jonathan carter

Edubuntu Maverick News

// September 27th, 2010 // 7 Comments » // Education, Free Software

Close to the end of the Lucid release cycle, I posted an update of what’s been happening in the Edubuntu project. Now seems like a good time to do it again! This release wasn’t as big shake-up as the last one, but it’s still a very good release for Edubuntu that builds on the work we did in the previous release.

New Website

A few weeks ago we silently launched a new website. It’s not that great yet, but it’s already a big improvement over our old one. We also now have Facebook, Identica and Twitter profiles, as well as a YouTube channel. The next step is to get lots of user stories, photos and videos on the site. In particular, we’ll try to include informative videos on how people used Ubuntu in their institution to deliver education.

Better LTSP and Netbook installers

For Lucid we moved completely to a graphical installation. After installation a user could choose from the Live CD to install LTSP and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface. It worked great but it wasn’t very intuitive. Many users who meant to install LTSP didn’t quite know about it and hit the reboot button at the end of the installation and completely missed it. We decided to do it properly for Maverick and have it integrated right there in the installer. Below are links to Glade mockups I made earlier. Unfortunately there just wasn’t time to implement everything, especially with a lot going on in my personal life and work in the first half of the release cycle.

About two weeks ago I told Stéphane that I don’t feel up to getting the Ubiquity changes all done in time and that I’m going to revert back to how we did it in Lucid, and defer the installation improvements for Maverick. Within a day or two he had it already working properly:

It’s now the easiest LTSP installation ever. You literally just choose that you want to install it, and which interface it should run on.

Gnome Nanny

Gnome Nanny is a relatively new addition in the Gnome family of tools. I came across it in this Tectonic article and thought that it would be a great addition to Edubuntu. It works good for home or small classroom use, but it doesn’t support groups yet so it’s not particularly useful for large deployments yet. It has some good potential though and I hope it will just keep on getting better!

New Wallpapers Collection

The default wallpaper stayed pretty much the same, but we added some more wallpapers to make things a bit more exciting. Some of them are especially nice, you can get them directly from the Edubuntu website if you don’t want to install the edubuntu-artwork package. For Natty we’ll most likely split the wallpapers off in an edubuntu-wallpapers package.

Documentation

Documentation can be somewhat of a challenge. There’s been several projects before to write a complete big Edubuntu handbook that explains the A-Z of everything you need to know about using Ubuntu in educational environments. That approach didn’t quite work.  For Maverick we basically just link to all the upstream versions of the documentation and wrote documentation for the Edubuntu specific parts that don’t exist yet. We’re currently also working on the Edubuntu 10.10 installation guide that’s currently still very much work in progress, but viewable. For Natty I hope that we’ll be able to properly revitalize our documentation efforts and also work closer with the Ubuntu documentation team.

Easter Eggs

Ubuntu 10.10 will be released on (20/)10/10/10. The date was chosen because 101010 is 42 in binary, which happened to be the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) series, which happens to be quite popular amongst Ubuntu folk. An easter egg is a hidden feature in a program, quite often a joke that is meant to be accidentally or sometimes even never to be discovered. The vim text editor has a HHGTTG easter egg that you can access by typing “:help 42″

I guess no one would ever notice it if I don’t point it out, but the background of the Edubuntu Ubiquity Slideshow happens to be #424242. There are at least 2 other HHGTTG easter eggs planted in Edubuntu, but I’d be a spoil sport if I revealed them now already :)

Some personal thoughts on the Ubuntu Application Review System

// September 21st, 2010 // 5 Comments » // Free Software

The Story So Far

At the last UDS, it was discussed how new applications could be released on stable Ubuntu systems post-release. Yesterday Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager announced the new application review process. This was followed by some harsh (and maybe somewhat misguided) criticism from Benjamin Humphrey from the OMG!Ubuntu blog. Perhaps just sour grapes because he couldn’t get his Ubuntu Manual in there?

Perhaps There are Better Ways

In my personal opinion, it would be better for developers to implement their free software in the Universe repository. Universe has a good and working Stable Release Update policy and process. There are problems with actually getting new packages in to Universe because the package review system, called REVU often doesn’t have enough people paying attention to it and reviewing packages. However, it’s still possible to get packages into Universe without much trouble. Additionally, getting your packages into Universe means that they can be fully FHS compliant (these app review packages puts everything in /opt) and you can use maintainer scripts and also eventually have it included in Debian and all its derivatives. Also, in the case of Benjamin and the Ubuntu Manual, that would be something that would be in my opinion, also be better suited for Universe in the first place.

Possible Uses

According to the original specification, the problem that this aims to resolve is having a good way to get new applications in to stable release versions of Ubuntu. This process might actually work well for that. I do think however that creating very specific packages for free software for a stable release will, at least initially, be a very niche market thing. It doesn’t sound like something people will do for ego or for ‘glory’ so much (they’d probably chase Debian or the Ubuntu archives then) and it certainly doesn’t sound like something someone would do to make money. One of the things I’m wondering is, who will actually want to use this? Perhaps Canonical has some plans to use it to push some apps to stable releases internally?

It’s a new process and with the newness comes some uncertainty and I think it’s understandable that some people are concerned. While I personally think there are better ways of getting your software out there, I also think that this new process may have some promise and that it should be given a fair chance. The Application Review Board are made up of good people and I hope that they’ll be empowered to steer the project in a good direction. This could get interesting, let’s see what happens.

Jumping in on the deep side

// September 20th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // Free Software, Jonathan

Jumping In

I’ve had too much to blog about and not quite the time to do so! So I’ll just do a bunch of entries that combines a bunch of them.

When I was around 4 years old, I was at my cousins’ house and they were all swimming. I couldn’t swim yet but I thought something along the lines of “Hey! They’re all doing it, how hard can it be!” so I just jumped in at the deep side of the pool and tried to swim. I didn’t quite get a hang of it, and my cousins panicked and yelled that I was drowning, so my father ran to the pool and jumped in with all his clothes on to get me out of there. He said that I shouldn’t do that again. About 10 minutes later when I was dry again I did it again and managed to get it right. Since then I’ve always loved swimming. Jumping in on the deep side didn’t stop there either…

Moving to Canada

I’ve been meaning to blog about this properly for the last 3 months. A little more than 9 months ago I started working for Révolution Linux, a company that does large-scale Linux deployments around the world. I still do my work in South Africa (which has recently expanded to Uganda) and the combination of being almost-full time employed while also doing my own thing is working *great*.

Révolution Linux had a requirement that I go to Canada and work there for 2 months for integration and to get to know everyone properly. I was initially going to come over around the end of 2009, but my work permit took way longer than expected and I only ended up getting it in June. Initially, while deciding what I’ll need to take over for 2 months (that’s very long for me to be away from home), I wondered whether I shouldn’t perhaps go over for 6 months instead. Then I could sell my car, get something cheap and nasty on the other side, cancel a bunch of stuff that I wouldn’t need anymore like gym membership, etc. I started wondering what actually stops me from doing a complete move, and then I just decided on a whim to pack up everything and move.

Lots of people asked me why I’m gone, how long I’ll be gone, when I’ll be back (especially on Facebook) and I just haven’t had a time to answer everywhere properly. In short, I love Cape Town and I want to live there again. However, I’m not sure when that will be, I decided when I came over here to split my long-term future plans in 2 year periods (almost like the Ubuntu LTS releases), so I’ll be staying here in Sherbrooke for the next 2 years and decide somewhere in between what will happen next. Maybe I’ll move to Brazil then, maybe Spain, maybe back to Cape Town, we’ll see how it goes :)

So far Sherbrooke has been quite good. It’s certainly a mixed bag. It’s nice and small and quiet but it’s also very old fashioned and the food here is horrible, but I have uncapped Internet now which kind of makes up for it! The people at work though are awesome, there’s a real sense of community between a lot of people at work, we see each other a lot outside of work hours too which is quite nice, I haven’t had that much with other places I’ve worked. I also have a flatmate for the first time ever. I’ve known Stéphane for a while know since we worked together in the Ubuntu community before, and we both work for Révolution Linux so it turned out to be very convenient, so far it’s been working out great. There’s also a big bunch of other people from work living in a 2km radius around us, which is quite cool.

My New Gym Buddies

I’ve gone to gym before, but it was mostly cardio and even when I’ve done weights, I’ve done it completely wrong (or so I recently learned). Max and Simon from work signed up recently and it inspired me to do so too and go work out with them every day. It’s the first time I’ve ever had gym buddies. It helps a lot and Max is an awesome “coach” who does a good job of telling me what I do wrong and how I can improve. It’s not even been two weeks and I can already feel the results (yesterday I couldn’t even lift my arms!).

I initially thought that I’d be at least better than Simon with the weights since he’s deceptively thin, but I learned quickly that I completely suck when it comes to doing exercise properly! The great thing is that now that I can learn from their experiences I’m actually learning and improving my physical health much better and faster than before. It kind of feels dumb not always being able to keep up with them, but jumping in the deep side with this definitely helps!

French Lessons

About two weeks ago I started taking French lessons. In Québec, around 90% speak French as their first language, which means that it isn’t really optional!

Some people I’ve met there didn’t know that these classes existed and some of those people have been here for nearly two years already, so if you’re ever in Sherbrooke and need French Lessons, contact Denis Charest at 819-823-8853 for more information.

There were about 50 people there the day I signed up, we’re divided in to classes of around 6-8 people. All the other people in my class are from Columbia. Now and again when I get stuck with French I just blurt out one of the Spanish sentences I learned while in Spain and they think it’s really funny. They’ve been really nice and I already consider them my friends. Columbians are officially awesome. I think most of them did French as second language in school or something because their French is *way* better than mine. It’s kind of hard starting a class when you start being behind everyone else, but they’ve done a great job at helping me when I get stuck and it certainly helps that they have a sense of humour. It makes jumping in on the deep side just so much easier if you have a great support network, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to gain that in the short time I’ve been here!