Ubuntu Community Week!

Ubuntu Community Week has begun!

Join us in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions) today through Friday for this brand new event to help you find your community, participate in your community, create your community, energize your community, and elevate your community to new heights!

Full schedule can be found on the event page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCommunityWeek

Ubuntu Developer Week: Summary Day 5

What a fantastic Ubuntu Developer Week it was again. Lots of great sessions, lots of people, lots of good questions and lots of excitement.

I’m already looking forward to the next one and also to seeing more of all the new people who showed up this time!

Let’s go through the last sessions of Oneiric’s UDW one by one:

• Fixing bugs in compiz – As Sam Spilsbury lives in Australia, he got up very very early for this session (or stayed up very long). This seemed to have no effect on his ability to give an interesting and fun session though. Apart from his love for vegetarian food we learned also learned about Compiz, how to debug it and how to get involved and fix bugs.
• Helping develop the Ubuntu Websites – Michael Hall was up next and talked us through a selection of Ubuntu Websites that make use of Django and are maintained as a team effort. One example was the LoCo Directory which is very easy to get involved with.
• Bug Triage Class – Carlos de-Avillez and Pedro Villavicencio are quite the double act. They’re not just fun to listen to, but they also did a great job explaining how to make sense of a huge mass of bug reports, how to stay productive and how to get in touch with the team.
• Lubuntu Development – Phill Whiteside works with the Lubuntu team on bringing LXDE goodness to Ubuntu. Phill put together a quick presentation that should make it easy to understand what Lubuntu is doing, what the plans are and how to get involved.
• Project Lightning Talks – Continuing our good tradition of Project Lightning Talks we had great fun again and had quick presentations of devscripts and ubuntu-dev-tools, Melia, tomboy-pastebinit and ibid. Also the idea of reverse lightning talks was discussed, so watch this space to find out what we’re going to come up with next time.

I had a fantastic time through out the week! Thanks a lot everyone for participating, for helping out and giving your sessions! I hope you had as much fun as I did, you made some new friends and learned something new. See you next time around! 🙂

Ubuntu Developer Week: Summary Day 4 – Outlook Day 5

Ubuntu Developer Week will have its last day today. They always pass too fast, but the good thing is: we have all the sessions recorded in logs and there’ll be another UDW next cycle.

Yesterday was another fantastic day with loads of action in a set of very diverse sessions.

Let’s go through them one by one:

• From idea to app in no time with QML – Olivier Tilloy started the day with an excellent session about how to use QML. He had written a small application from scratch and by going through the revisions of the code showed how small code changes immediately and very easily result in great new functionality.
• Deploy your App to the cloud, Writing Ensemble formulas 101 – Next up was Ahmed Kamal who also picked a small but very powerful example to showcase the power of Ensemble. Just a few simple commands and you not only deploy Drupal but also keep it scalable very easily. Awesome!
• Fixing common ARM build failures – Jani Monoses had the next slot and talked about compiling code on the ARM architecture. It was nice to see that it’s sometimes only small things in the code that need to change so you make the package not only build on i386 and amd64, but also on ARM. Way to go!
• nux – visual rendering in UIs made easy – Graphics mastermind Jay Taoko talked us through nux and how it is used in Unity currently to very easily render graphics without having to dive too deep into OpenGL. It’s very elegant and a lot of fun. Jay was a lot of fun too and explained how Ubuntu worked for him having a Windows background.
• Java library packaging with maven-debian-helper – James Page took the last slot of the day gave a very informative overview over Java library packaging. It’s clear from the session that it’s not really as daunting as you might think it is. Read the log and find out how you can help James with Java packages.

We’re all a bit sad, but here’s what will happen today, the last day of this Ubuntu Developer Week

• 16:00 UTC: Fixing bugs in compiz – Sam Spilsbury will lead the first session and explain how to get involved with compiz. It’s a lot of fun and there’s something simple and easy for everybody to get started with.
• 17:00 UTC: Helping develop the Ubuntu Websites – Nigel Babu and Michael Hall are two of many folks who work on Ubuntu Websites such as loco.ubuntu.com. Over time a team grew and worked on common foundations for ubuntu.com sites which make it much easier nowadays. Find out more and get involved!
• 18:00 UTC: Bug Triage Class – Carlos de-Avillez and Pedro Villavicencio will give you a great introduction on how to work with bugs effectively. We all try to keep them under control, but these two men are not only a great team together, but also have lots of experience.
• 19:00 UTC: Lubuntu Development – Next up is Phill Whiteside who will talk us through Lubuntu, what it is and what the next steps are. It was just made official a few months ago, but it already has lots of interested users and people working on it.
• 20:00 UTC: Project Lightning Talks – You are involved in a great project and want to introduce it to the world? Talk to Nigel “nigelb” Babu about it. He’ll make sure you get 5 minutes to do just that! Awesome!

Every session is worth attending! Today will be great! 😀

Ubuntu Developer Week: Summary Day 3 – Outlook Day 4

I just added the logs of Day 3 of Ubuntu Developer Week to the schedule and was again blown away about how diverse and interesting the day was! If you couldn’t make it there, make sure you read the logs. Loads of good information that bring you up to speed on translations, the kernel, dotdee, LAVA and upstart. Here’s what happened in detail:

• Getting Translations Quicker into Launchpad: Upstream Imports Sharing
  – David Planella kicked off day 3 by giving an interesting session about translations in Ubuntu, Launchpad and how upstream fits into the picture. He explained in detail what message sharing is, what the benefits are and how to enable it for a package/project you’re interested in. To get the latest translations goodness, make sure you check out the log.
• Debugging the Kernel – John Johansen was up next and talked about the Ubuntu Kernel, how to build it, how to bisect, and the general work flow of the Ubuntu Kernel Team. What was particularly useful was not only to get a first-hand look on how it all works and which commands to run, but also to get all the links to additional information on the topic.
• dotdee – break a flat file into dynamically assembled snippets – dotdee helps you switch flat configuration files or simple scripts to a more dynamic setup, where new bits can be put into separate files in a .d/ directory. Dustin Kirkland did a good job of explaining how it works and you can best make use of it. This will hopefully give everyone more flexibility and make management of tools and services much much easier.
• Introduction to LAVA – Zygmunt Krynicki was up next and talked about the project he is currently working on: LAVA. It’s used within Linaro to organise and manage the huge efforts around QA and certification. In a world with lots of changing code and different configurations it’s important to maintain an overview, get clever reporting and understand what changed where. If you’re interested in using this for your project, go and have a chat with Zygmunt and read the log.
• Introduction to Upstart – Mark Russel took the last slot of the day and talked with great energy about Upstart. How Upstart works, how to make use of it, and talked us in great detail through a live example. Well done, Markus!

Great! Isn’t it? Here’s what’s happening today, on day 4:

• 16:00 UTC: From idea to app in no time with QML – Olivier Tilloy will start the day and talk about QML and how it’s a fantastic approach to writing cool desktop apps.
• 17:00 UTC: Deploy your App to the cloud, Writing Ensemble formulas 101 – Ahmed Kamal, your friendly cloud expert, will do no less than explain how Ensemble makes deploying services a trivial matter.
• 18:00 UTC: Fixing common ARM build failures – We are all excited about more and more ARM devices running Ubuntu. One man who makes this happen is Jani Monoses. He will use an hour to talk about how to fix common build failures on ARM, so you know how to fix them in the future.
• 19:00 UTC: nux – visual rendering in UIs made easy – Jay Taoko is one of thepeople behind nux, a library to make visual rendering in UIs a lot easier. Using OpenGL and Cairo you can have fancy graphics without the pain.
• 20:00 UTC: Java library packaging with maven-debian-helper – According to James Page Java library packaging is a whole lot easier than it used to be. It’s actually quite fun. If you’re into Java, make sure you’re there!

Ubuntu Developer Week: Summary Day 2 – Outlook Day 3

Day 2 of Ubuntu Developer Week was fantastic! If you couldn’t make it there, make sure you read the logs. Loads of good information that bring you up to speed on packaging, hacking and QA. As always: if you didn’t have the time or couldn’t make it there, we put up logs on the UDW timetable. Here’s what happened in detail:

• Getting started with merging packages from debian: Bhavani Shankar kicked off the day and chose a topic which is of interest for contributors to Ubuntu development: What do I do with changes in Ubuntu that are not immediately applicable in Debian? How do I still make sure we get code updates from Debian?
• Porting from pygtk to gobject introspection: Martin Pitt gave a great session which explained how to port code that still uses PyGTK to PyGI to make full use of GObject Introspection. Very informative if you want to help out porting old code to the newest state-of-the-art.
• Working with bugs reported by apport: Brian Murray was up next and explained how to get the most out of all the automatic information that gets added to bug reports. Bug patterns, duplicate detection, how to get package-specific data added to the bug report and much much more. Read this if you want to make more sense of the bug reports a package you’re interested is getting!
• Fixing obvious bugs in Launchpad: Deryck Hodge has helped to see many Launchpad releases to the door and knows how to avoid common pitfalls when hacking on Launchpad. If you ever had small issues in Launchpad you wanted to fix, go and read this session log to make sure you get your fix through review quickly and integrated soon.
• DEX – how cross-community collaboration works: Nathan Handler took the last session of the day and talked us through the DEX project, what its intention is and how to get involved to particularly get Debian and Ubuntu closer to each other. Patches, Debian Bug tracking system, future plans of DEX, everything included in the logs!

Do you think day 1 and 2 were great already? Let’s check out the schedule for today, day 3:

• 16:00 UTC: Getting Translations Quicker into Launchpad: Upstream Imports Sharing – Launchpad has had a new cool feature for a while now: upstream imports sharing. With this, the translations of supported upstream projects are imported into Launchpad and shared (think of it as “linked”) with the translations of Ubuntu source packages. This results in faster and regular import times of upstream translations, and makes life much easier for Ubuntu translators. David Planella will tell you all about this new feature and how it can help developers and translators.
• 17:00 UTC: Debugging the Kernel – No matter if you are trying to debug your own kernel problem or want to get involved with Kernel bug triage, it makes a lot of sense to know how to understand error messages and where to look for more information. John Johansen has worked on the Kernel for many years now and is in an excellent position to explain how to best go about debugging.
• 18:00 UTC: dotdee – break a flat file into dynamically assembled snippets – Dustin Kirkland has been working on dotdee,  a nice way to break up flat files into small snippets to make the pieces more manageable. Especially if you work with configuration bits, you might want to attend the session and learn more about it.
• 19:00 UTC: Introduction to LAVA – Zygmunt Krynicki is up next and will talk about LAVA, the tool that Linaro uses to automatically validate a range of different things. If you ever found yourself having to manage loads of different tests in a very flexible environment, this is exactly the session you should attend to learn more about it.
• 20:00 UTC: Introduction to Upstart – Mark Russel takes the last slot of the day to talk about Upstart, our event-based init system. A lot of hard work has been put into it over the last releases and Mark will tell you how it works, what’s new and how to make best use of it.

Ubuntu Developer Week: Summary Day 1 – Outlook Day 2

Yesterday was the first day of Ubuntu Developer Week and what a kick-off it was! At times we had around 300 people in there and the amount of interaction was just fantastic. As always: if you didn’t have the time or couldn’t make it there, we put up logs on the UDW timetable. Let’s go through yesterday’s sessions one by one:

• Getting Started with Ubuntu Development: It was my turn to hold the first session at UDW and luckily it was a double session. I just reviewed the log of the session and realised that I had answered 56 questions. We covered the big picture overview of Ubuntu, how it’s developed, what to pay attention to and managed to set up our development environments together. It was a bit hectic, but I had loads of fun!
• Ubuntu Desktop Q&A: When we announced this, we said there would be “Ubuntu Desktop engineers” – well, it turned out that Sébastien “seb128” Bacher single-handedly ran the session and did a great job explaining what’s planned for the Oneiric Desktop, why and how the Desktop team works.
• Packaging Mono for the greater good: Jo Shields was up next and talked us through Packaging Mono. I’m glad he took the time to talk everybody through the very basics of Debian/Ubuntu packaging first and then pointed out how packaging Mono is special. I hope a lot of people got interested and will help Jo and the Debian/Ubuntu Mono team moving forward.
• Python packaging with dh7 and dh_python{2,3}: Barry Warsaw had the last session of the day and explained what state-of-the-art Python packaging looks like. Debhelper 7 and the new dh_python makes this a lot easier and there’s still a lot to be done to bring our existing packages up to the newest standard. (Talk to Barry to find out how to help!)

Not bad for day 1, eh? Let’s see what day 2 brings:

• 16:00 UTC: Getting started with merging packages from Debian – Our first session of today will be led by Bhavani Shankar who will show you how to do merges from Debian. In case Ubuntu changes are not applicable in Debian, we have to make sure tha tour changes are integrated into updates from Debian. As a package maintainer this is  your”bread-and-butter”.
• 17:00 UTC: Porting from pygtk to gobject introspection – Martin Pitt will be up next and show how to port Python GTK applications to the new state of the art: gobject introspection. If you want to polish up old code and make it use the newest technology make sure you’re there!
• 18:00 UTC: Working with bugs reported by apport – apport is our automatic bug reporting tool which adds loads of useful information so we don’t get involved in the usual ping-pong of bug triage questions. Brian Murray has triaged thousands of bugs already and will share his secrets, so you get more productive working with bugs.
• 19:00 UTC: Fixing obvious bugs in Launchpad – Deryck Hodge has been working on Launchpad for a few years now and knows how to make sure all the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted when submitting merge proposals for Launchpad. If you ever found yourself saying “This should be fixed in Launchpad – I know it won’t be hard” this session is for you.
• 20:00 UTC: DEX – how cross-community collaboration works – Nathan Handler has been part of the Ubuntu community for years now and knows how important it is to collaborate with Debian, our primary upstream project. DEX is a new initiative that wants to bring Debian and its derivatives closer to each other. The good thing is: it’s entirely about being active and actively working on things. Be sure to check out the session and get involved!

Coming up: Ubuntu Developer Week – Day 1

Today is the start of another fantastic Ubuntu Developer Week. What this means for you? It’s an excellent opportunity to get involved in Ubuntu Development, to learn a lot and make friends.

All of the sessions are intended to give you more insight into how the Ubuntu Developer teams work, what’s going on in the development of Ubuntu 11.10 and what you can do to contribute to the efforts. All the sessions are one hour long, happen on IRC, you can ask questions and we will keep logs of the sessions, so if you can’t attend, you can still see what happened.

Joining in is quite easy. We hope to see you there. And please let your friends know about this as well! We want to see as many new people as possible. 🙂

So let’s have a quick look at the schedule and see what’s happening today:

1. 16:00 UTC: Getting Started with Ubuntu development: Daniel Holbach will kick off Day 1 and give you a quick introduction to Ubuntu development. We will talk about the bits and pieces that form Ubuntu, how they’re put together and who all is involved in this, and why. In the second part of the session we will set up a development environment and have a look at a package or two.
2. 18:00 UTC: Ubuntu Desktop Q&A: We will have members of the Desktop Team there, so whatever question you bring will be answered there. It’s a fantastic opportunity to get to know the team and find out how to help out there.
3. 19:00 UTC: Packaging Mono for the greater good: Jo Shields has done huge amounts of Mono packaging already and will take you for a ride: Mono packaging got easier and easier over the years and Jo will show you how it’s done.
4. 20:00 UTC: Python packaging with dh7 and dh_python{2,3}: Barry Warsaw has a long history of involvement in the Python world and that’s why he’s in a good position to tell you about state-of-the-art Python packaging.

As you can easily see from the lineup above: today is going to be heavy on the packaging side of Ubuntu development, which is a lot of fun and the bread and butter of Ubuntu development.

We hope to see you there later on. Join in, learn more, make friends and have fun!

Upcoming Ubuntu Classroom Events

First up we have the continuing Weekly Q&A sessions. The next one is tomorrow, Friday, July 8, 2011 at 16:30:00 UTC, with Francis Lacoste (flacoste) who will be discussing and answering questions about Launchpad.

Next week, from July 11th 2011 to July 15th 2011 16:00 – 21:00 UTC, Classroom is hosting Ubuntu Developer Week!

Ubuntu Developer Week is a series of online workshops where you can:

• learn about different packaging techniques
• find out more about different development teams
• check out the efforts of the world-wide Development Community
• participate in open Q&A sessions with Ubuntu developers
• much more…

The following week, Mon 18 July – Fri 22 July, 2011, Classroom is hosting Ubuntu Community Week!

This brand new event is designed to help you:

• Find your community,
• Participate in your community,
• Create your community,
• Energize your community, and
• Elevate your community to new heights!

All Ubuntu Classroom events take place in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions).