The development version is a wonderful area to try new concepts, and this is something that is being tested.  I tried to use this for nearly an hour and found that my habit was too strong, and it’s not one that I currently wish to change.  I decided to revert it to something i’m used to (the far right), I’m not aware of an easy (graphical) method to do this, which means that we need to pull out some gconf -foo (hurray)!

Lets open gconf via holding ALT+F2 and typing “gconf-editor“.  This will open the application and allow changes to be made. I should warn that fiddling with gconf, and making errors could cause bad things to happen.

In this screenshot I have navigated to “/apps/metacity/general/” and double clicked the “button_layout” option.  On the end of the line (highlighted) there is a “:”.  This colon needs to be moved to the beginning of the line, so it reads - ”:maximize,minimize,close” rather than “maximize,minimize,close:” which it currently reads.

When you press OK, the buttons will automagically move over to the side we are all accustomed to.   However, if this design decision isn’t reverted then you will need to fix this on the rare occasion that the theme is updated.

It is with great pleasure that the Walker household can announce, following 9 months of development, our second LTS release; codenamed “Babbling Boy”. This LTS (Long Term Support)  release has an undetermined support period, but it’s likely to far exceed 34 years. Our first release, now 4 years old, is still well supported and testing has proved that that both versions co-exist happily.

This time the release is of the male variant, currently sporting a blue themed baby grow.  Release weight was a stonking 8lbs 2oz.

Unfortunately, as this is a bespoke release with a single limited edition version, full demo is by appointment only.  However, a screenshot is appended to the end of the notice.

Known Bugs

• Will awake from suspend without warning
  • Work around, is to provide reassurance.
• Inconsistently produces excess noise.
  • It is advised to wear ear defenders.
• Produces bad odours.
  • Keeping the “Waste folder” empty, reduces period of bad odour exposure.

One of the reasons for the delay was related to two rather serious DAHDI bugs meaning it couldn’t be installed, these are both now fixed and uploaded to the archives.

The important things to take note of when upgrading is documented here (ignoring the build process). However, if you are really keen and wish to know more detail, they are documented with superb detail here, here and also here.

Whilst I should stress that Karmic shouldn’t yet be considered for production telephony, it really does need some serious testing to ensure it is ready for the scheduled release date of Karmic which is October 29th(!).

If you are available to do some testing with Asterisk on Karmic we need testing of both new installs and upgrades. We also need to ensure hardware still has good support. If you encounter any bugs; please report them and ensure you state the package version and how to reproduce the bug. If you need any help with this, please do get in touch.

Thanks.

A tip can be something like:
“Ubuntu Server Tip: Browse the command line history with ctrl-r and then type a few characters that you know are part of the command you are looking for.”

The current roadmap suggests a tip like the above will be displayed after login, via motd (message of the day).

How can you help?
Currently there is a shortage of tips, and translations of these into other languages. I think we can easily get in excess of 500 soon.

So if you have a little gem of wisdom that is reasonably short, raise a bug and include a short description as a title, and include the tip as the main description. If it is accepted, it will be included.

Translations are another big part of this project, it’s only fair that people see these nuggets in their native language – so if you are capable, we would really appreciate help translating into different languages. Launchpad makes this area very easy to contribute to.

Once we have a few more tips, I’ll throw out a call for testing, so this is another area you can help.

Thanks for your help.

EDIT: Had some fantastic suggestions so far, but if the length could be kept concise (guide ~160 characters), it would be great

There is an exciting expo happening next week. It’s the Cloud Expo Europe 2009, in London and it’s FREE if you pre-register.

Now we’ve all heard of the term cloud (in the computing sense), but I suspect many don’t really know what it involves. So this is your chance to find out.

As with many conferences there will be stands for companies and projects related to the event. There will also be talks from field pioneers and other contributors- in both business tracks and a technical track.

I’ve been invited to talk about Cloud offerings regarding Ubuntu, and will be talking about Eucalyptus (no, not the plant), the Cloud suite that is the next big thing. This replicates the Amazon EC2 and other offerings in a free and open source software.

Also, the Ubuntu community have been offered a stand. If you want to help man this, it would be appreciated! Let me know if you are available.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

For more information:
http://www.cloudexpoeurope.com/

This was our first effort of having an event like this, and it was a huge success. As the UK is larger than people think, we actually held two venues, one was held in Birmingham and the other in our countries capital – London.

I traveled to Birmingham Thursday night, in preparation as it was a number of hours away. Luckily i did, as it mean’t I was able to attend the Birmingham Linux Users Group, who had the guest speaker of Scott James Remnant speaking about one of his pet projects, Upstart. This was really worth attending!

The Jamming started on Friday in the Birmingham venue, and in many ways I was kind of worried about having one during a working day – as not everyone can get away from employment commitments during the week. However, I was proved wrong – and was actually rather pleased with the turn out! It never ceases to amaze me how so many great people are willing to give up their free time to *want* to help make Ubuntu better.

As we had two venues, we eventually got a working video and sound link between the sites – things like this are really useful for a couple of reasons, primarily it was great to see the ‘other’ site at work on the large LCD television on the wall – but also it made it possible to share talks across sites. As we didn’t enable this until quite late on in the event, it wasn’t used as much as it could have been – however, it’s really something we can get working for the next one! I would also encourage other countries to consider this also, even if it’s perhaps snapshot pictures beaming across on the internet – just for others to see. It’s great watching others at work, surprisingly encouraging!

Both events were kicked off with me giving an Introduction to Launchpad, some people at both events hadn’t really used Launchpad (or in some cases heard of it), others believed that as they weren’t experienced developers (just users), that they were not entitled to have an account on Launchpad. This is a shame, and I hope the feeling isn’t widespread. The introduction talk I gave, covered the basics of launchpad including bug reporting, triaging, advanced triaging and then went onto fixing the bug by using the supplied information on the report to create a ‘debdiff’ and upload to the site pending review. I made it clear that someone didn’t have to work to the end, and each part of the process was really useful in itself. I’m pretty sure that to some people there, it wasn’t that useful, but I think it was generally useful to ‘get the day started’, and allow less experienced users to know where to get started. Following this the rockin’ Martin Meredith (Mez), showed how to locate bugs to continue work on, with the intention of getting them fixed, packaged and uploaded.

The London Jam started on Saturday, this mean’t I had to get a train from Birmimgham to London Saturday morning which shouldn’t be too bad. However, London Transport decided it would be a good weekend to have major maintenance work making delays and rerouting quite a problem. However, i got there eventually.

Following my second introduction to Launchpad, the ever awesome James Westby gave a presentation on fixing a package based on a patch and uploading it. This was great on many levels, as for me, I found it useful to see someone elses work flow and other ways of using tools I wasn’t previously aware of.

We were also quite lucky to get a GNOME developer turn up – Simos Xenitellis, which was mutually useful as we were able to show him some of the more advanced features of Launchpad, and he was able to show us around the GNOME Bugzilla and between us we explored advanced triaging methods and linking to upstream bug reports, he was really keen – which was great to see.

For me, the aim of both events was to meet as many people as possible, and pass on knowledge to as many as I could, as well as learn a thing or five for myself. It wasn’t necessarily to just churn out touching of as many bugs as possible, it was to equip others with the knowledge and skill to be able to go home, and continue working on them throughout the year. Otherwise, we would all probably have sat in silence trawling launchpad and working as if we were on our own anyway, saying that I did get the odd message on IRC from across the table!

At the end of both events, i asked for feedback and it was really encouraging. Will we hold another Jam in around 6 months? Hell yeah! I have some ideas for some things we could improve on, but as this was our first effort I think we did really well!

So a big thank you (and hugs), to everyone that turned up, even if you chaps feel you didn’t achieve much on the day(s), you really did! Every little counts. Infact, the success of this reasonably technical event has given me the confidence to explore organising more events, including more social aspects. Especially as we did pretty well in the Bug Jam Stats.

A special thanks to Linux Emporium for providing us a venue for the Birmingham Jam, Martin Meredith (Mez) for allowing me to stay at his digs – as I was a guest in Birmingham. Also James Thomas (selinuxium), for getting his employer to allow us to use their lovely offices in the centre of London.

If you see yellow snow, no matter how free or appetising, don’t eat it.

As you can guess, most of the UK has been getting snow this week. As ever, we’ve practically come to a halt – with an estimated 25% of employees staying at home, doodling in the snow.

For those that don’t know what Twitter is, I define it an “open chat” method, where you can ‘microblog‘, and really just let the world know when you scratch your bottom.

Now to the point of this post; Some crazy British chap, whom i suspect has drunk too much Newkie Brown, has decided to try and travel as far around the world as he can can in 30 days, surviving on hand outs from the twittering masses. He’s doing this with the hope of raising money for a good cause/charity. I won’t try and explain the whole shebang, as he describes it pretty well on his website http://www.twitchhiker.com.

However the real challenge, and what prompted this posting is the sub-challenge he’s set. If he can get 2000 followers by the end of today (02/14/09), he “will walk out in the snow, in my pants, and dance“. Well as we all know kids, without a photo or video – “It didn’t happen” – . So help some crazy Brit’ make a fool of himself, follow him now (Oh and consider helping him on his little challenge thingy)