a daily dose of ubuntu

quick status update

2012-02-16T23:08:00.001+02:00

No post since almost four weeks now, it's time to recover.
Lately I have been working a lot:

Working on GNOME System Monitor

porting the interface to a GTKBuilder based one. Preferences dialog migration is done, renice dialog migration done on a branch, I have also migrated the ui base (main window with base notebook + system tab). Right now I'm stuck with some strange threading problems for the System tab right now (the data should be loaded on a separate thread and set in the GUI from there, but it's unfortunately not set)

Papercutting software-properties

fixed some apt-add-repository issues (wrong api URL used, return non-null error code on errors) and
some misc. user interface issues (add repository dialog not respecting buttons-have-icons setting and has no title set, order other software sources alphabetically)
I have also reported a bug to improve the current layout for Other software, created a patch to make it look better:

Current layout vs. Proposed layout: Which one do you like better?

Papercutting Synaptic, although I know it's in universe now, so it does not get much attention, but it has lots of bugs, and many of them just ancient and minor issues, like string-fixes and small development exercises, so they are just perfect for me

I have started fixing them, and I'm still on a fixing streak, 13 bugs and still counting
9 out of the 13 bugs were more then 2 years old and all of them took around 5-10 minutes
2 were quite new, because I have found them while I have been fixing the others, so I have reported them and fixed them

I have also been featured as a first time contributor on the Ubuntu Development Status for this week, so I'm getting famous and proudly smiling back on you from lots of Ubuntu-related sites, just like I'm on the right :)

In the meantime Precise got into feature freeze, 70 more days to go until the release. There are lots of improvements in already, both for the performance freaks and the eye-candy maniacs. I'm probably more on the eye-candy maniacs side, so my favorites are the updated lightdm login screen and locking screen, the customized control center, and the upcoming locally integrated menus. I'm not a huge fan of the HUD to be added in the next release of Unity (5.6), but I might change my mind if I'll start using it (I have tried it, but it unfortunately broke more use-cases for me, than it helped, so I have removed it). On the other side there are lots of performance improvements, and lot of effort went into improving battery life also. Kudos go to all the people who have been working hard on all these stuff, nice job.

system monitor user survey

2012-01-21T17:36:00.000+02:00

As you might have seen, I have started reviewing System Monitor (part 1, part 2). However, as you can also see hat from the review and/or if you look at System Monitor, it will need some design work and development effort to get it into a better shape, make it scale up to the latest hardware configurations, and make it a bit more end-user friendly, but without sacrificing the hard users demanding more advanced functionality in System Monitor.
As a first step, I have created a short (20 questions) survey to get some feedback on how people use System Monitor. If you use System Monitor, please take the time (less than 10 minutes) to complete this small survey, and if you have anything to say about the survey, or about system monitor, feel free to comment.

about my first two debdiffs

2012-01-21T16:19:00.000+02:00

Last week has been a busy week. I have made my first two real debdiffs to update librsvg (2.35 as system monitor 3.3.4 depends on it) and gnome-system-monitor to a new version in ubuntu. It did take some time until I got used to the tools, and had to re-create the librsvg debdiff, as I have made some mistakes, but afterwards creating a gnome-system-monitor debdiff was a piece of cake. Unfortunately/luckily the update has revealed a serious problem (thanks to Karl Mardoff Kittilsen for reporting it in Ubuntu), the app crashes when the user has more than four cores, as resource graph default colors are only stored for 4 cores. It's funny that storing the colors as an array has been introduced to allow storing the colors for any number of colors, but now it only made the thing worse, and it's also my fault, as I have reviewed the patch and have overlooked this small detail. But I have quickly forwarded the bug to GNOME, investigated the issue and created a patch, and I hope it will get pushed to master and it will get in the 3.3.5 release due on 8th of February. Until then, for the lucky users of more than 4 cores, I have commented on the launchpad bug with a workaround.
I'm sure I'll try to get the 3.3.5 upload sponsored in Ubuntu as soon as possible.

Anyway, even with these small and unfortunate events, System Monitor 3.4 will probably be the best System Monitor release ever, as we "only" have 113 more open bugs on Bugzilla (that's an improvement, when I have started in November, there were almost 200), so thanks go to Chris Kühl for maintaining the package, committing my patches, and replying to my sometimes annoying comments, ideas, and forwarded bugs.

So that was my real development activity for the last week (aside of my job, of course :)) ).

system monitoring in review - part 2

2012-01-11T11:37:00.003+02:00

As promised in the first part of this series, in this post we will see how did/do other resource monitors scale up to the new hardware (many network interfaces, lots of logical CPUs), to help us find (a) properly working, well-scaling, elegant and user-friendly solution(s) to the System Monitor problems listed in the previous post.

I will start with the Mac OS tool for resource monitoring, called Activity Monitor. I haven't used a Mac, so I'm only talking based on what I did see on screenshots, please comment if you disagree/can add something. The devs from Apple have chosen the easiest solution: Activity Monitor can display in its window per-CPU usage charts for up to 4 cores, above that you will see an aggregated graph in the main window, and you will have to open a separate window from the menu to see the CPU usage for each core separately. Regarding multiple network interfaces: Activity Monitor isn't any better than System Monitor, as it only shows an aggregated chart for network usage.

The Mac OS X Activity Monitor on a Mac with 4 cores

The Task Manager from Windows 7 scales surprisingly well even with 256 logical CPUs, and shows a separate chart for each core, which might look like an overkill at first glance, but at least it works, and you can get an overview of the overall CPU usage from the average CPU usage bar on the left, and of the CPU usage on each core from the table. You can also switch to an aggregated CPU usage chart to show. The Windows Task Manager also scales very well for multiple network interfaces, as it has a separate Networking tab, where it shows one chart for each network interface (bluetooth, wireless, virtual, local network, ... )


The Windows 7 Task Manager monitoring a 256 core system

Microsoft has published two really interesting articles about the changes to Task Manager from the upcoming Windows 8, one of them sheddig some light on how Task Manager is used by users (I think the use-cases should resemble the ones used by GNOME System Monitor users), and the other talks about improving Resource Monitor scalability for computers with up to 640 logical CPUs, with screenshots of their current implementation (see below). What I like most about this redesigned performance/resource monitor is the layout: a tab-based layout with tabs on the left side, and the tab titles being the overview charts, and you can click any of the tabs to get further information about resource usage.


The Window 8 Task Manager monitoring a 160 core system

So this is how other operating systems' system monitoring tools scale up to the latest hardware and possibly strange, but still existing configurations.

In the next part of the series, we will see what we could do with GNOME System Monitor, what and how would we have to change it to get a more pleasant resource monitoring interface for more configurations running GNOME out there in the wild. Your comments, ideas and constructive criticism is welcome, so feel free to comment.

system monitoring in review - part 1

2012-01-10T10:16:00.001+02:00

As many of you might already know, I am contributing to GNOME System Monitor these days with bug triaging, fixing bugs and whatever else I can.

But what is System Monitor? What does it do? What does it do wrong? How can we improve it? I will try to answer these question in a series of posts. First I'm planning to list some problematic areas, and finding some solutions afterwards. Please, feel free to join the discussion by commenting, suggestions, ideas and constructive criticism are welcome anytime.

While triaging and working on System Monitor bugs, I did see quite a few bugs on the lack of scalability of System Monitor, in different senses of the word:

System Monitor doesn't scale very well: open the application, resize it to its minimum size, and you'll see something like the image to the right. You should have a 352px tall window content area (window size - menu bar - title bar - tab bar), with the real content you would like to see being the three charts, 17px tall each, totaling less than 15% of the available window area. This is quite an achievement.
System monitor doesn't scale up well to the top-notch CPUs (having more than 4 logical CPUs) because

it could not store CPU colors for more than 4 CPUs until recently (the bug got fixed), hence each fourth CPU has the same color
it had problems displaying many cores on the System Tab until recently (also fixed)
the Resources tab looks strange on a System with many cores (the CPU legend eats up lot of space) see the image on the right (link)
the CPU graph is cluttered on systems with many cores

System monitor doesn't scale well if the user has more than one network interface, as the network history only shows an aggregated graph for all interfaces and the user can not tell which interface is generating the traffic.

What can we do about these issues? How can we fix them? How did/do other resource monitors scale up to the new hardware (many network interfaces, lots of logical CPUs)? We will see in the next part of this series.

2012 - a new beginning

2012-01-06T20:26:00.002+02:00

First of all:
I wish you a Happy New Year!

It's been more than a month since my last post, but I've been a bit lazy lately, probably because of the holidays.

But I'm back to the business again. In the meantime I have been asked by the great people from the Ubuntu Desktop Team to become the maintainer of the Gnome System Monitor package in Ubuntu. It doesn't seem like something very hard, and I hope that I'm up to the task, as I have accepted. I will continue to work upstream to improve System Monitor for everyone using GNOME, and I will try to have the latest possible version in Ubuntu. Besides this I will continue working on upstreaming the bugs reported in Ubuntu, keeping the GNOME Bugzilla and Launchpad in sync.

The hardest part in this will be to reduce the buglists, mainly to fix the bugs reported and implement the features requested. For me it seems even harder to prioritize the bugs/features, because there are currently 50 enhancements requests filed (out of the total 130) and I'm unable to prioritize them. Maybe there are some of those which would be welcome by more people, some of those would be only useful for a small subset of the system monitor users. So I think I will continue randomly picking bugs to fix for now, unless You, my follower have anything special you would like to get fixed as soon as possible.

I would really like to avoid introducing new bugs by my patches, but I doubt it's possible. I have managed to do it recently: with the dozens of patches I have submitted to System Monitor, I have managed to introduce a quite nasty bug, because I have not tested the fix in some cases, but fortunately I have experienced the bug a few times, and have found the bug reported on Launchpad, so I quickly reported the bug to Bugzilla and attached a patch to fix it. A good lesson to test a bit more before committing, and another reason why the apps should be automatically tested. However System Monitor doesn't have any automated tests and I don't know how to start, but if you have any ideas on how to do automated unit testing of GUI applications written in C/C++, please let me know, and I'll see if I can do anything about it.

So there are lots of things to do, so if you feel that you want to help, please let me know in a comment or mail, I'm open for knowledge sharing (I would like to learn C/C++/Debian packaging among other things, and I would be glad to help anyone to get involved with GNOME System Monitor development) or if you already know everything, you can teach me a lot.

system monitor progress 2

2011-11-29T17:40:00.000+02:00

After my Black Friday, during the weekend I have written some more system monitor patches, so I have 10 patches waiting for review (2 were there from earlier, so that's a total of 8 patches for this weekend), fixing more than 7 bugs. Yesterday I have been thinking about fixing something else, but I didn't want to queue up too many patches, so I have decided to clean up some more bugs. I have marked some duplicates (it's unbelievable that I still can find some), reassigned bugs reported for the gnome panel applet to the correct package (the panel applet is the gnome-applets' multiload component), closed some fixed ones and requested more information on two bugs, so currently the open bug count is down to 137, and if my patches will get accepted and committed, it should get down to 130. So System Monitor is getting better and better.
I have reported a new bug and also created a patch to fix it. I have stumbled upon it while browsing for gnome System Monitor patches. A guy with a 24-core system has made some screenshots of his System Monitor and it looked strange :) the window did not fit on his screen because of the 24 cores listed in 24 rows :). After reporting the bug, Chris has quickly responded that there's similar functionality in Control Center, so maybe we should copy the code over. I have tried, but got lots of warnings, so it took me a while to get the code working, but I have managed to do it, and now instead of listing the cores in separate rows, it just displays the processor model with a multiplier with the number of cores. Yet another minor improvement, but aesthetic issues must be taken care of, and they are very useful to get used to the code.

black Friday night

2011-11-26T21:11:00.001+02:00

Yesterday was the first Black Friday here in Romania. Some online stores were brave enough to try to have some huge discounts. One of the best local online IT stores I am used to buy PCs, laptops, and IT stuff from did send out a newsletter 12 hours before the promotion began (it began at 5:00 AM on Black Friday). I wanted to see if I can find anything at an affordable price, and thought lots of people will find out only later. I did not manage to get up at 5 AM but only around 7 AM and some products (e.g. an Android Tablet with 50% discount) have been already sold out. There were some quite nice discounts there, but I didn't really need anything fancy. After discussing with my wife, we had opted for another discounted Android tablet (I have been thinking about getting one and the night before she already mentioned that she would also like to have one) at a pretty reasonable price, and ordered it, along with 3 classic movies, like Independence Day, The Pursuit of Happyness and Gone in sixty seconds. When I got to work a bit later, the servers of the site were too busy to handle more requests. The site had more then 1.1 million visitors yesterday, 90.000 orders and sales with a value of 8 million euros. They have mentioned they had moments when the site had more then 100.000 simultaneous visitors, and as a comparison, they have mentioned their previous record from 2010 december, around 10.000 visitors.

My order should have been shipped today, but I have checked with the company's call center, and they told me that it should arrive on next Wednesday.

So that was my first Black Friday, but I think we will have many more as the companies found out that it's a huge opportunity to make huge profits.

But it was not over yet, it turned out to be really black only a bit later, when I got home, turned on my PC and saw that my ISP has disconnected my computer because I forgot to pay the bills :) So I could navigate their site, but other pages did not load. The site had a pay online option, but I have managed to convince myself (with a bit of help from my wife reading Lord of the rings behind my back) that I can survive one night without internet. I had some help pages cached in my browser and the gnome system monitor bug list, so I have started working, without any disruptions from instant messages, twitter, RSS, or anything else. I have added the last boot time to the System monitors System Information tab as requested in bug 430572, and I wanted to do more. I fortunately had GNOME DevHelp installed, so I had the GNOME developer docs for offline browsing, and it helped me a lot. Implemented two features/enhancements/whatever, and I'm really proud of them.

Not paying online turned out to be a good decision after all as I have been a lot more productive without Internet, and today when I have asked how much it does usually take for an online payment to get registered and my PC to get reconnected to the Internet, my ISP answered 24 hours, and as we have been there to pay the bills early morning, it took me less then 12 hours to get reconnected.

But let's see what I have done yesterday. This time in pictures, as I tend to talk/write too much.

I have added the last boot time to the System information tab of System monitor (as requested in bug #430572). The 'Booted:' label might not be the best, suggestions are welcome, I have found this in the bug report, but I don't really like it. Here's how it looks:

I have added an optional Priority column to the process list with a textual representation of the nice values of processes (as requested in bug #131802) for the people who are not aware of the meaning of 'nice', mostly called USERS. You can order the process list by priority (Very High, High, Normal, Low, Very Low). And it looks like this, check the last column (I have set my browser processes to high to have more diverse values in that column, usually almost all processes are Normal Priority, some system processes Very High, and one Very Low):

I have changed the Change Priority... menu item from the Edit menu and the process context menu to a submenu to let you choose from preset priority values (see above) and a Custom priority showing the renice dialog we had before for the Change Priority menuitem (as requested in bug #131803)

So that's all. But I think I am getting used to system monitor. I hope others will like it, and my patches will get accepted.

system monitor progress

2011-11-25T10:53:00.001+02:00

Since my last post I have made some progress with system monitor, but it's not that visible. System monitor had its interface created fully from code. So I have been thinking of porting it to an XML-based UI editable with glade, for various reasons, like reducing the amount of C code, to be easier to fully port to C++ as currently it is a mix of C and C++, and others. Chris has reported a bug in the meantime about porting the interface to use GtkGrid as a layout instead of boxes and tables, as they are deprecated in the latest GNOME. This seemed like a good pretext to do the migration to separate UI files, as it touches mostly the same parts of the code, so I have begun with this, and made two patches to port the preferences dialog and the priority changer dialog to separate XML files, and using only GtkGrids. I have managed to do it in two nights, and the result is quite nice:

for the preferences dialog, the C code for creating the interface is more than 200 lines shorter, replaced by a large XML, but easily editable with Glade.
for the priority changing dialog, it's around 40 lines less code, plus the changes in the interface file.

I have also been looking at bugs to close the fixed ones, and I am trying to implement more and more advanced things to get more familiar with the codebase, so if you have a bug that bothers you and which you would like to see fixed, please let me know in a comment, and I'll see if I can handle it. Porting to GtkGrid is not yet complete, there's still a lot to do there, but you can help me in selecting the next bug to fix :)

some more janitorial work

2011-11-17T11:19:00.001+02:00

Since my last post I have been doing some more janitorial work, marked some duplicates, reviewed and updated old patches, created some simple patches to fix some old bugs, closed some obsolete bugs, and the open bug count for system monitor in bugzilla is now at 158, so 20 more have been closed since my last post, and I have three patches pending. So that's a 20% improvement in the last two weeks, since I have started working on System Monitor (kudos to Chris Kuehl, the system monitor maintainer for reviewing my patches and committing them to git).

system monitor janitor

2011-11-08T13:15:00.001+02:00

So, a quick status update since I have started helping out in GNOME projects, especially gnome-system-monitor. I couldn't keep this to myself.
When I have started working on system monitor, there were 198 open bugs. During the weekend 6 have been closed (either fixed by Chris or by me), reducing the bug count to 192. Yesterday I have managed to do some janitorial work, duplicate checking, and fixing (fixed two more easy bugs with patches). I have entered GimpNet #bugs channel to ask someone to mark the duplicates I have found. As no one has answered to the message sent in the channel, I have asked the only person I personally knew, and he did help me out, and gave me rights to edit bugs (and volunteered to be my supervisor to make sure I will not do any crazy stuff). So now I'm able to triage bugs by myself :)
I have also forwarded one accessibility bug from Ubuntu, and today Chris, the maintainer of the gnome-system-monitor maintainer (kudos to him) has completed the janitorial work, by accepting, committing and pushing my fixes to master, thus reducing the number of open bugs to 180 (at the time of this writing). That is quite a nice improvement, given the average number of commits/fixes on gnome-system-monitor.

UPDATE 1 : some more janitorial work, and the bug count is down to 178

focusing on GNOME

2011-11-06T22:10:00.000+02:00

As you already might know from last weeks UDS, the focus in the next cycle of Ubuntu will be on performance and stability of the operating system as a whole. I want to help to achieve this. But since the issues between GNOME and Canonical or GNOME and Ubuntu and the talk at UDS-O discussing these, I wanted to give back as much as possible to GNOME, as I am a huge consumer and fan of GNOME. I am not a big fan of Gnome Shell. I am a Unity user, as I got used to it, and it's hard to switch now. But Ubuntu is still built on GNOME, and I can't see that change in the foreseeable future. So there's a lot of shared code. So I have decided (again) that I will try to get involved in GNOME upstream, helping Ubuntu with this, but also some other distributions, and GNOME as a platform. I am not a great hacker. I did not program C or C++ a lot, so the GNOME apps seem a bit distant for me. But I am a developer. So I can help there.
So this cycle I will focus on GNOME (developing and testing in Ubuntu, upstreaming from Ubuntu to GNOME, etc. ). I have started last week, during UDS. The first application I have chosen to improve was gnome-system-monitor, as that's quite a visible app on the desktop (I use it daily), but got a bit neglected in the last years. There have been 6 commits to the source (src directory containing actual code) during 2010. Since then the situation has changed a bit, gnome-system monitor has a new maintainer, who seems a bit more active, but still, he needs help. So I have started checking the bugs (currently almost 200 open) and fixing the ones I can. This weekend I have submitted 5 patches, reviewed an older patch, triaged some bugs (found some duplicates). Some of the fixes have already been integrated (the new maintainer has committed some of them quite fast), and the maintainer also started to fix some bugs, so we have fixed 6 bugs in one weekend, some of my patches are still waiting for review (removed some obsolete documentation and updated the existing to match the current interface, improved the close time and reduced hard drive access on close, minor UI issues), some bugs should be closed as duplicates (3) and some bugs do not reproduce anymore (2) with the latest version of gnome-system-monitor, so if someone can confirm that these are indeed fixed, we can close out another 8 bugs, reducing the bug count with 14 in one week-end. That means almost 7%, for the ones who like numbers and stats.
So, all-in-all, GO-GO-GNOME :)

4th and 5th day of UDS

2011-11-05T19:45:00.002+02:00

Another exhausting week of planning and brainstorming on the next Ubuntu release is over.
On Thursday I have been listening to some sessions, but looking through the schedule I didn't remember anything really interesting, except the two sessions about improving upgrades. People agreed that this cycle the upgrade should get as stable and as robust as possible, to minimize the number of upgrade failures, because now we'll have people upgrading from 10.04 LTS and 11.10, and both cases should work without problems. Delaying the distribution upgrade available dialog one week after the release has also been brought up in the discussion, and I think this will help a lot in reducing the number of upgrade failures caused by servers overloaded, or upgrade requested when the user's mirror is not yet in sync, so it does not have the latest release yet. Another great idea was to add an option to the installer to complete a failed dist-upgrade, which should be get implemented this cycle. So these are great news.

On Friday there have been some really interesting discussions about:

improving multi-monitor support, which has lots of problems right now. The devs have demoed a PC with six displays connected, and seems to work quite fine. Hopefully the setup did not take long. Last week I had to set up my Oneiric install with a projector, and it was quite hard to do it properly. But here's the teaser of what it could be like working on multiple monitors:
community bug involvement, encouraging the community to report proper bugs, ask them if they want to help in improving Ubuntu and do not bug them if they don't want to, helping people to understand the bug workflows, how do bugs get resolved
accomplishments and trophies, a really interesting idea to reward users for everything they do, and suggesting similar tasks they can do to help them getting involved even more with the community, or just understanding/using their Ubuntu install more effectively
promoting 64-bit images has been discussed, and it seems like those will be promoted, as most people will be able to use it anyway
the lock screen experience, which should be improved to better match the desktop experience, so unlocking the screen and user switching should also use LightDM
improving the boot speed for the desktop as it is not as good as it used to be
bug and quality metrics - this was a very interesting talk, I did find out about lots of graphs and sites which are used to track the current progress of the cycle and the stats for bugs. The only problem I have with these is that I don't understand why there are so many of them, scattered around various sites - a suggestion to cope with this was to display them on the Launchpad Project pages, which seems like a very good idea for me.

The lightning talks were also quite interesting, I did hear about a new tool I would really be interested in, unfortunately I haven't found it yet (it's called TroublR, if you have its website address, please let me know)

So that was a long week, and I'm already looking forward to see the results of the discussions becoming real. This cycle will really be about performance and quality. There's a huge focus on quality and performance now, so if it's in focus, and there are no great new features to be implemented, I think it will be possible to have the best release ever. I know I say this about every release, but that's what I think. Ubuntu is getting better and better, even if there are some problems with communication (which should be solved), because people do care about Ubuntu. They have different ideas, but the goal of every single developer and community member is to have a computer which is "just working".

2nd and 3rd day of UDS

2011-11-03T00:58:00.003+02:00

Another two days of remote participation to UDS. I'm starting to regret I did not attend in person, and start feeling like before the last two releases (I have also attended UDS either remotely or in person) - the next one is going to be the best one of all the Ubuntu releases.
The headlines of the 2nd day:

Listened to the theming consistency session walking through the theming inconsistencies of the default apps, like strange toolbar of Software Center, strange design of Nautilus, and listened to suggestions on how to improve consistency between different toolkits' widgets
Listened to the elementary and Ubuntu collaboration session, really excited to hear that the Ubuntu folks are really interested in the elementary apps and maybe even getting some of their apps as default in Ubuntu (not for Precise however, as it's an LTS, and elementary apps are work in progress)

The headlines of the 3rd day:

Listened to discussion about signing in to Ubuntu with Ubuntu One credentials, which reminds me of Chrome OS, but I would really like this, especially if properly implemented with syncing the home folder and all the settings, so you could login to any computer just like it were yours, and you would log in to your own personalized desktop ... integrated with OneConf, this would simply solve the problem of installing the same OS on multiple PCs/laptops and customizing each one (apps, themes, preferences) separately.
Listened to brainstorming about the launchpad profile page and heard about some really interesting ideas. The fun here was that it was a brainstorming session, with putting post-its on a board, and as the audiostream did not help us (the ones attending remotely over IRC/icecast) the ones attending in person skyped the IRC participants who wanted to see what's happening to show them via the webcam what's happening in the room. So that's what I call a community effort :)
The session about Calendar integration was a bit sad to listen to, as I understood (hopefully misunderstood it) to have a Calendar application some people have considered it better to design, implement and test one from scratch then helping out the elementary calendar, Maya with some design ideas and some contributors (e.g. the ones who should be responsible for writing the Ubuntu Calendar app) - but these thoughts have disappeared later in the default apps session, where it was discussed that Precise won't have a calendaring application by default, as there is no drop-in replacement for the evolution calendar.
After that, an interesting discussion followed about Thunderbird enhancements, with some interesting ideas on how to simplify the user-interface.
In the afternoon I have been following many session notes, like GTK version, text-free boot, power management (but mostly only reading to see whether there is anything interesting I could do there, but these are expert topics, these are not for me), but there was an interesting session about the future of the Papercuts project and I was glad to see the ideas on how to revive the project
and at the end of the day there was an interesting session (at least based on the note) about Ubuntu on phones about problems related to porting and using Ubuntu on phones, but I have only read the notes, as I have been paying attention to the default apps session, to see what'll happen on the default apps front: there was a long discussion about Banshee vs. Rhythmbox, and as far as I have understood, Rhythmbox will return. The remote desktop application will be replaced, there was a discussion about getting some sysinfo tool, but the outcome was that probably what's required will be added to a panel from system settings. The newest GNOME additions like Sushi (for previewing files) and GNOME documents have been refused as these are using clutter and are not absolutely required apps. Some thoughts about recovery tools on the liveCD have been discussed, and probably some links will be added for easier desktop recoveries from liveCDs, as this is already possible in some cases, only the methods are not quite newbie-friendly ones.

Tomorrow's also gonna be an interesting day, with sessions about printer setup in GNOME control center 3, libreoffice global menubar issues, accomplishments and boot speed. Looking forward for another interesting day.

1st day of UDS-P

2011-11-01T12:02:00.001+02:00

Unfortunately I could not attend UDS-P in person, but I'm remotely participating to as many sessions as possible.

So here's what has happened yesterday, at the 1st day:

in the keynote Mark described what happened in the last 6 months, with some really interesting stats, like 110000 new Ubuntu One users since the release of Ubuntu One for Windows, then he mentioned that the Precise should be about stability, speed, and pixel-perfectness. Then he has talked about some futuristic plans about having Ubuntu 14.04 on many devices, like phones, tablets, televisions, etc, which is really a great idea, and seems really feasible, as Ubuntu already has an ARM build (and the Linaro team is helping a lot to improve it by testing it on ARM-based development boards).
I have attended (listened to) the session about the Software Center Roadmap, where mvo described the last 6 months for Software Center, and thanked all the contributors (including me, he even mentioned my name :) ) and has ran through some ideas discussing what could be implemented in this cycle, but the focus is really performance (e.g. for start the startup time has been already improved from 11.2s in Oneiric to 1.3s in Precise) and stability (unit-testing)
In the afternoon I have attended to the session about Unity integration. To prove Mark's statement "Ease of use is not incompatible with power users" people have been asking for Unity progress indication for some command-line tools like apt-get, wget, and rsync (these are tools which are not used by an average user)
I have also attended a session about control center cleanup, but there was nothing really interesting there.

As for today, I'm really looking forward to the session about theming and styling, meet the designers session, another software-center roadmap session, crash database session, common printing dialog (but this probably will be postponed to the Q-release). In the afternoon it'll be interesting to hear about the thunderbird enhancements planned, community bug involvement, community Unity design involvement, signing in to Ubuntu with Ubuntu1 credentials and the last but probably the most old problem discussed will be text-free boot.

So I'm looking forward to this huge list of interesting topics, and also the elemtary guys have promised some elementary-upstream (GNOME, Ubuntu) collaboration and integration session, which sounds like promising, as I'm really a fan of the elementary project, and would like some of them ideas/apps being used in Ubuntu/GNOME.

Preparing People for Precise Pangolin

2011-10-18T15:04:00.000+03:00

Oneiric is out, but you already know that. But the good news is that Precise Pangolin, aka 12.04 LTS is already open for development.
You can help to make the Precise precisely the best Ubuntu release ever in many ways, and we have almost six months to do it:

by reporting any bugs you may find in Oneiric, or the current version of Ubuntu you are using. Even if those will not get fixed in the release you are using, they might be fixed for Precise
by testing and using Ubuntu on all your computers
by participating in the Ubuntu compatibility testing. The total length of the tests is around 15 minutes, and you only have to answer Yes/No question about whether the test was successful or not. After this, you can submit the test results to the hardware compatibility database to let other people know how well does Ubuntu work on the computer you do have (to help them decide when they want to purchase a PC for Ubuntu)
by talking about Ubuntu and its advantages (and of course, disadvantages, but make sure you keep these two properly balanced - we all have to admit, Ubuntu is not perfect, YET) to your friends, relatives or other communities by either using the marketing material available or creating (and submitting it to SpreadUbuntu) your own to help you.
by reading the documentation available on your computer, and reporting problems, typos, grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, bad screenshots, anything you think is not right in there
by fixing bugs, if you are a developer, or if you are not, but you are interested in. If you just want to begin with fixing, look for bugs tagged with the bitesize tag, bugs suitable for beginning Ubuntu development. You can also use Harvest to find the low-hanging fruit to start fixing bugs and get your name known in the Ubuntu community
by joining the BugSquad and helping in processing the huge amount of incoming bug reports, asking questions from the reporters, re-assigning bugs to the right packages, verifying if bugs reported as New can be reproduced on your computer using the steps described (and marking them as Confirmed and Also affecting you if they are reproducible)

I have already started fixing the easiest bugs on Earth for Precise (some typos and out-dated instructions in ubuntu-docs, another set of typos in ubuntu-docs, some documentation problems and other minor issues in Software Sources), and on last Saturday I have managed to fix 9 of them, in one day (I think that's my personal record) :) and one is even getting fixed in Oneiric, as it has been considered important enough to be fixed.

So it's not hard to get involved. So don't just stay there and wait for other people to find, report, process, and fix all the bugs, but get involved and help us do it. There's plenty of work to do for you too.

Oneiric is out

2011-10-13T17:22:00.002+03:00

It's release day again. Oneiric has been released. See the online tour here, where you can test a very small subset of the features you'll have after you install it, but still, it shows a bit from Ubuntu's elegance.
Congrats to the release team, and all the awesome people who have contributed to this release.

bye Steve

2011-10-06T14:07:00.000+03:00

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle. (Steve Jobs, 1955-2011)

RIP Steve Jobs. Thanks for everything.

thanks

2011-09-29T10:34:00.000+03:00

I just wanted to say thanks again to Canonical, because they have invited me again with sponsoring to the next Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida, and I have felt flattered again. I'm really sorry that I can't attend this time because of personal reasons, changing jobs, a.s.o. and I'm also sorry I can't meet the nice guys I've met last time and the ones I have not met yet, I hope I'll have the chance to do it next time.

I'll try to do my best to attend remotely and take part of it as much as I can, as I have seen what it's like to be there, and it is MOTIVATING. Unbelievably motivating. I guess for me it's just one of those feelings and experiences people never forget. So a big thanks to Canonical again.

skype and android development on Ubuntu

2011-09-14T15:37:00.001+03:00

This is not a usual development status, just one strange experience I had today.
So here are the facts:

I am an Android developer.
I do use Ubuntu.
To use android debugging on phones from Ubuntu, I have to restart the adb server with sudo (there is another solution on the net suggesting me to change some udev rules, but that way the computer I'm working on does not start up, so that's excluded).
I do use Skype to communicate with people (not so cool, as Skype is not open-source, but it works quite well).
If I have a sudo-ed adb process running, and an Emulator started from AVD manager, people on the other end of the Skype call won't be able to hear me.

So I suppose you won't be able to talk to people on skype neither if you meet the same conditions. So just close the emulator, and try again.

The strange thing was that on the sound preferences input level indicator I have seen that my microphone works, but people have reported that they can not hear me. My luck was that I have clicked the Applications tab on the sound preferences dialog, and have seen that I have two QEMU apps shown there, one with a microphone icon, the other one with a strange media player icon. Anyway, I thought that closing QEMU might help, and it did. So I have solved the problem in 2 minutes. So use this knowledge with wisdom to solve it even faster if this happens to you too.

36th week of 2011

2011-09-12T12:34:00.002+03:00

Another quick weekly development summary:

On the update-manager front I've made two minor fixes, one to fix a crash caused by a GLib change, and another one to fix a simple warning message displayed only in the terminal when quickly changing selected packages to see their changelogs.

Beside these two really minor fixes, I have made a useful fix, a bigger one this time, to cache the changelogs for the packages in update-manager. This is useful because between the updates usually there are more built from the same source package, thus having the same changelog. So by caching the changelogs by URL, we only download the changelog for the packages coming from the same source package once, after that we only read it from the file-based cache, so it's much faster, as the changelog doesn't have to be redownloaded. I have checked, and for normal-length changelogs the loading time on the first time is almost the same as before, but on subsequent requests the loading time is less then 1/6th of the time required to download on my configuration.

On software-center, as the GTK3 interface will be shipped with Oneiric, to be released in 31 days, there is a lot to do. So I have fixed some bugs I was able to, and which did not require translations/docs update as we are in UI Freeze:

Fixed a crash caused by an int being used instead of float for initialization by converting to float
Added a frame to the dependency removal dialogs dependency list, as it did not have one
Fixed a problem caused by a recent change in Gdk
Set a useful minimum size for the software-center window, as it did have a very small one
Fixed a crash caused by not checking for None
Removed one of the duplicate labels 'You need to install this app before you can review it'

So that's quite a good progress for me, I'm proud of it.

development summary for august

2011-09-04T14:38:00.001+03:00

So let's see what I've done since my last post, more than a month ago. I've been on vacation for two weeks, and I did not program anything during that time. But when I have been around the computer, I have made some easy fixes, as usual.
I've made most of my fixes and triaging in update-manager, as usual:

fixed a bug my code has caused
a string-fix for clearer instructions
fixed a bug causing update-manager to crash when the Unity gir is not installed
and also fixed two bugs caused by the transition to GTK3

On the software-center front, as GTK3 is going live with Oneiric, I've also made some small fixes:

the about box's close button was not working, so I have fixed it
the developer site link on the application details was displayed as a button, changed it to a link
current day was not labeled as 'Today' in History, so implemented it the way it was in usc-gtk2
the help menu was referring to a generic Software Center, branded it to Ubuntu Software Center

Beside all of this, I have been working a bit on my "games collection", have been looking for the best framework/toolkit/language to use, but I think I will write a separate post on my adventures while searching. For now, let's say, that I'm leaning towards Vala, and I don't know yet what framework I will use, but I think it'll be Clutter.

I'm still actively triaging in the sparetime, I'm in the top ten in the five-a-day-ers weekly stats, and yesterday and today have been triaging old system-config-printer bugs and jockey bugs. It was fun, I have been reading a lot of code, just to find out that the bug reported has been fixed, and searching a lot in the logs, to find when it got fixed.

That's all for now.

mid-summer development summary

2011-07-27T11:47:00.000+03:00

Long time, no see. I've been busy with development, work, family, traveling, but you all know what summer is like :) But I did not forget to contribute, whenever I had the time, I have squashed some bugs, and when I had a bit less, I had only triaged them.
On the Ubuntu part, I have made lots of small fixes (and almost all of them are already merged), some in update-manager

showing decimals in package sizes in MB
also check for package support status from -updates in ubuntu-support-status to fix bug #622489
simple string fixes in update-manager for bugs #410310, #461780 and #537942
ordering the packages by name in the dist-upgrade for bug #764831
displaying more detailed info about when the package information was last updated for bug #747336 (the last two just got approved by mvo, while I was writing this post -- I have made these fixes yestarday late in the evening)

others in software-center

and a single one in both, as it was coming from aptdaemon, their common backend, I've fixed a very common overflowerror for bug #771678 with 85 duplicates at the time of this writing, and still counting.

In the meantime I have tried to get involved with the elementary development, as they are really doing a very pleasant and useful operating system, and I respect them, because they have a dream, and see that many applications don't fit into that dream, so they have started to re-imagine the most used applications, and re-implement them to fit into their dreams, and into an operating system with a consistent and well-designed, usable interface. It'll require lots of work, but the elementary idea has great success, so it's motivating for the people who got involved. So I have tried to help them out, and made some fixes for marlin, the elementary file-manager.

I have been checking lots of package management related bugs, like ones in software-center, aptdaemon, update-manager, and update-notifier, and now the number of open update-manager bugs is below 1000 (around 990), whereas I remember it being well above 1000, somewhere around 1070, see the progress from the last month on the image to the right (I'm not the only one who contributed to this, this is the work of the great bug triagers and developers involved in Ubuntu).

In the meantime, I have been thinking, that maybe I should apply for an Ubuntu Membership, as I think I have made sustained and significant contributions to Ubuntu (of course, I might be wrong). So please, if you do agree, do not hesitate to write a short testimonial on my wiki page.

mid-week status

2011-06-02T13:30:00.000+03:00

Yesterday, while trying to find the place where an update-manager problem should be fixed, I have stumbled upon a simple synaptic bug showing a dialog about the lack of administrative privileges when running synaptic --help from the terminal to see the command-line arguments of synaptic. This is ridiculous: do I have to see and click Close on a dialog complaining about no administrative privileges? So checked out the code, pretty easy change, moved the command-line argument parsing and showing help right before the administrative privileges checks, and proposed a merge.
I have checked out the list of synaptic bugs to see whether there are any more bugs I could squash, and found an old one about the ugly statusbar synaptic has, because unlike other apps, it does have a border around the statusbar text. See a comparison between gedit's status bar and synaptic's status bar:

So I have removed the border and added a bit of padding to make it look better, and now it looks like this (the bottom one is synaptic):

While looking through the bugs, I have also found an easy string-fix bug, so I have decided to fix that to, because now we're early in the cycle, and as it requires translating, it needs more time to get into the release.

In the evening I have tried to run auto-upgrade-tester to do some profiling and stats why do upgrades take a long time, but it's hard to get it working. First I could not get kvm virtualization to work on my HP Core2Duo laptop, so I had to work on another laptop. I have installed everything, but auto-upgrade-tester threw an exception about networking, and after googling, I have found that I also need the kvm-pxe package to get everything working. This could be added as a dependency of the auto-upgrade-tester if it really does require it. So after all this, a virtual machine seemed to be up and running, but I did not know what to do with it, as it did not have an interface. I have connected through VNC to see a terminal password prompt, but I have not specified neither a username nor a password, and I could not guess the password, so I gave up. I'll ask someone with a bit more experience to help me out with this.

UDS wrap-up

2011-05-27T16:56:00.001+03:00

Here's the post I've promised about UDS:

When I have arrived there, it was a bit strange, I did not know anybody, I did not feel like someone who can really contribute to the sessions, as I don't feel like someone who can implement anything interesting, design anything interesting, or do anything but triaging.

I've realized there are many ways you can contribute:

review a one-liner fix
report a bug
triage a bug
fix a bug
design something
translate some strings
measure performance
test on your own hardware
suggest Ubuntu to everyone, but do tell them both the strengths and the weaknesses - they have the right to know
constructively criticize the overall system or certain packages to help the developers improve it
and many more

And I can help in many of these. I've already got some work items for Oneiric, which I don't know how I'm gonna handle, but I've suggested a session, I have led that session, and I have to carry on investigating :) You can also help, find the area where you can contribute, and help Ubuntu to get better, to better help you accomplish your own tasks, and with that you can also help other people.

But back to UDS: it was an exhausting, inspiring, interesting, wonderful week, I've met many wonderful people, seen them working, heard them talking. I've seen how inspired they are, how hard they work, how they accept their weaknesses, how they overcome them, how they can separate work and fun in spite of mostly working from home and the most important one of all, how much they like what they do, and that they don't really want to stop doing it :) So to keep this as short as possible: thanks everyone for being there and making UDS at Budapest a really wonderful week from every possible point of view.

But as a picture can mean more than a thousand words, see a few thousand words in pictures:
Almost everyone attending (some people are above the ubuntu logo and you can't see them)

We are having fun, the Ubuntu all stars are playing:

If you're interested, you can check out the complete gallery:)

20th week of 2011

2011-05-27T16:56:00.000+03:00

Last week I've triaged lots of bugs, marked duplicates, and also made some small fixes:

in Software-center I've made some small string improvements to display more user-friendly messages for the application-use count string and the message displayed when trying to view reviews without a network connection - merged and released :)
there was a bug in the software-center search resulting in different results being displayed for searches with and without trailing whitespace characters, so I've fixed that, it was an easy one-liner - merged and released :)
in checkbox I've seen a bug about the option characters for yes/no being a/b - rather unconfortable, so with a bit of struggling and learning some python tricks and differences from other languages I've used (like the condition in the for loop isn't reevaluated in each iteration) - thanks Jeff and Marc for guiding me, I've fixed this to use a more natural y/n approach
I've tried to do something useful like implementing a feature from the wiki specs (also reported as a bug) for more useful suggestions when no results are found for a given search - I've made the changes, committed them to my own branch, to continue working on it later, and when two days later I wanted to check it, I've seen that it's already merged and released - the strange thing is that I haven't even submitted a merge proposal - so thanks Gary for reviewing and merging without a merge proposal

Also note that I did not write anything about the 19th week, as I have been at the UDS that week, and I've written daily posts on that. And I will post a short summary a bit later, because it does deserve a separate post.

5th day at uds

2011-05-16T13:54:00.000+03:00

Let's see what happened on the last day of the UDS.
In the morning we had an interesting talk about speeding up updates and upgrades, we have expected only a few people, but there were quite many of them. Based on some preliminary data collected by mvo, we've started discussing how can updates be improved, and we've had a quite nice talk about what should we profile, who has to check what, and hopefully the results will lead to a lot faster upgrade process.
We've had some interesting lightning talks, and after that a discussion on automated testing of ubiquity, and also collecting test results from various apps to one place, to have an overview of the release status (tests failed, succeeded, etc.)
The last talk was about the Default Apps selection, were we've decided that computer-janitor will be dropped, and there was a quite long discussion on dropping LibreOffice from the CD, but there was no clear decision on that. I'm really hoping it won't get dropped. That would me a major problem in my opinion.

After all this, we've had a very good party, starring the Ubuntu All Stars team... they really rock. Played some songs like Wagon wheel and Soulshine, some really nice songs, which I haven't heard before.

4th day at uds

2011-05-12T19:36:00.000+03:00

So, let's see what happened today, at the 4th day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit for planning Oneiric Ocelot and beyond at Budapest.

In the morning I went to a session about brainstorming on how to show localized and user-friendly release announcements in ubuntu, instead of the current implementation, which just shows a slightly formatted, and very long text with no details about the new version, only its name. It also mentions that Ubuntu is a Linux distribution, which probably you should know, as you're updating from an earlier Ubuntu, or if you don't know already, you don't really care, so there's no point of showing it. The suggestion is to have a nice little html page showing some of the features why you'd like to update, with links on it to be able to see more on the web. It has also been discussed that the system will check for release updates (currently every 48 hours - I don't want this) only when checking for updates (by default weekly).

After that I went to a discussion about the default email client, where people have decided, that Thunderbird will be the default, if it meets certain conditions (these will get fixed/implemented) until a certain date (alpha2/3). The discussion was pretty nice, with some people arguing that evolution might be large and slow, but with GNOME3, it has been improved a lot, some parts were completely rewritten. The only thing I'm not aware of, whether it'll be available in its fully-updated glory (GNOME 3) in the official repos (not PPAs) to be able to compare it, and make the decision also depend on that.

Then I went to an extremely short session about LightDM, an alternate desktop manager (displayed at login, the app responsible for requesting your credentials and starting the components required to have a functional desktop). That was extremely short, because I had the feeling that the decision was made way before, nobody argued, and we've discussed everything in 25 minutes. A developer from Canonical, the one who has developed it, will be working full-time on LightDM to fix everything and complete it. Hopefully this will speed up the startup a bit.

After the lunch, I wanted to go to the advanced partitioner redesign session, but I have decided in the last minute that I'll go to the GNOME healthcheck session. It was a good decision. It seemed to me a very tensioned discussion, between Canonical as a Company vs GNOME as a Foundation. But in the end it turned out to be fine, although the discussion ended a bit too early, with the decision that both parties should talk and admit their own mistakes and help eachother at getting better. It was kindof strange to hear about the different arguments (also blogged on the net some time ago) about Canonical and the Ubuntu Community not contributing enough upstream, to have some upstream influence and help from inside GNOME. That is true, it was admitted that Canonical has its own vision and all developers are paid to make it become reality. But GNOME people were also right, as that vision includes GNOME as the underlying platform, like the toolkit used, apps used, etc. So Canonical should have some developer resources assigned to making GNOME better. But the only problem I had with that was that GNOME as a community is not a really welcoming place for new contributors, as patches/comments/bugs are left without response in many cases, and GNOME people have admitted, that this is a problem indeed, because of the lack of resources, so new contributors have to push harder, ping people, etc. So everyone has its own problems, we have to live with those, and try to set them aside, also set the differences aside, and collaborate. I really like what someone has said not so long ago, not because of who said that, I don't care, it's just a coincidence:

We think that to people getting together who have exactly the same values, exactly the same way of working, exactly the same interests, exactly the same goals, we think that's collaboration. It's not. It's teamwork. Real collaboration is when you bring together people who have different goals, different constraints, differencies, and they find a way to work together. (Mark Shuttleworth)

A bit later there was a practical session of reviewing (mostly GNOME) patches with the GNOME people, which should be upstreamed or dropped, because they were also implemented upstream.
That was all for today, we'll have one last practice this evening for tomorrow night's Ubuntu All Stars :)

3rd day at uds

2011-05-11T20:28:00.001+03:00

Yesterday in the evening we had a Linaro Showcase, with nice demos of what Linaro is working with, like robots, media centers with the size of a credit card, mini-atx sized boards, quick-booting boards, boards running qt, and stuff like that, all with ARM processors. The one I like the most was the credit-card sized media player (the thickness was the only issue, around 5-10 creditcards thick, but the other sizes were ok), and maybe the almost same-sized board running android 2.3 and angry birds on a FullHD screen :).

Today was also a long and exhausting day, with a session on printer-config, which was a bit interesting, as the outcome was for some people that the only solution is to use THE system-config-printer, without doing anything, without integrating it in the system settings, without separating the ui from the backend, so basically without doing anything, as that is THE best, and other similar solutions "most probably" do not want to share code... as I have understood, all based on assumptions.
After that an interesting session on Dual Monitor support, switching between modes, use-cases for using multiple monitors, and things like that. Then a session on LibreOffice packaging, mostly about the packaging problems of LO.

After lunch some interesting plenaries in the Ballroom, the one I have liked the most was a Winetricks related one, as I started thinking, when will wine get proper UI integration, like propert theming, and stuff, and also when will that be integrated in the Ubuntu Software Center.

In the afternoon I've been to a session about better apport-bug reports, and duplicate detection, which will reduce the amount of work needed to be done by bug triagers, like me.
After that I went to a session on connecting the LibreOffice upstream and Ubuntu communities, really intersting brainstorming mostly about what should be done and about those things not being on the priority list of the upstream LibreOffice. Nice time to find out how many opportunities there are to get involved as a dev in LibreOffice development with tasks that are not marked as Easy Hacks, and are not on the priority list of the LibreOffice community, so you won't have conflicts that someone has already submitted a patch for what you're working on. Not that it would be that easy to fix the same thing in a package with many-many lines of code, modules and bugs.
At the end of the day there was a session about network-manager, mostly integrating per-connection based firewall (with ufw) and proxy profiles in the network-manager.

That was this day. In the meantime (or since yesterday) I have been actively thinking about an interesting idea: writing a new window-decorator (most probably in Vala) having the titlebar "borrowed" from Unity: that way we would have the buttons there, we would have the app name there, and also the menus (although I would show it by default) for non-maximized windows. And as in the top panel there's also room for indicators, that would be ideal for windicators too, just by having a separate category of indicators (let's just call them windicators) which would appear only in the window decorations if the window is not maximized, and would go up in the top panel before/after/... the regular indicators. I don't know how to program in Vala, I don't know anything about window decorators, but seems a fun thing to work on. :) And for the people who are laughing about how I'm gonna move the windows if the titlebar contains the menues and indicators and stuff : the titlebar does not have to be exactly 24 pixels. You can set it e.g. to 36 px and have the things that react (menu, indicator) in the bottom part, and the draggable area in the upper 12px ... that should be enough to grab. But that could be customizable in the theme, if you want to have that smaller, larger, etc. What do you think?

2nd day at uds

2011-05-10T20:02:00.000+03:00

I do start this post with yesterday, as I have written the last post yesterday, around this time. After that, we've had a great time at the Meet&Greet party, with food, drinks, people, chats, and after that, the musicians started jamming at around 9 PM, until midnight. It was really fun.
In the morning my Android phone - happens sometimes - forgot to ring, and I woke up 10 minutes before the first session, so I got a bit late :)
Started the day with the QA roundtable, to discuss with the QA which sessions were interesting yesterday, and which we should attend today, to have a QA person at the sessions that could involve QA.
The next session I've attended was about the compiz plans, really interesting about how to involve new developers, and further compiz plans. Some of you might already know about the new modal dialog stylesheets that were shown in a screenshot:

Really nice, although as you can see it's pretty much a work-in-progress, as it needs design (the best would be to have the top part of the dialog be in the same color as the dialog itself, as now there is a slight difference), and at first it has confused me... the parent window (the window which the modal dialog came from) looks like a frozen window, on which the Force Quit dialog usually appears. See the session notes for more details.
After that I've attended a session about sharing files with people, discussing different use-cases for sharing, like Collaboration, Collection and Distribution. It was mostly about discussing what do these mean, and there was one opinion about these should be the same on the UI side to avoid confusion like in the case of sleep/shutdown/hibernate, where the effect is the same (you computer will not work until you press the power button/open the lid again) but there are too many options presented to the user without explaining what the difference really is (and maybe the user doesn't care, so there should be only one - perfectly functional - option). See the notes for more details.
After that I have been waiting for a session related to bug triaging, but unfortunately, it was removed five minutes before it should have been started, and I have only refreshed the page after the first 5 minutes have passed to see that there'll be no session in that room. And I haven't been the only one, and I have informed the others that there'll be no session there. So there are some issues with UDS, but it's mostly fine. I've than relocated myself to the unity-testing session, which was interesting, describing what should be tested in unity and compiz, and how should this be done.
After the lunch there were some interesting Linaro plenary sessions about challenges, testing, servers and relation to android, but I think this might have been better after a general introduction to Linaro as a platform, or maybe a demo, which we will have tonight (Linaro showcase), so maybe it would've been better to reschedule these plenaries to tomorrow, and have those talks today. But that's only a personal opinion.
In the afternoon I've attended the session on reimplementing screensaver, which at the beginning of the talk seemed like an easy task for everyone, but at the end it turned out that there's most likely only one man who can do it right now (but he is willing to help anyone) and he is already too busy for the whole oneiric cycle (the main compiz developer, smsPillaz)
At the end of the day I went to the discussion on the keyboard indicator, which turned out to be a very complex topic, as there are many issues you have to solve, and you have to design the whole thing with these issues in mind. These were a bit hard to understand for me, as I only use the keyboard indicator for switching keyboard layout, but there are some people who need more complex settings exposed there, like setting the input method, the input mode, and other things I didn't really understand, as I didn't see them. At the end there was a small discussion around unifying the show current layout thing with an onboard screen which would be awesome in my opinion.
So that was all for today, I think.

1st day at uds

2011-05-09T19:56:00.001+03:00

First day sessions are over. The introduction keynote was interesting, about past, present and future, collaboration vs teamwork, the vision of ubuntu (~200 million installs in 4 years) and past failures.
No sensational announcements were made. People seem to miss those, as they didn't have anything to criticize. OK, maybe we could count as a sensational announcement Jono Bacon's (Ubuntu Community Manager) DRINK RESPONSIBLY or Mark's question/announcement on how to pronounce Oneiric (the codename for the next Ubuntu version is Oneiric Ocelot). The possible variations included One-Eye-Rick, On-A-Rick, Annoy-Rick, and other versions, illustrated by a group of volunteers, and of course, Rick (Spencer).

I've attended a session about having dejadup as the default backup app and one about user assistance, which turned out to be about the strategic goals of the docs team. Interesting talk, I saw that as related to the Ubuntu Help and Support center already discussed at udsl, only it was mentioned as a whole new idea.

In the afternoon I've been at a talk about Suspend vs Hibernate, Bug control membership policy for groups, and Online software catalog. The last one was extremely interesting, and will be a nice thing to have :).

The first day it's not over, as we're going to have a Meet and Greet event soon, and after that, a practice session for all the musicians :) I'm waiting for that.

I still feel a little strange, I still don't know lots of people, except my roommate, a QT Mobile dev, and a Python serverside developer. They are nice people. But one person recognized me from my badge as the one who marked lots of duplicates :) Yeah, that's me :) So now I'm heading to the meet and greet event, to know some new people :)

18th week of 2011

2011-05-08T21:54:00.000+03:00

Last week I haven't done anything really interesting, only triaging, and checking out the blueprints to see which sessions I'd like to attend at UDS. I've arrived here, I've checked in, mostly without problems, and waiting for the summit to begin. I've got a strange feeling, don't really know what I'm doing here, I've seen many people, and people seem to know eachother, but I don't really know anybody. OK, that's not true, I've seen people on photos, and I know them, but they don't know me. So it's kindof strange. :) But I hope that'll change during the week. So this week's gonna be a post-rich week, as I'll try to blog about interesting talks, decisions, and other things, which I'll consider interesting.

17th week of 2011

2011-05-05T11:36:00.000+03:00

Last week was a long one. I have duplicated many-many bugs, as Natty was released, because many people tried to update, and failed for various update problems. I have seen some comments (which I have to agree): don't update unless you know some terminal commands or you have someone near you, who knows them. So the update has caused some serious problems, for some people because of Unity, for others because of the new X server included, for others because of some samba4 update problems, or for other driver-related issues (blcr, oss4, etc).

Also, UDS O is being planned, there are many interesting plans, I guess it will be an interesting conference. I have already selected the sessions I'd like to attend, but I'll have to select some more for the hours I don't have anything scheduled. The sessions I'm most attracted to are the desktop-related ones, like lightdm, screensaver, gnome3, default applications, etc.

Last week I have made a small, but fun fix for software-center, an interface-candy, but it's still waiting for approval: you can see in the Featured and what's new carousels a nice fade-out fade-in transition every 15 seconds, but when you click any of the page dots, the page changes instantly. I have added a faster fade-out fade-in transition when the user selects a page, so it's almost instant, but it's nicer than just have the apps replaced. The details you can see in bug #633193 and my branch attached. It's waiting for review, probably people are busy with something else right now.

the Natty Narwhal is live and alive

2011-04-29T11:14:00.000+03:00

Ubuntu 11.04, aka Natty Narwhal was released yesterday. There were many blog posts, tweets, news headlines and facebook messages around the topic, so you all know about it now. If not, then listen carefully: it's brand new, it's useful, it's user-friendly, it's free, it's good. But this is only a personal review and opinion. If you would like an expert's review, read the review at ExpertReviews.co.uk, it's got 5 stars.

If you still don't believe it, go, see it for yourself at ubuntu.com, check out the features of ubuntu, and if you are not yet convinced to try it, see why you should use ubuntu, or see what's new if you have used Ubuntu in the past.

If all these did not convince you, please don't be shy, try it. You have many options:

you can try it online in your browser from our current operating system for 15 minutes (restricted because of the hight demand), but sometimes this service seems to be down, most probably also due to the high demand
you can install it from Windows, as you would install any application, you will be able to select which OS to use on startup (ubuntu or windows), and if you don't like Ubuntu, you can uninstall it from windows, just as you would uninstall a regular application
you can download Ubuntu and burn it to a CD or write it to a USB drive, then start your computer with the USB drive/CD in it and you'll see what Ubuntu looks like, without having to install it at all. You can browse, listen to music, edit/create documents, and you can do almost anything you would be able to do if you had it installed (almost anything because of the limited space/read-only nature of the USB drive/CD)

Now let's get to the facts if you still can't decide:

What you can do with it:

Browse the internet with your browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, but no Internet Explorer - most people can live with this restriction, as Internet Explorer is the number one browser used for downloading other browsers)
Read/write mails with Thunderbird or other email applications, or you can also do this using your favorite webmail site (GMail, Yahoo Mail, ...)
Get social using Twitter, FaceBook, identi.ca and other social networks using their sites in your browser or using a specialized app well-integrated in Ubuntu
Send/Receive IMs (Instant Messages) using your yahoo/google/msn/facebook/etc IM account with an application that can handle all these instant messaging services, so you don't have to install separate applications for each one of these (Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk)
Voice chat with skype or google voice from an Ubuntu-specific application
Play entertaining arcade, card, racing, first-person-shooter, logic, etc games
Install applications from Software Center without having to search and download the executable/installer
Listen to music using one of the many music-players available with easy-to-use interfaces. You can most probably find a match for your favorite palyer, as there are players similar (interface-wise) to iTunes, Winamp, etc.
Watch online flash videos from Youtube and other video sharing sites
Watch your movies using one of the many movie players you might already know, like VLC, MPlayer, etc.
Install and run some of your Windows applications/games
Edit/Create documents using a free office suite called LibreOffice, more-or-less compatible with MS Office file formats, only having a different interface

But as there's still more space for improvement, and Ubuntu is not perfect (yet), let's see what you can't do with it:

You can't use Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Dreamveawer, etc) - if you are a regular or power-user of these applications and you can not work with their open-source alternatives, you might have to wait until Adobe releases CS for linux (they already have promised, as the demand is getting higher and higher)
You can't play all your Windows Games, especially the latest ones
You can not use Corel Draw
You can not use AutoCad

There might be some other widely used applications among professionals in different areas which I have missed, but you can always ask in a comment or ask anyone from the ubuntu community support to see the level of support for your application.

If you have any questions, ideas, comments, please do not hesitate to comment.

16th week of 2011

2011-04-26T11:22:00.000+03:00

Last week I've done only triaging, marking duplicates in packages having lots of them, mostly kernel module build failures (blcr, oss4, fglrx). It's really hard to reduce the number of bugs. I'd like to see one day that the number of ubuntu bugs at the end of the day is less then the number of bugs at the beginning of the day, and not because people stop testing and resporting bugs, but because the number of bugs marked as duplicate or fixed is higher then the number of incoming bugs.

15th week of 2011

2011-04-18T11:41:00.000+03:00

last week I've been very busy, I've only triaged some bugs, found many duplicates, but I have done no fixing, no development. I've checked the IDOs (Indicator display object), and thinking again about trying to implement skype messaging menu support, using skype4py.

14th week of 2011

2011-04-11T18:46:00.001+03:00

Just sharing some development info and experiences from last week:

I've fixed some software-center bugs last week, but these were only minor fixes too:

bug #678442 - app summary was ellipsized when window got smaller, but when window got larger than required, the summary did not reappear - I've fixed it (1 line :)) and it's merged
bug #751068 - the installed on and purchased on data format was not localizable, so I've fixed it, already merged
bug #746173 - the application lists did not show half starts in ratings, as the data type was int instead of float - it was hard to find, but have finally found it - another 1-liner, already merged too
bug #739272 - there were some punctuation marks and capitalization issues on pages of non-existent packages, only string-fixing - as I didn't know about the utf-related coding conventions required by the internationalization tool, I have to fix that fix :)

I have realized that for such small fixes, I should better make only one branch and commit to that one, one bugfix in one commit, and after a number of small fixes, push them together, and request a merge proposal. It shouldn't be any harder for the reviewers to review it, maybe it'd be even easier.

As an unpleasant experience: I have tried to install GNOME3 from the gnome3 PPA in ubuntu, as all packages were built, but I didn't succeed. In fact, it was a total failure: after I have installed it, the theme got ugly. After that I have managed to get to a Fallback (ubuntu classic session), but I could not purge the packages (downgrade them to the standard versions) neither with command line, nor with ubuntu tweak tools, I have tried manually finding the package versions and downgrading them one by one. I have managed to remove the remaining GDM sessions too, so I didn't have any working sessions. My luck was that it was an almost fresh install of Natty, so it was really easy to reinstall. So the lesson learned is: GNOME3 is hot, but you might get burned when trying to install it on Ubuntu. I hope this'll get better as time passes, as there are some people who would like to use GNOME Shell by default (I'm not one of those). I don't want to have GNOME3 for GNOME Shell, I like Unity more, but I'd like to have the full up-to-date GNOME3 application stack for development.

And as a pleasant experience to even the unpleasant: I have managed to convince my lovely wife to reinstall the OS on her laptop (Chrome crashed everytime when G was pressed, Firefox was also crashing from time to time, and other weird and unusual stuff like these... ), and as I have said that Natty seems quite stable and there are less then 20 days until it gets officially released, she agreed to install Natty. She said that she likes the classic two-panel mode better than Unity, but I haven't changed the session, and she didn't complain about it yet, so I guess it is really easy to get used to Unity. Congrats to the team.

GNOME 3 released

2011-04-07T12:16:00.000+03:00

GNOME 3 has been released, after 9 years from the GNOME 2 release.

Congrats to the Gnome people for the new release, it's worth checking out. It includes some really neat features, and it does look nice. I haven't used it, only in beta, and it seemed really incomplete to me compared to Unity's Beta. But that probably has changed, as every GNOME default application is now updated to work with 3.0, so it should be more complete. And this also marks a big day, as I haven't fixed any GNOME bugs lately mostly because the trunk versions of the apps were updated to work with 3.0 but I could not set up a proper development environment, but now this should change. :)

Check out the videos to see what GNOME 3 looks like, or you can even download a live image for trying it out :).

13th week of 2011

2011-04-04T11:24:00.000+03:00

Last week was a really good one.

On 29th of March, Tuesday was the last day to apply for a UDS sponsorship, and I haven't applied. On Wednesday, when I woke up and I got to read my mails, I've read one, that I've been voted for a sponsorship by the Ubuntu Platform QA Team, so I should hurry up and register for UDS. I haven't applied because of the limited number of days off from work, and I wanted to save as many days as possible for the winter holidays and a summer holiday with my wife. But the offer was tempting me, as I wanted to go to the UDS, and after discussing with my lovely wife, we have decided that we'll be ok with as many days as I'll have left after the UDS. So I have applied, and am still waiting for a response, but I guess there are a lots of applicants, and it takes time to go over all the applications.

Also last week, I've fixed some bugs in update-manager

bug #665173 - update manager shows the changelogs not supported error message twice for sources that do not support changelogs - I've fixed it, a reviewer requested a Unit test for it, so I've written my first Python unit test, then it got approved, but it's still waiting for approval from someone who's able to merge it
bug #727069 - update manager refers to the Administration menu in Unity, but there is no such thing - I've fixed it by rewording to Applications, but people reported it needs fixing as there is no applications in the Classic mode - so I've fixed it by adding a condition on whether Unity is running or not - waiting for a review
bug #603974 - a feature request to have section checkboxes in update manager to be able to select/deselect all updates from a section - I've implemented it although it's not perfect, as the checkbox is only one with two states, it doesn't have a partially selected state ... but we'll see what the reviewer has to say
bug #150677 - a really old bug reported for update-manager not respecting the show images on buttons system-wide settings, as it does always show images - I've fixed it, got approved by a community member, still waiting for review from someone who's able to merge it

and software-center

bug #672229 - the time format in the history view did not match the specs - I've fixed it and it's already merged and the fix is released
bug #644438 - the most recent day from history should be expanded according to the specs - I've fixed it and it's also merged

So from the development point of view it was a really productive week.

Regarding the experiences, I've installed Natty on my HP laptop with ATI graphics card, and the situation there seems awful:

with the open-source ati driver the laptop is overheating, running on above 70 degrees Celsius when Idling, see bug #488152 - this has been reported a while back by me, but it hasn't been fixed yet
with the fglrx (binary proprietary driver from ATI) Unity does not work because of refresh issues, see bug #747802 for details.

So currently the options to run Natty with an ATI video card are to either run it with the open-source driver with the possibility of the laptop running hot or to run with the binary driver in the Classic mode, as Unity does not work. Sad. These are bad experiences.

And as a last thing: on 22th of November last year I've applied for an Ubuntu Beginner Team membership to get some help and guidance for development, and on 2nd of April I've got a response, that I've got a guide assigned, UndiFineD. I have discussed with him on IRC, and he said, that being a MOTU (Master of the Universe - people who maintain the packages in the universe repository) would probably fit me, although I didn't really agree, I've said let's give it a shot, and I'll say if I'll be convinced that it doesn't fit me, and then we'll find another task for me. If I'll be happy as a MOTU, then he was right.

So that's all for last week, I haven't done anything with my games, we'll see if this week I'll have time to do that.

12th week of 2011

2011-03-29T11:24:00.001+03:00

Last week's status was already posted about the minesweeper game in my previous post, and since then, I haven't done anything really interesting, as I've been traveling in the weekend.

A minor feature newly implemented in the minesweeper game is a feature I didn't even know about, but my wife said she misses it: when clicking on a revealed field containing a number a with exactly a flagged neighbors, the rest of its neighbors will be revealed. I've also made some bugfixes (incredible how in a so simple program bugs appear) regarding a hang on closing from the menuitem, an end-game flagging fix.

For the game to be feature-complete I'm thinking to implement the custom table size selection and the high-score list, and maybe the protect-first functionality (this apparently exists in many minesweeper implementations, according to wikipedia - you can not reveal a mine on the first click). Maybe a pause would also be good. And the menu keyboard shortcuts need a bit of fixing, as they don't work right now.

I'm thinking about what should be the next game. I guess it'll still be GTK-based. My current ideas are a typing tutorial (but that seems to be a bit more complicated with GTK, as it would require proper animation) or a tetris-like game with words or a crossword game. But I'll see what I'll come up with.

eMines update

2011-03-24T18:10:00.000+02:00

I had a bit of time to do some more programming practice. :) So now the game ends if you win, and you get feedback about that.
I have changed the characters used for flagging and for mines, and the end-game colors also. I also wanted to add the classic minesweeper smiley in the toolbar, so after a bit of googling around, found a good set of Creative Commons licensed smilies (by Bruno Maia from IconTexto) with a nice color palette that (almost) matches the GNOME one.

I have added the smiley set to the resources folder, of course with the license text and other related stuff, added Bruno Maia in the artists list of the game (he is the first artist :)), and my work is not commercial. Hopefully these things will be enough to not to get into any kind of licensing trouble, but I'll ask around.
Until I decide, here are some screenshots:

11th week of 2011

2011-03-23T14:26:00.003+02:00

last week I've done some minor fixes to my minesweeper game :) it's getting more and more complete, but I would like to keep it elementary. It's hard to decide where to draw the line.
Let's start with the end: When you click a mine, all the mines are shown, and you get a feedback: which flags you have put correctly (green flags), which were wrong(red flags), and mines that were not flagged(orange), and the fatality, the mine you have clicked (also in red), while all the other fields (numbers) are greyed out.
And yes, you're right, I've implemented flagging, the basic feature of every minesweeper : You can "flag" mines now, although the flags are just strange symbols :) the problem with that might be that it won't look the same with all the different fonts. But I'll see. It's ok for now. So you can lock fields to see that you've checked that, you can unlock them if you decide, that it's not a mine.

This game isn't really made for success-hungry people, as it doesn't end when you flag all the mines, and there is nothing more to do, the time is ticking ... and your only choice is to start a new game (or maybe there is a second one: quit the game, but I'll not count that, as the game is more enjoyable)

Still thinking on other simple features to implement (like the questionable flag on fields in windows), the high-scores... feel free to suggest, what would you like to see in the game to make it more enjoyable (but still elementary/basic...)

But one screenshot is worth more than 1000 words so here they are : one showing an in-game shot, and the other showing the game-over state

In-game shot

Game-over

If you can not wait to test it, and you are running ubuntu (it does work on windows too, but you have to install python, pygtk, and bzr), feel free to grab the code with bzr, hosted on launchpad. The commands are:

sudo apt-get install bzr # to install bzr

bzr branch lp:~evfool/+junk/eMines # get the code

python eMines/src/emines.py # start the app

If you are unable to run it, notify me, I'd like to know about the problems. And as a side-note: please avoid looking at the code, as it needs refactoring, a proper coding style, and many more improvements. Remember, this is practice, written as my first python app.

On Saturday I've done some bug-fixing and triaging, I've fixed six GNOME dictionary bugs, attached patches against the latest version from the git repository to the bug reports, but haven't received any response since then, the devs are probably busy getting ready for the GNOME 3.0 release, so that is acceptable. Anyway, gnome-dictionary is not the most active project, but it is one of the simplest, and I've found some really easy-to-fix bugs :) Hopefully they will not be let to rot.

I've also installed a Maverick on a PC from windows, with wubi, and it went absolutely fine, without any problems. The only annoyance is that GRUB2 is put as a second bootloader, so first I have to choose Ubuntu from the windows bootloader, and afterwards choose ubuntu again (or wait 10 seconds to start the default) in GRUB2 to start ubuntu.

So I had a running Maverick too. But as I'm used to Natty, it was unbelievable how much did I miss it. My productivity has decreased a lot, so I have decided to try to emulate Natty. The look is almost done (with globalmenu, awn, dockbarx), but some functionality would still be needed (probably that can be done by messing with compiz plugins, but I didn't have time to do that right now). See the screenshot of the result:

That's all for the last week.

10th week of 2011

2011-03-14T13:04:00.000+02:00

Last week I've been polishing the eMines game, added bomb counter to the left and timer to the right, but the timer doesn't work as it should yet, because when a new game is started, the last timer is not canceled, and therefore the timer is incremented multiple times one second after clicking new game. Design-related comments and suggestions are welcome.

Also added random bomb count based on the minefield size. I've also tried to add flagging mines on right/middle click, but the buttons are not repainted after the image is set, and I haven't found a way yet to force them to repaint, to show the images, and nobody has answered my question on the #pygtk irc channel, so I'll have to experiment more.

The current version of eMines

In the meantime I've also started a new game template, one that uses PyGame, but rendered inside a PyGtk window with an appmenu, thus looking like the eMines, but the game inside can be more interesting, using more than GTK+ controls. The bad thing is that embedding pygame inside a GTK+ window works only on Linux for now, on Windows the game is rendered in a separate window, but I'll try to fix that.

9th week of 2011

2011-03-07T10:45:00.003+02:00

Last week I've done some more bug checking and triaging, and two more Ubuntu One control panel fixes, both of them merged already in the trunk :)
I've also been working on a simple elementary game (based on the DevKit template application I've ported from Vala to Python) in Python. It's getting better every day, although I've tried a lot of things to get the resizing to work well (the fonts are resized with the window, and there was a button refresh problem), and finally got it working by setting a simple flag on all of the components. So as it is an elementary game, it is simple, easy, and one of the elementary games every OS should have : a Minesweeper clone :). But even that is a good coding exercise in a programming language I've never used before with a graphical toolkit I've never developed with. It's beauty stands in the fact that the application works well under both Windows and Ubuntu ... ~~although in Ubuntu it looks a lot better, but for now I only have a screenshot of it running under Windows, I'll add the Ubuntu screenshot later this day.~~

It's not quite ready yet, it lacks a game clock, high scores, a mine counter, and some more things, but as you can see, the basics are already working, and also some extras: mine counting, starting a new game, setting the difficulty, fullscreening and unfullscreening the application, and quitting. It also has a cute elementary-style menu, which should and hopefully will get a bit shorter, I've just put all the usual things there, but maybe not everything will be needed there, as some of the functionality will be available in the toolbar, and it should not be duplicated. That's all for last week, I guess.

8th week of 2011

2011-03-01T10:54:00.000+02:00

Last week I haven't done anything really interesting, only some bug checking. When I could've done something, in the weekend, Unity stopped working because of an update, Unity-2d was not installable because of a missing dependency, and in the classic gnome environment the network was not working for some unknown causes. So i had to do a complete reinstall... I have downloaded the daily build, but of course to make me happy, the installer froze after clicking Install, and did nothing more. So I had to install an earlier version... I had some CDs available, a 10.04 and a 9.10. The 10.04 did not work somehow, so I have installed 9.10, and updated it to 10.04, then updated that to 10.10, then updated that to 11.04 - it took some 4 hours to apply the 4 update-sets. And guess what: lots of error messages kept appearing when running update-manager, chatting in empathy, installing software from the software center or synaptic... so it was a very bad user experience... although this should not be a problem, as this is only an early development version, so "expect daily breakages". I have decided to reinstall it again, but this time with a downloaded natty alpha2 iso and then update it. And now it is working, so I can develop again. The only problem is that QT applications have lost the proper integration, probably because of the transition to GTK3, but that's just a guess. So that was last week.
And somebody had commented, that I keep writing 2010 as the year in the statuses, which is obviously a problem. I'm still living in 2010 :) But I have corrected all the titles, and will write 2011 from now on :)

7th week of 2011

2011-02-22T16:38:00.003+02:00

Last week I've done only some triaging, no bugfixes.

In the meantime I have tried the elementary team's devkit, a simple template application for developing elementary applications, with an appmenu button, without full menubars. I like it, and I have made a python port for it, because the original was in vala. That helped me in learning a bit more python :) I am very proud that I have made it work :) And it works on Windows too. The original DevKit was written in Vala, and under windows, Vala development is in its very early stages, that is another reason why I have ported it, besides the fact that I can learn some python.

I have been very flattered when Brian Murray (the owner of the Ubuntu Bug Control Team) contacted me over launchpad to ask me to apply for a membership and join the Ubuntu Bug Control Team, because I've made a lot of bug work :)

That was all for last week.

6th week of 2011

2011-02-15T12:57:00.001+02:00

Last week was a busy one. The LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org bug day was on Thursday, 45 bugs were hugged.

I have fixed bug #715710 in ubuntu one control panel (papercut), bug #641673 and bug #418552 in apt. All of them were pretty easy fixes, grammar mistakes, grepping, sedding and building. With the push for 715710 I had to resolve a merge conflict, so my bzr knowledge was extended :)

All of my commits were merged in to the trunks of the packages, so I'm happy now.

5th week of 2011

2011-02-06T04:28:00.001+02:00

this week I've been mostly busy with the LibreOffice/OpenOffice bugday.
I have checked a long list of bugs, and finally made the list of bugs to hug, see it on the bugday page of my first bugday :)

In the meantime, I have read in many blogs, that the next UDS will be held at Budapest, which is only 451 km away from here, and if everything will be ok, I will find somebody to sleep at in the city, and everything goes well, I would like to be there. I guess it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, but we well see what the future will bring. I can't afford the 5-star hotel for sure (for various reasons), so that's why I have to find somebody to sleep at, but hopefully that'll not be a problem. I'm pretty excited about this.

Yesterday I have fixed some simple bugs in apport, waiting for merge approval, I have investigated some older bugs also in apport, but they seemed to be forgotten, since the fixes were already more than a year old.

4th week of 2011

2011-01-31T11:56:00.002+02:00

this will be yet another short status report for the last week. I have finally finished checking all the apps in the Software Center for iconless applications, and have made a report. In the meantime I have been struggling to build a working version of CCV, but first when I have tried the Natty package repository was rebuilding its packages (freeglut3, libmesa, etc.), so I have first done it on Maverick, but the app segfaults after 1 second of running. In the meantime Unity on my Natty PC broke, it does not start up, so on boot only the background is visible (no Unity, no desktop, no icons). My luck, that Synapse is already started that time, and I can run unity --replace, and then in gconf-editor toggle the show_desktop flag to have the icons on the background. But as this is only an alpha version ("expect daily breakages"), that's fine. I'll report a bug on that if it'll not get fixed soon.

Lastly yesterday I have successfully built CCV on the Natty PC too, but it segfaults there too, so it's useless... I would like to get my PC remote controlled from my coffee table, like in the video below:

Cool, isn't it? Hopefully someone will find out someday how to do this :)

I have also found a "metabug" last week, it already has more than 20 duplicates, and it has appeared earlier this year, so it's less than one month old. Basically you can't install local deb files in Natty from software center because of this bug, so it's a really serious one.

That was all for last week, I think. Check out the video, and believe me, it's only a matter of time until it starts working on your Ubuntu computer too, and small things like this could be the major advantages of Ubuntu, that could turn many peoples heads towards Ubuntu.

applications without icons report

2011-01-27T14:59:00.000+02:00

I have checked the list of applications appearing in Ubuntu Software center for apps without an icon (as the ones reported in bug #599535). In the meantime I have found lots of metadata bugs, I have started reporting them and fixing them, but it will take time.
I have made another debian package patch, but got no response for this neither (so far), so I don't know whether anyone does take a look at any of the patches attached to bug reports, but I hope, that there is someone.

In the meantime LibreOffice 3.3 was released, so that's good news. This is the first stable release of the new Office suite based on OpenOffice, but cleaned up and with some interesting new features and lots of new contributors.

3rd week of 2011

2011-01-23T17:39:00.001+02:00

This has been a busy week for me, so I haven't done anything really interesting, only checked another bunch of applications appearing in the software center for metadata bugs, no icons appearing, and mispelled descriptions. There are lots of things to improve. The final report for all the applications is not ready yet, but when it will be ready, I will mention it here. After that, I will report the whole list of metadata bugs, which are easy to fix, but there are so many of them, that it will take some time. But hopefully it will be ready for natty, if forwarding to debian and accepting them in debian will go smoothly. So far the only fix I've done and forwarded to debian, is still waiting for approval, but no feedback was received. We'll see... hopefully not all package maintainger will be that busy/inactive.

2nd week of 2011

2011-01-17T12:22:00.001+02:00

I did not manage to write the status for last week in the weekend, I've been very busy.

Most of my time I've been looking for icon-less applications or mis-categorized applications in Software Center, like the ones reported in bug #599535. These bugs appear when the desktop file in app-install-data-ubuntu package references an icon that does not appear in that package, because it is not found by the archive crawler. These bugs could be fixed by manually adding the missing icons or by fixing the desktop files, but because the package is a generated one (by archive crawler), the best would be to let archive-crawler find them in the packages. The first step for this is obviously to find the packages which do not have an icon, the second step would be to find why isn't the icon found in the package (one possible reason for example is that the icon is not in the same package as the desktop file), the third step would be to fix this in archive-crawler, or in the package of the application itself.

Frankly, the list of apps in the Software Center is long, so I have first started with checking the Canonical Maintained software, and a report for that can be found on pastebin. I'm over the first half of the full app list, but it's not finished yet, I'll announce when it's done.

Building Unity

2011-01-09T03:11:00.001+02:00

Unity, Ubuntu's new desktop shell is meant to be a user-friendly, community-developed user-interface for the desktop.
If you haven't seen it, You can watch this video:

It looks nice, and it's getting better every day, just as Gnome Shell is getting better each day.
As I have said, it is a community project, and it should be easy to contribute to it, and to help with that, a very detailed (and scaringly long) How to build from source wiki page is written.
I have Natty testing installed, and I am running Unity to see how it's progressing.
I have found a bug in it, found and documented the steps needed to reproduce that bug, and I have probably found where in the code it should be fixed and how (with a bit of help from SmSpillaz), and it's a three-line long fix: add the lines

if (window->state && MAXIMIZED_STATE) {

  PluginAdapter::Default ()->NotifyStateChange (window, ~MAXIMIZED_STATE, MAXIMIZED_STATE); 

}

and add

#include <scale/scale.h>

to the include directives.
As I have said, in my opinion this should be enough to fix this bug. So the next logic step would be to fix it. I wanted to give it a try, so I have started following the instructions from the wiki guide on building Unity.
The destruction seems to be detailed, but I have ran into an error at the second step, in building nux, a required library, which needs the gnome-common scripts, so I had to execute the following commands to build nux:

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gnome-common
cd gnome-common
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

And that still wasn't enough, although the package list to download in the first step looks huge, but it was still missing a few packages for me, so I had to get them with:

sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libpcre++-dev

In the next step (building compiz) I have also experienced some difficulties, it was complaining about some missing kde headers, so I had to download the KDE dependencies with

sudo apt-get install libtaskmanager4b libkscreensaver5 libplasma-geolocation-interface4 libpowerdevilcore0 libprocesscore4b libprocessui4a libksgrd4 libplasmaclock4b libkworkspace4 libkdecorations4 kdebase-workspace-dev libkwineffects1a libplasmagenericshell4 libkephal4a libsolidcontrol4a libsolidcontrolifaces4a libweather-ion6 libkholidays4 libksignalplotter4 liblsofui4

That has helped me through some additional steps, but another problem occured while trying to set up compizconfig-python, related to some permissions, so I had to execute sudo chown -R /opt/unity to fix that. This was the last one, after this, everything went on fine, I had finally built Unity.

But that still was not enough, I wanted to test my fix, but I had the feeling, that I could not run the Unity I have built, so some instructions on running the built-from source version of Unity instead of the installed default one, and some basic instructions on Debugging (how to print a debug line to check whether your code is reached/running...) would be good for novice contributors, as for example I am not an experienced Vala/C++ developer, nor a Compiz hacker to know how to debug a compiz plugin, where to look for the output, and so on.

The bug mentioned is still not fixed, but I hope somebody will fix it, because I was not able so far. This post is mainly to point out the areas where the information regarding Unity contributions could be a bit more detailed, where and how it could be improved. Please also note that the commands I have mentioned to fix the problems have occurred are my solutions, they might not be the best ones, feel free to comment if you have better ideas, and please, if you are one of those people who are maintaining the Installation guide from source, update it to work for people without having to find out what additional dependencies do they need, and how should they get them.

1st week of 2011

2011-01-08T23:34:00.001+02:00

First of all happy new year everyone!

It has been almost a month since I've last posted. So I'll try to conclude what has happened since then.

Let's start with some news: I have a new desktop PC and a 24 inch monitor for development, since I don't travel that much anymore to need a last-generation laptop. Now with the new PC the distributed LibreOffice build (the benchmark to compare my computers) lasts 2 hours, instead of the 6 or 12 hours from the laptops.

I've got it set up beatifully, one Maverick install for daily usage and movies (as it is my media center also), and another one with Natty testing for cutting-edge development, building, and bugfixing.

I still don't have that much time, but last week I have concentrated upon some metadata bugs, but this bugfixing and packaging and forwarding to debian is a bit too hard for me. I've fixed a small package description with a patch, but the sponsors asked me to forward it to debian, thus I had to try to submit the patch to debian. That wasn't that easy: I've made the patch, but after that, since I did not have SMTP set up, I had to save the email that should be sent to Debian, and send it manually. That seemed to be easy, until I have realized, that although Evolution sees that the file is an email, but it could not open it. I have installed Thunderbird, and that opened the mail, but it did not contain all the necessary headers, like Package: and others, so I have listed them with submittodebian, and copied them manually into the mail, and sent it. So the bug has been reported, the patch is also attached, let's see what will happen.

Another achievement for this week was not really an achievement, but sort of a fail: my friends laptop did not boot, probably because the HDDs mbr had some bad sectors: Ubuntu failed to mount any of the partitions from it, and when started GParted, it hung without showing anything. I have made an image from the entire disk (it only lasted some 24 hours, and had 100 MB of errors on the 120GB HDD). After that I have tried many things, like getting the exact partition sizes, and splitting the file manually and then mounting them, it did not work.
Experimented with fsck, and other things like that, but it was kind of sad that some linux tools advised me to use chkdsk from windows. After all these failures, I have ran testdisk to recover what is possible, but it only saves files with random filenames, so it was not that easy to find the files (some homework), and after running it on the 80 GB partition, it segfaulted after some time, so it could not recover all files, only 10 GB of them. So the most interesting part came only after this... as GEdit can not open 120 GB files, and it had weird characters and would have complained about the encoding anyways, I have decided to use grep to find the files. I knew some words (variable names) from the files (flex and bison sources), and using only some grep parameters (show x lines before and y after), I have found the files and copied them out :).
Lots of files have been lost, but most of them could be recovered using this method, only you would have to know part of the file content, which is not that hard with text files, but a tough task with images, mp3s and others.

So these were my achievements for the first week of the year, and I have had another one, but that will appear in a separate post, because that needs more attention than these, and hopefully it will get it.

the future is getting closer

2010-12-16T18:10:00.001+02:00

chrome OS was released. the web is getting stronger. it's obvious that google is trying hard to make the web advance, because they have released a web-only OS, they have to help the cloud experience get as close to desktop experience as possible. a few years ago, no one would think, that it will be possible to have animated webpages, dynamic content, flash, etc. now we do know that this is possible. a few months ago no one would've thought that some day we will be able to play 3d games, like quake2 online, from a browser. now we know that it is possible, with webGL. google know has made a further step... combining science and technology online using the latest technologies. now we have the body browser. we can now 'browse' the human body in 3D, we can choose how many layers to show, we can rotate, we can zoom in and out. nice. it's like an interactive Discovery Science show. but you don't have to believe me. you should see it for yourself

long live google

2010-12-15T18:26:00.000+02:00

you've seen the title, and you're wondering why am I writing this. I'll explain it to you.
My favourite Java IDE is eclipse, because I'm used to it, I consider it not only a good IDE, but a platform as well, and I have used it for some projects. I am also looking forward to E4, the next generation of the eclipse IDE and platform.

As we all know, Google uses eclipse for some things, to mention the most obvious for example, eclipse is the primary IDE for Android development.

A while ago Google bought Instantiations, a company developing a well-known commercial GUI builder plugin for eclipse, WindowBuilder, and a profiling tool for eclipse, the CodePro Profiler. Now Google decided that it will donate these two projects with source-code and intellectual properties to the Eclipse foundation, thus these will become open-source under the EPL license. That is a major contribution to the open-source community, considering that the estimated value of the source and IPs related to these projects is somewhere around $5 million dollars.

So thanks Google (and not only - the Eclipse community has even more merits), I think Eclipse will remain my favourite IDE, although these projects will only appear as eclipse projects in early 2011.

status for week 49

2010-12-15T10:52:00.000+02:00

last week I've been searching for some more ancient OO.o bugs that still apply for the latest Ubuntu and OO.o, I've looked over the whole launchpad bug list. So now I've got a huge list of bugs, and I'm trying them one at a time, but it is a bit slow. I am very busy every day, so a daily five would be a good progress. I've checked around 30 bugs, and only 3 of them seem to be fixed - sad.
The two major issue categories reported are MS format import/export and GTK integration. GTK integration I think will not solved soon by upstream, so those'll have to be fixed with Ubuntu-specific patches. There is hope for the import/export issues to be fixed, but there are many of them, many files cause OO.o to hang... so the MS compatibility is still far away ... but hope for a better world... it is getting better with each passing day.
I'm doing a categorization of the bugs, having a separate category for each filetype, and categories for UI issues and GTK integration. After that I'll see what to do with them. Some import/export issues seem to be easy fixes, but you need to understand the code related to that first, and that might be a problem for me... bu it I can find someone eager to fix them, I'll be happy, otherwise I'll try harder and harder :)

awesome iMusicians

2010-12-09T09:59:00.000+02:00

I'm not an Apple fan, but you have to check this out

development, ancient bugs and news

2010-12-08T09:42:00.000+02:00

Last week I haven't done many things.

I have tried to implement the sound menu integration for RadioTray, an awesome and simple internet radio application which only does what it's meant to do (plays internet radios) and does it very well. The only problem with that is that you can control it using its tray icon and as we all know, there will be no tray in 11.04, alias Natty anyomore. So there are two choices: either implement an application indicator or implement soundmenu integration. Soundmenu integration would be a more elegant solution, because RadioTray is a music player, and should appear therefore in the Sound Menu, as other music players do. So I've checked out the source, checked it and the DBUS interfaces required for the integration were implemented, so I thought it'll be a piece of cake. I've successfully added the application to the sound menu, but I could only strat it from there, I could not control it. I have looked for similar integrations, Exaile is also written in python and has soundmenu integration, but I could not find and port the necessary things to RadioTray. I don't know neither Python, nor DBus... I'll have to learn about them some more.

In the meantime I've asked for help on the ayatana-dev list, suggested that some more info on integration would be nice on the soundmenu wiki, like the simple examples in C, Python and C# on the appIndicators page.

After this failure I've fallen back to the standard LibreOffice cleaning task, which is easy and also helpful, so I've cleaned up another 600 lines of unnecessary, commented code and comments. :)

After that I've started looking after the oldest OpenOffice bugs in Ubuntu and checking them again, to see if there's any progress, and update their status if something's changed. I've found 82 bugs I can verify easily in the first round, but I've checked only about 400 out of the 1367 :). I've verified 11, found 2 duplicates, 3 fixed, and the other 6 still apply, however for one issue there seems to be a fix in the Novell version of OO, which I think is already included in LibreOffice, and therefore there is a chance that the fix will appear in Ubuntu too.

So that was my last week.

And as for the news and events of the last week: There were quite a few releases: Android 2.3 was released, ChromeOS and testing notebooks were released, the Chrome Web store was released. However, I don't think this'll lead to the end of desktop. :) It's just some developing new platforms, for some specific usecases.

bugging

2010-11-26T15:57:00.002+02:00

Since my last post I've been bugging Ubuntu a lot. I've triaged some bugs, forwarded some to GNOME, I've set the right packages for some, and reproduced simple ones. I've experimented with some easy fixes there, sent some ubuntu-docs patches for string fixes. I've traveled with train for some hours, and I've spent those with cleaning up LibreOffice code - that didn't require an internet connection, and it is quite easy to do anytime, anywhere.

The biggest fail of the week was a small debdiff for the JOSM package for moving it from the Geoscience category to the Geography category... it sounds easy, but it is not. I've requested sponsoring, I've received that, mostly useful tips, but the worst was that the debdiff didn't even apply for the reviewer :(. Maybe next time I'll do better.

Yesterday I have stumbled upon some bugs stating that the help.ubuntu.com does not use the new ubuntu branding, and it made me think about the Ubuntu Support and Learning center. I've checked it's wiki page for the thoughts about it, some sort of specification draft, checked it's project page, but no progress there.
I gave it a shot, tried to do something based on the wiki page.

So I've installed one of the two CMSs mentioned there, the Python-based Plone v4, checked for some addons for documentation management, I have found Plone Help Center, which looked promising, installed that, started it, but unfortunately it hasn't been ported to Plone 4.0 and gave some errors. So that failed.

I didn't like the other framework, so I have decided that I'll try sometime to fix the problems in Plone Help Center, because it looks nice, and it'd be nice to get it working with LinhuaPlone, which would make it possible to translate the page based on the po translations... I think... I hope... I didn't get that deep into Plone to check this.

So that's what I've been doing in the last two weeks, besides some family reunions and the daily work I have to do. So nothing really interesting. Maybe only one: i use workflowy.com as my to-do list... it looks nice, it's easy to work with, and has hierarchical task management. And does all this while following the KISS principle.

vector graphics

2010-11-15T21:14:00.001+02:00

I was a bit bored, and thought that I'd like to do something creative, something cartoony. Googled around a bit, and found some nice vector cartoon drawing tutorials, but most of them were for Illustrator users. You know, illustrator is Adobe's vector drawing application, part of the well-known Creative suite, available for a few hundred dollars, and well-known also for the fact that it is availabla for Mac and Windows, but not Linux.

Anyway, I thought I'd check how much can I reproduce using Inkscape, which is totally free and available for Linux.

See the tutorial here.

I did not follow the tutorial exactly, and therefore there are some differences between the results, but the point is the same... an Illustrator tutorial can be easily followed using Inkscape. I say that, because I have never used neither Illustrator, nor Inkscape, nor any other vector graphics drawing software before, and I have finished the tutorial in a bit more time ( around 2 hours ) than the tutorial said (30 minutes to 1 hour), but that's not bad for a beginner. :)

So here are the results:
The result with Illustrator

My result with Inkscape

I hope you like it :)

summary of uds-n, libreoffice

2010-11-01T11:17:00.000+02:00

uds-n is over, and as a short summary, I'd like to mention that there aren't going to be lots of visible changes in natty, besides Unity :)
banshee will become the default music player ... I'm happy, because I like banshee too, but I'm sad because
1. I've just got used to rhythmbox
2. F-Spot got removed from the default install, therefore the only app depending on the mono runtime was tomboy (, which could've been easily replaced by gNote, having almost the same functionality as tomboy, only it was written in C++) but now that banshee got included, the mono runtime must stay on the disc.

yesterday I've been playing a bit with the libreoffice code, done something really easy, like removing commented code, bogus comments, and translating some german comments (only really simple ones). that was fun.

ubuntu marketing

2010-10-27T13:30:00.000+03:00

wow... the first official Ubuntu ad... presented for the first time on the first day of UDS... look at the simplicity and the beauty...

uds day two, linux gaming and photogallery

2010-10-27T13:22:00.001+03:00

i did not find many intersting topics on the second day of uds, and I could not listen to all the ones I was interested in, so i have listened to the topics Encouraging game development in Ubuntu, General Networking Stack Enhancements, and Photo printing is not user-friendly and often broken and read the Gobby docs for some others I was interested in, like Natty Papercuts, and Reinvigorate the artwork team.

I have expected too much from the game-development related topic, and I was disappointed. Only a few things were discussed, the talk seemed a bit out of the scope of the Natty cycle, and after all, the results were that there will be some quickly templates to quickly start developing python, flash and java games, there will be one fun game in the installer that'll be changed every cycle, and somebody'll contact Valve to see if they want a Linux-based steam client, and if they have started it, why did they stop....

i was thinking on this a lot, because linux gaming needs a renewal. i don't know how, but I think that people won't be making better games for linux just because they do have the quickly templates. something else must be thought of. an idea of bundling windows games with wine libraries was discussed too, but no serious steps in this direction... but i think something like this should be done until good native games do appear for linux, and for that, gaming linux usage must increase, and that can only be done by giving people games to play with... so it's an evil circle... but once we are inside the circle, it'd be easier, i think.

another idea I have been thinking about related to linux gaming was that of bundling some good old dos classics with dosbox ... sadly, there are some old dos classics that are better than many of the current linux games.

also, the repositories do not have the best-quality games... the best linux games can not be found in the repositories... this should change too... there are many things that could be done.

in the meantime, the discussions around the switch to unity went on, and I'm still curious what will be the result of this move :) but let's hope for the best.

now let's talk about something else... a bit development related

I have had my wedding last month and my wife's sister also got married this weekend, and asked me to share the photos I have taken... I have been thinking a lot about setting up a webserver with a photo gallery on one of my laptops, which is only used as a media center currently.

The laptop does have an 1.5TB Samsung G3 external harddrive attached for media storage, Ubuntu installed, VLC for movies and XBMC for music and photos (XBMC does have some issues with movies, they appear black and white... I don't know why, that's why I use it only for photo browsing and music) and gAnyRemote for remote controlling all these with an old Nokia N70 phone or event my current phone.

I have started importing the photos from my photo folders with shotwell (I did not use any photo manager until now, I was using only folders, because I did not like f-spot and I did not want to search for a good photo manager), I have been looking at some open-source photo galleries, and the only feature I wanted was to be able to sync with folders and automatically rebuild the gallery if they change....

I wanted to try gallery3 but i could not set it up , and I did not like the others I have found, so I have looked for a tutorial, and I have found one on how to generate a gallery from a folder ...

I wanted to use the thumbnails Shotwell created, but those were named oddly, and I haven't found the relation between the original filename and the thumbnail name, so I have generated some new ones.

At first I though it'd be nice to write an export plugin for shotwell, but I could not get shotwell to compile, so I thought I'd better write a PHP script. I have written one, that reads the Shotwell photo database, and creates a gallery for each event, using one thumbnail for each one and using HighSlide JS to show the rest of the photos ... I have chosen HighSlide because it is free for personal use, and it looks nice and is stylable.

After a bit of struggling with the directory symlinks, access rights and things like these, the script ran fina at 7:30 am ... started writing it at 2:00 am... with no prior PHP knowledge ... and it looks quite decent. but it'd be fine to have an export to local image gallery plugin in shotwell.

I'd show you, but I have to set up proper access rights for apache, because I'm a bit paranoid ... and the main gallery page still needs a bit of styling... but I'll show you when it's ready.

UDS day one

2010-10-26T12:48:00.000+03:00

day one of the Ubuntu Developer Summit is over. the gossip has been confirmed by Mark in the keynote, Unity will be the default shell in the Desktop, but reworked to give a better desktop experience than the netbook Unity gives on the desktop.

the feedback from the community is mixed... some are on the Unity side, others on the Gnome Shell side... the major issues with the Unity as mentioned by the community are the performance issues, and usability in multitasking. Gnome shell is also in progress, and although I don't like neither, I'm in the Gnome shell-supporting camp. It has more work behind, and it is upstream. Basically gnome shell has been developed for more than a year now, and Unity for the desktop development is starting now, but even if we count the last six months of work done on the netbook UI, it's still half a year behind Gnome Shell.

some people blogged about this step as the next step towards Canonical copyrighting its own UI. let's hope their wrong. other people have bad feelings about this step because even if Canonical did not contribute a tremendous amount of commits to Gnome, it's contribution is there in the bug reports, and feedback, coming from Ubuntu users, flowing upstream to Gnome.

the thing is that the headlines are filled with: Ubuntu ditches GNOME.... Ubuntu switch to Unity from GNOME .... these are lies. Ubuntu will not switch from GNOME. they just replace the shell. they will use the same widgeting toolkit, the same GNOME-based applications. we will see what it will be like later.

this was the most controversial part of the first day, but there were also good news: the focus in this cycle will be on performance and drivers... really needed. Unity will switch from mutter to Compiz, for performance considerations. the other news is that the work on the new icon theme starts now, and hopefully it will be finished for 12.04, the next LTS release, having a fully revamped interface compared to the 10.04, having Unity, ubuntu font, Ambiance, Radiance, ubuntu icon theme, etc...

Time for UDS-N

2010-10-25T09:32:00.001+03:00

The maverick Meerkat has been released more than two weeks ago, and it's time for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Natty to discuss the direction ubuntu is going in in the next cycle.

Gossips appeared about Unity becoming the default interface in the desktop version of Ubuntu too, but this is only a gossip, hopefully. We'll see for sure only after Natty has been released :)

UDS is starting today, 4pm-1am every day :) I'll try to follow after I get home from work, as much as I can, and only the topics I'm interested in.

Today I'd like to listen to the Introduction and Keynote, The Ayatana: How are we doing? What next?, the GNOME plans for the Natty cycle and Ideas for basic Visual Feedback. After these, there are some presentation about the Design Guidelines, ubuntu software center and the future of the universe, and I'd like to know what these will be about, but I'll see if I can listen to them. There will be one session late in the evening at 0 am about integrating Wine into the software center, but I think I'll just read the Gobby document for that.

So these are my plans related to the developer summit today. I'll be participating remotely, and I'll se how it's going. anyways, there will be lots of blog posts everywhere regarding the most interesting things happening there.

elementary truth

2010-10-20T10:14:00.004+03:00

i've been following the work of the elementary team ... most of you probably know, the guys responsible for nautilus elementary with integrated terminal and clutterview, the elementary iconset, and the elementary theme overall. lately, also some rhythm-e screenshots have appeared, a version of a simplified rhythmbox interface.

the thing is that all these things are created and worked on to have an elementary os... which will look really awesome in my opinion. people like the idea, as can be seen by the number of users using nautilus elementary (clearly identifiable on most of the screenshots showing a file manager), of the posts regarding the rhythm-e. linux apps do need decluttering. this is an elementary truth.

to show what it might look like, I've just collected some mockups created by talented people, all hoping for the elementary dream to come true.

Nibbler text editor concept by spiceofdesign - two options: write a whole new text editor or simplify an existing text editor like gedit or scribes to look like this

Presentation software concept made also by spacedesign - people could experiment to write a new interface using the LibreOffice code, but this is a tougher task :)

Boot splash also by spiceofdesign - based on a danrabbit's design

Feedler feed reader mockup by spiceofdesign

Midori browser mockup by spiceofdesign

Noise media player mockup and Marlin file browser by the ace of elementary designs, danRabbit

What do you think? All these, and many more apps like these, combining elegance and simplicity, usability and similar, newbie-friendly uncluttered interfaces would all look fine in an operating system. The guys in the elementary team share this dream. Do you share their dream? Contribute ... if you are a programmer, a designer, just a simple linux user or wanna-be linux user having some thoughts about elementary interfaces, who likes the idea ... there are many ways you can contribute. Check their elementary website also having a beatiful design, and see where you can help.

Thank you DanRabbit and spiceofdesign for the breathtaking designs and theming and thank you ammonkey for nautilus elementary and rhythm-e, the wannabe noise media player. And if you are an active elementary team member, I am thanking you too for the hard work... keep it up.

funny news

2010-10-12T12:23:00.001+03:00

i've just read some news on a local gossip portal: the website of my university has been cracked by a romanian cracker. this isn't that interesting. he only made an alertbox appear. the author of the article relating about this made a screenshot too. the thing that makes me happy is visible on the screenshot. I don't know whether I'm allowed or not to post the image here, so I'm just posting a link. the text is not important, if you don't understand it, don't worry, just look for the screenshot :)

maverick install annoyances

2010-10-07T14:29:00.000+03:00

i like ubuntu. i recommend it to everyone. and i wish you to have a pleasant and successful install experience.

i did not have.
yesterday, I wanted to reinstall the maverick rc on my Latitude D820 laptop, with an NVidia Quadro 120 video card. The install went fine, the desktop came up, everything was ok until that moment. the additional drivers dialog popped up to install the NVidia drivers, I have clicked activate, and an error message appeared, with the message: SystemError: installArchives() failed. and the driver was not activated (see bug #626320). i have started the terminal wizardry to try it with the text-based interface of the additional drivers installer, and I have got the same error message. so i had to install the nvidia_current package from synaptic. that worked.

after a restart, I have seen the beatiful text-based plymouth :) and I have tried to fix that, using the instructions posted on webupd8, because i thought this was the solution I have used last time. but i was wrong. this mistake resulted in a system that booted up successfully about one time out of five, the other four trials resulting in a blackscreen after the plymouth, and no further activity. i have reverted my changes, to have a working system without a good-looking plymouth. this morning I have retried to make it work, now with the instructions from softpedia, and the first solution worked. at least for one bootup, because i did not have the time to test it further. but i will see later.

another small annoyance to note: the extras repository was enabled, to let people use fresh applications from PPAs, but the thing is that currently synaptic gives me an error on reload if the extras repository is enabled.

things to note: the default boot time is now above 30 seconds, nvidia driver simple installation failed, i cannot add my facebook account to gwibber due to bug #614742, a black border appears around notifications, as described in bug #654921

the good news is that there are lots of things to do in ubuntu, there is enough room left for you and me to contribute :)

and in case you didn't hear about it, OpenOffice might not get included in the next release of ubuntu, codenamed Natty Narwhal. OpenOffice was forked by a consortium called The Document Foundation, and the fork is called LibreOffice. Among the members of the consortium you can find names like Red Hat, Gnome, and Canonical, so I believe that LibreOffice is in good hands. But you can contribute there too, if you'd like :) You can already download LibreOffice or you can install it from a PPA, for instructions see OMGUbuntu.

that's all for now, and i'll be back with further details after I have installed Maverick on my other laptop too. or should I wait for the final release? I'll have to decide :)

advanced web presentation

2010-10-06T10:11:00.000+03:00

i have been looking lately at HTM5 and CSS3 to see what's possible ... and it was very good to see that these can be used to create sites that were possible before only with flash. now I have stumbled upon an even more advanced example, which is worth looking at. you can also checkout Brad Neuberg, the developer's post about this demo.

maverick development cycle summary

2010-10-05T18:50:00.000+03:00

the countdown is almost over for the next Ubuntu release, Maverick Meerkat. I've already ordered my own copy of it. In this cycle I've helped ubuntu with minor contributions, but more than I've done for lucid (for that cycle I've done only translations). Now I have some bugfix branches in jockey and in the gnome-user-docs, which were merged in the trunk :) I'm happy about that. I've made a few translations, but I've also made lots of bug reviews, and set the duplicates to duplicate status, and on some bugdays, I've done serious triaging. :) All of this was a lot of fun.

but this is not the thing I wanted to blog about, but the overall progress in this cycle, at least what I am aware of. after the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Maverick Operation Cleansweep, aimed at testing and forwarding patches attached to bugs, was started by some devoted people, part of the community, and made a good progress: in spite of the fact that the progress counter on the right shows 20%, the number of bugs fell from over 2000 to less than 1500. Nice job, cleansweepers.

another big project, the One Hundred Papercuts project, aimed at fixing 100 small usability issues per cycle has currently 84 papercuts with fixes released, and another few In progress and with Fixes commited, but I don't know whether these will make it into the final release of Maverick.

the people working on the new netbook UI, Unity made quite a good progress, it looks beautiful on screenshots, but not good enough for me to be able to test it, because it does not work with my NVidia card. (check bug #614088)

the datetime and network indicators still need a lot of work, I don't even know whether these will be included. the sound indicator has received some attention, it is quite useful now, and three media players already support it (Rhythmbox, Banshee and XNoise).

about my hopes for maverick : it will not be RGBA-enabled, no windicators, no nautilus-elementary. the only thing that became reallity is the Global Menu for the netbook.

about the things talked about at the UDS-M : software center became even better, polished, F-Spot has been replaced with Shotwell, and the Ubuntu Support and Learning Center has been postponed by the Ubuntu Manual Team for the next release - hopefully I will be able to help there. They are very busy with updating the ubuntu manual, but it will be most likely delayed, it will not be released on the same day with Maverick.

And the major UI improvement is the in-progress Ubuntu font, which looks stunning, in my opinion, but it still needs a monospaced version for the terminal, and support for many other languages. It will not be the default in Maverick, but it will be available.

So that's all, comment if you know about anything major, that I've left out. :)

open letter

2010-09-09T08:52:00.000+03:00

I've just read Aaron Toponce's open letter on planet.ubuntu.com. I knew about that Qur'an burning event from a month ago, but I did not know what to do. Aaron Toponce showed me what is the right thing to do as a Christian: his letter is a well-written one, with arguments from The Holy Bible, but that is not related to Ubuntu, that is another thing. But the more interesting thing is that he also wrote some arguments from the Ubuntu philosophy of an Anglican archbishop, Desmond Tutu.

But this is all belief-related, and I'm trying to remain neutral on this blog. The thing that is not belief-related is the reaction of the Ubuntu community to this letter, showing acceptance both from christians and atheists. So after seeing this reaction of the community, I'm even prouder to be part of it, along with other memberse who accept other people's beliefs and opinion, and react to it in a respectful manner.

beatiful dreams

2010-09-03T12:08:00.001+03:00

People do dream. That's good. But when people dream about things, and those dreams do not become reality, people get mad and sad.
I do dream too. Most of the times I don't remember my dreams. But sometimes other people do share they dreams, and I am able to tell whether I would like to dream that too.
And now I'm sharing a video for all the tech freaks out there, who are like me. A dream shared in form of a concept video...

So developers, device vendors, you can see what the short-term goal might be... let's do it, let's make this dream come true :) The uTouch framework might help to build that UI on top of Ubuntu ... that would surely be nice :)

Regarding the long-term goals ... the only thing that limits us is our imagination. Dare to dream.

what's up lately

2010-08-07T22:03:00.000+03:00

i've been very busy lately with changing my job, organizing my wedding, moving to a new flat, and "small" things like these, so I'm just silently reading the news about ubuntu, the percentage of the contributions of canonical vs red hat, the discussion on ayatana about the window borders, menus, and their sense or lack of sense, the advances in the sound menu, and the thoughts about it... things start falling apart... the community somehow is falling apart, there are soo many people who used to like ubuntu and had enough of it... and that's bad. but I don't know a solutio for that. sadly.

I haven't contributed anything lately... but yesterday a desktop testing team emerged for ubuntu, so I have entered, and I am currently installing maverick alpha3 on my second laptop to go through the test cases described :)

I sometimes go through the list of bugs to find something I could help at... but I haven't found anything I like. Sometimes I make some translations, but those are minor contributions. I haven't seen any interesting bugdays lately, mostly because of GUADEC and other conferences, I hope, and maybe there will be more.

About my experiences: my chromium seems to be muted somehow... opera plays sound with youtube, firefox plays too, chromium does not. otherwise I like the new messaging menu improvements, the sound indicator progress, the clock indicator advances... I miss the keyboard indicator... I haven't seen anything of that yet... and no windicators... maybe that'll get postponed 6 months, just like Gnome 3.
I don't like the closed beta state of the new ubuntu font, and I don't understand why it can't be a public beta. But maybe someday I will be enlightened.
Oh ... I almost forgot to tell you about the advances in the software center... it's still something I probably won't use, but it's starting to take shape, and it's getting beautiful and user-friendly... so good for newcomers.

That's all for now... I'll get back when I'll have an idea what to blog about :)

song a day guy

2010-07-19T13:00:00.000+03:00

I've just read about a guy, writing a song each day, and publishing it to youtube. You gotta check his blog. He has already got 563 songs. My favourite ones are the last few ones (I didn't listen to all of them, yet).
Check this about the IPhone 4 antenna problem:

... and another one about Steve Jobs :)

if you like him too, check his blog at http://www.rockcookiebottom.com/

have a nice (song a) day :)

silence and development

2010-07-16T07:56:00.000+03:00

nowadays I'm not writing very often, because I feel exhausted most of the time, my current job is eating up my time.

In the meantime, I have almost daily a new development idea, so there's no problem with that. Many of them are Ubuntu and Ubuntu-specific app development tasks, others are whole new applications, systems, some of them web applications.

I even have started developing on web application, I have set up the environment for that, basically that was about integrating eclipse Helios, Spring IDE, Vaadin Plugin and Hibernate, because the web app will use Spring as the base framework, Hibernate and some DB (MySQL or HSQLDB or Derby) for ORM and storage, and Vaadin will be used for the UI part.

As some of you might have seen, Chrome and Chromium now do have web app tabs, so now if you do write a web application, the only element from the browser would be the tabbar, and besides that, your application could look almost like a native application: can have menus beneath the titlebar, resizeable, etc. Note that by native I do not mean the look and feel of the nativae apps, but the UI design of the window displaying it.

That's all for now, I'll be back soon (hopefully with another post)

jockey "simple" papercut part 1

2010-07-01T13:49:00.001+03:00

I've mentioned papercuts already, and the fact that I did start looking for the right papercut for me, one that I can fix. I've found it. After looking at bug #409338, marked as a papercut, the task looked like replacing some strings.

I wanted to give it a try, downloaded the source of the package, searched for the occurences of the string "Hardware Drivers", replaced each one of them with the new string discussed in the comments with Vish and others,"Proprietary Drivers", made a bzr branch, and proposed for merge.
The proposal was rejected by Martin Pitt, a jockey developer, with the comment, that jockey is not just for proprietary drivers. It was nice to find out about it, but until now, in three years of Ubuntu usage, I have only seen there GPU drivers, and Wireless drivers, all of them proprietary. But as Martin said, it's supposed to handle open printing drivers too, and sometimes the linux kernel backports module too. So it's far more complex than users (like me) can see.

After that Vish found that the ubuntu docs uses only proprietary drivers for the drivers you can handle with jockey, so the documentation is wrong too :). So maybe this bug seems simple, but it involves many changes - not code changes, but String changes, and documentation rephrasing. And it is a good example of the lack of communication between app developers and the documentation team, because if that would've been worked, than the documentation wouldn't discuss using Jockey in a section entitled Proprietary Drivers. So there is much room for improvement.

After we have discussed that the wording should be changed to Downloaded Drivers, I've realized, that jockey on first activation of a drivers downloads the driver needed, so we can't call a window downloaded drivers, and then download the driver on activation, so I'll wait and think about a better wording. So far the Additional Drivers sounds good, although one might ask "additional to what?".

Stay tuned for the updates on the status of this papercut. I'll post if I have an idea, or I have done something relevant, but please comment if you have some really good ideas regarding the wording!

i'm done

2010-07-01T13:03:00.000+03:00

I'm done. I have finished and presented my MSc thesis on Benchmarking the performance of mobile device resources. The application got better, than I expected it. The benchmarks were good, gave realistic results, and explainable. Hardly believable, but explainable.

One example of the results is that the Nokia E71 and E51 smartphones perform worse in Java applications than an old and simple Sony Ericsson W200i phone. That's because of the JVM implementation -> Nokia phones have a JVM implementation using JIT (Just in Time) compilation, which means, as far as I have understood, that blocks of bytecode are optimized and run. Sony Ericsson phones do have AOT (ahead-of-time) compilation, which means that the Java bytecode is compiled to native code before running the app. That takes time, but the result is that the application runs much much faster. There is another type of JVM, the worse one, that just interprets the Java bytecode, used for example on a new-generation LG GT505 touchscreen phone. That is awfully slow in Java.
Note that my application just benchmarked the phones, the JVM types for each phone I've found on the JBenchmark results page.

The good news is that the phone's performance isn't related to Java performance. So you can buy any of the phones mentioned above, they might work well generally.

making the right choices

2010-06-28T13:19:00.000+03:00

this video is not strictly Ubuntu-related... but I had to post it. It's good. The only thing I don't understand is, why does a Java and Open-source fan use a laptop with the forbidden fruit on it?

gnome sound preferences part 1

2010-06-27T09:48:00.000+03:00

while searching for the right papercut to fix, I've stumbled upon bug #594396. The bug stated is simple, an always-reproducible usability issue: when clicking sound preferences from the sound indicator, the sound preferences dialog appears, with the Sound Effects tab selected by default, that being the first tab.

The first solution would be to make the Applications tab selected by default, but there are two problems with that:
- would it be a pleasant to look at a dialog with a tab bar, with the last tab selected by default? - (IMHO no)
- if there is no application with an active sound stream, the Applications tab is empty. Does it look nice? (IMHO no)
It would look like shown on the screenshot.

So it doesn't look nice. Someone commented in the bug that the sound preferences would need a redesign. This doesn't sound like a papercut for me, but it's challenging indeed.

I'm not a designer, I'm a developer, but I like UI design, so I've started reviewing the current gnome sound preferences dialog from a user's perspective, then redesigning it.

The overall look of the dialog is OK. The general output volume slider must be accessible anytime, so that should remain on top, every other setting in tabs. Let's start with the first, problematic Sound Effects tab:

Half of the space available in the tab is wasted - The alert sound table columns could be set to 10%-45%-45%, that way the table would not seem so unbalanced, and the Enable window and button sounds checkbox could be moved up in the same row with the sound theme Combo.
Why do we have 2 different ways of selecting one item from an item list? One possible answer is that because in the Sound theme combo, there is only the name of the theme to display, but in the alert sound selection, the type is displayed too. Does a user need to know whether the alert sounds are From theme or Built-in? IMO, no, he/she is not curious about that. That kind of information isn't displayed for GTK Themes neither, in spite of the fact, that themes can be Root-themes, from /root/.themes, can be shared from /usr/share/themes, or user themes from ~/.themes. So why do we need to display it for the alert sound?
Enable window and button sounds - What sound do I enable? a play button would be good, to be able to play the sound I'm enabling... or even better, some way to select it for myself - Sound effect preferences should be about my preferences, shouldn't it?
The Mute checkbox and No sounds theme do the same. A Mute button is effective, if you want a fast way to mute the sounds of an application. You have no chance of bringing up the sound preferences dialog, and click mute while an alert sound, a window sound or a button sound is playing. And if you don't want to hear any of these anymore, you can simply set the sound theme to No sounds.
There are things which should be, and are not displayed on this tab. The best example is the Gnome login sound, which can be enabled and disabled from the Preferences->Startup Applications dialog, by Enabling/Disabling the gnome login sound, and/or from the Preferences->Login Screen dialog, by Checking/Unchecking the Play login sound settings. A reason for this would be the discussion related to another bug, which has the status set to Fix released in Lucid, but I can't find a way to configure the startup sound... that's why it should be in the Sound Effects tab.

That's all for the first part of the sound preferences redesign, because I'm trying to limit the length of my posts :) But there are 4 tabs left to review, and the redesign is still in progress, so stay tuned.

Dox day two - docky

2010-06-24T10:59:00.000+03:00

The second dox day lasted a week :) I have been using docky for one week. Then I have realized, that I'm not using it for anything else, than basic application switching and launching, and that can be done with gnome-panel too. But let's see the good side and the bad side of docky...

Docky with the default settings looks like any other dock, with zooming icons on mouseover, and a beautiful transparent dark theme (the screenshot is not with the default settings, but something like those... I don't remember what were the defaults and there is no restore defaults button). But it does have a panel mode, for people like me. But that doesn't have zooming icons, doesn't have useful docklets and helpers (although stack and a skype helper are coming).

There is no useful CPU usage monitor, only a circle flashing, but it does not show the history, like the gnome panel applet does.

The two helpers I could use are the Banshee and the deluge helper. The banshee helper displays the album art for the currently playing song(although in 40x40 px is not very visible), displays the time left from the currently playing song, although that is too small too.
The helper puts the Next, Pause, and Previous items in the right click menu, but I could not take a screenshot of that, because of an old bug/feature ... screenshotting is impossible when a menu is displayed - this is duplicated functionality for me, because this is what the Banshee app indicator is for.. The deluge helper displays some upload and download statistics. But I'm not a big torrent fan.

Another problem with the 3d mode is that it looks ugly with maximized windows. With every single dock, I have tried.

Another thing worth mentioning is the clock applet, beautiful, but not as useful as the gnome panel one. On click, it expands, and show the current months calendar, but with no events shown, only the current day with bold font. No screenshot of that, because of the bug/feature mentioned above.

That's all about docky, I wanted to mention. I'm not using it anymore, because I didn't use it for anything more than I'd use gnome-panel for, and gnome-panel is started anyway, so why start another application, and slow my startup down with that 1 second?

Stay tuned, the reviews of the gnome-panel integrated docks/launchers, like dockbar, dockbarx, and Talika, and maybe others are coming.

my (partial) success story

2010-06-23T21:01:00.001+03:00

now I would like to share my experience on using ubuntu for a serious task: preparing a master's thesis from scratch ...

I use ubuntu primarily. I had to write my master's thesis and develop an application for that too. It's logic, I have decided to do all in ubuntu.

Deciding about on which editor to use: my choice was the geeky TeX :) people are scared by latex, because it's like programming... but it's not that hard and lifts the weight of formatting the document from your shoulders... and it does produce typografically beautiful document. I'm not a latex expert. I just know what that is. Everything else I have found by googling for it ... so if you have a question, google for it, and you'll find the answer.

The tex editor I have chosen was texmaker, because it handles documents structured in multiple tex files well, it does have useful keyboard shortcuts for the basic operations. The bad thing is that if you make a mistake, it'll reveal tons of other errors, so you won't be able to find the exact location of your typo.
Next I had to do some coding... java micro edition. the required toolkit, WTK installs just fine.
About the development environment: I am an eclipse fan, but people said that Netbeans is better for j2me coding... I wanted to try it... after a few days, I have switched to eclipse, because netbeans is bloated, slow, and I could not edit the generated code => I have switched to eclipse, where I have to create the base midlet class, but I can edit it, when I want, and I am not told by an IDE what I should and what I should not do.

I needed some UML tools too: Visual Paradigm is very nice, netbeans based, and has a community version... you can only create one of each diagram in the community edition, but that was basically enough. When I did have to do more, I have downloaded ArgoUML, and used that... but Visual Paradigm is better. Although not perfect.

That was all about coding and writing the document. When I was done with the app, I needed to do some charts... I have chosen OpenOffice for that... not a bad choice, but there's still a lot more to improve. I have typed the data in a spreadsheet. I wanted to have some charts, then export them to images. I have created the charts, but then I saw, that Spreadsheets can only export to PDF and html. Neither of them is an image format. I had to copy the charts to OpenOffice Draw, to be able to save them as images. But when copying two charts at once from the SpreadSheets app to the Draw app, the datasets got somehow duplicated on the way, and instead of 3 datasets, i got 6 on each chart. So I had to copy each chart to Draw, one by one, select them one by one, and export them, one by one. And I had around 15 charts. But that was ready too.

Now my master's thesis was ready for printing. I have experienced some problems with my Canon Pixma MP640 when printing from Ubuntu through a wireless connection (I wanted to print from 20 copies of an image from OpenOffice Draw, and printing stopped definitely while printing the third copy, when half of it was out, the other half was still in). My fiance had to print her thesis too, and she said that she'll print it from window 7. She started printing, and after the third page (weird), windows 7 died with a Black Screen (of Death). After a restart, she tried to print again, but not the whole document, but only 20 pages of it. It all came, out, but when she started to print the next 20 pages, she forgot to set the papersize from Letter to A4, so... After she had finished printing her copy, she asked me to copy my thesis to her computer, and she'll print it... I said no... and I have started to print from Evince - I did not have any configuration options (no quality settings, no size settings) so I did not have the option to set anything wrong, and I clicked print. And it all went fine, my thesis was printed. And it was ready faster then the document printed from windows 7 via USB. And Ubuntu did not die with a black screen. So the two major hardware support issues ("there is no driver disc for my printer" and "my wireless card does not work") did not appear for me, both worked... I had to install them, but users do have to install these on Windows too... the only difference is that on windows you have lots of options to configure them and crash your OS, and on Ubuntu you don't have options, but they work very well in the default mode.

We went to the building where we had to hand the theses in, we have bought a couple of CDs (we had to hand the app in on CD). I have turned off my laptop to write the two directories to the CD - first 3 tries: gnomebaker made a loud sound, and a notification about writing failed. After that I had realized that there is a collapsed part of the writing failed window where I can see the log... The problem was the depth of the directory structure... it was too deep: 7 instead of the 6 allowed (what is this? the stone age? people can't burn eclipse to a CD because it's directory structure is too deep?) finally the solution I've found was to archive the files... when done, clicked burn... and after one minute of work, and a fixation error, my CD was screwed up... and no way to burn the apps to CDs. So I have admitted that I can't do anything more to have my thesis done from scratch in Ubuntu... so I have booted up Windows 7 for the first time in the last three months. It began checking my disk drives... I have tried burning from CDBurnerXPPro, it failed, then from InfraRecorder, that failed too, then finally, I have tried the Explorer Builtin Write discs to file, which (although awfully slow) worked.

So that's my Success story of Ubuntu. Everything works fine, until you have to do a task so trivial, that everybody thinks it'll work fine, but when you try, you'll fail. So Ubuntu is good. Using CDs and DVDs is outdated anyway. But it should work. I can write the disc with Windows Explorer, I can print a LightScribe label in Ubuntu, and I can't write a CD in Ubuntu? Strange.
The good thing is that I am ready, and I can get some sleep now. stay tuned for more info

Dox Day One - awn

2010-06-15T03:23:00.002+03:00

I'm in search for a good-looking dock and app launcher with low resource usage. I've decided I'll try and use each dock one day, and post my experiences about it.

The first one I'm trying is the latest awn (avant window navigator) because it just got indicator applet support. Downloading and installing it from the awn testing PPA went fine.

Customizing it... too much settings for me. I've seen some really good-looking screenshots. But I want something different - it'd look like this: window list and launchers on the left, temperatures monitor, system monitor, workspace switcher, trash can on the right. I've tried to get a setting like this. I don't like center alignment.
Styles

The none style is good, but it's usable only with panel mode, because otherwise windows go underneath docky, and statusbars will appear below docky. Because of this neither docky is not pleasant visually, nor the status is readable.... for example, with chromium it looks annoying, because under the window list when a page is loading, statuses appear and disappear.
Curvy is does not look good for settings like mine, where the applets should be on the two sides of the screen.
Floaty looks... floaty... the border around it looks interesting. I don't like it.
3d looks good, but when using for example a workspace switcher applet, it does not look nice.
Lucido did not work for me as it did for the ones who take beautiful screenshots of it, because it had that curve only on one side of the screen for me. Maybe it is just a metter of settings, but I have spent a few minutes with setting it up, playing with styles, themes, position on screen, but the curve was visible only on one side.
My choice: Edgy style, because it does have a good-looking thing on one side, that's where I've put my menu.

Besides the applets I've mentioned I wanted to have, I have added the terminal applet, a media player applet and two stacks applets.

So after some 15-20 minutes of playing around with the settings, I've got my setup finished. The problems I've had, maybe because I'm using the testing PPA: when changing the theme, the style settings are lost: Expand as panel is uncheched and Icon size reset to 48.

About the Indicator applet support: it really does have support for indicator applets, but the icons are barely visible... on the default setup with 48 pixel icons, indicators are put in two rows. Another thing is that they are not integrated well: with gnome-panel you have the feeling that the menu is "flowing" out of the panel. With docky: there is a good looking semitransparent dock, and when clicked, a standard gnome menu appears. It would be good if it'd look like the menus for window icons with multiple windows open: a beautiful menu in AWN style. I know it's still in the early stage, but there's much room left for improvements.

Another thing is about the applets: it would be nice if they'd be movable with Drag and Drop... The settings tab for applets is messy: many categories, with one or two items in it, no filter option to quick search for an applet, and so on.

About the launcher and window list applet - I haven't found a way to remove the Firefox launcher - no applet preferences, drag and drop out of the dock does not work.

Avant window navigator does not support multiple docks - you can start only one instance... and have one dock. If you need more docks/panels/etc., than AWN is not the right choice for you.

What I like about AWN is the way of handling multiple windows of the same app when grouped: triangles for the first 3 instances, then 3 triangles and the number of open instances after that.

Day One - AWN day is over. That's all, stay tuned for the next Dock Day.

Classics on Gnome project

2010-06-12T01:14:00.002+03:00

after the gnome-games hugday I have realized lots of things... that made me a bit sad. There are lots of bugs reported because of games like glChess or quadrapassel not working on certain video cards. Why is that?
Let's start from the beginning ... the gnome-games exist. A bunch of small, old and classic games, and some not so classic games which got in the package somehow.
these games were written by different people... different languages... different toolkits. Just to name a few: Gnibbles (C and Clutter), Quadrapassel ( C ++ and Clutter), GnoMine (C and GTK), glChess (py, OpenGL), Gnome sudoku (Python and GTK). I did not check the others. Now my opinion: all these games are simple. They do not require 30 fps high quality graphics. and can be written wuth GTK only. That is my guess. I will give a shot to see if it's really possible.

Another bad thing about the games in the package is their UI consistency. They can be found in the same package and: some do have a toolbar, others don't. Some do have a menubar, others don't. Some have separate menu items to enter and to leave fullscreen, others have only one which changes depending on the current fullscreen state.

All these things have led me to do some research on how to make a unified gaming gui for all these simple games. So far I've made some decisions, which do not comply fully to the Gnome HIGs, but they are worth trying. The Gnome HIG is going through some major changes for the next release... so we'll see what the future brings about these ideas.

First of all games should have a common GUI. See the mockup.
The games should only require GTK. Games should have single window interfaces. Only show things that are required.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts.
If anyone wants to help with this, please contact me. Otherwise, wait for the result and tell your opinions.

ubuntu progressing

2010-06-11T05:24:00.001+03:00

many people disagree with many ubuntu and canonical decisions. I won't argue with them. They might be right to a certain degree. But in this post I'll try to outline a few things, which made and make ubuntu progress, evolve, advance, get better, etc. - the way I see it.

Companies start to admit that Ubuntu can be an alternative for Windows. I'll take two examples for that - one global and one local. The global one is a well-known company, Dell. Dell now has a site dedicated to Ubuntu, ships some PCs, laptops and netbooks with Ubuntu preinstalled, making them cheaper. On this site, there are some pretty good reasons for novice users on why should they choose Ubuntu. I like that site. It is really informative. And user-friendly. BUT it lacks the cons, and cases when users should not choose Ubuntu preinstalled computers - like hardcore gamers, and Adobe Creative Suite users. By lacking this information, Ubuntu is presented as a perfect OS ... and people get suspicious about perfection, and ask a friend about it - if that friend really knows Ubuntu and does have up-to-date information about it, then Ubuntu still does have a chance... but in most cases the friend will not know much about Ubuntu... and his advice will be to choose the well-known Windows....

The local example is a local(romanian) company(PCMadd) selling refurbished Dell PCs and laptops. Last time, I have checked, they had Ubuntu 9.10 preinstalled on every laptop, and Windows could be purchased optionally. But now I see they had removed the Ubuntu preinstalled texts.... maybe they did not yet update to 10.04 ... and got criticized about it. Hopefully. Anyway, I'll contact them and ask them about the status.

To see a list of improvements which led Ubuntu to this, can be found on David Siegel's blog in the UX Advocates announcement. He lists the major improvements over the last two years - from 8.04 to 10.04 - and compares them to the Mac OS X improvements from the last two years, but that's not important.

To see how fast Ubuntu is evolving... First list the things that'll be implemented for the next release (lots of indicators, Unity, Global Menu for netbooks ...) to see the new features. After that you can check the status of Operation CleanSweep - a project for checking patches submitted to ubuntu-related bug-reports. The Review Team is doing a great Job there... in the last 4 days, they have reviewed almost 400 patches.

And yet another example... last time I've blogged about the gnome-games hug day. It's over now. From the 105 items selected, 95 were checked.

So Ubuntu teams and community ... go on like this, and someday bug #1 will be fixed.

gnome-games hug day

2010-06-09T09:33:00.001+03:00

linux gaming needs improvement. i've already mentioned a few times, that the lack of good games for linux influences gamers to stick with windows and mac osx. lately things are getting better, with the humble indie bundle going open-source, many windows games getting wine support, dosbox for playing the good old classics (still a better integration would not hurt). Also there are a few good games developed for linux, like OpenTTD (open-source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe - with some patches and graphic set it does have really neat graphics, but not finished yet - a good place for graphic contributions), Astromenace, a spacecraft shooter with really good graphics and gameplay, OpenTyrian, another remake, OpenSonic, yet another one, a recent project ... and the games from the playdeb repos - which seem to be down for the moment.

but these are just games that need to be installed from external repositories, patched manually, etc. the default games to be found in most Gnome-based distros or their repositories, and Ubuntu too, are in the gnome-games package. there are many games in that package, but only a few of them are installed by default. they are simple games like mahjongg, solitaire, mines, sudoku, chess, tetris and even these have very tough bugs. the best thing was that after my lucid install, i have started quadrapassel - the tetris game from the gnome-games pack - and the game area appears only when the blocks are animated as falling down. sudoku sometimes generates unsolvable puzzles, chess uses 100% CPU when doing nothing, solitaire does not permit legal moves ... just a few bugs, that make the out-of-the box gnome gaming experience worse, besides the fact that these are just "entertainers", they can hardly be called games IMHO.

but the ubuntu community has a very good habit to work on bugs related to a topic, reviewing, triaging them on a weekly basis, every thursday - these days are called hug days. the last one was about compiz, the desktop effects component, the one before that was about epiphany, the fast browser developed by the gnome folks. the activities to do on these days are like testing if a bug still exists with the latest software versions, forwarding upstream, asking questions on how to reproduce things, marking duplicates ... nothing too hard - and can save the time of developers to focus on the real bugs, that are not yet fixed.
and the next ubuntu hug day will be about gnome-games - on the wiki you'll find a list of bugs, on launchpad you'll find even more... if you have a few minutes, just check one bug ... you play a few minutes, and in the meantime you contribute to the community. if you find another bug, report it.

So - feel free to contribute on the hug day to make the linux gaming better... and stay tuned for more game-related posts, sometime I'll review the games I've mentioned above

good news

2010-05-28T11:48:00.000+03:00

Yesterday I have read lots of good news ... for me ... but I thought I'll share them with you
to sum it up in one sentence: the supremacy of the software giant (ms) is over
The first news headline was about Apple taking Microsoft's place as the largest technology company. The good thing is that Microsoft has lost this war. The bad thing is that Apple has many problems. But as people say (I don't know, haven't tried any of the Apple products) their products are better, and more stable.
The other news are some blog posts - debunking some windows myths - about windows ease of use, about windows device support - I'm happy that some people do realize these things, and do share these thoughts with people.
And the last one is related to Linux gaming - about some statistics , about how much the users of operating systems do donate. The result is that Linux users have donated almost twice as much as Mac or Win users. So game makers, do some porting - there is a market for Linux Games.
That's all for now... share your thoughts about these ... What d'you think? Happy or sad?

nautilus-elementary sidebar revamped

2010-05-18T15:36:00.004+03:00

So here's the new revamped sidebar integrated into nautilus-elementary with the elemntary theme. As I already have mentioned, there were a few bugs with my sidebar patch, but kitkat fixed most of them, and included it in the nautilus-elementary trunk, and therefore one more bugfix is commited. See more screenshots and his comments posted on his blog. Thanks kitkat for the post, the commit and the screenshot.
If you like it and you'd like to see it on your desktop, it's just a few terminal commands away from you.

sudo apt-get install bzr
bzr branch lp:nautilus-elementary
sudo apt-get install build-essential intltool
sudo apt-get build-dep nautilus
cd nautilus-elementary
./configure --prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install
nautilus -q

After executing these commands, you can try it, and if you find any bugs, report them at launchpad nautilus elementary bugs

silence

2010-05-17T10:19:00.003+03:00

I'm not blogging much these days because I should be working a lot on my diploma thesis. Last weekend I have submitted a patch to nautilus-elementary for the sidebar tweaks I have mentioned - see the details, suggestions and a screenshot in the nautilus-elementary bugzilla. Thanks to kitkat I'm aware of a few bugs, issues like rearranging the bookmarks is not possible (instead of that people can drag the categories :) ), and something's wrong with the expander cellrenderer borrowed from the opensource world(rhythmbox, empathy use that) - some error messages appear on stdout - but people using Gnome(like me) won't see that anyway. Moving the Desktop and Home folder shortcuts into the bookmarks is a bit harder than I thought it would be, because they are handled a bit differently - but kitkat has suggested a few solutions for that too. So stay tuned, and watch nautilus-elementary - suggest improvements and see nautilus turning into a good looking file manager tool:) The guys in the team are doing a really good job - like the UI improvements so far, now the zeitgeist integration - it'll rock.

In the meantime I have noticed that I cannot install gnome-shell on Lucid - why is that? Does anyone know? It says something like "Library x needed but it's not going to be installed" - a message not too easy to understand, especially when I want it to be installed - does Ubuntu have its own life, that it does not obey my commands? - is it turning into windows? - (no way, just a minor bug, I'm sure :) )

uds news and sidebar working

2010-05-12T15:14:00.003+03:00

the Ubuntu Developer Summit is held this week in Belgium. quite a few interesting sessions happened and will happen. at the beginning Mark has held a session about the new Unity interface for netbooks, there have been talks about the global menu, improving nautilus, writing the indicators for the remaining notification items(calendar, network, keyboard), enhancing the existing indicators(me menu, sound applet).

Regarding the software center people have been talking about making community apps discoverable in software center, selling apps and rating apps in software center. Regarding default software there was a session about simple image management, with focus on replacing F-Spot (at last) with another one, Shotwell or GThumb, Shotwell being the favoured one.

Another great idea that has been discussed is the Ubuntu Support and Learning Center, which is a central support website with cutting-edge technologies like HTML5, implemented as a moderated wiki, so that the edited and accepted content can get into the ubuntu manual, and people can have access to up-to-date support pages. It looks really awesome on the mockups, and it fits in the new ubuntu branding scheme.

In the meantime when I was not listening to the sessions and following the gobby specs, I have finished and fixed my Nautilus Elementary sidebar with categorized places, now the drag and drop seems to work. Let's see what'll happen with that... There is a nautilus-elementary bug reported for the inclusion of a categorized sidebar, kitkat also made some suggestions regarding the categories, so after those are implemented, I'll post a patch there, and let's see if other like that.

hopes for maverick

2010-05-06T13:16:00.001+03:00

I have read some news related to maverick... it seems to me that it'll be awesome ... with RGBA enabled - transparent windows -, windicators on the right side of windows, global menu by default in the netbook edition, but installable on the desktop too, and nautilus elementary might be included, and discussions about the default browser - firefox or chromium... but that's to be decided at the UDS next week... so these are all exciting news. Gnome Shell will not be included by default, but will be available in the universe repositories too, so we will work with the classic Gnome environment - great news for me also, because I don't like the Gnome Shell that much - as a concept it looks good, but on the usability-side it still needs a lot of work - I have tried to get used to it, but I did not succeed.

about the windicators concept

2010-05-04T20:29:00.002+03:00

yesterday Mark Shuttleworth bloggeed about a new idea of using the top right corner freed by moving window controls to the left side. he thought that it might be a good idea to have app-specific indicators up there, and totally remove the statusbar from the bottom of the window, maybe show a transient popup instead of that when something happens. i like this idea very much, now i'm sure it was worth moving the window controls, because something awesome will be in their place. or if somebody wants to keep the window controls in the top right corner, than he'll have something awesome on the other side.

i have thought the idea over, and enhanced it: the status notifications should be taken into the top right side, just like system notifications (notifyosd) are currently in the top right corner. i have expressed my ideas, thoughts related to this in the ayatana mailing list, check them out. those were just usability issues, like having one sound volume indicator for each window and one in the panel would be problematic and why should status notifications appear in the top right. after that my mind couldn't stop ... thought about more code-reuse: in the last few days i have been thinking about extreme things like moving the menubar up to the window titlebar... now I know that's close to client-side decorations.... I even have looked at the metacity code ... but after this whole windicators the ideas are just popping up...

I was thinking of implementing a gnome panel in the window titlebar - that way we could have windicators, we could have menus in the titlebar, we could have almost anything in the titlebar besides the window control buttons.
I'm aware that this requires a huge amount of metacity hacking, but it's still unclear to me what will happen with metacity after the release of Gnome Shell - maybe it will not be hacking anymore if Gnome will choose not to maintain metacity - then the hackers could become maintainers... but I don't really know how these changes happen in real-life, these are just guesses.
So in these days in my spare time (I do not have much) I am checking the metacity and gnome panel code to see if what I was thinking of is possible... I would like if it'd be... but if it ain't it'bb be implemented sortof' by the Ubuntu developers - at least that's my guess..

Also today I had an idea about a revolutionary file browser, but I'm still thinking about the details and if it'd be useful. But that's the topic of another post.

lucid browser benchmarks

2010-05-03T01:01:00.004+03:00

people when they work on their computers, spend most of their time browsing. that is what I think, and my opinion is supported by the wakoopa application stats (wakoopa is a social network with user application usage tracking for Win, Mac, Linux, Web apps, Iphone...), where in the first eleven places we can find the 6 different browsers (1. firefox, 2. chrome, 5. ie, 6. safari, 7. opera, 11. chromium) and 3 web applications (3. facebook, 9. youtube, 10. gmail). The other two entries are Windows Explorer - which can be found in the top 10 only because all people running windows are running Windows Explorer in the background - and Windows Live messenger, which also requires an internet connection. So the point is that the people tracked there use their browsers most of their time, and I think this can be generalized.

So I have decided to benchmark the browsers available for Lucid to help you out when choosing the right browser for your newly installed fast operating system to be as fast as the OS is generally. I have found a quite good browser benchmark suite by FutureMark, the world leader in performance benchmarking. It is called Peacekeeper, used for benchmarking the Javascript capabilities of a browser, so the result is independent of the bandwidth, whether Flash is running or not, etc. I have tested both of my laptops to get a more accurate result. So here they are:

Now II assume that you need some explanation for that. The Peacekeeper has six different benchmark suites: Rendering, social networking, complex graphics, Data, DOM operation and text parsing. They run a series of tests for each suite, calculate the geometric mean of the test results and obtain a score for that category, and than the overall performance score is calculated by calculating the geometric mean of the different test suite results excluding the Complex Graphics test, which is an HTML5 Canvas test, not yet supported by all browsers.

First I wanted to test all the browsers available, like Epiphany, Midori, and the Firefox 3.7 alpha, but none of these finished the tests, they were stuck at different phases. So the results are taken only for the browsers that were able to run the tests successfully. The browsers are

Chromium from the lucid repository (5.0.342.9)
Google Chrome unstable dev channel version (5.0.375.28)
Firefox Namoroka 3.6.5pre
Opera 10.10
Opera 10.51 snapshot 6252 - Opera beta(mistyped, it should be alpha, as the beta was released on 4th May) on the charts
Safari 4.0.5(531.22.7) for Windows emulated with wine

The overall results are similar on both of my laptops, just the results are scaled by a factor of 2 on my Hp laptop. Look for the overall browser scores in the last "column" to select your browser... it is obvious that Chrome should be the one - it is my selection from now on. What surprised me is that the overall scores of Firefox and the Wine emulated Safari are very close... Safari even performs better than Firefox on my Dell.

I hope all this info will be useful for someone... and wait for the next post - it might be about Ubuntu themes.

lucid install annoyances

2010-05-02T16:44:00.002+03:00

yesterday I did not post anything, because I have installed Lucid on my old laptop, a Dell Latitude D820 with Core2Duo CPU and NVidia graphics, and it was a serious headache. It never took so long, and it was never that hard to make it work. Karmic performed well, but I wanted to update. On my second laptop I have made a clean install with the alpha5, and updated regularly, so that was ok. But I wanted to see if the distribution update is working ok. It took approximately 3 hours and 35 minutes. Amazing performance. And it was slow. So I have decided to reformat and do a clean install. It took 20 minutes. I have installed then the NVidia driver, and the frequency scaling applets, and then scaled the CPUs down to 1 Ghz. After that, I could not set it back to normal. That was annoying. I have reformatted and reinstalled again, after reporting a gnome-applets bug for that. Than it seemed to work, but after installing the NVidia driver again, the system seemed slow, and it was back again at 1 Ghz. Finally I have turned off Speedstep (frequency scaling) in BIOS.

Than I saw that the plymouth boot screen does not work correctly. I have followed some instructions to make it work (setting grub resolution and make plymouth use that too), but my monitor having a resolution of 1920x1200, that must be too much, because when starting up I got an out of memory error frequently, which had to be solved by running "sudo nvidia-xconfig" to generate a new xorg.conf to use the nvidia settings. So I have set the grub resolution to a resolution lower than the native resolution of my screen, just to make everything work.

Now all seems to work fine, but I don't like that the changes are beautiful and they work fine with new laptops, but they seem to forget about older computers. I don't like that idea, especially for a LTS release. People with older laptops who do not install non-LTS releases and wait 2 years for the next LTS, have to face the fact that their hardware is not be supported anymore, only if they learn the geeky terminal wizardry to make it work? That is not user-friendly... I'm fine with doing geeky stuff in the terminal, but there are many people who don't like the idea of a console at all.

After solving these issues, I have started to make some browser benchmarks, that could help you in picking your browser for lucid, and the results will be here soon.

Lucid Lynx is here

2010-04-30T23:29:00.000+03:00

Lucid Lynx was released yesterday, in spite of the problems that appeared, like the Xorg memory leak or the GRUB dual-booting problem which was discovered on the day of the release. The first solution for that was a 0-day update, but then the team decided to rebuild the ISOs, which was done in a matter of hours, showing the commitment of the team and the community to deliver a quality product on time.
So, Ubuntu teams, keep it that way... and that goes for the whole community and everyone who contributed ...
stay tuned for more information, more Ubuntu-related news and applications. The change is here. And it is beautiful. And useful. And the press wrote about it many good things, it received many good ratings. Let's see if it changes something in the eyes of the users of other OSes.

nautilus places sidebar

2010-04-29T15:13:00.002+03:00

I have seen some pretty good nautilus sidebar mockups, especially places sidebar improvement ideas. yesterday I wanted to give a try on implementing one. then I saw, how many sidebars does nautilus have, and started by removing the ones, which I do not use, like notes, history, description. I have left only two, the tree and the places bar. the tree sidebar was mostly ok, but I do not use it often, but kept it because I might want to use it sometime. but the places bar is cluttered, lots of places enumerated there, and only one separator between the bookmarks and the rest. the problem statement and a possible solution appeared on Hylke's Home blog. I have started to mess with the latest version of nautilus elementary, source from bzr. after three hours I have managed to make it look a bit better, see my screenshot on the left side. the improvement stands in the expandable and collapsable categories for places. it still needs some work, because the drag and drop onto the places bar does not work correctly, but hopefully I will be able to fix that.

in the meantime, I have found that there is a bug report for this on gnome bugzilla, and it also has a patch attached by A. Walton, who blogged about his solution, and received quite positive feedback, but his patch still needs work(as he states) too. His implementation looks a bit different (picture on the right side). what do you think? what else should be done to make nautilus look more professional? which solution is better?

skype indicator

2010-04-28T14:05:00.002+03:00

yesterday I have started to implement the indicator integration for Skype. skype has only a basic version for linux, but hopefully the opensource client will be released, and that'll have more functions implemented for linux, just like the windows version. but until then I wanted to have some sort of integration with the new ubuntu, because right now the blue skype icon looks ugly in the panel with monochrome icons everywhere. and anyway, the notification area will be completely removed, so people who want or have to use skype on ubuntu, will have to have some sort of integration.
so i have checked the skype APIs, there is a COM based API, a Java based API, and a Python based API. I have chosen the python one because I COM as far as I know is too tied to windows, and there are no Java bindings for the indicator applet API (the gnome bindings are quite old. so I have written my first python script in a matter of few hours and got a basic understanding of python while implementing the app indicator.
i first wanted to do messaging mennu integration, but i couldn't find the way how to do this, because pidgin does it, but after searching in the source (libindicate, libindicator, appindicator, pidgin, pidgin-libnotify) and not finding anything I got tired and made a separate app indicator, capable of starting skype. I have also tested the API making voice calls. what more... the best would be to have missed calls and chats notifications like in the messaging menu, and the arrow indicator that skype's running. after that, when I'll find the way for integrating with the messaging menu, the code will be reusable too.
and stay tuned... only one more day until the release of the Lucid Lynx, which did not succed in its initial goal of booting up in 10 seconds on netbooks, but it does that in 18 seconds on some netbooks, and it boots up that fast on one of my laptops too, a HP ProBook 4710, which does not have an SSD, but a traditional HDD. so the boot performance isn't as good as it was said to be, but it isn't bad. it is quite good in my opinion.

get ready

2010-04-28T07:07:00.000+03:00

this is my new blog about ubuntu. only about ubuntu: ubuntu compatible hardware, ubuntu compatible applications, ubuntu concepts, ubuntu community, ubuntu personalization, ubuntu news, ubuntu development. the ubuntu community is growing. the number of ubuntu users is hopefully growing too, or if it is not, then hopefully it will be growing with the release of Lucid Lynx, the fastest and the most beautiful ubuntu out-of-the-box so far. so take care, and check this blog from time to time. the change is coming.