Ubuntuwire: developer services by the community for the community

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-11

Ubuntuwire: tools for every developer

The UbuntuWire project, created to get developer services to the community by community members, is the culmination of lots of hard work from Ubuntu Developers within the community outside Canonical. The aim is to provide hosting and support for the many community-developed tools that help to make Ubuntu run smoothly, particularly for those working on Ubuntu's Universe and Multiverse.

  • “people.”: SSH access with shell scripts, cron and Ubuntu-related file uploads without having quotas, bandwidth, or CPU restrictions. A genuine replacement for the (restricted access) “people.” server previously available and finally on par with what people.debian.org offers!

    ssh username@people.ubuntuwire.com

    is all that is needed for any Ubuntu developer already registered on Launchpad and with their SSH (secure shell) key uploaded. Log in today!

  • qa.: Quality Assurance. Automatic testing run on a scheduled basis to will help improve the quality of future Ubuntu releases.

  • lists.: Mailing lists for anything Ubuntu Development related. Quickly, efficiently and without any hassle.

  • REVU: The legendary web-based package checking tool. New contributors can do a real “dput” upload with and have the new package syntax checked. Even if you are not an Universe maintainer (MOTU) yet , your “NEW” packages can be forwarded to the main archive after checking and a review by fellow developers! For an introduction, hop over to theREVU pages on the wiki.

  • Ubuntu search: customised Google search, making it easy to find those *buntu related answers. The next time your are stuck, you'll know where to go first, without having to trawl through pages and pages of unrelated Google results!

Reinhard Tartler, behind REVU and UbuntuWire

The history of Ubuntuwire

The community network was founded 18months ago, back in February 2006. Ubuntu developers wanted a quick way to compile and test for several architectures (i386, AMD64 and PowerPC). One of the first pieces transferred across to the new hosting was REVU (“review”) the system used to check new upload for the community supported “Universe” and “Multiverse” components of Ubuntu. REVU was transferred across in August this year has most recently been joined by a customed Google search covering Kubuntu and other members of the Ubuntu family.

The developers behind UbuntuWire had a long desire to provide a single location of the set of tools available to developers to work and help improve Ubuntu. In the past most of the available servers behind Ubuntu have been funded and run by Canonical, with the downside that access has only been available to those developers directly sponsored by Canonical and not to the vast majority of developers within the Ubuntu community.

The solution in the mean time has been the spreading out of lots of individually developers tools across lots of servers. Ubuntuwire now provides a central location to pull together All the testing services that have been independently developed and keep them in a single, easily accessible place. A big difference is that network speed to the servers has been increased and stability improved. Now the servers are hosted by the Technical University of Nürnberg instead of lots of home internet connections!

The Future

By coordinating the administration of available servers, and providing consistent linking to recommended services, the project hopes to fill the gap that was previously left between what Canonical has been able to provide and what works best for efficient workflow within the Ubuntu development community.

UbuntuWire is growing. There is a hope to restore the email, jabber and 'ppc' and 'amd64' shell access that used to be available. For any technical question or request or help out, get in contact with the MOTUs and Core developers over on #ubuntuwire.

Kubuntu 7.10 in the eyes of a full-time geek

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-05

Jes Hall (canllaith), a KDE developer, has taken Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) through its paces and finds much to like. Amongst other changes in 7.10 she discusses, Jes admits that she enjoys the six month development cycle, saying:

I do enjoy the Kubuntu development cycle. Just as I’m starting to feel that my stable, long-configured system is starting to get a little blase, the new version is just around the corner. I eagerly upgraded to Kubuntu Gutsy when it was released on my faithful Vaio TX. Gutsy has been released for a few weeks now, so consider these not my first impressions but my opinion formed over 2 solid weeks of using Kubuntu as my main operating system at work.

Jes provides her initial impressions with things such as the installer, the new artwork and color scheme, as well as the new KDM login theme that now contains a user selector. She goes on to talk about the new restricted drivers manager for non-free hardware drivers and the new Gdebi KDE client for easy installation of .deb files.

File management, desktop effects, and productivity round out this review, with the blog post titled Kubuntu Gutsy.

Weekly News #64

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-05

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #64 for the week for the week October 28th – November 3rd, 2007 is now available. In this issue we cover the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Hardy Heron, FOSSCamp, the release of Mythbuntu 7.10, Ubuntu-Illinois codesprint, and, as always, much much more!

  • Ubuntu Developer Summit
  • FOSSCamp
  • Mythbuntu 7.10 Released
  • Ubuntu-Illinois Codesprint
  • Ubuntu Forums News
  • In The Press and In The Blogosphere
  • Meetings and Events
  • Updates and security for 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10
  • Translation stats
  • Bug Stats

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News please submit it via email or on the wiki !

UWN is brought to you by the Marketing Team.

Boston 2007 Developer Summit Day 5: Final day and wrapup

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02

Today was the last day of the Developer Summit and as such, it was a much lighter schedule.
After the spec sessions ended, Matt Zimmerman and Jono Bacon led a wrapup. However, a light schedule does not mean nothing was discussed:

Building a community around “enterprise” Ubuntu

Running Ubuntu in a large deployment can be tough, and a team to help reduce the pain is sorely needed. This spec talked about how to build such a team, including ideas like chatting with spec authors to make them aware of the needs of users of such deployments, as well as helping “enterprise-y” users contribute meaningfully to the larger Ubuntu community, including teams such as MOTU.

Banshee information discussion

The Banshee lead dev, Aaron Bockover, came to UDS to run an informal session on Banshee, talking about what it currently does and what development is expected in the future. He showcased how Banshee handles large libraries, iPod and other media device sync, and other features. Although shipping Banshee by default is not likely in the Hardy timeframe, it was strongly suggested that Hardy+1 would be a good time to do this.

Wrapup session

At the end of the conference, Matt Zimmerman led a wrapup session, describing this UDS as the “biggest and best” with the largest scope, encompassing Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and general education, Mobile, Server, and community. He then went on to cover the highlights of each major track:

Community – focusing on workflow between teams with the project, working with LoCo teams as well as building relationships with upstream developers.

Kernel – targeting the 2.6.24 kernel for Hardy, building a schedule, and announcing daily kernel builds during the Hardy cycle

Platform – focusing on robustness is a key target for Hardy, including creating a better testing infrastructure for language packs, bootloader, desktop applications and more.

Server – planning an amibitious schedule including LDAP auth on client/server with AD as an additional target, packaging of web apps, and more.

Mobile – focusing on how to handle software updates, backups, which applications to install by default, and general platform issues.

QA – talking about better measurement of QA during Hardy processes for verifying bugs. Also created a detailed schedule for what the QA team will be doing.

Desktop – discussing a major new theme for Hardy, including better procedures. Also talked about tracking new upstream projects such as PolicyKit.

Matt then turned it over to Jono, who led a a discussion of accolades and gripes about the UDS, with the reward of a donated O'Reilly book for the speakers. Lots of feedback was generated, from the now working phone system, the schedule being rejigged, notice boards and notices in general, where lunch was held, working with the LoCo team to help generate list of eating and cultural place within the host city, and much more.

Thanks for reading all this. There are a few more articles coming out over the next weeks, including talking with the Mobile and Server teams to see what they covered at UDS and those teams' general plans for Hardy.

Group photo of UDS Boston 2007 attendees

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02


Attendees at UDS Boston 2007. They included community members, Canonical staff, upstream projects such as Samba, Banshee, Mono and others as well as reps from many companies including Google and more. Photo taken by Ken Wimer.