Category Archives: Linux

Linux

Michael Hall: Dropping Letters Hackfest

Leave a comment
Mmmmmm, Pie....

We only have 2 days left in the Ubuntu Core Apps Hack Days!  I hope everybody who has participated has enjoyed it and found it informative and helpful.  If you haven’t participated yet, it’s not too late!  Come join us in #ubuntu-app-devel on Freenode’s IRC network anytime from 9am to 9pm UTC and ping either myself (mhall119) or Alan Pope (popey) and we’ll help you get setup and show you where you can start contributing to the Core Apps.

Today we get another chance to play while we work, because the focus is going to be on Dropping Letters, a simple, fun, yet surprisingly addictive little app written by Stuart Langridge.  Stuart has since handed off development of the app to others, but not before having it already in perfectly usable state.  Because of it’s simplicity, our list of dogfooding requirements wasn’t very long:

  • Start a new game. DONE!
  • View high scores.

Short as the list may be, it’s only half done!  We still need to integrate a high scores screen, which means we need you Javascript and QML developers!  Dropping Letters also needs to be tested, which means Autopilot, which of course means we have something for you Python hackers too!  So come and join us today in #ubuntu-app-devel and help make this great game even better.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Daniel Holbach: Join our Ubuntu Touch Porting Clinic today

Leave a comment
Ubuntu Touch

These are very exciting times for Ubuntu Touch. Not only is the Ubuntu Edge, an Ubuntu super-phone, being funded right now, but we are also making lots of progress on getting Ubuntu running perfectly on phones and tablets near you.

I blogged about this a couple of times now, but Ubuntu Touch has been ported to LOTS of devices in the meantime. If we consult our Touch Devices list, there are 45 working ports, with 30 more in progress, and across 21 different brands. This is awesome. Now it’s time to bring all of them into the fold.

There are two things we have to do:

  1. Update some of the ports to the flipped container model. This switch has been happening over the last couple of weeks, but we’re there now. Android bits now run on top of an Ubuntu container. Some of the images still need to be updated to benefit from this.
  2. Enable the ports in phablet-flash. Yes, you read correctly. Since the announce of the Touch preview, we only supported four devices (Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10). We always wanted to make it easier to flash all other devices too, and now we’re almost there: If you as an image maintainer make some information available, phablet-flash will soon be able to pick it up.

Updating your image to the new world order is something we are discussing today, 1st August, in #ubuntu-touch on irc.freenode.net. We are having an Ubuntu Touch Porting Clinic today. So bring your device, your questions and we’ll help you get set up for the new image formats.

If you want your images to be supported by phablet-flash, that can be easily arranged too. Follow this process, to document how the flashing of your image works. Check out the latest branch of phablet-flash (not yet landed in trunk) to try out if your image works: lp:~sergiusens/phablet-tools/flash_change.

As always: if you have any questions, talk to us on #ubuntu-touch on irc.freenode.net or on the ubuntu-phone mailing list.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Dustin Kirkland: I Want a PC, that Fits in My Pocket, and Happens to Make Phone Calls Too

Leave a comment

A Slashdot article today poses the question:

“It’s interesting to watch the Ubuntu phone development process, even as those who are satisfied with Android phone or iPhones, ask, ‘Why?’ We could ask the same about the Firefox OS Phone, too. Maybe the most realistic answer in both cases is, ‘Because we could.'”

I’d like to take a crack at answering that question…

  1. Android, iOS, and Blackberry started with a phone, and have spent years adding general computing capabilities
  2. Ubuntu started with a general purpose operating system, and recently added the ability to make phone calls

And frankly, as we’re on the technical cusp of device convergence…

What I really want
is a general purpose PC,
that fits in my pocket,
and makes phone calls too!

I believe that the latter approach will actually succeed in that endeavor.

I want a super speedy user input interface when using the handheld device, but it must also quickly, seamlessly, and ideally, wirelessly, dock into a PC environment with the creature comforts of a huge LCD screen, comfortable keyboard, and mouse.

Is that too much to ask?  Perhaps not…

Cheers,
Dustin …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Lubuntu Blog: Skippy-XD PPA

Leave a comment

We have found a new PPA for our beloved Skippy-XD tool. If you don’t remember what it is, just have a look at the article (now updated) on this blog. If you want to install this compilation from GIT (another “latest” apps repository) you can do it the easy way, having no more depending on DEB downloads and ensure updates. Just open LXTerminal and execute these two command lines:

sudo …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

David Murphy: Continuous Integration with Tarmac and Vagrant

Leave a comment

As part of our self-improvement and knowledge sharing within Canonical, within our group (Professional and Engineering Services) we regularly – at least once a month – run what we call an “InfoSession”. Basically it is Google Hangout on Air with a single presenter on a topic that is of interest/relevance to others, and one of my responsibilities is organising them. Previously we have had sessions on:

  • Go (a couple of sessions in fact)
  • SystemTap
  • Localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n)
  • Juju
  • Graphviz
  • …and many others…

Today the session was on continuous integration with Tarmac and Vagrant, presented by Daniel Manrique from our certification team. In his own words:

Merge requests and code reviews are a fact of life in Canonical. Most projects start by manually merging approved requests, including running a test suite prior to merging.

This infosession will talk about tools that automate this workflow (Tarmac), while leveraging your project’s test suite to ensure quality, and virtual machines (using Vagrant) to provide multi-release, repeatable testing.

Like most of our sessions it is publicly available, here it is is for your viewing pleasure:

The post Continuous Integration with Tarmac and Vagrant appeared first on David Murphy.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Luna QML 1.4 (Plasmoid Script)

Leave a comment
Thumbnail

Luna QML 1.4
(Plasmoid Script)
This plasmoid is entirely written in QML + JavaScript.

This plasmoid displays the current phase of the moon. If you click on it, a dialog appears which shows the dates of the important moon phases in the same month (last new moon, first quarter, full moon, third quarter and next new moon). The format in which these dates are shown can be customized. You can navigate to previous or future moon phases by clicking the arrow buttons or by pressing the arrow keys. Clicking the middle button or pressing the “Home” key returns to the current dates.

changelog:
version 1.4 (2013-05-16):
– the dialog now scrolls in and out instead of just appearing or disappearing when the plasmoid is added in a panel
– split tooltip text in a main text and a subtext

version 1.3 (2012-11-29):
– scrolling the mouse wheel when the mouse cursor is in the popup dialog navigates to the previous or next moon phases
– show a more correct description of the current phase in the tooltip

[read more]

job recommendations:

[more jobs]
…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at KDE Apps

Linux

Jorge Castro: Scaling down in the cloud with Juju

Leave a comment

I’ve talked in the past about The Way to Run WordPress in the Cloud. It looked like this:

juju deploy wordpress
juju deploy mysql
juju add-relation wordpress mysql
juju expose wordpress

But the problem with building tools that scale up is that we sometimes forget that people like to scale down too. Counting the bootstrap node that comes out to 3 instances. We default to m1.smalls so that comes out to about about $133 a month for an on-demand WordPress blog. Not very cost effective.

As of Juju 1.11.3 and newer, we can now deploy services to the same instance. How we express this is via the juju deploy --to command. Let’s look at our WordPress example again, this time, let’s save some money and run the entire thing on one node.

juju bootstrap
juju deploy --to 0 wordpress
juju deploy --to 0 mysql
juju add-relation wordpress mysql
juju expose wordpress

Then run a quick juju status to get the public IP of your WordPress installation, and you’re done. On reserved instances that comes down to $61 a year, or $5.08 a month! Commit to three years on AWS and it’s closer to $2.65 a month. Now we’re talking, just don’t forget to add the cost of bandwidth in there.

So what’s the big deal? Running these things on one instance isn’t exactly rocket science. Well ok. Your twitter moment has arrived and now you need to scale your blog. You need on-demand scalability:

 juju add-unit wordpress

Without the --to juju fires up a new instance of wordpress to help you scale. How famous is your new blog post? juju add-unit -n4 wordpress will fire up another 4. Now let’s scale back down, let’s remove units 3 and 4:

juju remove-unit wordpress/4
juju remove-unit wordpress/3

This brings us down back to nodes 0, 1, and 2 running. Keep on going until you’re back to just node 0 running everything. Start on one instance and be able to scale up and down based on traffic. Not bad indeed!

You’re not just getting some out of the box vanilla WordPress and MySQL either. You’re getting a battle-hardened scalable WordPress deployment that’s tuned to scale with nginx. If you want to turn the crank to 11 you can also deploy memcached with it for a really fast blog.

Some caveats; while this works with WordPress right now the individual charms are running on the raw instance, they are NOT in containers yet! That is, if you deploy multiple charms to one box they might collide and stomp on each other. So play with it, but I recommend waiting until the next release of Juju (next month) for containers to land so we have a nice clean seperation of the units on the instance. Work on that continues, along with adding this ability to the GUI. However WordPress works today!

In the meantime here’s how to Get Started with Juju. Happy Orchestrating!

References:

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jorge Castro: Juju Ecosystem Status for 31 July

Leave a comment

General Info:

Highlights

  • OSCON
  • new juju-gui which can be seen at jujucharms.com
  • manage.jujucharms.com has the review queue and charmer tools
  • local provider
  • “–to” “–constraints” (reminder)
  • James Page’s blog post
  • We’d like this fixed for the local story in 12.04: Bug 1203795
  • amulet
  • juju-core release should be happening this week. Should also be the first homebrew “release.”

Tools/Helpers/Testing

Amulet

  • 1.0 release this week
    • Deep deployer integration
    • Improved ability to inspect services, units, and relations in depth

Tools

  • No new changes released

Helpers

  • Minor bug fixes
  • Password generator helper added

Docs

  • We should add docs for --to
  • New walkthrough of the charm author section, much easier to follow.
  • 2 bugs:
    • Charm Author maintenance, how to monitor bugs
    • Make subordinate information better

Charm updates

  • http://manage.jujucharms.com/recently-changed

Events

  • OSCON done!
  • Submissions to ODS done
  • RubyConf is our last submission for the year!

Charm Championship!!! o/

  • http://juju.ubuntu.com/charm-championship

GOALS

  • [jorge] Blog about –to: TODO
  • [jorge] Ask Forum moderators to put Juju/Cloud section on the front page: TODO
  • [arosales] scaling video: DONE
    • http://youtu.be/qLN-yq9huPs
  • [marco] upgrades video (I missed another week): INPROGRESS
  • [pavel] email list on continuous deployment story using Rails charm: DONE,
    • [arosales, marco] To get feedback to pavel: TODO
  • [evilnick] Charm Author docs structure: INPROGRESS
  • [marco] Changes to charm-tools update: DONE
  • [marco] amulet completed deployer integration (1st iteration): DONE
  • [marco] amulet sentry integration: INPROGRESS
  • [nick] Update AWS getting started docs: DONE
  • [nick] Add local provider getting started docs: TODO
  • [pavel] nagios, logstash, memcached Rails charm integration: DONE
  • [pavel] Work on amulet integration testing: TODO
  • [pavel] Start investigating how to do backup in Rails: TODO
    • in github branch atm.

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

13 apps that will make you wish you had an Android smartphone

Leave a comment

FP: In most cases, developers prefer to make new smartphone apps for iPhone first, only moving to Android and other platforms once they get some traction.

There are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

AP Photo/Marcio Jose SanchezThere are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

In most cases, developers prefer to make new smartphone apps for iPhone first, only moving to Android and other platforms once they get some traction.

(Android owners who had to wait months for Twitter’s video app Vine know what we’re talking about.)

But there are some outliers. There are a bunch of great apps that happen to be Android exclusives. Check them out.

Ingress is a unique real-world scavenger hunt game.

 

Ingress is a unique real-world scavenger hunt game.

Google

Ingress is a sci-fi game that sends you on a scavenger hunt through the real world to find “hidden” virtual goodies.

Google developed the game. Here’s the plot:

“A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe. The origin and purpose of this force is unknown, but some researchers believe it is influencing the way we think. We must control it or it will control us.”

So, basically, you run around your town trying to find this illusive “energy” before the bad guys do.

Price: Free

Facebook Home turns your home screen into a Facebook photo gallery

Facebook Home turns your home screen into a Facebook photo gallery

William Wei, Business Insider

Facebook Home adds a Facebook-powered wrapper to your Android phone. Instead of seeing your normal lock screen, you get a beautiful slide show of your friends’ Facebook photos and status updates. You can comment and like those updates directly from the lock screen without opening the regular Facebook app.

Price: Free (Only works on select Android phones.)

DeskSMS makes sure you’ll never miss a message again.

DeskSMS makes sure you'll never miss a message again.

DeskSMS is a nifty app that allows you to forward text messages (and picture messages) from your Android smartphone to your desktop via Gmail, Google Talk, and the Chrome Web browser.

Price: Free

WiFi Analyzer lets you determine how strong a wireless network is in your vicinity

WiFi Analyzer lets you determine how strong a wireless network is in your vicinity

Have you ever been stuck on a slow wireless network?

WiFi Analyzer lets you see how strong networks are around you, helping you to pick the fastest, most reliable one.

Price: Free

Weather Bomb gives a data-intensive view of the weather on your Android device

Weather Bomb gives a data-intensive view of the weather on your Android device

Weather Bomb is an extremely detailed weather app that gives users seven days of data.

There are various views, but our favourite is the graph view, which gives the week’s rain, wind, and cloud forecast at a glance.

Other data includes rain, wind, cloud, temperature, pressure humidity and wave height.

Price: Free

Google Skymap lets you know exactly which star you’re staring up at.

Google Skymap is an open sourced app that lets you point your smartphone up at the night sky to decipher constellations, planets, and stars.

Price: Free

Llama Location Profiles uses where you are to change aspects of your phone like ringer and Bluetooth

Llama Location Profiles uses where you are to change aspects of your phone like ringer and Bluetooth

KnowYourMobile

Llama is a nifty app that automatically switches specific phone settings depending on where you are. You can automatically silence your phone when you arrive at your office or turn Bluetooth on at 7 a.m. to pair with your headphones for a morning run.

Best of all, the app doesn’t use your phone’s GPS, which can drain your battery. Instead, it uses cell towers in your area to figure out where you are.

Price: Free

BetterBatteryStats helps you spend more time unplugged.

BetterBatteryStats helps you spend more time unplugged.

BetterBatteryStats lets you analyze your phone’s behavior, pinpointing exactly which applications are causing your battery to drain. Once you know what the culprit is you can specifically fix the issue.

Price: $2.89

APP Lock password protects specific apps.

APP Lock password protects specific apps.

The premise behind APP Lock is simple: password protect installed applications with a password or pattern. Now you don’t have to be nervous when someone else is playing around with your smartphone.

Price: Free

SwiftKey 3 will change how you type on your Android smartphone.

SwiftKey 3 will change how you type on your Android smartphone.

Business Insider / Matthew Lynley

SwiftKey improves your productivity by helping you to type better.

Swiftkey gives much more accurate corrections and predictions than other keyboards. Very sloppy typing will make sense, even if you miss spaces, and SwiftKey 3 also predicts your next words.

Price: $3.99

Tasker lets you automate everything on your smartphone from settings to SMS

Tasker lets you automate everything on your smartphone from settings to SMS

Tasker is an awesome app that lets you tweak specific phone features like turning the flash on for alerts. You can even cancel specific notification pop-ups.

Tasker features more than 200 actions, triggers, and even an app creation section for making your own app.

Price: $6.49

Friday helps you discover new things to do

Friday helps you discover new things to do

Friday’s makers say that the app brings self discovery to your life by introducing the first passive auto journal.

Friday captures your entire life through your phone and builds a timeline of the things you do. You can even filter and search your life to find the exact information you want.

Friday allows you to share and log your favourite activities that you’ve been doing all day.

Price: Free

Robin is a great alternative to Apple’s Siri

Robin is a great alternative to Apple's Siri

Before Google Now, Robin was the first true Siri challenger.

We love the expanded capabilities of the newer virtual assistant. You can ask Robin for directions, local places, real-time parking, traffic info, gas prices, weather, your Twitter news, and much more.

Robin is disrupting the personal assistant arena, and we only hope that her existence pushes developers to make personal assistant apps feel more like true personal assistants.

Price: Free

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Linux Today