New hard drive

During UDS-Q I bought 3TB Seagate disk in USB 3.0 enclosure. Today I finally connected it to my desktop, formatted as ext4 and mounted.

I am surprised by speed of USB 3.0 – 147MB/s according to hdparm test is more than rest of my hard drives have. If technology will increase that way my SSD may became obsolete at time when another hdd will join my setup.

What for 2.73TB drive someone may ask. I plan to use it for backup of my machines.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
New hard drive was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

The Canononical Community Team

We had a new team photo taken. Thanks to Graham Binns!

L-R: Jorge Castro, David Planella, Jono Bacon, Daniel Holbach, Nicholas Skaggs, Michael Hall.

Community Leadership Summit 2012 Coming Soon!

Just a quick reminder that in just over a month we will be hosting the Community Leadership Summit 2012 in Portland, Oregon on from Sat, July 14, 2012 – Sun, July 15, 2012. The event happens the weekend before the OSCON conference, so this is a great opportunity to attend both events.

The Community Leadership Summit 2012 brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community.

This entirely free event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community. We have over 250 people registered, and we would love to see you there too!

At the heart of Community Leadership Summit 2012 is an open unconference-style event in which everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. These sessions are very much discussion sessions: the participants can interact directly, offer thoughts and experience, and share ideas and questions. These unconference sessions are also augmented with a series of presentations from leaders in the field, panel debates and networking opportunities.

Joining Us

You can find out more details about where the event is and how it works as well as seeing the registered attendance list. If you are interested in joining us, it is an entirely free event, but ask you to register here.

Plenaries

This year we are also going to be including a series of 15 minute plenary presentations that will happen after lunch on each day. These plenaries are designed to present interesting techniques, learnings, and case studies that will be of interest to community managers and leaders. If you are interesting in giving one of these plenaries, please email your topic and a summary of what you would like to speak about to jono At ubuntu DOT com.

Sponsorship

I am just in the process of finalizing our sponsors for the event and will be announcing them soon. We are a little under our sponsorship budget, so if you would be interested in sponsoring the event, please email me at jono AT ubuntu DOT com.

Find out more at www.communityleadershipsummit.com!

Executing on an idea; a UDS story

UDS is now behind us, and the excitement of the work that lies before us for the next cycle is fresh on our minds and hearts. Last cycle I solicited and received some amazing ideas for improving how we as a community do QA inside of ubuntu. As UDS neared I encouraged many of those with ideas to participate in UDS by attending, signing up for work items, and advocating their ideas.
This is a key portion of being a part of the community -- you must be willing to act. If you are unwilling to act upon your own idea, why would anyone else? If you don't believe in it, no one else will. Own the problem you wish to solve and you will find others who share your passion along the way to help you achieve your goals. This is the heart of open source.
But how? How can I act? What if the problem is outside of my skillset? Because of the greater community and the nature of open source, you don't have to solve all of the problem by yourself. As you undertake work to execute your idea, you will find it attracts those who are of like-mind and similar persuasion to you. The best part is that they will have different skillsets to bring to the problem and can help you accomplish more than you could alone.
In a previous job, I was given the freedom to spend a percentage of my time on anything I chose; provided I could convince two of my workmates to help out. The idea behind the requirement was a litmus test for my idea. If the idea has merit, I should be able to convince my colleagues to work on it with me. Ubuntu is one of several open source projects to operate on this idea of 'meritocracy'. The basic premise is to have the best people making the most informed decisions possible about problems specific to there expertise. This is achieved by granting authority to make decisions to anyone who demonstrates there ability to do so by contributing to the project.
So, returning to UDS I would like to tell you a small story of just one example of executing on an idea. Let me introduce Paolo Sammicheli to you. Paolo is from the Italian Loco team, and has been active in driving growth in the localized iso community. He began his work by starting an "Italian Testing Team" several UDS's ago, and has been advocating greater testing and community participation for several cycles now. This past UDS, Paolo wanted to help kickstart a localized iso community beyond just his Italian loco iso. Before UDS, he had already produced a set of wiki pages documenting how to use the isotracker admin features with a bent towards running your own localized iso tracker. Additionally, the Italian loco team planned and tested during the 12.04 cycle to create a localized ubuntu 12.04 image for release. Finally, Paolo came to UDS and created a blueprint so he could share his idea with others. Have a look at it yourself:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-q-localized-iso-community-growth

Paolo was able to generate good ideas, and see other people attempt to replicate his work within their own locos. Plans were made to have two other loco teams produce localized isos this cycle, and ultimately use there findings as a model for future loco teams. Although the work is on-going this cycle, Paolo, I think, has been successful at bringing his idea to life.
How can you replicate Paolo's example? A couple key points I see in what happened.

• Lay the groundwork
• Start proving the idea out as best you can. Perhap's it's a demo or prototype -- maybe even just a specification or a storyboard. You need to convince yourself (and others!) your idea makes sense and can be done
• Tell others
• Let others know about your work. Blog about it, come to UDS, present it at a Ubuntu user days event, post it to the forums, talk to people on IRC about it, etc
• Do it
• This is key. You need to start executing your idea as best you can. People are not going to make your idea a reality without you! (and why would you want them to? It's your idea! Own it :-) )
• Share your work
• Invite others to work with you on your idea. It's helpful to have specific and easy ways to get involved, but don't limit people. You want to work openly in a way that anyone can participate at any level.

Forward, without fear of reprisal

Browser based gaming has had a troubled birth. When the developed world took to the web in our millions at the end of the last century those of us working in it eagerly told disbelieving friends and family of the pace of change they could expect.

“You’ll buy everything on it … you won’t need to go to the shops … and you’ll be able to work from anywhere!”

An area poised to benefit from this new connectivity was gaming and while we have shifted so many day to day activities to a browser, publishing like I’m doing right now, office documents like spreadsheets, even old stalwart technology like IRC, the thing that still feels new and a little bit thrilling is playing a game in a browser. It still feels a bit like you’re doing it wrong. Like you’re just playing Farmville and gamers as a whole aren’t always comfortable with our hobby being taken that far into the mainstream. Sure I can work on that presentation or TPS report in Firefox but play Bastion in Chrome?! Hang on! That’s not where we play games is it?

The launch on Monday of Reprisal Universe is an exciting new addition to this increasingly crowded space. It shamelessly borrows from the late 80s classic Populous, so much so it name checks it on the homepage to ensure that readers with Commodore Amigas or Atari STs in their lofts will recall fond memories of the original. Here we get to play a re-imagining of the original god game in a browser using Flash. Thirty levels are available at present and of the twelve I’ve played so far it’s pleasingly addictive, if a little on the easy side. The fusion of 16 bit pixelated graphics with more subtle shading and a very modern feel to the menus and other functional aspects of the game take it beyond nostalgia and show it to be its own game with its own sensibilities. Visually it reminds me of Journey combining striking flat areas of colour with more subtle tones which makes the old feel oddly new again. This is a calculated move as retro is the new modern and they play with this musically too. A chip-tune score wafts over you while you click away flattening out areas of land for the autonomous little people of your tribe to run around in and make their own. Raising and lowering land is at the core of this game in order to create a space where your tribe can thrive. The aim of each map is to become strong and beat the other tribes. Give your guys space and they will throw up a sizeable settlement in moments and this is vital for your success. The more people you have and the larger their abodes the more mana you generate. This magical currency is how you buy the ability to create land, cast spells and lay waste to your foes.

The game teaches you over the course of a few early maps how to drive the basics and while their approach felt a little overly simplistic it is at home in a game designed to be as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. The more hardcore amongst us will champ at the bit to get out there and while it’s a little easy, so far at least, I get the impression I’m being lured into a false sense of security and that Starcraft like build orders will be the key to victory against dedicated players in the future.

In case it’s not obvious I’ve been won over by Reprisal and will be chasing the devs down to see what I can find out about how they intend to monetise their RTS and see what their plans are for the future. In the meantime you can get in and spend an hour or so in its company. You’ll be glad you did.

Kernel Team Meeting Minutes – May 15, 2012

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20120522 Meeting Agenda

ARM Status

Q/omap4: first omap4 kernel (Ubuntu-3.4.0-200.1) based off 3.4rc7 has been pushed to the repository – some noticeable bits were disabled (omap5 support, sound, sata, dsp, etcetc) but work is geared to enable all the remaining parts.
A v3.4 based version was uploaded.

Release Metrics and Incoming Bugs

Release metrics and incoming bug data can be reviewed at the following link:

people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kt-meeting.txt

Milestone Targeted Work Items

If your name is in the above table, please review your Alpha-1 work
items. If anyone has a spare cycle, feel free to take one of the work
items assigned to the team.

Status: Quantal Development Kernel

We’ve rebased the Quantal kernel to upstream v3.4 final and uploaded.
This upload collapses the -virtual flavor, reinstates the i386 generic
flavor, and transitions the i386 generic-pae flavor to the generic
flavor. We’ve also homogenized the entire linux-meta package and
removed the non-smp powerpc meta package as it was made obsolete in
Precise.
Important upcoming dates:

• Thurs Jun 7 – Alpha 1 (~2 weeks)

Status: CVE’s

== 2012-05-22 (weekly) ==
Currently we have 85 CVEs on our radar, with 3 new CVEs added this week.
See the CVE matrix for the current list:

people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/ALL-linux.html

Overall the backlog has increased slightly slightly this week:

people.canonical.com/~kernel/status/cve-metrics.txt

people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/CVE-linux.txt

Status: Stable, Security, and Bugfix Kernel Updates – Precise/Oneiric/Natty/Lucid/Hardy

Here is the status for the main kernels, until today (May 22):

• Hardy – 2.6.24-31.101 – No change this cycle
• Lucid – 2.6.32-41.90 – Prep; Single CVE
• Natty – 2.6.38-15.60 – Prep: 7 CVEs
• Oneiric – 3.0.0-21.35 – Prep; 2 stable upstream releases (approx. 111 commits)
• Precise – 3.2.0-25.39 – Prep; 2 stable upstream releases (approx. 271 commits)

  Current opened tracking bugs details:

• people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kernel-sru-workflow.html

  For SRUs, SRU report is a good source of information:

• people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/sru-report.html

  Future stable cadence cycles:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/ReleaseInterlock

Open Discussion or Questions? Raise your hand to be recognized

Thanks everyone

Three audio bugs that need your hardware info

Are you:

• Missing speakers or internal mic in sound settings?
• Seeing a S/PDIF device show up for your USB device?
• Having no or extremely low sound from your internal microphone?

If so, I might need your help to be able to fix it for you!

In Ubuntu 12.04 – and very likely, other recent distribution releases as well – there are at least these three audio bugs that need manual quirking for every machine. This means that you submit your hardware info in the meta-bug, I will look in that info for some ID numbers and include them in a list of devices for which a specific workaround has to be applied. We can’t apply the workaround for every device, as that could potentially cause problems for other devices.

So if you’re suffering from one of the bugs I’m describing below, I could use your help to make sure they are fixed for future releases of Ubuntu and ALSA/PulseAudio.

Missing speakers or internal mic in sound settings

If you’re suffering from one of the following problems:

1) In the sound settings dialog, when you plug your headphones