Notes from the Mousepad

Fellow Chicagolander, nixternal, provided the Ubuntu-Chicago local community team with a few links to packaging-related articles that are available from some Debian and Kubuntu websites:

1) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#policy
2) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#devref
3) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#maint-guide
4) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide
5) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PbuilderHowto
6) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide/Lists/DocumentationResources

He sent them out to the mailing list in advance of a packaging session that’s being held this Sunday at the College of DuPage, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to cram into our session that day, but it should be a good start for those of us who aren’t familiar with packaging at all.  As someone who has primarily been focused on assisting with documentation, hopefully some day I’ll at least know how to package the set of docs that we create. 

Both this article and this article note how Ubuntu’s documentation needs to be better than it is. The first article describes (in the last point on the second page) that we should do more content scraping from the unofficial documentation (with permission) to improve our docs. We receive lots of requests for mentorship, so there certainly isn’t a lack of interest in helping out with documentation. The sprawling mass of wiki pages and forum tips is pretty enormous, though, and we need to specifically target the alternate doc sources a bit more. This process may even be going on already without me being fully aware of what is going on. (I do live in a sort of cave.)

One thing that stands out to me in the second article, though, is the point about release notes. We didn’t have release notes ready for the final Beta and RC of Xubuntu 7.10, and the final release notes for 7.10 weren’t put together until after the official release. We need to do better with that. I guess I’ll be studying up on what makes good release notes.

The Ubuntu documentation team has recently migrated all flavors of *Ubuntu documentation from Subversion over to Bazaar.  There are now separate branch repositories for each of the flavors, and instructions on how to download the repositories (and how to submit your changes) are up on the Ubuntu wiki.  Thanks to Matthew East and a few others for their work in getting this set up.

The Xubuntu documentation turned out ok for the Gutsy Gibbon release – it was certainly much better than it had been for the Edgy and Feisty releases, but we still didn’t reach our goals.  We did a lot of work on the docs, but without the efforts of Luzius Thöny at the very end, I don’t think that the docs would have been shippable.

Xubuntu Hardy Heron (Xubuntu 8.04) will be a long-term release, so I want to make sure that the documentation is top-notch.  The good news is that we already have a good base to work from (we don’t even have to copy everything over from Ubuntu from scratch like we did before), and we also have some people who have some documentation experience under their belt now.  This is good.

I’m not sure how else I’ll be able to contribute to the Xubuntu effort this time around.  I’ve started a new job that is more demanding than my prior jobs, so that has to take priority.  I’d still like to contribute to Xubuntu, though.  I enjoy it, and the people involved with the project.

I have been coordinating the ISO testing for Xubuntu since February of this year, and while it has really helped me to learn more about the release cycle, I am going to be changing jobs soon, and will not have as much free time. I’m also trying to contribute more to Xubuntu documentation, and that takes up my time, too. With those things in mind, I’m looking for someone who would be available to coordinate pre-release ISO testing for Xubuntu.

The good news is that this is technically a very easy task. It just requires an interest in testing and some time immediately prior to a release. Things can get hectic on the days leading up to milestone release day, but it is otherwise not too difficult.

A couple points:
- I will still test, but I just won’t be able to coordinate testing
- It’s not happening immediately. My new job starts on September 24th.
- I’ll help transition things to whoever wants to take this over. You won’t have to learn things from scratch.

Who would be good for this role? Here’s a few qualities and attributes that would be helpful for someone interested in being the ISO test coordinator:
- An interest in testing pre-release versions of Xubuntu
- A basic knowledge of the overall Xubuntu release cycle
- A computer with a cd burner and a decent (i.e., not dial-up) internet connection
- A spare computer, hard drive, or disk partition on which they would be willing to perform a test installation of Xubuntu
- Preferred: I think it’s easier for a test coordinator to coordinate things if they live in Europe (UTC-200 to UTC+500). This isn’t a requirement, but a person in Europe would be at home in the evening when test coordination activity is ramping up, and it’s much easier to coordinate activity from home than from the grocery store or your job.
- Optional: Test coordination could even be shared amongst a few people.

If you’re interested in heading ths up, please let me know. If you aren’t interested in leading things yourself, please mention this to your appropriate local community teams in case someone else may be interested.

After thinking things through for a while, I finally got around to making a few updates to j1m.net. Previously I had everything over on j1m.net/chi-ubuntu, but I’m moving my posting activities over to the root page of my site. I’m still working on Xubuntu (quite a bit), and I’m still a member of the Ubuntu-Chicago Local Community Team, but I just thought that it would be better to have a more general web presence. After all, what if I ever have to move to Florida or something? I wouldn’t want to have to change my site’s main url to be j1m.net/fla-ubuntu, so it’s best to make this change now.

As for the site’s appearance, I’m using a modified version of the Misty Looks WordPress theme. I liked the layout of Matthew East‘s page, so I’ve taken a fair amount (okay, alot) from that, and have otherwise mostly worked to make the page a little wider, and (in case you haven’t noticed) to give it the colors of Xubuntu. I’ll be tweaking the CSS to clean up a few elements eventually (the vertical spacing between the blogroll links is a little wide for my taste, and the way I’ve removed the header image is a bit of a hack), but the site looks good enough for now. It’s pretty straighforward in appearance, but I’m just really getting to know CSS, and hopefully I will learn more as I go along. If the site renders strangely on your computer, please let me know.

As for FOSS-related activities, we had an in-person meeting of the Ubuntu-Chicago Local Community Team last weekend. It was held immediately prior to the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group meeting, so there were a number of Chicago Lug members present, and at least one person from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s LUG was there, too. Although we frequently collaborate with members of the Chicago Lug, it’s good to see some opportunities to work with members of the UIC Lug, too. We’re going to be working up some educational sessions, and some informal hackfests with folks from UIC, and I’m looking forward to it.

Xubuntu Gutsy Gibbon documentation is coming along. I’m going to be doing some more work on it today. It’s my first foray into documentation, so it’s been fun trying to learn the ins and outs of docbook. Because we’ve used the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn documentation (thanks, Ubuntu!) we’ve had to remove or change Ubuntu-specific elements to suit Xubuntu, and we’ve had to make sure the documentation is current for this release. It hasn’t been too challenging, but I think we’re still trying to wrap our heads around the .ent files. I think we’re close, though.

Well, this is all for now. I hope the new site works well. Thanks for visiting.

Things have been pretty hectic lately. It seems like there’s always too much to do in Chicago in the summertime. I’m excited about what is in store, though. Freddy Martinez and I have been working on Xubuntu documentation, basing it largely off of Ubuntu’s Feisty documentation, and we have to submit our first set of patches soon. As it stands now, I’m mostly just making the actual text accurate for Xubuntu, but I still have a lot of questions about the docbook, and how certain docbook elements may be used to interact with Yelp, the Gnome documentation browser.

We also have to do some additional work on the specification for the Xubuntu Documentation Browser, or x-d-b, as it is being called. “Xubuntu Documentation Browser” is just a lot to type out.

This weekend is BARcamp Chicago, and it runs all through the weekend. For what ever reason, I didn’t know that it ran 24-hours through the whole weekend. Yeah. As if I’ll be awake for all of it.

I’ve applied for Ubuntu membership, but the next community council meeting falls at the exact moment of a meeting that I have to attend in Eagan, Minnesota, which is near Minneapolis. I’ve pushed myself to the end of the line of membership applications, hoping that they’ll be able to fit me in somehow. *fingers crossed*

I volunteered at Free Geek Chicago again on Sunday, and spent much of my day trying to get Xubuntu Feisty Fawn to install on some rather unique hardware. It didn’t go so well.

The machine in question was a PII with 256mb of RAM, and two SCSI hard drives – one 8gb and one 4gb in size. I tried to set up an LVM installation, but the installer hung after it had completed 85% of the software installation. So I also tried manual partitioning, setting up the root partition on the 4gb drive, and boot, home, and swap partitions on the 8gb drive. It hung at 85%, too. Even trying to do a command-line installation hung at 85%.

With frustration mounting, we just switched over to a new computer. I knew there had to be a way to view what was causing the install to hang, so I asked the folks in #ubuntu-iso what I could do to see these error messages. I talked the issue over with Stephane Graber, and he suggested that I check out some of the install messages in /var/log by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 and getting to run level 2 once the installation had hung.

I’m going to do that the next time I’m at Free Geek Chicago. If anything, I’d like to at least get a good bug report out of this. I haven’t done too much testing of SCSI drives, and also haven’t done to much LVM testing, so I think I might try and add that to my testing repertoire on this release cycle. I’m even going to trade in my standard PII testing box (which runs just fine, thank you) for this SCSI beast (assuming it has no hardware issues).

Tonight I went to a couple of Linux-related events after work, and I’m glad I made it out. I first went to an initial set-up meeting for a Chicago Gnome user group. We had some informal discussions about Gnome, and what a Gnome user group might be and do in the city.

Kevin is leading things up, and though things are still in preliminary stages, I think it will go well enough. It sounds like we’ll have a mix of application-specific talks, some coding talks, some work on understanding the Gnome frameworks and UI conventions. … It sounds like there’s room for everyone to participate.

After that, Kevin, Tristan and I walked over to 400 S. Wells and met up with a group of volunteers from Free Geek Chicago for an organizational meeting. I hadn’t been out to Free Geek since the second week in April, so I was excited to hear that the group is starting to use Xubuntu Feisty Fawn on the computers we build – we had previously used Xubuntu Dapper Drake.

In the words of Taylor, “Feisty Fawn is the bomb.” It was funny to hear him say it like that, but it also felt very good. I had known Feisty was good, but you sometimes take things for granted when you work closely with them. You see how much better something can be, and lose sight of how good it already is Even though I’m not a developer, it was nice to get positive feedback about a project I had assisted with.

I told them that myself and at least one other person are going to be hacking on some Xubuntu documentation this summer, and they were excited to hear it. They want to have more documentation and educational resources available for people who earn or purchase their computers. After all, what good is a free computer if you aren’t familiar with the OS and you don’t know how to use it? Dave and I laughed about being baffled by the huge lists of installable programs when we first were using Linux. The range of choices can be overwhelming.

As usual, there’s a lot of activity in the free and open source software world in Chicago. I’m still glad to be a part of it.

How about replicating an installed package list this way:

dpkg --get-selections | grep '[[:space:]]install$' | awk '{print $1}' > packagelist.txt on the old machine,

then:
sudo apt-get -u install `cat packagelist.txt` on new machine,

That should work. Only disadvantage is that you’d have to download the installed packages from the ‘net onto the new machine, rather than having them available via a CD. The advantage, of course, is that you have burnt one less CD, and will automatically download the most recent version of your packages.

Apt on CD looks pretty awesome for For x/k/ed/ubuntu and debian users . . . There’s got to be a way to back up all of your installed .debs without the gui, but this will be useful for most desktop users. And I like how it allows you to share the packages that you already have installed with other folks. Something like this would come in handy for Xubuntu, which isn’t installed with a very rich set of multimedia apps, for example.