Scott James Remnant

It seems that some people with heavily customised Ubuntu installations have had problems upgrading from dapper to edgy. While we do test upgrades as much as we can, there’s no way to test every possible permutation, so problems do creep in.

Here’s a checklist to perform before upgrading to minimise any problems you might have:

• Make sure you have the ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-desktop packages installed (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc. should use the appropriate meta-packages for their distribution). This may require removing some replacement programs you have installed, but you can always put those back after the upgrade process.
• Check for any locally installed packages, you can use aptitude search '~i!~Oubuntu' to get a list of them. Some of these may cause conflicts with the upgrade process, it may be worth removing them and putting them back after the upgrade.
• If you have manually installed any software from upstream, and not used Ubuntu packages (especially the Nvidia or ATI binary drivers), revert those to the Ubuntu-provided versions before upgrading.
• Use the update manager, as described in the release notes, and not apt-get dist-upgrade. While the latter may work eventually, it will require more manual tinkering than the automatic upgrader.

If, after taking all of these precautions, your upgrade still fails; please file a bug report, and try to include as much information as possible. Provide the list of packages that failed, and if possible the error message provided by them. Provide /var/log/dpkg.log and the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade.

Now that Ubuntu 6.10 (”The Edgy Eft”) has been released, we’re starting to see reviews of it; while largely positive, one common theme is that Edgy isn’t quite as edgy as people were expecting.

Mark’s original announcement is certainly the likely reason for this expectation. In it he set the scene for a bold, brash, bleeding edge release to counter the boring dapper release.

Unfortunately, the simple truth is that reality set in. When planning the release schedule for edgy, we realised that if we wanted to get back to our original six-monthly release schedule, we were only going to have four months in which to develop it.

That’s still enough time to throw everything to the wind, and shove out a “release” at the last moment when the CD happens to be installable. It’d be edgy in the extreme sense.

Unfortunately while exciting, we felt that such a release would ruin Ubuntu’s reputation. It’d be a release that, for all intents and purposes, would only be interesting to Ubuntu developers.

Mark has already touched on this in his blog, citing a conversation he had with Matt (the Ubuntu CTO). Especially noteworthy is the mention that the kinds of itches that developers get are not the same as those users get. We get itches because the installer still relies on devfs-style paths, or because it’s not possible to boot the system without race-conditions. None of these things are noticeable to the end-user.

We’re drawing up the list of topics to be discussed at UDS Mountain View in two weeks time, this is as good a guide as any for what we’re thinking about for feisty, the next release. At the end of that summit, we’ll have a list of approved specifications, assigned to developers throughout the community for implementation in the feisty schedule.

Obviously some of those won’t make it due to time constraints, but the best thing about a six-monthly release cycle is that they’re not delayed for long.

Now that edgy has been frozen for the beta release in a week’s time, and the next developer summit, where the plans for the next release will be discussed, has been announced, I think it’s the perfect time to start thinking about the kinds of features we want to see in that release.

At our recent sprint in Wiesbaden, Mark reminded us that when Ubuntu first released we were leading the field in many of the components we installed by default. Many users came to us because we provided Linux 2.6, hotplug/udev and Project Utopia by default; along with the latest GNOME release and development framework. Now everybody does that, butwe led the way.

With the dapper release, we produced something that could be supported for a long time. With edgy we’ve scratched our itches and fixed things under the hood that have been causing us problems. edgy+1 seems a good time to integrate the hottest new technologies and lead the way again.

So what do I think is exciting, and what do I want in edgy+1?

telepathy, farsight and galago

Anybody who has used the 2006 software release for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet will have seen these in action already.

They’re, in my opinion, some of the most exciting projects currently being worked on; and ripe for integration into Ubuntu.

Telepathy is a communication framework built on DBus that allows any application to establish communication with users all around the world, using any protocol from IRC to MSN to VoIP.

It uses Farsight to provide the codecs and protocol support on top of the GStreamer media framework.

And Galago glues it all together; providing presence information about contacts and allowing users to specify their own status.

This means that you’ll be able to contact your contacts. Your calendar alarm tells you that it’s a colleague’s birthday, you’d be able to click their name and see a selection of different ways that you can contact that person right now. From e-mail, opening an MSN or Jabber window or even establishing a VoIP or SIP call to them.

The most exciting thing is that because every application on the desktop has easy access to this, people are coming up with fantastic ideas for using it!

zeroconf

By this, I mean zero configuration networking. Something the OLPC project appears to be going to do very well indeed.

Where no existing network infrastructure exists, your computer should still be able to communicate with other nearby computers. It should use ad-hoc wireless networks, link-local IP addresses and server-free DNS resolution with libnss-mdns.

Play games with your friends on the train without touching a button. Chat with other people in a lecture hall or at a conference where the existing network is unavailable. Hassle-free home and office networking without any complicated set up.

Networking that “just works”.

avahi

Whether your computer is on an infrastructure or ad-hoc network, it should be able to locate resources on the network and share its own to other people.

Avahi allows applications to, via DBus, do this by using a mulicast form of DNS; compatible with Apple’s Bonjour protocol.

The immediately obvious benefits of this are that one can locate such things as file servers without any complicated directory; more fun things can be done too, such as sharing your music from RhythmBox with other users on the network.

Combine it with telepathy, etc. and you can establish communication with anyone else, with a wide range of different protocols.

The immediate problem here is that we currently have a “no open ports” policy, which if we’re going to give the users the opportunity to establish ad-hoc networks is almost certainly a very good thing. We already have exceptions for that policy for DNS and DHCP, it may be that Avahi (mDNS) joins that list. Another option is a “mobile-phone like” interface for enabling and disabling discovery and sharing.

Bluetooth

I don’t think we should stop discovery and sharing at 802.* networking either. Linux actually has a pretty decent bluetooth stack, it’s something that we should start taking advantage of.

Your computer should be able to discover paired or known bluetooth devices when in range without intervention and communicate with them.

If I attempt to establish a network connection, and my phone is nearby, that should be offered as a method for getting on the Internet. If possible, it should also be offered through telepathy as a method for contacting people in my address book!

Synchronisation

These technologies together give us a really big possibility, automatic synchronisation of user’s information.

When I bring my laptop home, it should automatically update my desktop with any changes I’ve made to my address book or calendar, and any shared files, etc.

Likewise it should be automatically be updated with any changes made on the network, to a company address book on a server, for example.

And why stop there? Don’t use share your music, synchronise it so that your laptop, desktop and iPod have the same selection available at all times.

Hassle-free backups is an obvious win here.

But we’re stopping again. Why is my mobile phone, and PDA excluded from this? Via bluetooth, my address book and calendar should be automatically updated from these and these should be automatically updated themselves.

If I add a new number to my phone’s memory, it should appear in my computer address book; and my computer should offer me the ability to contact that person (using VoIP, for example).