I’ve been doing some documentation work with Mallard and DocBook 5 recently, and have been looking for software that supports them well.  The trick is that both Mallard and DocBook 5 are based on RelaxNG schemas, and while there are many XML tools out there, there are few that are open source, and fewer still that support RelaxNG.

From flickr user tsmall. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

After perusing my options, I decided to try Emacs with nXML-mode.  Emacs’ nXML-mode provides real-time validation for RelaxNG-based documents, something which no other open source authoring tool provides. But while nXML-mode can validate XML documents on-the-fly, the default installation is not set up to validate against the recently-developed Mallard and DocBook 5 schemas.

Thus, to take full advantage of the latest in duck-based documentation technologies, I needed to modify my .emacs file and the nxml-mode files themselves.  What follows is an overview of exactly what I did in the hopes that others can make use of the same changes, too.

An nXML-mode foundation

Before we get started, though, you should know that much of what follows is derived from information on this website.  I encourage you to visit the site, as it provides an introduction to how nXML-mode is configured, and enough of an introduction to using nXML-mode to make you at least modestly productive right away.

Part One: Setting up your .emacs file

The first step in setting up nXML-mode for Mallard and DocBook 5 is to make a few changes to your .emacs file.  If you are new to Emacs, your .emacs file sits in your home directory, and serves as a personalized Emacs configuration file.  You may need to create the .emacs file if it doesn’t already exist.

;; /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/tcc-nxml-emacs:  Add these lines
;;      to your .emacs to use nxml-mode.  For documentation of
;;      this mode, see http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/help/pubs/nxml/
;;--
;; Add the nxml files to emacs's search path for loading:
;;--
(setq load-path
      (append load-path
              '("/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/nxml/")))
;;--
;; Make sure nxml-mode can autoload
;;--
(load "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/nxml/rng-auto.el")

;;--
;; Load nxml-mode for files ending in .xml, .xsl, .rng, .xhtml .page
;;--
(setq auto-mode-alist
      (cons '("\\.\\(xml\\|xsl\\|rng\\|xhtml\\|page\\)\\'" . nxml-mode)
            auto-mode-alist))

The above .emacs configuration tells Emacs where to look for detailed XML processing instructions, and also causes Emacs to automatically use nXML-mode for XML-related files.  (Did I tell you that Emacs might have a bit of a learning curve?  Yeah, that’s true.)

Part Two: Modifying the nXML-mode configuration files

The second step is to modify the nXML-mode configuration files themselves. This will add the appropriate nXML-mode secret sauce to handle Mallard and DocBook 5 documents.

Fortunately for you, I grabbed the latest nXML-mode source files from the nXML-mode website, and made the appropriate modifications myself.  You can download my customized nXML-mode files from this archive.

Here’s what I changed from the default setup:

• I added the docbookxi.rnc and mallard-1.0.rnc schemas to the schemas directory
• I modified the schemas.xml file, thus including the docbookxi.rnc and mallard-1.0.rnc schemas as part of the XML-validation process.

Note that I have used the DocBook 5 “docbookxi.rnc” schema which allows for xinclude functionality.  If you want to use the schema that does not allow for use of xinclude features, you’ll need to adjust the files accordingly.  The current DocBook 5 schemas are available here.

Part Three: Copy your nXML-mode files to the proper location
The final step is to copy the nXML-mode files to the proper location on your file system.  As indicated in our .emacs file, that location is:  /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/nxml/.  Thus, you should copy all of the files in the downloaded “nxml” folder into that directory.  You will need administrative privileges (using root or sudo) to do this.

Wrapping up

That’s it, though.  You should now have a functioning nXML-mode environment that will allow you to fire-up Emacs and start writing Relax-NG-based documents, getting all of the real-time-validation features that Emacs provides. If you can think of any ways in which I could improve my approach, please let me know.  Otherwise, I encourage you to head-on over to the nXML-mode website, and view some of the nXML-mode information and resources that are available as you get started.

Here’s a quick rundown of some upcoming Free and Open-Source software events in the Chicagoland / greater-midwest area.

Saturday and Sunday, August 21 and 22, 2010: Barcamp Chicago

• Running all day and night this Saturday and Sunday
• 215 E. Ohio Street in downtown Chicago
• Numerous presentations, and a “BarCompany” startup hackathon

Sunday, August 29: Ubuntu Chicago’s Ubuntu Global Jam

• Socialize and work with the team on bug-triaging and fixing, documentation, and more!

Friday through Sunday, September 10th through 12th: Ohio Linux Fest

• Keynote presentations by Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, creator of the open-source audio format Ogg Vorbis
• Tracks dedicated to getting started in Free and Open-Source software, Linux security, and so much more.
• For Ubuntu users, there will be an “Ubucon” during the morning and mid-afternoon hours on Friday.

Saturday and Sunday, October 2nd and 3rd: Barcamp Milwaukee

• A wide range of sessions relating to Free and Open Source software and general geekery.
• Like Barcamp Chicago, this event will run throughout the entire weekend, including overnight activities between Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd: Erlang Camp, Chicago

• A weekend devoted to learning how to confidently put Erlang code into production for your company, group, or individual project.

Events at the Chicago hacker space, Pumping Station One

• Check their calendar for their ongoing list of events and activities

Today is Debian’s 17th birthday*, and with that comes Debian Appreciation day!  Do you want to give them some thanks for the super work that they do?  Just head over to thank.debian.net, and leave them a few words to express your gratitude.

You can even search for your favorite package, team, or packaging team, and thank them directly!   (Don’t we all want to thank the XML/SGML Group, though?)

*I’m sure that Debian is looking forward to next year when it will turn 18, and (at least in the U.S.) be able to vote and smoke cigarettes.

We’d like to get your input on where to focus documentation efforts on the Ubuntu Packaging Guide. There are all kinds of topics that need to be written, updated, or improved — so where should we start? What do you need most?

Give your input via the this Google Docs Survey. I’ve provided some direction by asking you to focus on tasks, concepts, and terminology that can be best documented in the Packaging Guide, but you’ll no doubt have other ideas.

If you’re interested in writing on a particular topic, please be sure to note that in the survey comments (and include your name and email address!).  I’ll be sure to ping you once we get the new guide outlined and stubbed out.

Also, if you have any suggestions for the packaging guide that aren’t encompassed in the survey, please feel free to leave a comment here.

Thanks!

P.S.  Oh, and wouldn’t you know that the Mozilla documentation team is updating their Mozilla Developer Network documentation, too? Janet Swisher from their docs team published a note seeking developer input on how their docs can be improved.  She publishes her blog content under a CC by SA 3.0 license, so I’ve “borrowed” some of her phrasing.  Hi, Janet!

Dear Yahoo!

Welcome to Ubuntu! As a regular contributor to the Ubuntu project, I think it’s great that you are partnering with Canonical.  Because of the agreement you signed, Canonical will be able to hire more people to work on Free software.  Also, your contributions will help Ubuntu continue offering their OS at no cost to users.  These are great things.

As things get going, though, there is one big thing (or a set of big things centered around one request) that you need to do to make the Ubuntu-Yahoo! user experience better.  In short, you need to index the crap out of Ubuntu- and Linux-related sites.  For example, if I do a Yahoo! search for launchpad bug 387765, I need the first link that comes up to be a link to the actual bug page for Launchpad bug #387765.  As it stands now, a Yahoo! search for that phrase brings up two results, neither of which are relevant.  The first of the two results is a link to the Debian Bugs page on Launchpad.  As a contributor, this is not what I need.

For comparison, the same search on Google brings up 273 results, with the first result being a direct link to the bug report on Launchpad (which is now closed, thanks to the efforts of Fabien Tassin and the other Chromium packagers and hackers)).  Google’s results not only link me directly to the bug that I am inquiring about, but also link me to a large number of pages that may be relevant to that bug report.

The example that I provide above concerns search results that are beneficial for contributors and developers, but what about regular users?  When I search Yahoo! for “Dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu,” the first page in the search results is for the Ubuntu 8.04 “Dual Booting,” official documentation page.  This page is out of date, especially given our migration to Grub2 in the 9.10 release.

These are just two examples, and my searches are likely not representative of the multitudes of search requests made daily on your site for Ubuntu-related tasks.  Moreover, I won’t pretend to understand how incredibly complex indexing the web can be.  I’m just writing to note that there is room for improvement, and I would like to see improvement so that our users can use your service to get relevant search results.

After all, improving Linux-related searches would be a win-win for us and for you.  Ubuntu developers and users would get their work done, and problems solved, more quickly and effectively, and you would get more regular users performing their searches on Yahoo!  This sounds pretty good to me.  Here’s to hoping it can happen.

Congratulations to Jannis Pohlmann on the release of Thunar 1.1.0!  For those who don’t know, Thunar is the Xfce file manager, and this release marks a major milestone for Thunar and for the Xfce project.  Why is this release so noteworthy?  With this new version of Thunar, users will be able to access networked file systems (SFTP shares, FTP shares, Samba shares, etc.) from within the file manager itself.

This means that desktop users will be able to access their networked files and folders via a couple of clicks.   Users of previous versions of Thunar who wanted to access network folders would have to hack around with FUSE file systems, or use a separate application altogether.  Configuring a special file system, or having to open a different file manager application to get files and folders on a network do not represent user-friendly approaches to networked computing.  Thus, providing network-share support from within the file manager represents a major improvement to the Xfce user experience.

Admittedly, for long-time GNOME and KDE users (or even for Windows or Mac users), adding network-share support to the file manager may not seem like a big deal. The respective GNOME and KDE file managers, Nautilus and Konqueror (or Dolphin), have provided network-share support for some time.  However, Xfce is a much smaller project than GNOME or KDE, so I’m sure that people can appreciate the effort of a small group of developers working to add important end-user functionality such as this.

For long-time Xfce users who don’t want or need the new network share support, and would prefer that things stay as simple and lightweight as possible, there is good news for you, too.  Jannis will be issuing a maintenance release of Thunar that includes several of the improvements from the 1.1.0 release, but uses the previous back-end of Thunar, called Thunar-VFS.  Thunar-VFS does not support native access to network shares.  Thus, individuals who package Thunar for their Linux/BSD distributions will be able to choose whether or not they want to incorporate the new network-share features into their packaged version of Thunar.

While the network-share support is the most prominent improvement that comes with this release of Thunar, several other improvements are also included.  Have a look at the release notes (best viewed in Firefox) if you want the full-scoop on the improvements and new features that come with this new release of Thunar.

[edit] as John Carr indicated in the comments, the GIO/GVfs back-end is the result of the hard work of GNOME developers, so credit is due to them, as well.  Also, the performance of the GIO/GVfs back-end has not been tested in comparisons against the Thunar-VFS back-end.  Thank you for the comment, John.

The Xubuntu team will be holding a meeting this Sunday, January 10th, at 20:00 UTC, and all are welcome to attend.

The primary focus of this meeting will be on team governance, as Cody Somerville is transitioning out of his role as primary project leader.  With that, we’ll be discussing changes to the Xubuntu Strategy Document.  However, there are still a few other topics to be discussed, and you can add topics to the agenda.

Hope to see you there!

The next Ubuntu Developer Summit will be starting up tomorrow, and although not everyone can attend the event, there are a number of ways to participate remotely.

Among other things, I like to follow the ‘dents (from Identi.ca) and tweets (from Twitter) from the event.  Typically, people will use Identi.ca and Twitter to share snippets about some particular topic that has come up during the conference, but I’ve found that some notices can be more helpful than others.

For example, here’s a fictitious example of what I think is an unhelpful dent/tweet:  “I’m going to attend the virtualization session! #UDS”

I saw a lot notices like this posted during the last developer summit.  Notices like these show that you’re excited (cool), and they can also help other attendees to know your location at the conference (pretty cool), but they don’t actually tell us much of anything (not very cool).  I know that sometimes you just can’t help it . . . you’re at this great event, and just want to share a bit of what is going on with the outside world.  I’m sure that this is not a big deal in the grandiose scheme of things.

With that, though, let’s take a look at some more interesting ways to make use of these social networking tools.

• Seek feedback from conference participants: “Experimenting with blip.tv for UDS videos: http://is.gd/1Fv5g what do you guys think?“  Notices like these can be used both during and after an event.
  
• Share information about a social event that will be going on after conference hours: “I’ve created a sign up page for Monday night @ the firing range. Everyone welcome https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-L/FiringRangeNight #uds !uds”
• Let others know about room or schedule changes: “Due to overflow crowds, remaining Xubuntu sessions have been moved to Big Texas Conference Hall B. #UDS”  (Ok, I made up that dent.  I can dream, though, can’t I?)
  
• Inform others (okay . . . complain) about conditions at the conference: “Hmmm, my laptop kept me nice and warm during the pleniary sessions, but it’s still cold in the rooms. Anyone want to max my CPU? !uds“  After all, the conference organizers pay good money to an event site to host their event there, so rooms should be comfortable for attendees.
• Share technical information from a session (aka “live-tweeting” a session): “#uds “package-branches” is the tag used for bugs (in #launchpad) related to source package branches.” Notices like these may not make sense to everyone, but they will likely make sense to those interested in the topic.
• Presenters can use identi.ca or twitter as a presentation tool, too.  For example, Tom Johnson recently wrote an article noting that presenters can pose questions to their audience, and let the audience respond via Twitter.  This can provide for real-time feedback to the presenter about a particular topic, and can help to break down some of the barriers between the audience and the presenter.

Of course, I expect that people will use microblogging for fun, too.  I wouldn’t want for people to feel uptight about their tweets.  I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts for how people can better use microblogging at a conference, thus making things more enjoyable for those in attendance, and for those who are participating remotely.  If you have any other suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments.

Ara Pulido sent this message out to the Xubuntu-Users mailing list the other day, and I thought it was worth passing along to the greater Ubuntu community.  Testing for the Xubuntu 9.10 release candidate is going on now, so please read the email below and help out if you can.  Thanks!

Hello Xubuntu users!

As you may know, Thursday 22nd October we are releasing Xubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate. This is a very important milestone, as it will be very similar to final Xubuntu 9.10 (between them, only very critical fixes will be accepted).

For the 9.10 release we are having very little coverage of Xubuntu images and we would need a harder effort for the RC milestone.

To help, you will need an account in the ISO tracker [1]. This blog post is useful as starting guide:

http://tinyurl.com/yjujh6c

Also, one of the common complains about ISO testing is that, when the call for testing is done, it takes too long to download the ISOs for that candidate image.

Preparing today for that moment couldn’t be easier:

dl-ubuntu-test-iso is a script, available as part of the ubuntu-qa-tools, that downloads Ubuntu (+ Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc) ISO images for testing purposes. The script uses rsync, which means that the second time you run it, it only downloads the changes to each ISO. So, if you use it today, and keep running it every day (or every couple of days), you will be already set up to help when the candidates images for RC start appearing.

You will need a configuration file to tell the script which images your interested in. I have prepared a configuration file for Xubuntu, and it is attached. You will only need to edit it to select which architecture you’re interested in. Save it in you home folder as .dl-ubuntu-test-iso

Once you have save the configuration file:

* If you’re running Karmic, you can install the ubuntu-qa-tools package directly.

$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-qa-tools
$ dl-ubuntu-test-iso

* If you’re not running Karmic, get the ubuntu-qa-tools from its bazaar repository:

$ bzr branch lp:ubuntu-qa-tools
$ ./ubuntu-qa-tools/dl-ubuntu-

This site lists who they’ve identified as the top 50 technical writers on the web, which I stumbled upon via a link from Scott Nesbitt’s blog.  While this list will certainly provide me with additional documentation resources, I notice a dearth of open-source documentation names in that list.  No Shaun McCance, no Emma Jane Hogbin, no Matthew East, and certainly no one with a name as cool as Milo Casagrande.

Paul Cutler, a member of the GNOME documentation team, has said that he wants to make documentation cool again.  He used some different phrasing (ok, he actually said, he wants to make it “sexy,” again, but I don’t really feel like going there), but what I take his comment to mean is that he wants to make documentation something that people see as technically innovative and relevant to users, even if most users instinctively turn to Google as their first line of support.  After all, Google’s search results don’t just grow on trees – the content that comes up in all of those search results has to come from somewhere.  Why shouldn’t the answers to user questions come from carefully prepared and researched documentation?

I don’t say this to denigrate blog posts, forums, or IRC support networks – that’s where users get most of their support these days.  Comprehensive documentation has its place, though.

With that in mind, I’m making initial, but steady progress on the Xfce 4.8 documentation, and really want to improve the Xubuntu documentation.  (I’m actually a bit ashamed of its current state given the beauty that is the rest of Xubuntu 9.10.)  I will be at UDS (though, unfortunately, only for the last two days), and look forward to meeting with fellow doc-team members, and anyone else who would like to discuss documentation and translations.