Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

Development Update

We are almost there. Tomorrow language packs will be test-built. Next Tuesday we will hit the deadline for translations for language packs and from next week on Ubuntu 12.04 images of the release candidate will be built and extensively tested. Make sure you give the candidates a spin and report issues as you find them. On Tuesday, the 24th Universe packages will be frozen as well, so there are still 12 days for you to fix pet peeves. Read our spotlight below to find out what to bear in mind when fixing bugs in Ubuntu 12.04 at this stage.

April 26th will be the day when Ubuntu’s 16th release and 4th LTS release gets released.

Letting developers speak for themselves

 

Events

Ubuntu Algorithms Team Class
Marek Bardoński has been spearheading the Ubuntu Algorithms team. The team will hold a classroom session tomorrow, Friday 13th April. Be sure to check it out and get started with the team.

Ubuntu 12.04 Release parties
The whole world seems to be celebrating Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Teams in South Africa, Malaysia, Palestinian Territory, Thailand, Australia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Switzerland, the UK, Canada and the USA are getting together locally to hang out, learn and party.

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

  • Also did John Lea from the Ubuntu Design team talk to us and mentioned that there are bugs up for grabs, where the design has been decided on and the implementation might need YOUR help. If you want to help improve Ubuntu’s UI, have a look at these!

 

Spotlight: What to do toward the end of the release cycle?

Everybody’s busy at the end of the release, everybody is testing, fixing small bugs, translating or otherwise preparing the release of our next LTS release. If you are interested in Ubuntu development, the question is: what can you still work on and stand a chance to get it into Ubuntu? This is one of the key questions for new contributors. As Ubuntu has such a tight release schedule it’s important for us all to focus on stabilising things after Feature Freeze.

New releases with huge features. Wait for Q (the yet to be named 12.10 release). It’s no use trying to cram them still in. Even if it’s just a tiny less-exposed package, better go with stability because we have no time to test it properly. Get it into Q and consider a backport if you feel users of Precise should get it. In the meantime you can upload it to a PPA and ask for fellow users of the package to test it.

Bug fix releases. Here you have multiple options. If it’s a package in Universe, you can ask for a freeze exception and try to get it still in. The backport option above might make sense too. If the exception should not be granted by the release team, you could try to extract patches which fix specific problems and get those in.

Bug fixes. We obviously want those to get still in. For packages in main, the window is closing very fast, for universe packages you still have a tiny bit more time. If the release team should feel it’s better to give the fixes (if they are not really obvious) some more testing, have a look at our SRU (Stable Release Updates) procedure.

Summing it up, the more obvious the fix, the smaller the risk to create unrelated breakage, the better. Less important bugs, like typo fixes might be deemed not important enough to fix at this stage. One course of action might be to create a fix and submit it to upstream, so it will trickle back into Ubuntu in the next release.

So where to find suitable bugs? Daniel Holbach blogged about Harvest recently, a site which makes finding development opportunities easier. On the site you can select sets of “opportunity types” and sets of packages to narrow down the search somewhat. Simply check out our docs before, pick something from Harvest and get going.

If the first opportunity you find is too hard or not what you enjoy doing, pick another. Also: we’re hanging out in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net where we help you, if you should get stuck.

Happy last-minute bug fixing everyone!

Get Involved

  1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
  2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
  3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

 

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

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10 Responses to “Ubuntu 12.04 Development update”

  1. Petri Says:

    Hi there,
    Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) worked fine but next version 11.10 did not. Computer freezed and I had to download older LTS version. I hope these problems are solved.
    Computer is Samsung N210 Plus.

    br,
    Petri

  2. kidakaka Says:

    How can complete newbies help? Have never tried OS development myself, but have been using Ubuntu for the past 6-7 releases and would like to help!

  3. dholbach Says:

    Check out the first few articles on http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/ – they should provide with you enough background to get started.

  4. Walter Says:

    Please, PLEASE add support for my GTX 550 ti.

  5. David Says:

    as Walter said, Please, PLEASE add support for my Nvidia GTX 550 ti video card. I can’t even try the beta’s due to it not providing any display (other than a curser blinking in the top left and slight flashing of the upper portion of the display at random intervals). This is very frustrating…

  6. dcommini Says:

    will this work well on my acer aspire one d250? i haven’t upgraded from 10.04 due to reading about all of the issues similar computers have had with newer versions.

  7. steve Says:

    Since 10.04 I’ve tried all the releases hoping there’d be a good one before suppport for 10.04 ran out (currently on 10.04.4 – very nice.) As I can’t stand Unity I’ve also tried Mint and various other distros. Then came 12.04. To avoid Unity I went for Xubuntu which cannot cope with the monitor (SyncMaster753s rated at 1280×1024) except at 1024×768; 10.04 never had problems at 1152×864 though even it didn’t manage the 1280×1024 that WindowsXP manages. I then tried Ubuntu12.04 with MATE still no luck (and Unity froze with errors.) I’m not yet convinced 12.04 is going to be viable and I’ve only got a year left before 10.04 is binned. Can support for it be lengthened please? And I’d like the world clock back if it’s not too much trouble – for some of us sunrise and sunset times are at least as important as clock times.

  8. Jan Says:

    I have had a few problems after upgrading to V12.04 from V11.10. I no longer have root access and I need to edit the menu.lst in Grub. Also my keyboard does’t work in the KDE workspace. These are new problems. I was also not able to update the Mysql database for the applications.

  9. shaji Says:

    I installed ubuntu 12.04 along with windows 7.. I am unable to connect using wifi when working with ubuntu.
    The system does not show the wifi signals but i am able to use using windows 7 pls sent me some suggestions…

  10. pavan Says:

    i don’t want unity toolbar how to remove that…..

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