seb128's blog

Canonical has an open Ubuntu Desktop QA Engineer position. If you like GNOME, have upstream experience and are ready to deal with bugs coming from enthusiastic users you might want to consider applying for the job 😉

That’s an Ubuntu Desktop Team call for contributors! The team has some rocking contributors already and the feisty desktop is quite good, we are overworked for some time though and it’s not easy to keep up with the work to do. The working ambiance is usually quite nice, so if you want to give it a try just join on IRC or the list 😉

The things you can do there:

• help triaging bugs: apport bugs are really nice, they are sent directly to launchpad though which highly increased the distribution bugs workload. Upstream might be interested by the retracing which gives automatic debug backtraces for the crashes.
• give an hand to merges desktop packages with Debian. The list of packages to look at is available on the wiki desktop TODO. Feel free to claim one if you want to work on it. If you have any question or need a sponsor to review and upload your work you can join #ubuntu-desktop on the freenode IRC or the ubuntu-desktop list
• maintain a desktop package. There is quite some packages that could use a dedicaced maintainer or team. The usual work is to merge changes with Debian, send them patches they could be interested in, up to new versions and look at bugs.
• work at packaging new cool things which are not available to Ubuntu yet
• create new teams to work on a group of packages. Daniel recently announced a ubuntu-gnomemm team that some people have already joined, applying that to other domain like the voip (ekiga) could be nice
• update the wiki to make it easier to contribute, list cool ideas we can work on for gusty, etc

This week has been really an amazing one for Ubuntu and GNOME!

• Ubuntu 7.04 is available since yesterday. Edgy was rough on the edges due to the short cycle after dapper, feisty is ROCKING!

  What is new with this version (Ubuntu 7.04 tour)?

  – The installer has now a Windows migration tool

  – GNOME 2.18.1 is available on the desktop and it’s a pretty good milestone, congrats to the whole GNOME community for the awesome work

  – Network-manager is now part of the default installation

  – Compiz is available on the CD, you just have to use the desktop effects menu item to try it

  – Easy installation of multimedia codecs

  – Easier install of proprietary drivers

  – The new bug reporting tool apport makes trivial to retrace crash files to get debug backtraces. The bugsquad is doing a rocking work there but there is still lot of detailed bugs which could be useful upstream. If you are upstream you are welcome to subscribe to the package corresponding to your software on launchpad or have a look on bugs there. If you don’t want to get distributions bug you can subscribe to the upstream product and you should get mail only when an upstream task is opened

  – And many other changes

• Other good news for Canonical, Ubuntu and GNOME, Canonical has joined the GNOME Foundation’s advisory board and is a silver sponsor for the next GUADEC 😉
• Next week Ubuntu will have a new UbuntuOpenWeek with lot of interesting IRC sessions, feel free to join!
• Congrats also to everybody who worked to create the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative

The Ubuntu Desktop Team has started a serie of bugs cleanup days on desktop packages for feisty.

• What is that about?

  The desktop team picks a GNOME package and we work on it during the day to clean the list of bugs, note problems that would be nice to fix for feisty (the next Ubuntu version), run valgrind on applications, write patches and forward useful informations upstream.

• Where?

  Launchpad, the ubuntu-busquad and ubuntu-desktop mailing lists and #ubuntu-bugs and #ubuntu-desktop on IRC

• What’s next?

  Tomorrow we will work on gnome-utils. We will send a summary mail about the package on the Ubuntu mailing lists and pick an another package and day for the next cleanup round

Having compiz rocking for feisty would be really nice. Since the previous version didn’t work really fine on my desktop (ATI card) I’ve decided to update the feisty package to 0.3.4 (if you opened bugs on launchpad that would be nice to try to the new version and update them to mention if they are fixed or no) and to give it a new try.

The new version works pretty fine on my laptop (intel video card), not that fine with an ATI radeon 9600 card apparently: the window were not refreshed correctly (GTK widget all grey when opening a window and only displayed fine after resizing the window).

Yesterday gandalfn, who is doing some work around compiz packages for Ubuntu, suggested some xorg option to try to get compiz better.Using ‘Option “AccelMethod” “EXA”‘ fixed that problem and now compiz is working correctly.

There is still some features lacking at the moment to make the switch to compiz easy. One problem is that it doesn’t use the keybindings previously configured with GNOME capplet. Another one is how workspaces are working. The NEWS from compiz 0.3.4 mention “Support for multiple desktops (workspaces)”. The desktop switcher applet still doesn’t agree with compiz apparently (ctrl-alt-left or right don’t change the workspace selected on the applet which is confusing). I know there is some libwnck patches available to make it work better with compiz, they add some API though, which means that if we use them and upstream decide to go a different way we will have to break the libwnck package ABI when switching to the upstream version which is not nice. Once those problems fixed compiz will probably be very nice to use 😉

Today starts the Ubuntu “Reduce the delta with upstream” week where we will spend some time to clean up the packages changes and to send upstream the patches that should go upstream. The desktop team has created a wiki page for that, you might be interest to have a look on it and give a hand to update it (other team might be interested to do the same).

If you want to participate or have any question feel free to join #ubuntu-bugs on freenode (or team specific chans like #ubuntu-desktop). We also welcome upstream wanting to talk about changes we do to their application! (Vincent if you read that, are you sure you still don’t want that gnome-panel “add to panel” patch upstream? 😉

The new version of Ubuntu:”Edgy Eft” is now available. It has GNOME 2.16.1, firefox 2.0, f-spot, a faster and nicer startup and many other things too. You can read the details from the announce mail. The new version of Edubuntu, Xubuntu and Kubuntu are also available. Congrats to all the people who worked on those new versions and contributed to make them rock!

The Mountain View summit will take place soon. If you have nice ideas for the next version of Ubuntu, a Call for Topics has been made for you 😉

Some days ago, after the pygtk 2.10.2 issue which created a flood of deskbar-applets bugs on bugzilla, I had a discussion on #bugs with guenther about the number of bugs opened against evolution without an useful backtrace.

I already noticed on some occasions than there is cases where gdb produces a correct backtrace and bug-buddy doesn’t get an useful one. I was wondering if the issue is due to bug-buddy and I decided to have an another look with that the pygtk 2.10.2,deskbar crasher

Thread 1 (Thread 47961906685648 (LWP 32518)): #0  0x00002b9efffbeeef in waitpid () from /lib/libpthread.so.0 No symbol table info available. #1  0x000000000000000b in ?? () No symbol table info available. #2  0x38000000006fa750 in ?? () No symbol table info available. #3  0x0000000000000000 in ?? () No symbol table info available. #0  0x00002b9efffbeeef in waitpid () from /lib/libpthread.so.0 

Thread 1 (Thread 47933151876816 (LWP 32616)): #0  0x00002b984e97b297 in IA__g_type_fundamental (type_id=4035225266131284752) at gtype.c:3098 #1  0x00002b984e961b90 in IA__g_boxed_free (boxed_type=4035225266131284752, boxed=0x7fff5cac71d0) at gboxed.c:453 #2  0x00002b984e82ef85 in init_gobject () from /var/lib/python-support/python2.4/gtk-2.0/gobject/_gobject.so #3  0x000000000044537f in PyTuple_Size () ...

Damien, Ubuntu edgy has not been released yet (the beta version is available for some days and has GTK 2.10.3). GTK 2.10.4 has been uploaded on friday and has been tested before upload. I knew about the ekiga crasher (you pointed a bug about it by mail on friday morning before the upload to edgy) and decided to upload it anyway because the desktop was not exploding with it, the new version was available for almost a week without a lot of bugzilla activity about it and that’s the way we work on unstable distribution: we push the new versions when available (if they don’t break too much) and work on issues created by the update then. No luck for you than ekiga was crashing on startup and that the new bug-buddy makes easy for user to file a flood of duplicates about a crasher issue. A patched GTK package has been uploaded on saturday afternoon with the upstream fix for that issue

Now than edgy beta is available the universe freeze has been announced. No new version nor new package (out of UVF exceptions) from now until edgy. Some nice changes landed before the freeze though: