Archive for the ‘Ubuntu’ Category

Making a splash

As you probably know by now, even if you’re not following the karmic development closely, Ubuntu has gained new splash screen software called xsplash.  This is the hard work of Cody Russell and Ken VanDine of the Ubuntu Desktop Experience team.
There’s been some press coverage of this already, and various comments from different people raising [...]

Intrepid Sprint (London)

The great thing about the Ubuntu distro team development sprints is that you get to sit around a table and share your knowledge about workarounds for all of the broken things in the current release:

To get the machine to resume from suspend, boot an older kernel
To get X to start, disable usplash
To get a useful [...]

Ubuntu Brainstorm Announced!

The Ubuntu QA community have put together an awesome new resource for Ubuntu users and developers – Ubuntu Brainstorm.  This allows you to suggest ideas for improvements, and to vote on the ideas others have suggested.
We have of course been inspired by the IdeaStorm site from our good friends at Dell but modified the concept [...]

On Metadata

The last release (Ubuntu 7.10) was the first in which we shipped Tracker enabled by default; this service runs in the background and indexes all of your files, storing information about them in a metadatabase which can subsequently be searched. The two main ways of searching are through the deskbar-applet (press Alt+F3) and within [...]

Ubuntu Desktop Developer

Continuing my mission to put together a kick-ass team to develop the Ubuntu Desktop, the following position is now up on the website:
Posting Date & ID: September 2007 UDD
Job Location: Your home with broadband. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: To adapt and develop the GNOME desktop to improve the Ubuntu user experience.
Key responsibilities [...]

Something for everybody

According to the current issue (#93) of Linux Format, Ubuntu 7.04 (”Feisty Fawn”) is “…a dull release for Ubuntu, leaving Fedora to storm ahead…” (p. 23) whilst “shaping up to be one of the most innovative Linux distro releases of the year.” (p. 38)
Especially amusing for myself is that, with Upstart, they “seldom notice any [...]

Upstart 0.3

For the last couple of months, both at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View and on the #upstart IRC channel, we’ve been discussing the changes we want to make to upstart for the Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu.
This will ship with a version of upstart based on the 0.3 series (it may end up [...]

Slippery Slopes

One of the most interesting thing about slippery slopes is how you never seem to be standing at the top of them, looking down. The slope seems fine at the top, and it’s only once you start down it that you realise this could end up with some broken limbs.
When Ubuntu was formed, Debian [...]

What we’ll get in feisty

This post is a sequel to my “What I want in edgy+1″ post, which was written when the developer summit was first announced. Now that the summit (and the following company All Hands meeting) is over, and we’re all back home, this seems as good a time as any to review what was discussed [...]

The Edgy Dance

Last week, a few of us gathered at Canonical’s London offices to oversee the final release preparations. This basically consists of testing the various candidate CD images and performing both install and upgrade tests on them.
As you can imagine, three people performing repeated tests of edgy means that the fabled startup sound got many, [...]