Posted
about 5 hours
ago
by
lucas
(Context: Michal Čihař complains about bugs filed in Ubuntu not being looked at nor forwarded to Debian or upstream)
Michal, I think that your complaint is caused by a misunderstanding of how package maintenance happens in Ubuntu (or
... [More]
Canonical). I’ll try to clarify it, based on what I understand (if you know better than me, don’t hesite to comment).
The part of Canonical maintaining the distribution is organized into teams (full list here), like Kernel, Foundations, Desktop, Mobile, Server, etc. Most of those teams have mirror-teams in the community, like the Ubuntu Desktop team. Those teams take care of subsets of packages in Ubuntu, of relevance to the respective teams. (This is orthogonal to package upload rights, which are managed with the Ubuntu Core Development Team, and the Ubuntu Development Team ; there’s a proposal to change that so that package upload rights are based on the first set of teams).
However, there are some packages (probably more than 70% of the packages in Ubuntu, including main+universe) that are of no interest to any particular team. Those packages are maintained on a best-effort basis by all the Ubuntu developers (inside the loosely defined MOTU team), and focus is usually on not diverging from Debian, to make their work as easy as possible. It’s very similar to what we do in Debian with orphaned packages: sometimes, important bugs get fixed, because someone complained loudly enough or a developer ran into the bug and did a QA upload ; but usually, we don’t really do any bug triaging. Of course, there are some packages in Ubuntu that are not maintained by any “core” team, but still have someone that cares about them. They are more the exception than the rule.
So, yes, obviously, you will run into packages with lots of untriaged bugs, sometimes even with patches. And those bugs and patches are rarely being forwarded manually to Debian, simply because nobody cares about those packages in Ubuntu. In an ideal world, with infinite resources, this would not happen, of course. But realistically, this is not going to change anytime soon.
There’s a link on the PTS to the bugs of your packages in Ubuntu. The idea is to allow an easy access to the bugs reported in Ubuntu, which are likely to be also relevant to the Debian package. You should probably feel welcomed to triage the bugs against your package in ubuntu, if it makes it easier for you to monitor them.
There’s some noise in the Ubuntu bugs, of course, but more and more often, by looking at the Ubuntu bugs, I find important bugs in my Debian packages that are not even reported in Debian yet. [Less]
Posted
about 5 hours
ago
by
matthew
Reviews have begun to appear for VMware Cookbook, written by Ryan Troy with some assistance from me. The comments I am seeing have been positive.
Comments have appeared today from Meera Subbarao’s Java Blog, Learnxpress, and Amazon.com.
Share and Enjoy:
Posted
about 6 hours
ago
by
directhex
I’m making a few changes to my online interactions.
Chicken Little Remix will no longer be updated. There will be no 10.04 from me.
I will no longer be visiting certain websites, under any circumstances, courtesy of 127.0.0.1
... [More]
entries in /etc/hosts. This includes sites such as Ubuntu Forums, some blogs, and some “news” sites.
I will be blocking some people from Twitter, in order to avoid their @mentions from appearing to me.
I may (this is undecided) opt to change my anything-goes policy regarding comments on my blog. Redacted comments will have their content deleted, to make it clear that a comment is redacted, not held in moderation
Some things, however, will NOT be changing.
I will continue my efforts in Debian. In fact, these efforts will be redoubled.
I will continue my efforts in Ubuntu. In fact, these efforts will be redoubled.
I will maintain my existing IRC, Twitter, email & IM presence.
I will, when the opportunity arises, combine sweet and savoury foods.
Thank you for your time. [Less]
Posted
about 8 hours
ago
Between second and seventh grade, I went to a school that required that
I wear grey corduroys. Every day. I loathed them. When I left that
school, at twelve years old, I swore to myself that I would never wear a
pair of corduroys
... [More]
again.
And I kept that vow until earlier this year when, in Germany, I came
across a couple carpenters in Germany on their one-year traveling
post-apprenticeship waltz. As it turns out, journeyman German
carpenters wear some pretty wild bellbottom corduroys ---
zimmermanhosen. Although I tried, I couldn't resist acquiring a pair
at a local work clothing store.
A year and a couple more trips to Germany later, I now own several pair
of zimmermanhosen and wear them nearly every day. They are tough,
distinctive, and have pretty awesome double-zipper flies. And although I
love them, I still feel a little conflicted every time I put them on. [Less]
Posted
about 9 hours
ago
by
apachelogger (nor...@blogger.com)
As all my dear groupies probably have noticed, I started working on getting Ubuntu One a KDE frontend.
First results are now available as a tech preview.
The Ubuntu One KDE client is a small application that lives in your system
... [More]
tray (the thing next to your clock). It notifies you when a new transfers from or to the Ubuntu One server have been started and when they are finished.
Additionally it will show up whenever there is a problem with the connection.
You can get an impression of what it does from the two prototype sceencasts
http://aplg.kollide.net/screencasts/ubuntuone-kde1.ogvhttp://aplg.kollide.net/screencasts/ubuntuone-kde2.ogvWhat can you expect from this preview?
Crashes, startup failures and missing functionallity, as to be expected from a tech preview.
Please note that this preview is directly based of a prototype, so the internals are most likely to change a lot.
Still here?
Ok.
You can get the client from a special PPA. Just add the source lines and install ubuntuone-client-kde. Before you do anything you need to run the GNOME client (ubuntuone-client-applet) at least once to obtain authentication from the Ubuntu One server, then you can just quit the GNOME client and start the KDE one (you need to start it with --nofork or it will not work).
I have also create a screencast showing all that.
Once authentication is implemented an the client works properly I'll take a look into implementing Dolphin integration (most likely via a kio slave, due to lack of other options). Meanwhile the Desktop CouchDB Akonadi resources get finsihed. So we will hopefully have meaningful integration into the KDE Platform by the time Kubuntu 10.04 LTS gets released.
Interesting times lie ahead! [Less]
Posted
about 9 hours
ago
by
putt1ck
So much has changed; Palm devices now use and support Linux, are cute and very, very neat (oh, and for iPhone users: among other things, the Pre can run more than one application at at time ).
But K/Ubuntu 9.10 did away with /etc/event.d
... [More]
, which means that the debs thoughtfully provided by Palm to facilitate access to your Pre from your Linux box don't work as advertised.
So for any Pre owners out there using K/Ubuntu 9.10 or variants, who's just updated their Palm Pre to the shiny new WebOS 1.3, and had it go wrong (like a scary message involving www.palm.com/ROM) here's how to do sort it all out the easy way[1].
First, don't go straight for the excellently cross-platform solution offered by Palm, the WebOS Doctor; you will need it though, so if you have already got it up and running, no matter.
You need to install the Palm SDK and Novacom tools, which you can get from here:
http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1585 (bottom of page)
Run the installer as directed, but ignore the errors caused by the Novacom install, which are caused by the above referenced deprecation of event.d. To get this vital element working you can just run sudo /opt/Palm/novacom/novacomd (thanks to http://zootlinux.blogspot.com/2009/11/installing-webos-sdk-in-ubuntu-910.html).
Now go for it on the WebOS Doctor - if you haven't already got it, go here: http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/pre/recoverytool/
See now that was not so hard. But it would have been so much easier (particularly for the non-techies) if these things were in the Partner respository. How on earth do things get into there?
[1] Where easy means "not trawling around a whole bunch of websites first" [Less]
Posted
about 10 hours
ago
by
Adi
This a post about Ubuntu Karmic Release Parties in Romania.
The wonderful people from ROSEDU have organized just before the release the third edition of their, by now well known, Ubuntu Install Fest. More info and pictures on the event
... [More]
page. Below is just a sneak peak.
Thanks to ArLug, just in time for release, we had a great party in Arad. Beside the usual chat and drinks this event was highly connected to the latest online social sensation having a great Upstream.TV live streaming and a presentation on Slidecast… high-tech! More info and pictures on the event page. Below is just a sneak peak.
Next in timeline was the greatest Ubuntu release party we had and all thanks to awesome boys and girls from SBLug. Kudos to all of you who make this thing happen. After the Ubuntu presentation there was also shown a nice video celebrating 5 years of Firefox. More info and pictures on the event page. Below is just a sneak peak.
We also had a great event in Târgu-Mureș, organized by Mureș-Lug and educatie.inmures.ro. The event was organized as a release party for Ubuntu Karmic but it was not all about Ubuntu. There was also a presentation about Mandriva and the Firefox anniversary video. I am very happy to see such a diverse event and a strong collaboration between local free software communities. Kudos to organizers. More info and pictures on the event page. Here is a preview. [Less]
Posted
about 11 hours
ago
by
MacSlow
The first alpha version of blender 2.50 (what will become blender 2.60 once final) is officially out. It is being stress-tested by their user-community and by the artists working on “Sintel” (the newest installment of the OpenMovie-series
... [More]
by the blender foundation).
I’m really looking forward to this new short, even more than I anticipated the last two ones. Because this time around I, or rather the martial-arts team I’m a member of (banGang), is going to help out the creative minds behind “Sintel” with fighting, acrobatics, stunts and reference footage. [Less]
Posted
about 16 hours
ago
by
Mackenzie (nor...@blogger.com)
I just gave an impromptu lesson on symbolic links (symlinks) and hard links, complete with ASCII art, in #ubuntu-offtopic, and Topyli commented that simple explanations of this for beginners are hard to find, so here's a summary.
The purpose
... [More]
of a link is to allow you to have two (or more) paths to access the same data without having the data exist on disk multiple times, thus giving convenience without sacrificing disk space. So why are there two kinds of links and how do they work?
Symlinks (ln -s REALPATH LINK) work like this:
LINK --> REALPATH --> DATA
While hard links (ln PATH1 PATH2) work like this:
PATH1 --> DATA <-- PATH2
See what's happening here? In the symlink case, your link points to another path, which points to the data. In the hard link case, two paths point to the same data directly. I think I could get a lesson on pointers in C out of this ASCII art if I wanted to. If you want a bit more background, your hard disk's filesystem contains a table of inode numbers, which is just like the Index at the back of a book. Symlinks are when you get "(see also: rubber ducky)" and hard links are when you get "Rubber ducky: 5" and "Sesame Street: 5" both showing up in the Index. Since we can have multiple filesystems mounted on one machine (for example my /home is on a separate partition), it is important to note that while a symlink can point to something located on another disk (or in a book "Further reading: Little Red Riding Hood"), a hard link only knows about data on its own filesystem (ie same partition). So, if you want to link from your hard disk to a flash drive, you need to use a symlink. This makes sense since your hard disk can't know if your flash drive rearranges things while it's plugged into another computer.
How do these show up in ls? Hard links look like normal files. For symlinks ls -l --color will show LINK -> REALPATH. If REALPATH is deleted, this will be highlighted as red text on a black background.
Speaking of deletion, how does that work? Well, if you remove LINK, REALPATH and DATA will still exist. If you remove REALPATH, DATA goes away too and LINK just points at nothing (though if you add REALPATH back, LINK will start working again, as it only goes by filename). As for hard links, DATA goes away once no more inode numbers point to it. As mentioned before, hard links point directly to the data, so this means removing all links and the original filename. So if I remove the original filename (PATH1), PATH2 will still point to DATA.
I hope that's a straightforward enough explanation of how it works.
From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com [Less]
Posted
about 18 hours
ago
by
kees
As more attention is given to the ARM ports of Linux, I’m hoping someone (maybe me if I learn a bunch) will be able to implement some upstream kernel features that are implemented only on x86 so far:
ASLR of mmap allocations
ASLR
... [More]
of text/exec area
ASLR of vdso
ASLR of brk area
Stack is already randomized, it should be easy to do the rest! ;) [Less]
