Tag Archives: Ubuntu Community

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Philip Ballew: CLS WRAP-UP!

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DSCN1340

CLS has been a great success. It is clear that the people such as myself who were able to attend have all been able to grow our community knowledge together in a way that will be evident to the greater Open Source community. One of my favorite sessions I was able to attend was called “engaging volunteer communities” and here I will be able to use this knowledge and move it to be useful to the Ubuntu Community as a whole. We as a greater open source community have benefited greatly here.  Now we will move into the week as OSCON approaches. It is going to be a great week and I look forward to all the people I will meet.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Charles Profitt: Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot

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Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
It has been an eventful week in the world of Ubuntu. It started with a move to an online format for UDS, progressed through a discussion about the possibility of rolling releases and the announcement of Mir as a replacement for X windowing. That is a lot of change. I have waited until now to write about these changes because I wanted to take my time to reflect on each of them and Ubuntu as a project.

Today the Ubuntu Community Council had a discussion about these events with Mark Shuttleworth. There was one consistent theme; we all want Ubuntu to be successful. One thing Mark expressed is that for Ubuntu to be successful it must succeed with lots of people across all the platforms they use. I agree with him; I would not consider Ubuntu a success if it ends up being no more than the most popular linux distribution for desktops and laptops.

It is my opinion that the emergence of phones and tablets as personal computing devices presents an amazing opportunity for Ubuntu. The two major players, Android and iOS, are tablet and phone operating systems only. Apple has OS X and Google has chrome, and there is no doubt in my mind that they are working towards a convergence as well. The time for Ubuntu to take the lead is now. This would be a dramatic change for Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically. I have no doubt that the incredibly talented people at Canonical and in the Ubuntu Community have a real shot at taking the lead and getting their first. I imagine this process will involve periods of chaos and moments of pain that will require decisive and difficult decisions.

Technology moves rapidly so this opportunity needs to be seized quickly and will require the community and Canonical to be agile. With this in mind one can begin to understand the recent changes and announcements.

UDS Goes Online:
The first thing that has to be acknowledged is that this decision was poorly timed for members of the community. Many people, including myself, are not going to be able to attend sessions due to being at work. With less than a weeks notice there was simply not enough time to take time off from work. While my initial thoughts were focused on the lack of in-person time and the informal conversations that happen outside the sessions I realized today, after attending one session, that there were many things that would be better. Todays remote experience was a far better than my previous remote sessions. I was able to clearly understand what was being said by the people in the hangout compared to poor audio from the fish bowls of the past. I saw more people contributing to the pad and more attention paid to the IRC channel. When I attended sessions remotely in the past I felt like a person that got bad …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Benjamin Kerensa: Unlikely to see HTC Ubuntu Tablet

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htc 300x180 Unlikely to see HTC Ubuntu Tablet

As you can imagine many Ubuntu Community members are waiting in excitement for the announcement tomorrow surrounding the Ubuntu Tablet but the fact that HTC.com currently has a countdown with the exact time as the Ubuntu.com countdown appears to be just wild coincidence.

If you look at htc.com’s source code you will see they commented their countdown and listed it as the “m7 countdown” which is the codename for a handset they have been developing.

I do however hope tomorrow some new hardware is announced and if that is the case I think hardware will likely come from a lesser known OEM to start with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Unlikely to see HTC Ubuntu Tablet appeared first on Benjamin Kerensa dot Com.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Ubuntu Classroom: Ubuntu Developer Week Starting Soon!

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Each cycle, the Ubuntu Classroom team holds an event called the Ubuntu Developer Week. Here, you can be part of different workshops, where you will be able to learn about the different tools and processes in the Ubuntu Community, in respect of Development.

This cycle, the Ubuntu Developer Week will be held from Tuesday, January the 29th to Thursday, January the 31st, which is exactly a week from now. Sessions will include an introduction to Ubuntu Development and to patch systems, workshops on working with upstreams, writing applications, finding memory leaks and testing, and some explanations about the App Review process. It will all finish with a Developers Roundtable, where you will be able to hear experiences from other people, as well as sharing your own experiences. More information about the event and the full schedule can be found here.

Sessions will start at 15:00 UTC, and finish at 20:00 UTC. You can check the event timing on your local time zone here.

All classes will be given on #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net, and discussions and questions will take place on #ubuntu-classroom-chat on irc.freenode.net. If you have any questions, please make sure to prefix it with the word ‘QUESTION:’ (in capitals and without quotes) for the bot to take it.

If you think anyone may be interested on the event, make sure to share the links, and we’ll see you there!


Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

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Charles Profitt: Ubuntu: That was friendly!

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When I first started using Ubuntu the difficulty with using it on a laptop was centered around wireless issues. Today wireless issues are much less common, but Linux laptop compatibility is still plagued with problems due to ‘optimus’ graphics and poor bios decisions from many vendors. As an IT professional I know enough to avoid certain hardware, but for people without my IT background trying to find a laptop that works well might seem an impossible task.

Option 1:
A consumer willing to purchase a laptop on-line might order a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed from a vendor like System76 or Dell.  For many of people they would prefer to order from HP, Lenovo, or a local store like Best Buy.

System76 Lemur Ultra

System76 Lemur Ultra

System76 offers excellent laptops for a broad range of users including power-hungry gamers (with Steam being on Ubuntu graphics power is likely to be much more sought after). Dell offers a fantastic ultra-book with Ubuntu pre-installed that is aimed at Developers.

Dell XPS 13

Dell XPS 13

These options still amount to a very small selection of laptops and many people would like to get specific features in their hardware that are not offered on models with Ubuntu pre-installed. In the past when people got a laptop and then installed Ubuntu themselves it has resulted in experiences like the following:

After 3 days of solid searching, installs, compiles, theories, interfaces config, supplicant creation, and “this is what worked for me”- I’m once again at the end of my rope.

I’ve been having a real hard time staying with linux because of my laptop. it doesn’t have the worst combination of hardware, but the ATI card is really close to the worst thing.

Having a hell of a time installing ndiswrapper and wpa-supplement to get my wireless working. Again. ndiswrapper did come with Ubuntu, but wpa-supplement didn’t. I had it on a flash drive though, so I attempted to go compile it. Except it took about 50 tries before I realized Ubuntu must not have installed any dev tools. Got Make installed and tried to compile this stuff, now I can’t figure out why it keeps choking on some stupid error. I’m sure I’m doing something stupid that a Linux pro would a laugh at, but I’m so frustrated at this point I may give up.

All of the above issues could be avoided by knowing what hardware will work before a purchase is made. Around May of 2011 Ara Pulido and a small team from Canonical started Ubuntu Friendly to address this concern. Ubuntu friendly differs from the ‘Certified Program’ in that it is driven by community submissions. Ubuntu Friendly is a brilliant idea and will help as more and more people want to use Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Friendly

Ubuntu Friendly

There is a need to transfer this project from the Canonical employees to a community team. Nicholas Skaggs and I had a discussion on IRC last night and we both hope to get this process rolling in the next few weeks. There is a need to ensure the information on the wiki page is accurate and up-to-date as well as get familiar with the current process. I am sure that the needs will include web development, database work, testing application work and documentation. As the details are worked out I will blog more about the specific team needs, but if you are interested in helping out please contact me or join the discussion on #ubuntu-quality of irc.freenode.net. This is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to the growth and success of the Ubuntu Community.


Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu