😉

Break and FOSDEM have finished

It was a really good experience going to the FOSDEM. It was my first, but I hope it won’t be the last.

I had the opportunity of knowing a bit Brussels: the beer, the chocolate, the waffles, the city center… very nice place… errr, but the weather… rains and cold… not really my type.

The FOSDEM itself was amazing. So many people from so different projects (hackers and users).

Kudos for the organization people, they did just great. Huge and great work! 😉

I missed some friends over there but I met new friends and I could talk a lot about the GCDS (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit), which is going to be a very important event. It seems that people from GNOME and KDE are ready for collaborate as much the time over there let us.

I very exciting about the event and all the think are coming with it.

By the way, there are new mail list for the event:

http://mail.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/mailman/listinfo/gcds

Stay tuned! 😉

The other thing I want to write is about my break.  I was in a break of my job for having time for me and some personal stuff. Well, that break is now over 🙂

On Monday I come back, but I have some changes. I’m going to work on a six months project, out of the office (actually at the client office) but in a good a nd interesting (at least for me) Spanish free software project.

I’m really exciting about this too, but I’ll wait until I start (on Monday) to talk about the project and what I’m going to do in it.

Well, I’m keep reading, learning and searching some stuff more that on Monday I have to be prepared 😉

See you! Happy hacking! 😉

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.