Daniel Holbach (aka dholbach), one of the lead developers working in the Ubuntu Desktop team, has been speaking to BehindUbuntu.
Now, when you meet Daniel at conferences, you can compete with other people to see who knows most about him.
I’ve got my own notes here, written on my arm:
I’m sure we’ll be the best of friends!
Two important events take place each September:
Every day deserves a little “Yaaarrrr!”, as far as we're concerned, so we turn our attention to Software Freedom Day, instead.
The Software Freedom Day website explains it best:
Software Freedom Day is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere!
Teams around the world, organise local events to promote and celebrate software freedom. The more people we can get involved in free software, the better!
Find your local team and celebrate software freedom this coming Saturday, the 16th of September!
Most of the software contained in K/Ubuntu started life in other projects. We call these original projects “Upstream projects”, because of the similarity to a river starting off in the mountains “upstream” and flowing downwards, gaining momentum as the water spreads out to the distributions, of which Ubuntu is one.
Simon Law is Ubuntu's Quality Controller and champion of the Ubuntu bug-tracking system called Malone. Simon has just sent us news of the upcoming Hug Day:
Once again, I'm pleased to announce the Ubuntu Hug Day.
The BugSquad is always looking for new volunteers and we'd love it if you joined us. We'll be meeting in the #ubuntu-bugs IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. When, you ask? All of Wednesday [2006-09-13], whereever you are. Just hop on and introduce yourself.
We'll be concentrating on forwarding bugs from our bug-tracker, Malone, to any upstream projects. This helps everyone by providing good, researched bug reports for upstream projects to look at. And then the new code lands in Ubuntu.
After new bug reports come in, a step called triaging takes places. Triaging is the process of gauging the severity of a bug, then ensuring that the issue is passed on to the correct contacts. Often the “correct contacts” are the original programmers, who may not themselves be associated directly with Ubuntu.
The upstream triaging process consists of passing confirmed bug reports to the original project and is called “Upstreaming”. Upstreaming a bug consists of searching the bugtracker of original project, hunting to see if a matching issue has already been reported as a bug. If a matching report is found, for instance in the Mozilla or GNOME bugzilla, then all the details from the Launchpad/Ubuntu bug page are forwarded.
Forwarding bug data requires ensuring that the most vital details are transferred correctly and removing any superfluous information that may confuse the situation. Careful use of cut-and-paste is required, combined with a small amount editing.
Passing on bug reports to upstreams helps everyone, not just Ubuntu users. A bug fixed by a original project will propagate to all users of that program, be they using Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Suse or Mandriva. Sometimes, in the process of forwarding a bug, an Ubuntero may find that the upstream authors are on the case and already have a fix for the bug with a new version! When a bug is fixed directly by “upstream, the Ubuntu developers gain by being able to focus on making Ubuntu better—on making the sum-of-parts work better, so to speak.
We urge you to join this effort to improve the quality of the packages included in Ubuntu. Doing so helps to make the world a better place, albeit in a very small way. You will be rewarded for your efforts with a warm, friendly hug every time you close a bug and of course a magical boost to your Launchpad karma rating! As Simon says, we “Hope to see you there!”.
As time rolls on and the release of Edgy as Ubuntu 6.10 draws ever closer, discussion and planning of the next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) has begun. At the summit, “Edgy+1” (the version of Ubuntu following 6.10) will be discussed, planned, debated and documented. We have been given sneak details of UDS Mountain View!
This Developer Summit will take place at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA between Sunday 5th November 2006 and Friday 10th November 2006. As ever, this is not a conference with talks and panels, but a developer summit with discussions that debate and flesh out specific ideas and plans for Edgy+1. These discussions result in specifications that are planned for the next edition of the distribution. The specific areas that will be discussed at the summit will be announced closer to the time, and for more details as they happen, visit the Ubuntu Developer Summit Mountain View page
UDS Mountain View is open for anyone to attend, but remember it is very developer focused, so probably unsuitable for those without an interest in participating in Ubuntu. If you would like to attend, click here to add yourself to the attendees page. We also have limited sponsorship available. To apply for sponsorship, click here.
If you can’t make it to the summit in person, we are also working to make the summit as accessible as possible for external contributors. The collaborative ‘Gobby’ application will be in use for writing specifications, see the Participation page as more information becomes available. Start planning those flights, ferries, trains and ride-shares to reach California!
For a few weeks now, the Official Ubuntu Book has been released, and the reaction has been incredibly positive. The book is available in print as well as under a free license. Some chapters of the book are even included in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, click System→Help→Ubuntu Book Except).
One of the most valuable chapters in the book, and one that many reviewers found compelling, was the chapter filled with recipes to solve common problems. Eager-eyed readers of The Fridge will know that there was a call for recipes some months back to fill the book with your experience.
As we now edge towards edgy (no pun intended), we are looking for some more recipes for cool things in edgy. So, now we need your help again. We are looking for some more recipes, and like the previous call for recipes, we are looking for interesting solutions to problems, clever tips and tricks, and other fun and useful tweaks. There will not be a print edition for Edgy, but the recipes will be used in the free online documentation.
The deadline for this is pretty short and is 22:00 UTC on Monday 18th September. Send all your submissions to the awesome Corey Burger at corey.burger AT gmail DOT com.
Don’t forget: you must sign the agreement, attached to this article, before we can use your recipe. Don’t worry, you’re not signing your life away 🙂