my blog

Thursday 15 December 2005

Ubuntu Desktop News is out!

The first issue of UDN is out! Check it out!

It contains some cool news about the latest development in the Ubuntu Desktop, about how to contribute to the Desktop Team but also about who the people in the Team are:

  • GConf should be faster than ever
  • Simplified menu for the user
  • How to install a .deb file? Double-click on it!
  • All your translations are belong to us
  • New logout dialog
  • What's new in the Dapper desktop?
  • Light on... rhythmbox
  • Interview with a desktop hero
  • Love tasks for Desktop lovers
  • Desktop Team meetings
  • Hug days
  • About the Desktop Team

Go read it now!

Tuesday 13 December 2005

GNOME & Ubuntu were in Montpellier last week-end

Note for french-speaking readers: a probably more complete version of this post is available in french.

The Journées du Libre de Montpellier were organized at the end of last week. This is the first time I went there and I must admit I think I'll go there next year ;-) It was well-organized, with really nice and helpful organizers and interesting speakers.

Fabrice and I held a booth about GNOME and Ubuntu:

I also made small demonstration sessions about GNOME and Ubuntu. As the demonstration for GNOME was aimed at companies and most people already knew GNOME, I showed Sabayon and some accessibility features. It went mostly okay, but I had some difficulties due to my computer running dapper...

In the second session, aimed at home users, I wanted to demo that all the usual things you do on a computer (surf on the web, read mails, listen to music, etc.) was easy to do with a distribution like Ubuntu, and this wasn't to hard to demp ;-). I also tried to explain the ideas that are behind Ubuntu and to show that, with the launchpad integration, Ubuntu tries to involve users in the development in some new way. People were interested in this last item: enabling users to be easily active in the development is a really strong point, and I believe this will be even more important in the future.

As you can see on the photo above, we had some GNOME & Ubuntu promotion materials. Thanks to Canonical for sending all the Ubuntu material (CDs, but also leaflets, stickers and t-shirts): this is most useful in such events. I only regret that the leaflets were in English ;-)

Tuesday 15 November 2005

Smoketesting GNOME 2.13.2

As promised yesterday, here are some instructions to smoketest GNOME 2.13.2. Right now, only one or two people are doing this before the release. We need more people so we're sure to catch any potential problem.

First, build all the modules. This takes time, but you can leave your computer alone and it will do most of it ;-)

  • go read Elijah's howto,
  • do steps 1 to 4 in Elijah's howto (I suggest you use this .jhbuildrc),
  • then, do:
jhbuild -m bootstrap build meta-bootstrap
jhbuild -m http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/teams/releng/2.13.2/gnome-2.13.2.modules build meta-gnome-desktop

If the build fails for you, please contact the release team or ask on IRC. But it shouldn't fail.

Once the build is finished, it's time to test GNOME:

  • if you don't have a test user, create one. You don't want to test this build of GNOME and lose all your settings, do you? ;-)
  • copy your .jhbuildrc in the test user home directory,
  • create a .xsession file for the test user containing:
exec /path/to/jhbuild run gnome-session

where /path/to is the path where you installed jhbuild.

You can then log in as the test user into your jhbuilt GNOME and verify that everything is working fine. If it's not, please contact the release team or ask on IRC.

Ready to go?

Update: the build fails right now, we're waiting for a libgnome release. I'll update this post once it's out.

Update: everything should be okay, now (well, in a few minutes, once the FTP is synchronized). Smoketesters are welcome :-)

Monday 14 November 2005

How to contribute to the release process (and also to GNOME)

Three weeks ago, Elijah asked me to write an entry explaining how to participate in the release process. I told him I'd do it the next day. So, here we are, three weeks later :-)

It all started with a discussion in the release team about how we could involve more people in the release process. Sometimes after the discussion, Elijah sent this mail. But I believe not enough people have seen it and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people reading the planet who wonder what can I do for GNOME?. If you're wondering this, search no further.

There are a lot of ways to contribute to GNOME, and GNOME Love is well known. Some people think it's difficult to get in, but it's not. It's really easy and you can even help with our release process. There are many areas where you can help for the release process, but three of them are the most important:

  • Writing release notes. The release notes are essential in our releases: this is the first thing people read, to know what's new in the latest GNOME. The notes need to be clear, list all the cool new features and enhancements. They need to be ready a few days before the release, in order to enable translators to translate them. Everyone can help with the release notes. It's really easy. You can do some screenshots or you can write the text. We even have a page on the wiki listing the release notes items. There are already some volunteers ready to help for the release notes, but a small team would be fantastic! If you're interested in this, please contact marketing-list.
  • Bugs and patches nagging. There are a lots of bugs in bugzilla. In fact, there are so many bugs that, sometimes, the maintainers can't look at all of them. And they forget some bugs. Big crashers. Localization/internationalization bugs. Patches. Even approved patches. Some of those bugs are easy to fix, some are showstoppers. If we want to have really good releases, we need to fix these bugs. But this implies that we need to find them and know about them. This is where the nagging game is: someone sends a list of bugs to the right mailing list and after a while, maintainers get so ashamed that they have to fix the bugs ;-) Good examples of nagging are: showstopper bugs, internationalization bugs (they have to be fixed before the string freeze), bugs with an approved but not committed patch, bugs with unreviewed patches, etc. You can easily generate some useful list of bugs with bugzilla, so it's not hard. Interested in this? Send a mail to gnome-bugsquad!
  • Testing the releases before they go out (smoketesting). Before we do the actual release, we always build the whole GNOME and test it a bit to verify there's no huge crasher. That's what we call smoketesting. It's really easy: you only need to use jhbuild for this and Elijah wrote a nice howto. So, here's the deal: before each release, the release team issues some module sets for jhbuild. Everyone can then build what will be the next GNOME release and verify it compiles fine and works. If it doesn't compile or if there's a showstopper bug, then contact the release team or the maintainer of the relevant module. It should help make our releases be more solid. And with more people smoketesting, the releases should be rock solid! I'll post a blog entry tomorrow to let everyone be able to smoketest GNOME 2.13.2.

See, there is a lot of stuff where you can help. If you want to help in some other way but don't know how, look at this page. And if after this you're still lost, don't be afraid: ask. If you don't want to send a mail to a mailing list, send a mail to someone. If you don't get an answer, try again. You know, GNOME contributors are busy people. But also nice people :-)

Do you want to contribute? I know you want.

Positive feedback

Maybe I'm too used to people saying "it's crap", or to receiving tons of bugzilla mail for the panel, but the feedback I have received for pessulus has been completely positive. It seems a lot of people are glad to see this kind of tool for GNOME. This makes me feel really good. Thanks to everyone who sent a nice message!

People made some good suggestions, translators have already started their fantastic job and Dennis Cranston submitted two HIG patches (two, because I broke the HIG after he committed the first one ;-)). Also, after some discussion with Alex, pessulus contains some glue so that Sabayon can use it (and it already does). Rock!

Oh, by the way, pessulus 0.2 is out. Check it out! There's still room for improvement, so contributions are of course welcome ;-) Feel free to send a mail if you want to help.

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by Vincent