Bash man page typo
Sorry if this isn't the place for this, wasn't sure where to send this, and this list is listed as the package maintainer for bash in Ubuntu. I verified that the upstream is correct. I found this while reading bash[1] on Ubuntu 14.04. Here's the main block: Bash attempts to determine when it is being run with its standard input connected to a a network connection, as if by the remote shell daemon, usually rshd, or the secure shell daemon sshd. If bash determines it is being run in this fashion, it reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc and ~/.bashrc, if these files exist and are readable. It will not do this if invoked as sh. The --norc option may be used to inhibit this behavior, and the --rcfile option may be used to force another file to be read, but rshd does not generally invoke the shell with those options or allow them to be specified. And the line in question: ~/.bashrc and ~/.bashrc, if these files exist and are readable. It seems like a reference to /etc/bash.bashrc was substituted with ~/.bashrc (back with 10.04?), and while the line isn't incorrect, it is a typo. Also this shows up: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/bash.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/saucy/man1/bash.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/raring/man1/bash.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/man1/bash.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/bash.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man1/bash.1.html Thank you! Evan Ostroski -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Crashes from Unity/Xorg continues with 12.10
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Thomas Novin tho...@xyz.pp.se wrote: Now I had my first crash in 12.10 and it generated a crash-file in /var/crash: -rw-r- 1 root whoopsie 5718069 okt 22 16:14 _usr_bin_Xorg.0.crash However, after logging in, I didn't get any notification that my system had crashed and question about submitting. Is update-notifier running (`ps aux | grep update-notifier | grep -v grep`)? This is the process responsible for watching for changes to the /var/crash directory. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: ext4 recovery/deleted orphans on reboot...
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 7:48 PM, Daniel J Blueman dan...@quora.org wrote: In Ubuntu 12.10 pre-release, I've frequently been observing ext4 recovery has been needed after reboot [1]. This clearly isn't expected, however could be a side-effect of eg incomplete flushing after unmount before the ACPI/cf8 reset vector is hit. So, is this thought to be a kernel issue or userspace? I'm using a 256GB Samsung 830 SSD, but was seeing this on an OCZ Vertex 3 (Sandforce) SSD also. Without more information my money would be on a kernel issue, although it may be something very low-level like upstart. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: trouble building (linking) code on Xubuntu
I'm going to take a guess that the build system is looking for
libraries in the old locations, rather than the new multiarch
locations. Try playing around with -L options to the linker (possibly
missing /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu)?
Evan
On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 8:58 AM, John Gabriele jmg3...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Not sure if this is the right place to ask about this. Please let me
know if I should be asking this elsewhere.
I'm trying to build the most recent version of
[ne](http://ne.dsi.unimi.it/) (the nice editor) on Xubuntu 12.04.
The source files seem to compile fine, but then when I get to the link
stage, I get this:
~~~
{...snip various files getting successfully compiled, ... then}
cc -lm actions.o ansi.o autocomp.o buffer.o clips.o cm.o command.o
display.o edit.o errors.o exec.o ext.o hash.o help.o input.o
inputclass.o keys.o menu.o names.o navigation.o ne.o prefs.o regex.o
request.o search.o signals.o streams.o support.o syn_hash.o
syn_regex.o syn_utf8.o syn_utils.o syntax.o term.o undo.o utf8.o -
lcurses -o ne
menu.o: In function `draw_status_bar':
menu.c:(.text+0x1416): undefined reference to `floor'
menu.c:(.text+0x15c1): undefined reference to `floor'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [ne] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/john/opt/src/ne-2.4/src'
make: *** [install] Error 2
~~~
(If it matters, this is on a 64-bit machine.)
As an aside, if I go ahead and install ne via apt-get (which gets me
the older ne version 2.3.1), I see this:
~~~
$ ldd `which ne`
linux-vdso.so.1 = (0x7fff76fff000)
libtinfo.so.5 = /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5
(0x7f29b7416000)
libm.so.6 = /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x7f29b711c000)
libc.so.6 = /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x7f29b6d5e000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x7f29b765)
~~~
Any suggestions as to what might be the problem?
Thanks,
---John
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Re: questions about current ways of work in Ubuntu release process
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Sivan Greenberg si...@omniqueue.comwrote: Hi All, Some of you might remember me, some of you won't. I used to be part of the Ubuntu community and loved every minute of it. I've been drawn to some other open source projects since then, but the apparent quality boost I'm experiencing with 12.04 has left me eager and curious about things, not to mention Mark's helped to engage this curiosity[0]. So, I'm terribly curious about: 5) Is 'Fauna' another software / cloud component? (I've never seen such a blog post with so many cryptic words for the non native English speaker ;) English borrows that from Latin: flora fauna === plants animals He was simply referring to the animal code names that Ubuntu uses. Also, I believe you missed your footnote link: [0] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1121 Sorry I can't help with any of the other more interesting questions. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Where is libgcr-3-common:i386?
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Paul Smith p...@mad-scientist.net wrote: I'm trying to run a program under Wine in my Ubuntu 12.04 64bit fresh installation. When I run it I get this error: p11-kit: couldn't load module: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pkcs11/gnome-keyring-pkcs11.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory I've discovered that the 64bit version of that file lives in gnome-keyring and so I tried to sudo apt-get install gnome-keyring:i386. I found some libraries it requires and those require other libraries, all of which do exist, until I get down to a requirement for: $ sudo apt-get install libgcr-3-common:i386 Package libgcr-3-common:i386 is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'libgcr-3-common:i386' has no installation candidate However it's odd because if I go to the Ubuntu site to look it up, that library seems to be packaged properly; for example: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/i386/libgcr-3-common Can anyone explain what the message means and how I can get a copy of that library to install? Am I missing some extra repo (I think I've turned them all on at this point)? This is bug #885492 [1]. My understanding is that this is something broken by the transition to multiarch, which will be fixed when libgcr-3-common is converted to the new multiarch format. Not 100% sure though. Evan [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-keyring/+bug/885492 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: hang in failsafe.conf on precise
On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Christoph Mathys erase...@gmail.comwrote: I just encountered some problems with very long boottimes on precise. failsafe.conf just hangs until the timeout has elapsed. The culprit seems to be that I define interfaces in /etc/network/interfaces that do not exist when I'm testing in kvm (ifup -a fails). This then seems to prevent static-network-up to be emitted. I'm not quite sure why this event is never emitted. Is static-network-up only emitted, if the job networking (exec ifup -a) runs successfully? (I've disable network-interface.conf) The static-network-up event is emitted by ifup using the /etc/network/if-up.d/upstart script, and I believe it's only emitted when all the 'auto' interfaces in /etc/network/interfaces are successfully brought up (upstart is more my area than networking). The event is necessary for boot to proceed safely, so if it doesn't happen, nothing past that point will run until the failsafe kicks in after 120 seconds (which is what you're seeing). As a workaround I think I'll just disable failsafe.conf and write my own job which immediately emits the static-network-up event. You don't have to disable failsafe.conf. As long as something emits static-network-up in a reasonable amount of time it won't cause any problems, and it's useful to have active in other cases. Writing another job that immediately emits the static-network-up event is problematic in that it may be run before any network interfaces have actually been brought up. This will cause all sorts of trouble for jobs that start expecting to find active interfaces but then can't. I believe the correct thing to do in this case is to remove the offending entries from /etc/network/interfaces, since they're apparently unnecessary in this particular environment. If there's some reason you'd rather not, try sending an email to the upstart-devel [1] mailing list. Someone there might know a better workaround. Cheers, Evan [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/upstart-devel -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: grub2 and Previous Linux versions submenu
It's not a simple switch exactly, but: Those entries are generated by the shell script /etc/grub.d/10_linux I believe your best choice at this point is to edit that file so that it doesn't create the submenu. Evan On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 5:36 AM, Christoph Mathys erase...@gmail.comwrote: Since some time grub started to hide old kernel entries. This is usually a good thing. However, on work we routinly boot older/different kernels and its tedious to always navigate into Previous Linux versions and choose the correct kernel. Is there a simple switch that disables the new-style grub menu? Christoph -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: How to install Precise without getting screwed?
On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Vernon Cole vernondc...@gmail.com wrote: -snip- For example, on my 11.04 box I have launchers for Thunar and Wireshark under gksu -- so that I can conveniently move or modify system files, and monitor my ethernet interfaces. The nicest thing about using Ubuntu for a router is the ability to use Wireshark to see what application programs on the downstream network are doing. For that, you need a gui screen with root access. Easy if you have custom launchers -- very clumsy, otherwise. -snip- I'm not up to commenting on the rest of your email, but as a brief tangent: running Wireshark as root is a bad idea and NOT recommended. Even ignoring the obvious security problems inherent in running the full application as root, Wireshark's design suffers several bugs when run as root user. It is quite possible to capture packets without full root permissions: you just have to follow the instructions in the file [1] (included in the wireshark-common package). I realize this isn't exactly discoverable - I've had a few talks with upstream already, and the process should be much more obvious in future versions. Evan [1] file:///usr/share/doc/wireshark-common/README.Debian -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: How to install Precise without getting screwed?
On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 7:52 AM, Dale Amon a...@vnl.com wrote: With the release date for the new LTS coming rapidly, I am faced with a quandary. There are things in Precise which I need; I do not like to be behind the curve for updates and such; but I just *cannot* have my desktop mucked about with. I make my living off consulting, so this is a serious monetary issue, not just a simple matter of taste. I've built up a working environment that lets me react to customer needs quickly and has everything I need for my day to day operations close at hand. I cannot afford to lose that, nor can I take an extended time to figure out what to do in an entirely new environment. Just as an example, I have about 30 terminals on my desktop. Clicking on one of them puts me directly into a server somewhere. I can have a customer on the phone, click once and be dealing with their problem almost instantly. I have skype, gringotts,pigeon and other apps which I need instant access to on my top toolbar. So the question is, how can I install Precise and *NOT* have Unity put me out of action and cost me days of work getting rid of it and getting my working environment back to normal? Sorry, but I don't think you can. Between the HUD, the Dash, and the new Alt-Tab/Alt-Grave I've found Unity to eventually be *more* efficient than the old Gnome 2 stack, but it did take a few days of figuring things out and retraining before I was comfortable with it. My advice would be to treat the upgrade as an investment - it will require some time now that isn't immediately productive, but it will make you more productive in the long run. Just my two cents, Evan P.S. For better or for worse, Unity is the future of Ubuntu (for better, IMHO). If you're not willing to spend the time to adjust your workflow to it, switch to another desktop. I hear Cinnamon aims to be comparable to the old Gnome-2. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Drop Gwibber from default install
and less feature-full than the Twitter web site. The original parent provided several verifiable examples, so I don't think anyone can agree with the problem statement, even if you might disagree with its severity. Solution One: Remove Gwibber from the default install. Solution Two: Improve Gwibber. If the Twitter website is sufficiently fast and feature-full that Gwibber can never provide sufficient advantage to outweigh it's cost in maintenance and CD space, then the correct solution is to remove it. If it is believed that it can, in future, become more useful, then the correct solution is to improve it. Obviously neither of these are going to happen for Precise, as we are well past FeatureFreeze at this point. I have CCed Ken on this, since he is one of the main Gwibber devs and is probably best equipped to answer questions on what sort of effort would be required to improve it. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Drop Gwibber from default install
On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 7:13 PM, Ken VanDine ken.vand...@ubuntu.com wrote: First thing is to remember the reasoning behind including gwibber in Ubuntu wasn't to provide a twitter client, it was for social networking integration in the desktop. Provide an easy way to share information with your friends and see what your friends are up to. This doesn't mean the gwibber client user interface providing you a stream of your friends activity, but real application integration. Like a simple way to post to all your accounts from the former MeMenu or to share user reviews in software center. Software Center is a great example of why Gwibber was included, after you write a review you can choose to share your review from right there inside the software center interface. Sure applications can implement the functionality themselves, but that would require quite a bit of effort. To use libgwibber to post, it really only takes a few lines of code. And this type of desktop integration really can't be done with the browser. That's cool, and I didn't know you could do that. If we want to go in that direction though (which I think we do), then we need to do much more to make Gwibber discoverable. Right now it's hidden either in the messaging menu (under the not-necessarily-friendly name 'broadcast') or in the dash where the user has to explicitly search for it. One possible way to do this would be to add something to ubufox that would prompt whenever a user logs in to facebook, twitter etc (with the same style prompt as the 'remember this password'). Someone sitting down in front of Ubuntu who wants to access facebook will just go to facebook in firefox and log in. If we then let them know they can use Gwibber for that and get all sorts of cool integration, I expect usage (and thus, slowly, contributions) would go way up. I would really like to see Gwibber get fixed as opposed to dropping it. Not because I am now the maintainer, but to continue with the original spirit of why it was included. If nobody cared to fix Gwibber I would have no problem spending my time working on other projects, I took on Gwibber because the previous maintainer stepped down and I had a vested interest because of Ubuntu. The real problem we have with Gwibber is lack of contributors, we only have a few regular contributors all with other responsibilities. Fortunately I get to do some work on Gwibber as part of my day job working for Canonical, which is awesome. However, most of the work I put into gwibber is in my spare time. None of the complaints I've seen from people are unsolvable, but we need to have a plan and people to work on it. To get people interested in fixing it, we need to get people interested in using it. I haven't historically used it, but only because I thought it wasn't useful - I had no idea it had all this potential for integration into other parts of the desktop. 1. More Discoverable 2. More Users 3. More Contributers 4. Profit! My proposed solution: Put together a plan of what needs to be done and do a call for volunteers to help work on it. I do think we can find some people with enough interest to do their part. This is much more constructive than just saying we need to drop it. For those that haven't tried the latest version, I really suggest getting 3.3.91 and taking that for a spin. Most of the effort we've put into it recently have been quality, so no stunning changes but more reliability. Duplicate detection and handling of the content. Scrolling and keyboard navigation has improved quite a bit, but we really need smooth scrolling. I would say that would be at the top of the todo list. I know I'm interested. I have coding experience, but I don't have a lot of spare time. Still, I'll branch the bzr repo and poke around. A to-do list (especially with some bitesize bugs for new contributors) would be awesome. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
LibreOffice file-type association with Visio Files
I was reminded of this by the recent xdot thread. The LibreOffice version in Precise can now import Visio files, so it would be a good thing to have that file association in place as well. I assume it's a one-line fix somewhere, but I have no idea where. I'm willing to do the work if someone can point me in the right direction. Bug at [1]. Thanks, Evan [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/926940 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Luminance HDR package
On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 8:21 AM, Davide Anastasia davideanasta...@users.sourceforge.net wrote: Hi All, I want to introduce myself since this is the my first message on this mailing list. I am currently the principal maintainer of Luminance HDR, an open-source project that some of you may already know with its previous name, Qtpfsgui. I took over as leader of the project in September 2010, granted by the previous principal (Giuseppe Rota). Since then, constantly fighting with the lack of time, I have tried to improve Luminance HDR, releasing a new version every 6 months or so. The current version (2.2.) is dated January 2012 (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/?p=207), but Ubuntu repositories are still stuck on Qtpfsgui 1.9.3 ( http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/qtpfsgui ). I don't know whether this mail list is the right place, but I wonder whether it is possible to push for an update of this package into the next Ubuntu LTS. Currently Ubuntu's users keep up to date using external PPA. Best regards, Davide Anastasia Hi Davide, Typically Ubuntu gets its packages from Debian, so I would ask there first. From the looks of things [1], the package is effectively unmaintained: there's been no update since 2010, and the 'Problems' section says they're looking for a new maintainer. Since someone is already building debs (I assume) for the PPA, it would probably be easiest if they could take over maintaining the official package in Debian. Then, Ubuntu will sync up with Debian and get the latest package automatically. If whoever is building the debs right now isn't an official Debian maintainer, that's fine: Debian has a mentoring/sponsorship program for just these situations [2]. Cheers, Evan [1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qtpfsgui.html [2] http://mentors.debian.net/ -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: multiarch pulling in i386 packages
Historically, ia32-libs provided *all* of those libraries in one package. Ubuntu and Debian have now transitioned to a better method where the libraries are broken up into individual multi-arch packages so that other packages only have to pull in the ones they need. Until all other packages use the new method however, there will be still some that depend on ia32-libs and expect that to provide everything they need. So the transitional version of that package depends on *all* the new multi arch packages. This is expected behavior until crossover is updated to use the new multi arch system, at which point it will depend directly in the libs it needs and ia32-libs can be removed completely. Evan Sent from my iPod On 2012-02-02, at 3:40 AM, Ritesh Raj Sarraf r...@researchut.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 On my x86_64 Ubuntu install, I have CrossOver installed. Its package description looks like: Package: ia32-crossover-pro Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: non-free/otherosfs Installed-Size: 117268 Maintainer: CrossOver Packager i...@codeweavers.com Architecture: amd64 Version: 10.2.0-1 Replaces: cxoffice, cxoffice-xandros, cxoffice2, ia32-crossover-demo-xandros (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-pro-canonical-demo (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-pro-demo (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-pro-xandros (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-standard (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-standard-canonical-demo (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-standard-demo (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-xandros (= 10.2.0-1), xandros-cxoffice-patch-1.3.1-3 Provides: cxoffice5 Depends: libc6-i386, ia32-libs | ia32-apt-get, lib32gcc1, lib32nss-mdns, lib32z1, perl5-base, perl-modules, python (= 2.4), python-gtk2, python-glade2 Conflicts: cxoffice ( 3.0), cxoffice-xandros, cxoffice2, cxoffice5, ia32-crossover-demo-xandros (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-pro-xandros (= 10.2.0-1), ia32-crossover-xandros (= 10.2.0-1), xandros-cxoffice-patch-1.3.1-3 It has a depends on ia32-libs. In Ubuntu ia32-libs now depends on ia32-libs-multiarch, which if I install, will pull in a lot of i386 arch of the packages. 14:00:13 rrs@champaran:~$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: bluez-alsa:i386 glib-networking:i386 gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3:i386 gstreamer0.10-plugins-base:i386 gstreamer0.10-plugins-good:i386 gtk2-engines:i386 gtk2-engines-murrine:i386 gtk2-engines-oxygen:i386 gtk2-engines-pixbuf:i386 ibus-gtk:i386 libaa1:i386 libaio1:i386 libao-common libao4:i386 libasn1-8-heimdal:i386 libasound2:i386 libasound2-plugins:i386 libasyncns0:i386 libatk1.0-0:i386 libaudio2:i386 libaudiofile0:i386 libavahi-client3:i386 libavahi-common-data:i386 libavahi-common3:i386 libavc1394-0:i386 libcaca0:i386 libcairo-gobject2:i386 libcairo2:i386 libcanberra-gtk-module:i386 libcanberra-gtk0:i386 libcanberra0:i386 libcap2:i386 libcapi20-3:i386 libcdparanoia0:i386 libcroco3:i386 libcups2:i386 libcupsimage2:i386 libcurl3:i386 libdatrie1:i386 libdv4:i386 libesd0:i386 libexif12:i386 libexpat1:i386 libflac8:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libgail-common:i386 libgail18:i386 libgd2-xpm:i386 libgdbm3:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libgettextpo0:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 libgnutls26:i386 libgomp1:i386 libgphoto2-2:i386 libgphoto2-port0:i386 libgssapi-krb5-2:i386 libgssapi3-heimdal:i386 libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0:i386 libgstreamer0.10-0:i386 libgtk2.0-0:i386 libhcrypto4-heimdal:i386 libheimbase1-heimdal:i386 libheimntlm0-heimdal:i386 libhx509-5-heimdal:i386 libibus-1.0-0:i386 libice6:i386 libidn11:i386 libiec61883-0:i386 libieee1284-3:i386 libjack-jackd2-0:i386 libjasper1:i386 libjpeg-turbo8:i386 libjpeg8:i386 libjson0:i386 libk5crypto3:i386 libkeyutils1:i386 libkrb5-26-heimdal:i386 libkrb5-3:i386 libkrb5support0:i386 liblcms1:i386 libldap-2.4-2:i386 libltdl7:i386 libmad0:i386 libmikmod2:i386 libmng1:i386 libmpg123-0:i386 libnspr4:i386 libnss3:i386 libodbc1:i386 libogg0:i386 liboil0.3:i386 libopenal1:i386 liborc-0.4-0:i386 libp11-kit0:i386 libpango1.0-0:i386 libpixman-1-0:i386 libpulse-mainloop-glib0:i386 libpulse0:i386 libpulsedsp:i386 libqt4-dbus:i386 libqt4-declarative:i386 libqt4-designer:i386 libqt4-network:i386 libqt4-opengl:i386 libqt4-qt3support:i386 libqt4-script:i386 libqt4-scripttools:i386 libqt4-sql:i386 libqt4-svg:i386 libqt4-test:i386 libqt4-xml:i386 libqt4-xmlpatterns:i386 libqtcore4:i386 libqtgui4:i386 libqtwebkit4 libqtwebkit4:i386 libraw1394-11:i386 libroken18-heimdal:i386 librsvg2-2:i386 librsvg2-common:i386 librtmp0:i386 libsamplerate0:i386 libsane:i386 libsasl2-2:i386 libsdl-image1.2:i386 libsdl-mixer1.2:i386 libsdl-net1.2:i386 libsdl-ttf2.0-0:i386 libsdl1.2debian:i386 libshout3:i386 libsm6:i386 libsndfile1:i386 libsoup-gnome2.4-1
Re: Should we set vim's default background colorscheme to assume dark?
On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Clint Byrum cl...@ubuntu.com wrote: This bug was filed fairly recently: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vim/+bug/871907 I tend to think that its a bit confusing why we default to a light background setting in vim, when our default terminals all are dark. I have not checked on any of the other flavors of Ubuntu, but at least on our main desktop configuration, all terminals have a dark background. This seems like a no-brainer, so I was thinking of uploading a fix before FeatureFreeze, but I wanted to open up the discussion a bit wider in case there are people who feel that this might be too radical of a change. The change would be simple.. vim defaults to a light background, so in the default vimrc for precise, we'd change it to have background=dark. I have CC'd ubuntu-server, because I'm certain there are a lot of users of non-Ubuntu desktop platforms who ssh into Ubuntu servers, and would possibly be affected by this, whether negatively or positively. +1 for the change. As someone who uses Vim on Ubuntu almost every day, I didn't even know this existed! My eyes thank you, and I can't think of a reason why this doesn't make sense as a default. Users who change the default terminal and use vim on a regular basis have the kind of savvy necessary to change this setting too. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Post-natty changes to unity [Was: Re: Ubuntu Gnome 3.4]
On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 10:41 AM, James Haigh james.r.ha...@gmail.com wrote: I was a keen Unity fan when Natty came out. However, since Oneiric, Unity is the main reason why I'm still using Natty. I find that very interesting. My personal opinion (and the general majority opinion, as far as I can tell) is that the Oneiric changes to unity were clear improvements. I'd be very grateful if you could provide some specific examples of behaviors that you preferred in Natty that were changed or removed in Oneiric. Thanks, Evan It has become a lot less usable, and a bit less elegant (Eg: Ubuntu start button thing). Some of the things that drew me to Natty have gone. It's not the first time that upgrading Ubuntu has lost features, but usually it's worth it due to other improvements. These things aren't accidental regressions, they are intentional. I think there should be some way of communicating to developers positive feedback about features (not just bugs or feature requests). Otherwise you only hear when it goes wrong. Something like I use this feature and it's good! Please don't remove it!, or at the very least, there should be an /option/ to enable the feature even if it's no longer default. I'm planning on switching to Gnome 3, but why isn't there a flavour of Ubuntu for Gnome? I want to give out CDs again, but I'm not giving out any post-Natty version of Unity. James Haigh. On 06/01/2012, Bilal Akhtar bilalakh...@ubuntu.com wrote: Hi Gianfranco, These links should help you with that : https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-p-gnome-version http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/11/precisely-what-gnome-version-will-be-in-ubuntu-12-04/ Hope this helps, Bilal Akhtar. On Jan 5, 2012 8:42 PM, Gianfranco Costamagna costamagnagianfra...@yahoo.it wrote: Sorry for the stupid question: Are you really plan to release ubuntu 12.04 without gnome 3.4 in the official repository? I mean, I can understand you prefere unity as default, but IMAO ubuntu should provide the latest gnome, like it provides the latest kernel released in the developing process. Please don't leave users to search for a ppa/build it themselves, since this is a bit usability problem, and a regression for bug 1 [1] [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1 Just my 0.02 $ Gianfranco -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Proposal to delay release of Precise Pangolin
On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) jonat...@ubuntu.com wrote: Hi Joseph On 11-10-19 12:21 AM, Joseph Toppi wrote: Because no one else seemed willing to check, compact view does remove the needless amount of margin, but also switches to a more list-like look and changes the scrolling to horizontal. I checked in Nautilus 2.32.2.1 the version that ships with 11.04 with all updates applied. What kind of QA process is there before a release, how can I help with that? The QA team can always use some more hands, there's even a dedicated QA site where you can get all the information you need: http://qa.ubuntu.com/ It seems that the Desktop testing program is of particular interest to you: http://qa.ubuntu.com/testing/desktop-testing-program/ The QA team is already doing a fantastic job from my perspective :) More to the point, they're not in desperate need of extra help (although I'm sure they wouldn't say no to it). It seems to me that we need more developers fixing bugs, not more people trying to find bugs. We're already finding more bugs than we fix. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: compilation booksim
Hi Ali, I think you've accidentally wandered onto the wrong list. The Ubuntu-Devel-Discuss list is for the discussion of the development of Ubuntu itself, not of other projects on Ubuntu. You probably want to send this to one of the mailing lists on https://nocs.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/Resources/BookSim instead. I can still take a stab at the problem though - it looks like stats.cpp is missing the line #include cstdio at the top. Hope this helps, Evan P.S. Si vous ne comprennez pas ce message, je vais essaier a le traduire en francais. Ma francais n'est pas parfait, mais j'espere que c'est suffisant. On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Bourogaa Ali bourogaa_...@yahoo.fr wrote: during the simulator installation guide booksim celon he said he type the code line svn co suivate https://booksim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/booksim but after the execution I run the make command poster: stats.cpp: In member function `virtual void Stats::Display() const': stats.cpp:133:32: error: `fopen' was not declared in this scope stats.cpp:138:45: error: `fprintf' was not declared in this scope stats.cpp:141:17: error: `fclose' was not declared in this scope make: *** [obj/stats.o] Error 1 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Chromium vs Firefox?
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 10:36 AM, John Moser john.r.mo...@gmail.com wrote: Has anyone yet brought up the potential to ship Chromium default rather than Firefox? At this point it's more advanced methinks, with the only likely complaint being that you can't add NoScript or AdBlock+. Ubuntu doesn't ship these default anyway; if you want those things, you can get Firefox yourself, as you likely already know what you're doing. For the privacy discussion, see SRWare Iron as a potential source of ideas for changes to back-merge (or options to add). I can't think of a compelling reason to switch. After a quick browse and performance test in each, Chromium and Firefox (both latest versions) seem about on par. What are you referring to when you say it's more advanced? Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Chromium vs Firefox?
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 11:00 AM, John Moser john.r.mo...@gmail.com wrote: This has not been my experience. Flash seems to crash a lot in chromium, but it doesn't take it down. I've had Chromium blow out completely once, and once I've had every single page in it turn to Sad Browser. But that was around Chromium 5. Firefox has been doing better, but it only seems to handle a Flash crash once or twice: after the first crash, if you reload a page with Flash, Flash will likely crash AGAIN very quickly and tear down the whole browser. Firefox also tends to go down if you have too much crap going on, i.e. if you load a page that runs excessive scripts or brings in too many GIF images. The whole UI will lag (Firefox 4 too), and often crash if it comes under too much load doing too many things (race conditions?). I've never seen Firefox actually free memory by closing a tab. Chromium has been a lot faster and a lot more stable for me. I use Firefox 4 at work and Chromium at home, and I'm constantly restarting Firefox after it crashes. I switched to Firefox 3 for a time, it's more stable but still crashes--a lot less than 4, but 2-3 times a week. Also, when one tab in Chromium is lagged down to the point of complete and total browser crawl, you can still switch to other tabs and use them like nothing is happening. So eh. What's unstable? I'm a fairly heavy firefox user on both ubuntu and windows, and I've never seen anywhere near that level of crashing. It could be I'm just lucky, but have you tried browsing for a while on a fresh, extension-free profile? As per the memory usage when closing a tab, that's by design. As long as you have memory to spare, it won't free the tab immediately so that it's fast to reopen via Recently Used Tabs. I'm not necessarily sure I agree with that decision, but it isn't a bug regardless. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Keyboard access to me menu in Unity? -- lacks front-to-back cycling
Even if it isn't a coding error per say, it's still a design bug. I have no idea what package to file it against though... unity? indicator-appmenu? appmenu-gtk? Can someone with a bit more knowledge of which package handles what point us in the right direction? Thanks, Evan On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Jason Todd jtodd...@hotmail.com wrote: Yes, this is exactly what I'm experiencing. Maybe a bug? From: eapa...@gmail.com Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2011 08:22:54 -0400 Subject: Re: Keyboard access to me menu in Unity? -- lacks front-to-back cycling To: jtodd...@hotmail.com; ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Did a little more testing: even stranger. If I have a truly menuless app open (like Update Manager), then F10 does focus the first indicator as you mentioned, Jason. In that case I have right-to-left wrapping, but not left-to-right wrapping. On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 8:01 AM, Evan Huus eapa...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:57 AM, Jason Todd jtodd...@hotmail.com wrote: I'm basing this on use of the Beta 2 Live CD (no install). Maybe this could be explaining the difference? Possibly. I upgraded via beta 2 though, and I've only installed one round of updates since. From: eapa...@gmail.com Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:47:58 -0400 Subject: Re: Keyboard access to me menu in Unity? -- lacks front-to-back cycling To: jtodd...@hotmail.com CC: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Jason Todd jtodd...@hotmail.com wrote: The other issue I'm facing when accessing Session-Menu is that the arrow keys don't cycle front-to-back/back-to-front when scrolling the panel indicators in Beta 2. I'm actually able to do this just fine. One tap left and I wrap around. That's odd. For example, if I have no apps open (and then no global menus present) and I press F10 the highlight appears on the first indicator menu. Another difference with my machine: If I have no apps open, the global menu for nautilus shows up (since presumably the desktop is nautilus, and it has focus). Again, odd. One of our machines seems to be behaving oddly. I'm guessing it's mine (it's an upgrade from maverick from lucid), but either way it would be nice to know the intended behavior here. Cheers, Evan If I press the left arrow key (with the intention of cycling to the Session-Menu) nothing happens. If I press the right-arrow key then I can cycle through the menus, but I have to go through each indicator menu which involves much tapping. I would be so much faster to be able to tap the right-arrow key and land directly on the session-menu. From: eapa...@gmail.com Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:03:23 -0400 Subject: Keyboard access to me menu in Unity? To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com In past versions of Ubuntu, Super-S would select the me menu so that you could access it without a mouse. In unity, this combo is used for the expo plugin, and I cannot find the combo that replaced it. I have found http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/unity-keyboard-mouse-shortcuts which is fairly comprehensive, but doesn't list a combo for this. Is this a bug I should file, or is there already a new shortcut that I'm just missing? Thanks, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Keyboard access to me menu in Unity? -- lacks front-to-back cycling
On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Jason Todd jtodd...@hotmail.com wrote: The other issue I'm facing when accessing Session-Menu is that the arrow keys don't cycle front-to-back/back-to-front when scrolling the panel indicators in Beta 2. I'm actually able to do this just fine. One tap left and I wrap around. That's odd. For example, if I have no apps open (and then no global menus present) and I press F10 the highlight appears on the first indicator menu. Another difference with my machine: If I have no apps open, the global menu for nautilus shows up (since presumably the desktop is nautilus, and it has focus). Again, odd. One of our machines seems to be behaving oddly. I'm guessing it's mine (it's an upgrade from maverick from lucid), but either way it would be nice to know the intended behavior here. Cheers, Evan If I press the left arrow key (with the intention of cycling to the Session-Menu) nothing happens. If I press the right-arrow key then I can cycle through the menus, but I have to go through each indicator menu which involves much tapping. I would be so much faster to be able to tap the right-arrow key and land directly on the session-menu. From: eapa...@gmail.com Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:03:23 -0400 Subject: Keyboard access to me menu in Unity? To: ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com In past versions of Ubuntu, Super-S would select the me menu so that you could access it without a mouse. In unity, this combo is used for the expo plugin, and I cannot find the combo that replaced it. I have found http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/unity-keyboard-mouse-shortcuts which is fairly comprehensive, but doesn't list a combo for this. Is this a bug I should file, or is there already a new shortcut that I'm just missing? Thanks, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Keyboard access to me menu in Unity?
In past versions of Ubuntu, Super-S would select the me menu so that you could access it without a mouse. In unity, this combo is used for the expo plugin, and I cannot find the combo that replaced it. I have found http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/unity-keyboard-mouse-shortcuts which is fairly comprehensive, but doesn't list a combo for this. Is this a bug I should file, or is there already a new shortcut that I'm just missing? Thanks, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: IronPython and Mono are very old. How can we get an update?
Hi Vernon, Welcome to the list. As far as I know this is the right place to raise this sort of question. Which version of mono you have probably depends on which release of Ubuntu you're using. Ubuntu 10.10 (the latest stable release of Ubuntu) has mono 2.6.7 which is the latest long-term stable release of mono according to http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html RedHat, oddly enough, has mono 2.10, which is the latest release of mono, but is not a long-term support release. The question is probably more why RedHat chose to avoid the long-term release rather than why Ubuntu doesn't have the absolute latest version. Hope this helps, Evan On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Vernon Cole vernondc...@gmail.com wrote: Hello. I am new to the list, please forgive and let me know if this is not the appropriate forum. I was very pleased when IronPython appeared on synaptic -- even though I was a bit concerned that the version was 2.6B2 about the time that 2.6 was released. No problem, given the regularity with which Ubuntu updates their packages, so I waited. A short while ago, I contributed a patch to the IronPython standard library. I received a somewhat acid comment that my patch had not been tested on Mono/Linux. True, it had not. I downloaded the current source of IronPython from github, and discovered that I cannot build, because my version of Mono is too old. In order to get a current version of Mono, my sources suggested, just switch to Redhat!!! WTF?! _Redhat_ has the latest stuff and Ubuntu is dragging in ancient history? Something is wrong here! IronPython 2.7 was released last week, with my patch and without the requested test. Other than grouching on this list, what can I do to get my favourite distro up to speed? -- Vernon Cole -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: IronPython and Mono are very old. How can we get an update?
From the Ubuntu mono page (http://mono-project.com/DistroPackages/Ubuntu): Mono is considered a core framework in Ubuntu, meaning it has many applications depending upon it (roughly 40 applications). Due to this, the chance of one of those applications breaking due to unexpected changes in their underlying framework is considered too high to risk an update. Given this, the chance of getting an SRU in for any current version is effectively zero. I think getting it into Natty is your best bet at this point. I don't really know who you would want to talk to in order to get that done, but perhaps somebody else on the list could help? I'm sorry that your experience thus far hasn't been great, hopefully Ubuntu can do better in the future. Cheers, Evan On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 7:36 PM, Vernon Cole vernondc...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, Evan, I suppose you noticed that there is not a debian package on the mono download list? Their cross reference links lead to exactly what we already have. By another strange twist of fate, there is a PPA on launchpad which allegedly has a current version of mono, but it is only built for LTS versions of Ubuntu, so to get the latest version of mono, I have to unload Maverick and install an earlier version of Ubuntu. This is starting to sound like an episode of The Twilight Zone. I am, as we speak, installing a new workstation which will have enough resources that I would be able to build mono from source, as soon as the 300MB of updates finish installing. (Doing it on my laptop, which already has two operating systems and seven versions of Python on it was too much.) That would do for testing. But then I would have to distribute my own versions of mono and IronPython as well as my actual application code, so it's not a good final answer. So, back to my original question: What can I do to help get the distro release up to the latest stable version? Should I be working on Natty? -- Vernon On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 3:23 PM, Evan Huus eapa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Vernon, Welcome to the list. As far as I know this is the right place to raise this sort of question. Which version of mono you have probably depends on which release of Ubuntu you're using. Ubuntu 10.10 (the latest stable release of Ubuntu) has mono 2.6.7 which is the latest long-term stable release of mono according to http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html RedHat, oddly enough, has mono 2.10, which is the latest release of mono, but is not a long-term support release. The question is probably more why RedHat chose to avoid the long-term release rather than why Ubuntu doesn't have the absolute latest version. Hope this helps, Evan On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Vernon Cole vernondc...@gmail.com wrote: Hello. I am new to the list, please forgive and let me know if this is not the appropriate forum. I was very pleased when IronPython appeared on synaptic -- even though I was a bit concerned that the version was 2.6B2 about the time that 2.6 was released. No problem, given the regularity with which Ubuntu updates their packages, so I waited. A short while ago, I contributed a patch to the IronPython standard library. I received a somewhat acid comment that my patch had not been tested on Mono/Linux. True, it had not. I downloaded the current source of IronPython from github, and discovered that I cannot build, because my version of Mono is too old. In order to get a current version of Mono, my sources suggested, just switch to Redhat!!! WTF?! _Redhat_ has the latest stuff and Ubuntu is dragging in ancient history? Something is wrong here! IronPython 2.7 was released last week, with my patch and without the requested test. Other than grouching on this list, what can I do to get my favourite distro up to speed? -- Vernon Cole -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Canonical fleeces the gnome foundation?
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Patrick Goetz pgo...@mail.utexas.edu wrote: I found this article to be extremely disturbing. Surely the negative PR of such a move isn't worth $1/yr in revenue? Who's making these brain-damaged decisions? http://www.networkworld.com/community/banshee-amazon-store-disabled-by-canonical-in-ubuntu I too would be interested in hearing the rationale behind this decision. Most of the article seems needlessly inflammatory, but the telling part of the article was: But ask yourself whether this would seem Kosher if Microsoft or Apple [did the same thing]. I can't think of a reason why this kind of thing should be acceptable for Canonical when it would clearly cause an uproar for Microsoft or Apple to do something similar. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Location of installed files
On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Gregor Shapiro gregor.shap...@gmail.com wrote: The Ubuntu Software manager does not tell users where to find the files that are installed using that service (neither does Synaptic). I would like to know at least where I could find an application in case I have a file that I want to open with a specific application (and can not find it in the list that opens when I right click and choose Open With Other Application). I.e. what do I write in that Custom command field... Synaptic does provide this information, it's just hidden away. Right-click on the package in Synaptic, and select Properties. The third tab in the dialogue box lists the installed files. To put in the 'custom command' field you probably want a file located in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, or /usr/sbin. Hope this helps, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Feature suggestions: optionally placing home folder into separate partition during ubuntu install
On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Daniel Gross daniel.gr...@utoronto.ca wrote: Hello Matthew, I wonder whether the definition of user data is well understood. Does it include all configuration data of installed packages? Does it include data stored in non-standard locations? What about user data stored by different applications? Do all applications behave and place their data in hidden home folders? I guess what i am getting at is that a commitment to preserve user data needs a clear and visible definition what is and what is not included, and thus reasonably preserved. There's a freedesktop standard for that: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/index.html I'm not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, since it also covers things like the location of cache files and such, but I'm sure it could be adapted (or just a subset of it taken) for this purpose. Cheers, Evan thanks, Daniel On Thu, 2010-11-04 at 16:24 +, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Daniel Gross wrote on 28/10/10 01:01: ... It would be great if a tool existed that supports moving the home folder from the boot partition to a data partition. Ideally, the tool would support creating a data partition by resizing the boot partition, as well as recommending a minimum size for the data partition based on the size of the home folder. Ideally, i think, such a setup could already be suggested during the Ubuntu installation process. Perhaps, under an advanced setup heading -- removing the need to move the home partition. The main benefit for such a setup, is that it allows reinstalling Ubuntu without loosing the users data, which would be safely sitting in a separate data partition. ... That is a common misconception. Reinstalling Ubuntu on the same partition doesn't lose the user's data either. A problem that is both real and more interesting, is working out why so many people have that misconception, and how we can correct it. - -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkzS3lEACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecoFyQCgi293WgfunRFjLNEumIqEFvZE 8fMAn29Q09tBn+onl0ni3/fgtHQp4XG+ =InlV -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Feature suggestions: optionally placing home folder into separate partition during ubuntu install
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Daniel Hollocher danielholloc...@gmail.com wrote: That is a common misconception. Reinstalling Ubuntu on the same partition doesn't lose the user's data either. A problem that is both real and more interesting, is working out why so many people have that misconception, and how we can correct it. Is this really a misconception? I thought there was a point in time that you did need to have a separate /home for what we are talking about. You needed a separate home for that until Hardy, if memory servers. So it's not an ancient feature, but it's not exactly new at this point either. Also, do you know how widespread the policy is? ie, is it Ubuntu only, debian based distros, or all of linux? I have no idea. I imagine it's part of Ubiquity, not debian-installer, which would make it Ubuntu-specific. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Feature suggestions: optionally placing home folder into separate partition during ubuntu install
On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 7:54 AM, Davyd McColl dav...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:33:30 +0200, Aur?lien Naldi aurelien.na...@gmail.com wrote: If you want to keep installed packages, you can upgrade instead of installing from scratch (if you don't skip a version or if you go from LTS to LTS, otherwise it may be painful). I'd like to just raise a paw here: the only reason I got to see the new (and very slick!) installer is because my upgrade went pear-shaped. As far as I can figure, one of the packages that was being upgraded was asking a question about replacing a conf file (or something similar) so the upgrade dialog just hung until I killed it and all the apt/dpkg processes I could find and started again manually. I'm assuming this created some bad juju on my machine because after the upgrade, I would get hard hangs after a few idle hours on the machine. A clean install doesn't exhibit the problem. Unfortunately, this kind of thing has happened to me in the past (the upgrade dialog stalling and when I manage to force things to start again in a console, I see that the first package to be upgraded is asking a question about overwriting a modified conf file). This is just the first time (9.04-9.10-10.04-10.10) where the end result was unusable. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd like to log a bug report -- I honestly don't know what package to choose as the victim though. I'm not 100% sure, but I would imagine you'd file this against update-manager-core. When a package prompts for a conf-file, the gui is supposed to bring up a nice dialog prompt as well, not hang. If it is just hanging, the bug is in the gui, not apt or any actual package-related programs. Of course the window placement for these dialogs has been kind of weird in my experience - it's possible that the dialog was raised, but minimized on some other workspace instead of where you'd expect to see it. Still a bug imho, but I'm not sure which package in that case. Metacity/Compiz? I would also add a me too to the OP. I keep my /home on another partition for all the same common reasons and it would be neat if that were offered as an easier option for newer users -- which would make re-installs when they break the system due to learning slightly less painful, for example. Again, being able to reinstall to a single-partition Ubuntu and keep your /home intact should cover the majority of use cases here. Using a separate home to maintain settings between multiple OSes is very much a power-user thing, and not recommended as it is very dangerous (eg if the version of rhythmbox in Natty upgrades your rhythmdb.xml to a new format, then booting into Maverick after will make rhythmbox unusable). I will add my own +1 to the idea of the automatic partitioner offering to reinstall/upgrade an existing Ubuntu install though. I don't know how easy this would be (or if it already exists in the new Maverick installer?) but it would make using the CD as a recovery disk much simpler for the less technically inclined. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Feature suggestions: optionally placing home folder into separate partition during ubuntu install
On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 8:01 PM, Daniel Gross daniel.gr...@utoronto.ca wrote: Hello, I have finally taken the plunge and installed the latest Ubuntu instead of Windows XP (while still running Windows xp in a VM). Congrats :) It would be great if a tool existed that supports moving the home folder from the boot partition to a data partition. Ideally, the tool would support creating a data partition by resizing the boot partition, as well as recommending a minimum size for the data partition based on the size of the home folder. Ideally, i think, such a setup could already be suggested during the Ubuntu installation process. Perhaps, under an advanced setup heading -- removing the need to move the home partition. The main benefit for such a setup, is that it allows reinstalling Ubuntu without loosing the users data, which would be safely sitting in a separate data partition. Putting it on a separate partition isn't actually necessary. Currently when Ubuntu is directed to install to a partition which previously had Ubuntu on it, it reinstalls only what is necessary, leaving things such as user settings intact. So this is effectively already done, just without the necessity for multiple partitions. Also, during (re)installation, Ubuntu could recognize the existence of a data partition that includes a home folder, and suggest configuring itself accordingly. This is an interesting idea. I'm not sure what we currently suggest when another Ubuntu is already installed, but a kind of reinstall/upgrade option would probably be useful. Again, we'd only need the one partition for it though. Taking this idea a step further, perhaps its possible to also preserve the packages that were installed, so that these remain intact in the data partition also. Perhaps a better name for the data partition could be User partition, which includes all user configured, tailored, created data. As opposed to the System partition which includes the base OS only, and that can be reinstalled at will. Technically, every part of Ubuntu (including the base OS) is considered just an installed package, so doing this wouldn't be simple. I'm also having trouble seeing the use case for this - most people (in my experience) reinstall Ubuntu as a way to clean up cruft (or apparent cruft - a fresh install often feels faster just by placebo effect). Presumably they would want such packages removed, else why would they reinstall? They're may be something I'm missing, but I can't see reinstalling while keeping current packages to be a common desire. You've raised some very interesting points, all of which merit further discussion. Enjoy your shiny new Ubuntu :) Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Where can I find more docs/help on upstart?
On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Paul Smith p...@mad-scientist.net wrote: On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 11:28 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Paul Smith wrote on 04/09/10 20:46: Esp. how it interacts with Ubuntu/Debian packaging. ... So far my Google/etc. searching for admin-level details of upstart hasn't netted me very much. ... Have you found http://upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/? Yes, thanks for that. Most pages there are specifications for future improvements. The documentation about today's implementation doesn't give any hints about how a service can be disabled, a la update-rc.d disable. All I can find is the description of the init file. I don't know if there is an 'official' way to disable a job, but the two ways I have used in the past are: 1) Rename it so that it doesn't end with .conf. Upstart only watches .conf files, so renaming it to .conf.disabled will kill it. 2) Add an unused event (like 'never') to the 'start on' field. As long as nothing emits the 'never' event, then the job will never start. 1 seems more robust in that 2 can still be started by upstart accidentally if something emits an event that it shouldn't. However, I believe 2 plays more nicely with dpkg and how it manages configuration files (upstart files are listed as debian conf files). If you're still looking for a better answer, try asking on https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/upstart-devel Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Emergent: Oracle's behavior re Java
On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 9:00 AM, John Moser john.r.mo...@gmail.com wrote: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/08/13/0255205/Oracle-Sues-Google-For-Infringing-Java-Patents Emergent news. I want to raise the question on what to do about this if it persists. We're too early to call this another SCO fight (Ko fight?), but I'm not the only person in the world with a strong distaste for Oracle's crappy products and aggressive business practices. I don't see much of a problem here, but I still want to pose the question: how would Ubuntu deal with this if it became relevant? Let's say Oracle continues to pursue just Android for its non-Sun/Oracle Java implementation patent infringements. Would the Ubuntu developers ignore this? Would they wait several months, years, or to verdict/settlement before making a decision? Would Oracle suddenly be in the clear if it backed off, or if the judge ruled against their favor? What if the decision was made to react to this? Oracle gets to court, Google starts fighting, it looks uncertain but everyone decides that Oracle is too aggressive to keep ourselves in their shadow. GCJ could be at risk, or any open source Java reimplementation. It's okay to use Java, as long as it's Oracle Java. Given these threats, the decision is thus made to sever Ubuntu from Oracle. Okay, so then what? Source directly from Go-oo and disable Java functionality in OpenOffice.org? That would be the main application of effect here; but what about the tons of open source software written in proprietary, non-open-standard Java? Apache Tomcat especially. Ejecting Java entirely will create problems; and keeping Sun Java (and ejecting open source Java implementations) would create controversy and phantom legal troubles (which could become REAL legal troubles). Even worse than that, let's look at the patents Oracle holds in relation to this case: 6,125,447 - Protection Domains To Provide Security In A Computer System 6,192,476 - Controlling Access To A Resource 5,966,702 - Method And Apparatus For Preprocessing And Packaging Class Files 7,426,720 - System And Method For Dynamic Preloading Of Classes Through Memory Space Cloning Of A Master Runtime System Process RE38,104 - Method And Apparatus For Resolving Data References In Generate Code (A reissued patent; the original number was 5,367,685) 6,910,205 - Interpreting Functions Utilizing A Hybrid Of Virtual And Native Machine Instructions 6,061,520 - Method And System for Performing Static Initialization Lots of these could apply to an implementation of the CLR, i.e. Mono. At least on the face. I haven't read the patents, I don't know how Java-specific they are; but you could write a CLR by modifying Java to interpret CIL instead of Java bytecode. Slip a .NET class library around it and you have another Mono. This behavior at the moment is completely emergent and unknown. It could become significant, or the whole issue could go away. Still, just how much hangs in the balance here? What would the impact be if this became relevant? Something to keep in mind is that this won't just affect Ubuntu. If this does become a major issue, Debian will have to deal with it, Mono (as a project/community) will have to deal with it etc. Since we effectively inherit from all of these projects who will be much more directly affected, I think our best course of action is simply to keep on eye open, and be prepared to participate in any discussions that happen upstream. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Apache2 in default Ubuntu install
On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Louis Simard louis.sim...@gmail.com wrote: At 2010-08-13 08:39 GMT, Joshua Timberman jos...@opscode.com wrote: Hello! On Aug 13, 2010, at 12:37 AM, Micah Gersten wrote: Because sensible defaults are necessary. You get your choice of Apache or something else. If you selected another httpd on install and php5 dragged in apache, that might qualify as a bug. If you selected nothing, well you get the sensible default which is Apache. Why not have the depends something like: Depends: ... apache2 | lighthttpd | nginx | otherhttpserverphpworkswith ... So that if one of the others is installed, php5 doesn't try to install apache2? -- Opscode, Inc Joshua Timberman, Technical Evangelist C: 720.334.RUBY E: jos...@opscode.com -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss Or, perhaps more future-proof, have php5-cgi Depend on a new virtual package called http-server or something, and make apache/nginx/lighttpd/... Provide http-server. However, I don't know how one would go about making the php5-cgi package install the proper library (like libapache2-mod-php5) for the specific httpd that's actually installed, upon installing php5-cgi itself... except via Suggests/Recommends + the user opting to install the proper one afterwards :) What would really be useful here would be some sort of dpkg co-depends field. So php5 co-depends on apache-mod-php with apache, it co-depends on lighttpd-php (or whatever the package is) with lighttpd, etc. Probably too complex to ever get into Debian, but an interesting idea none-the-less. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Ubuntu Stack Exchange
About two weeks ago I created a proposal for an Ubuntu Stack Exchange (http://webapps.stackexchange.com/ or http://stackoverflow.com for the unfamiliar). My hope is that this proposal will be accepted and the Ubuntu site will be helpful for those individuals whom are already familiar with the immensely popular Stack Overflow type sites, and for a new class of user (we can always use more of those, right?) for whom the forums might be a bit too cumbersome for any multitude of reasons. It also wont hurt to leverage the success and talent pool that the Stack Overflow family of sites have cultivated. I'd appreciate it if others would hit the Follow It! button on http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7716/ubuntu and up-vote 5 on-topic and 5 off-topic questions so that we may move to the next round of evaluation. Also, I'd greatly appreciate if you could help spread the word. Thanks and all the best, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Prevent people from updates with critical components
On Saturday, May 29, 2010, Joachim Langenbach joac...@falaba.de wrote: Yes, that's totally correct! And from my point of view, really many people don't read release notes This is very true. I don't know what percent of users currently read the release notes before upgrading, but I know that a very tiny percent of computer users as a whole do. (including me). This are espacially new and unfamiliar users, but also other users, who think, if they release an update, it would work on most machines and of course every user thinks, that he owns such a pc. Another point is, that unfamiliar users may don't understand the notes either (I don't know, because I don't have read them ever, not the gentoo ones, not ubuntu ones). But such a system has the advantage, that really nobody can say afterwards, hey, you didn't mentioned, that it wouldn't work after the upgrade. I think this is a great idea, and I'm sorry I didn't reply earlIer. Having a simple method to parse the release notes and check for possible known issues before proceeding with the upgrade (or even a straight install) would almost certainly save users a lot of headaches. Including this tool as part of the windows-autorun app on the CD would probably also be a good idea, if a lot more work. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Progress-bar Menu for Indicator Applet?
I was in the middle of a couple of things, and realized I needed to reorganize my workspaces because they were getting quite messy. By the end, I had an entire workspace dedicated to progress-bars: - Downloads (Firefox and Transmission) - File Moves/Copies - Software Center Installs - F-Spot Importing - Brasero CD Burning Since we already have a Messaging Menu, why not a Progess Bar Menu for indicator applet? Applications could register there and use it the same way they use the Messaging Menu. This would allow users to close or 'hide' all of the little dialogues they end up with for long-running tasks, and have everything nicely grouped in their panel. Thoughts? Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Rethinking Ubuntu's Repositories
-browser), Thunderbird and Wine spring to mind), which are under active development and could be treated similarly... Perhaps deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-desktop maverick universe ? Sincerely, Conrad Knauer This idea has been raised before in various forms. See http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com/msg02743.html I suggest you read through to the end of the thread, since a lot of good points are raised on both sides. I'm not against the idea, but there are still some obstacles to overcome. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Archive frozen for preparation of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
I'm sure everyone has a lot on their plates with Lucid coming up so quickly, but I would like to draw some attention to libpcap (the library behind wireshark and tcpdump). The version currently in Lucid has several memory leaks as well as having completely broken support for USB. There is a new upstream release which fixes all of these, and I have filed for a freeze exception at [1]. Lucid is shaping up to be a great release, let's make it even better. Cheers, Evan [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libpcap/+bug/561631 On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 4:55 AM, Steve Langasek steve.langa...@ubuntu.com wrote: We are one week out from the 10.04 LTS release candidate and two weeks from the final release, so as many of you have probably already noticed, the archive is now frozen and will not thaw again before release. During the freeze, all uploads to main must be approved by a member of the release team, so if you have fixes that are important to get in and will need discussion, please do get in touch as soon as possible. Uploads to main should at this point focus on release-critical bugs only. See the previous message for more information about this process: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2010-April/000705.html The list of release-critical bugs that we want to still try to resolve before the release candidate on April 22 is tracked here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+bugs?field.milestone=21439 Additional bugs that are still considered targets of opportunity for the release are found at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+bugs If you have bugs which you believe should be listed there but aren't yet, please get in touch with me or another member of the release team. In addition, Lucas Nussbaum has helpfully been providing a list of packages that fail to build in Lucid. Please help us to make 10.04 LTS the best release possible by pitching in to resolve these build failures: http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu_ftbfs.cgi Cheers, -- Steve Langasek On behalf of the Ubuntu release team -- ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list ubuntu-devel-annou...@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Thoughts on quitting and window controls
and the service goes on in the background. If the music is stopped and Rhythmbox's controller is closed, Rhythmbox has no reason to continue running, so the process should exit. That should have absolutely no impact on the surrounding user interface, however. The Problem: that does have a strange impact on the surrounding user interface. Particularly strange for Rhythmbox, since the indicator serves as a launcher for the controller. Unless we want that Rhythmbox indicator to be permanent, it always will create a bizarrely shape-shifting desktop within the current design. It always will with a really close button, too, because really closing the window will kill the Rhythmbox service and, therefore, the indicator applet. Consider the inconsistency at hand from a lower level: killing the Rhythmbox process kills its indicator, its controller, and the music. Killing the Empathy process kills the buddy list but maintains your accounts as they are and the message indicator. Killing Evolution does not delete your email (unless you were having a good day; it gets jealous). Good news, in my books: gnome-shell has launchers and running applications in the same place ;) That is a more profound improvement than mere cosmetics. It means things don't move unexpectedly. Personally, I want to be able to reliably head to wherever I start applications and open my Buddy List, unconcerned with whether a process called empathy was already running, and I want to do that as quickly as heading to the message indicator and opening my Buddy List from it. I want to do that because the same functionality fits for anything, not just instant messaging; from notes to music to calendars and todo lists. We can either have a specialized launcher in the top panel for every single type of desktop service, or we can have a smarter application launcher. Take care, Dylan PS: Granted, my chewing on this was in the midst of a billion things happening at once, so I realize I may be coming across as a complete lunatic. Mind-boggling: yes. Lunatic: not necessarily :) If I'm understanding you properly, the user should have no concept of services or processes. There is a single list of all applications, whether they are running with a window, running as a service, or not running at all. When the user clicks on an application which is not running, or running as a service, then the control window for that application opens on top. When all of an application's windows are closed, then the process closes (as long as no services are running). If a service is running as well, it is responsible for garbage-collecting itself when it is no longer doing anything (ie when rhythmbox is no longer playing music). When a service process exits like this, the UI shouldn't change at all - the user shouldn't even know. The only question I have right now about this model is the action which occurs when an app with a window already open is clicked on in the list. In the current windowing model, you can focus the existing window (via the task bar) or open a second window (via the menu). With the integrated application list, how do we nicely handle both of these use cases? Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Thoughts on quitting and window controls
On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 8:40 PM, Derek Broughton de...@pointerstop.ca wrote: Evan wrote: On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Dylan McCall dylanmcc...@gmail.com wrote: I chewed on this thought for a bit, and I think adding a really close button to a window would compromise what is _potentially_ a pretty well thought out bit of UI. That's not to say it is well thought out yet, but I think it could be! Conventionally, a window represents some thing the user is doing, so closing it should close that thing. A toplevel window is almost always something the user has directly triggered and is directly, purposefully interacting with, and I don't think we have anything else in the desktop that fits that role. Therefore, if the act of closing a window is affecting anything more than what that window is representing, something has gone wrong and should be fixed. For most web browsers, we're fine; the close button closes the web page associated with that window, but the application, other web pages and any current downloads (should) keep running. The rest is naturally fed by the “Just Works” philosophy; if a process is not providing anything, it should become irrelevant (probably by exiting). Firefox does this for you all the time. A lot of developers think of it as a robotic all window are closed, so exit deal, but I think it's more we are no longer serving a purpose, so exit. Applications should track what they are doing for the user to decide whether they are wasting memory. Windows are remote controls for resources. In the case of Tomboy, that's a note. (When you close a window in Tomboy, you aren't destroying the note!). For Empathy, that's an instant messaging account (Telepathy). When you close the buddy list, it doesn't log you out, but you can open the buddy list and tell it to log you out. (In this case that's technically the case, too; Telepathy, Empathy, etc. are split into a whole pile of small, detached programs that run for different purposes). Rhythmbox is a different example, but let's try to fit it under the same theory. It already mostly does. The Rhythmbox main window is for controlling what music the Rhythmbox service (represented by its indicator icon) is playing. It just happens that the Rhythmbox service is, technically, the same process as the Rhythmbox main window. Users don't care about that, though. Someone opens Rhythmbox to control the playing music (to pause it or play it), then closes it when that is done and the service goes on in the background. If the music is stopped and Rhythmbox's controller is closed, Rhythmbox has no reason to continue running, so the process should exit. That should have absolutely no impact on the surrounding user interface, however. The Problem: that does have a strange impact on the surrounding user interface. Particularly strange for Rhythmbox, since the indicator serves as a launcher for the controller. Unless we want that Rhythmbox indicator to be permanent, it always will create a bizarrely shape-shifting desktop within the current design. It always will with a really close button, too, because really closing the window will kill the Rhythmbox service and, therefore, the indicator applet. Consider the inconsistency at hand from a lower level: killing the Rhythmbox process kills its indicator, its controller, and the music. Killing the Empathy process kills the buddy list but maintains your accounts as they are and the message indicator. Killing Evolution does not delete your email (unless you were having a good day; it gets jealous). Good news, in my books: gnome-shell has launchers and running applications in the same place ;) That is a more profound improvement than mere cosmetics. It means things don't move unexpectedly. Personally, I want to be able to reliably head to wherever I start applications and open my Buddy List, unconcerned with whether a process called empathy was already running, and I want to do that as quickly as heading to the message indicator and opening my Buddy List from it. I want to do that because the same functionality fits for anything, not just instant messaging; from notes to music to calendars and todo lists. We can either have a specialized launcher in the top panel for every single type of desktop service, or we can have a smarter application launcher. PS: Granted, my chewing on this was in the midst of a billion things happening at once, so I realize I may be coming across as a complete lunatic. Mind-boggling: yes. Lunatic: not necessarily :) If I'm understanding you properly, the user should have no concept of services or processes. There is a single list of all applications, whether they are running with a window, running as a service, or not running at all. When the user clicks on an application which is not running, or running as a service, then the control window for that application opens on top. When all of an application's
Re: Thoughts on quitting and window controls
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Jonathan Blackhall johnny.one@gmail.com wrote: Why must this be different in Rhythmbox? Think about Rhythmbox as some kind of service running in the background. The window is just a user interface for that service that you can close if you don't need it, without stopping the service. Ok, I'll give you that it technically means 'close' the window. My issue still stands, however. On most applications, closing a single window is synonymous with quitting the application. My frustration comes when this doesn't happen. Closing my last Firefox window doesn't leave it running in the notification area as a service. I understand in theory why keeping Rhythmbox open and running as a service is useful. In practice, however, I should be able to fully quit any application (at least when there's only a single open window) by clicking a single button. None of this File-Quit business. (Being able to quit an application with a single button even with multiple windows open is an interesting idea.) Again, it's frustrating when a button behaves one way for some applications and not others. And it's frustrating not being able to quit an application with a single button click. The current behavior can cause a number of problems. As other users pointed out (and I have also experienced), sometimes you want to quit an application, such as Empathy or Gwibber, only later to find yourself still logged in, online, and maybe receiving messages. Another issue is with Rhythmbox. This is especially true for newer users. Let's say I just click the 'X' to quit, just like I do with Firefox or Calculator. I don't notice that the icon is still present in the Notification Area. It's not doing any particular harm there right now. However, then I shut down my computer and come back the next day. I open Rhythmbox, and it starts minimized to the Notification Area. I'm sitting there waiting patiently for it to open, but it never does. Now you could argue that this is a bug in Rhythmbox (and it has been reported), but my point is that it highlights an underlying problem of an application not quitting when the user wants it to. Just for reference, I have a problem with this bug almost daily, and I can't seem to teach myself to remember File-Quit to close certain applications but not others. For the record, the keyboard shortcuts are much less ambiguous and much more consistent... Ctrl-Q: Quit the application Alt-Space-C: Close the window Since I use my keyboard for almost everything I have never run into the problem you describe in any serious way. It does sound like a usability issue though. Just my 2 cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Booting and login - why are users not logged in automatically?
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Asif Youssuff yoa...@gmail.com wrote: Was just playing with the latest daily-live cd (testdrive is very cool!) and noticed that when installing, after entering a username and password, the Require my password to log in is selected. If the ureadahead daemon is optimized for auto-login (slightly assumes you're using auto-login; so waits about 45s after the display manager starts before it stops reprofiling from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1434502), why is this the default option? Shouldn't the fastest boot be the one that is preselected, especially if the ureadahead daemon is optimized for this use case? For security we definitely want users to enter their passwords by default. However, given this default you raise a good point that ureadahead should be optimized for this option, not for auto-login. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Booting and login - why are users not logged in automatically?
On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Timo Jyrinki timo.jyri...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/3/24 Evan eapa...@gmail.com: For security we definitely want users to enter their passwords by default. However, given this default you raise a good point that ureadahead should be optimized for this option, not for auto-login. Note though that Ubuntu Netbook defaults to auto-login Why? I'm sure there are reasons, but my initial reaction is that any computer which can easily be stolen (ie laptop/netbook) should NEVER have auto-login enabled. and netbook boot speed has been the primary goal with boot speed optimizations AFAIK (although everyone benefits of course, a lot). Granted. Evan. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Trouble with 32 bit Gtk app on 64 bit system - no or misleading error msgs
On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 3:10 AM, Christopher Chan christopher.c...@bradbury.edu.hk wrote: I don't mean to be a [citation needed] troll, but I've honestly never heard anything suggesting this before. Would you mind explaining how RPMs handle 32/64 better than DEBs? My understanding was that as long as you installed ia32-libs then you shouldn't have to do anything else; the software having problems in this thread is some sort of anomaly. It probably is not rpm being better than deb. But right now most 32-bit library packages cannot just be installed on a 64-bit installation. 32-bit packages will take over /usr/lib 'namespace' in a 64-bit installation when they should be stuffing themselves under /usr/lib32. It is as if you need to have a separate repository for 64-bit distros just so that their 32-bit library packages can be told to make their home in /usr/lib32 and not try to take over /usr/lib which really belongs to 64-bit libraries on a 64-bit installation. In fact, this is exactly how Fedora and RHEL work. They have a separate repository for 32-bit distros and for 64-bit distros. The 64-bit distros' repos have both 32-bit and 64-bit packages which are going to stick their contents in the places. The problem therefore is the way packaging is currently done and the repository architecture. That is why you have to resort to an uber ia32-libs package which is really not a solution at all but a cloth being tied around a leak of a pipe. It helps but does not completely solve the problem. That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Trouble with 32 bit Gtk app on 64 bit system - no or misleading error msgs
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 1:29 AM, Scott Beamer geek...@angrykeyboarder.comwrote: Thomas Tempelmann spake thusly: ... I've created a 32 bit application that uses Gtk 2, which launches fine on the 32 Bit Ubuntu 9.10 default installation. But when I launch the same app on the 64 bit Ubuntu version, the following things happen.. [...] The problem is that Debian (and therfore Ubuntu) is still in the 20th century when it comes to easily installing and running 32-bit software beside 64-bit software. Outiside of sticking with OS X (or Windows for that matter) your other alterntiave is to go with the more advanced RPM-based distributions where you can routinely install 32-bit packages on a 64-bit OS (examples of such operating systems include Fedora, openSUSE and Mandriva). *Someday* Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) will catch up I don't mean to be a [citation needed] troll, but I've honestly never heard anything suggesting this before. Would you mind explaining how RPMs handle 32/64 better than DEBs? My understanding was that as long as you installed ia32-libs then you shouldn't have to do anything else; the software having problems in this thread is some sort of anomaly. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Trouble with 32 bit Gtk app on 64 bit system - no or misleading error msgs
On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Thomas Tempelmann tempelm...@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 00:26, Dmitrijs Ledkovs dmitrij.led...@ubuntu.com wrote: I don't think an error is needed. Generally on Ubuntu you launch .desktop files of applications installed using Software Centre / Synaptic / apt. All of which are of correct architecture. I disagree. I think it's important to get your error reporting right, because error reporting is mostly for the cases where things are NOT normal. Like here, in my particular case. A general attitude of no error handling needed, as it's not happening usually only leads to more and more slips, and hard-to-maintain software eventually. I agree. If a case should never happen, we still need to handle the what-if-it-does. It can't be considered a high priority item, but it should be dealt with. Maybe a papercut bug? Anyway. My biggest problem now is that all I get in the Terminal is seg fault and no other hints telling me where the problem might be so that I could fix it, maybe. Any suggestions how I could debug this Assuming that ldd isn't missing anything (if that is even possible?) then I don't have any suggestions beyond printf, but I do hope you get it working. Cheers, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Package version numbers in names
On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:21 AM, Scott James Remnant sc...@ubuntu.comwrote: On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 14:55 -0500, Evan wrote: Thank you so much for clarifying, that makes more sense. Now let's throw symlinks into the mix :) Suppose libexample is at version 1.0 upstream. The previous version was version 0.5. The current package is named libexample0.5 It has a version field of 1.0 This would not be compliant with policy. The current package would be named libexample0 and have a version field of 1.0 - the symlink would be libexample.so.0 - libexample.so.0.5.x It installs libexample.so.1.0 It also installs the symlink libexample.so.0.5 - libexample.so.1.0 This would be a violation of policy. The symlink would be libexample.so.1 - libexample.so.1.0.x and if packaged, this would be libexample1 These would not conflict. Now as I see it the problem exists in one of two places: Either upstream misincremented the major version number (without changing the API/ABI), or it has been mispackaged. Neither. It's perfectly valid for a package's version number and SONAME to be out of sync. One is the upstream version of a package, the other is the library ABI/API version. The poster child example here is glibc 2.x, which has a SONAME of libc.so.6 Again, thank you so much for clarifying. I will email the maintainer of the package which prompted these questions and see what turns up. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Package version numbers in names
This question has been floating in the back of my mind for a while, and a bug I ran across recently brought it forward. What is the official policy for including version numbers in the package name? This is the way I understand it: In a normal scenario, for a library X, we would have the package libX. When a new version of the lib is released upstream, the new version gets packaged, and the version field of the package gets bumped appropriately. In certain cases where we want to have two versions available in the repos at the same time, we have libX1.0 and libX2.0, which are managed appropriately. The old libX becomes an empty transitional package which depends on the desired default (either libX1.0 or libX2.0). That is how I had originally imagined it must work, but given the way certain packages (in main) have been organized I must be missing something. I have briefly browsed the Ubuntu Policy Manual and found nothing pertinent. Could someone clarify please? Thanks, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Package version numbers in names
On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Scott James Remnant sc...@ubuntu.comwrote: On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 10:36 -0500, Evan wrote: In a normal scenario, for a library X, we would have the package libX. When a new version of the lib is released upstream, the new version gets packaged, and the version field of the package gets bumped appropriately. No, not true at all. This is the scenario for *badly maintained* libraries, which do not maintain their ABI and instead consider the upstream version canonical. Sadly glib, GTK+, etc. were examples of this in the past which is why they have 2.0 in their names :-( The *correct* way for a library, and which the vast majority follow, is that each library has its ABI versioned, and this is reflected in the library's SONAME For example, the first version of a library would be: libexample.so.0 The second version would be libexample.so.1 The third version libexample.so.2 etc. Minor versions are permitted in the library name, so if you add new API/ABI without breaking any existing, you might name it: libexample.so.2.1 this still has a SONAME of libexample.so.2 (since it is compatible) Packaging policy *always* includes the SONAME of the library in its binary package name, e.g. libexample0 libexample1 libexample2 Thus libraries with different SONAMEs are always parallel installable. For the minor version example, both would be libexample2 but different versions of it. dpkg provides the shlibs and symbols systems for identifying the minimum required version of a library at build time, and encoding this in the dependencies. Thus a package built against libexample2 that actually required symbols from 2.1 would have libexample2 (= 2.1) in its dependency list, while a package built against the earlier version (or that did not require symbols from 2.1) would have just libexample2 Both can use the same library package Thank you so much for clarifying, that makes more sense. Now let's throw symlinks into the mix :) Suppose libexample is at version 1.0 upstream. The previous version was version 0.5. The current package is named libexample0.5 It has a version field of 1.0 It installs libexample.so.1.0 It also installs the symlink libexample.so.0.5 - libexample.so.1.0 Now as I see it the problem exists in one of two places: Either upstream misincremented the major version number (without changing the API/ABI), or it has been mispackaged. Does this make sense? Thanks, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Triaging Bugs with Patches
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Brian Murray br...@ubuntu.com wrote: On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 10:42:34PM -0500, Evan wrote: I've been triaging a few bugs, and I came across a pair of bugs in libpcap which had patches [1][2]. I found and checked the wiki page on triaging bugs with patches [3], and after completing the available steps, I ran into a wall. The complete text of the section describing what to do with a bug that has a patch reads as follows: In the event that [the patch] is not a debdiff one could incorporate the patch into a debdiff for the latest release of Ubuntu or apply the patch to a bzr branch of the package and link the branch to the bug report. If an attachment is a debdiff and applies to a recent version of the package the bug report needs to be sponsored https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SponsorshipProcessto the appropriate archive. This is done by subscribing (NOT assigning) the appropriate sponsorship team to the bug. For packages in main and restricted the ubuntu-main-sponsors team should be subscribed. For packages in the universe and multiverse repositories the ubuntu-universe-sponsors team should be subscribed. You can view their queues at main-sponsors https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.subscriber=ubuntu-main-sponsors and universe-sponsors https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.subscriber=ubuntu-universe-sponsors . 1) The two attached patches are simple diffs, not debdiffs - is there a way to convert them, and could it be added to this page? This isn't exactly trivial as you would need to incorporate the patch in the package's patch system (if it has one) and update the changelog among other things. Some documentation that might help in this process, if you are interested, can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Complete. I've added a link to the patch-related portion of that page to the wiki. 2) As a triager, how is one expected to be able to apply a patch to a bzr branch, and what if the project isn't hosted on launchpad/bzr? This seems more dev-related then triager-related. Most packages are available in bzr on launchpad so you could use bzr branch lp:ubuntu/libpcap. Unfortunately, this isn't the case for libpcap though. There is also a plugin so one can use bzr patch and the link to the patch on launchpadlibrarian. I'm a little confused on this point - is it Ubuntu's goal to host all package's sources locally on bzr, even ones which have their own upstream versioning system? While I appreciate the integration, it seems a bit redundant. 3) Is there a way to tell from a bug page which repository the package is in? I eventually found it on the launchpad libpcap package page, but I couldn't find any obvious indicator on the bug page itself. This should probably be mentioned as well. When you mouse-over the package name in the bug task table you are presented with information about the latest package version and the repository it is from. I'll update the wiki page appropriately. To my mind, once a bug has an attached patch which the triager can verify as at least being potentially useful, there should be a simple button flag as patched. This flag should ping the maintainer with something like: Project X has a ticket with a patch!. The maintainer (or another dev) should then check the patch, commit it, and close the bug. The bugs with patches are already flagged this way in bug listings, the dual band-aid icon, additionally e-mail notifications now indicate when attachments flagged as patches are added to bug reports. I've updated the wiki to mention the band-aid icon, and removed the reference to the out-dated greasemonkey script (it seems launchpad does this itself now?) The sponsorship queue is a way to collate bug reports with patches across packages which is something that isn't easy to do in Launchpad. You can either view all the bugs with patches (quite a lot at the moment) or only one package's bugs with patches. I'm not a workflow expert, so there may be reasons for the way the system is currently set up, but it doesn't make sense to me. I agree that the current workflow isn't ideal but hope that I've helped clarify some of the process for you. You have. Thank you very much! Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Triaging Bugs with Patches
I've been triaging a few bugs, and I came across a pair of bugs in libpcap which had patches [1][2]. I found and checked the wiki page on triaging bugs with patches [3], and after completing the available steps, I ran into a wall. The complete text of the section describing what to do with a bug that has a patch reads as follows: In the event that [the patch] is not a debdiff one could incorporate the patch into a debdiff for the latest release of Ubuntu or apply the patch to a bzr branch of the package and link the branch to the bug report. If an attachment is a debdiff and applies to a recent version of the package the bug report needs to be sponsoredhttps://wiki.ubuntu.com/SponsorshipProcessto the appropriate archive. This is done by subscribing (NOT assigning) the appropriate sponsorship team to the bug. For packages in main and restricted the ubuntu-main-sponsors team should be subscribed. For packages in the universe and multiverse repositories the ubuntu-universe-sponsors team should be subscribed. You can view their queues at main-sponsorshttps://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.subscriber=ubuntu-main-sponsorsand universe-sponsorshttps://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.subscriber=ubuntu-universe-sponsors . 1) The two attached patches are simple diffs, not debdiffs - is there a way to convert them, and could it be added to this page? 2) As a triager, how is one expected to be able to apply a patch to a bzr branch, and what if the project isn't hosted on launchpad/bzr? This seems more dev-related then triager-related. 3) Is there a way to tell from a bug page which repository the package is in? I eventually found it on the launchpad libpcap package page, but I couldn't find any obvious indicator on the bug page itself. This should probably be mentioned as well. To my mind, once a bug has an attached patch which the triager can verify as at least being potentially useful, there should be a simple button flag as patched. This flag should ping the maintainer with something like: Project X has a ticket with a patch!. The maintainer (or another dev) should then check the patch, commit it, and close the bug. I'm not a workflow expert, so there may be reasons for the way the system is currently set up, but it doesn't make sense to me. If the general consensus is that my points on the wiki are valid, I'll take a shot at rewriting that section. Thanks, Evan [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libpcap/+bug/523340 [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libpcap/+bug/523349 [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Patches -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Question regarding A828_Installer_x64_0.28-Beta
On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 2:59 AM, David Hunter dave...@gmail.com wrote: I have the above mentioned driver installed in my system (currently running Ubuntu 10.04). I find it frustrating that every time I update the kernel, I have to re-install the driver. is there a way I can update the driver module without manually running the shell script? Contemplating writing a *.deb package for the driver. -- David Hunter In an ideal world the driver would use DKMS which is the framework designed for expressly this purpose. I don't know if it is easy/possible to write DKMS hooks for a driver without the source. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: if my disks start spinning wildly i wanna know whats causing it
For me it's mostly mlocate's updatedb I often find that if you sort by cpu-usage then the active program will float near the top even though it isn't using more than a fraction of a percent of cpu (given that most of it's activity is IO). I agree it would be nice though - maybe create a blueprint on launchpad, or upstream with gnome? Evan On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Larry D'Anna la...@elder-gods.org wrote: On 2010-02-08, Rene Veerman rene7...@gmail.com wrote: Hi.. I got a feature request for system monitor for you: Please add the ability to view disk-activity/second per program running per mountpoint. Don't forget to include system-level processes. Very occasionally my disks start spinning without me knowingly initiating it, and i would really like to be able to look up quickly which program is responsible. I bet it's tracker. That thing is grade A Evil. --larry -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Backup application in default install
I believe Deja-Dup was originally started for the purpose of becoming default. At the very least, it is simple, useful and actively developed. https://launchpad.net/deja-dup I'm not sure how stable it as at the moment, since I'm not actively using it, but I have poked around its interface a bit. 2010/1/27 Flávio Etrusco flavio.etru...@gmail.com +1. Even a manual backup utility would suffice to me ;) Is there a bug entry for this? Best regards, Flávio On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:07 PM, Caleb Marcus caleb.marcus+u-...@gmail.com caleb.marcus%2bu-...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, yes, yes. I fully agree. Currently I use an anacron job running rdiff-backup, but this is CLEARLY not right for non-techie users. I stopped using Simple Backup ages ago... it was really deficient. For one thing, its incremental backups had to be restored like so: 1) restore last full backup 2) restore next incremental 3) rinse and repeat until you're restored to the right date. On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 3:14 AM, Aaron Whitehouse li...@whitehouse.org.nz wrote: Hello all, According to: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem Backup is essential. However, no tool to backup the system is available in the default installation. By contrast, Mandrake (as it was then) included an excellent simple option built-in when I used it around five years ago: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Howto/Drakbackup I have just read through all of the Wiki pages I could find on the topic: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Home?action=fullsearchfrom=0context=180value=backup and it seems that each release brings a new spec to include a backup program by default and, each release, people write out the use-cases, set out the alternative backup programs available and argue about missing features. Then the release happens and no backup program is installed by default. Simple-backup-suite appears to be the most officially-sanctioned backup solution for the simple use-case and I understand that it was designed for Ubuntu (during the 2005 GSoC) for this purpose. Unfortunately, the project does not seem at all maintained, which makes it unlikely that bugs will be fixed or features added. The facility to restore backups is also pretty primitive (as far as I can tell), requiring the user to search through each backup file one-by-one to find the correct version(s) of a file, rather than having any master indexes. I would really like to see Canonical/Ubuntu officially support this crucial part of the desktop. There are so many choices for backup, each with subtle differences, that having a recommendation would be very valuable to all but the most skilled backup experts. Canonical/Ubuntu supporting one backup program would also no-doubt encourage further activity in that program. Finally, there could be excellent (revenue-generating?) opportunities to offer an option to backup to Ubuntu One etc. I understand and appreciate the differences between the backup programs (some using inotify and hard-links, some using diffs and archive files etc.), but I feel that it is one of those cases where it is more important to encourage the user to backup the system in any of the available ways than to keep arguing about the most technically-correct approach. Regards, Aaron -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: making a workaround web page for bugs, in LTS release, not fixed
On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:51 PM, John Moser john.r.mo...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 6:53 AM, Marco Pallotta marco.pallo...@gmail.com wrote: Often Ubuntu users (expecially new users or user that doesn't know much of Ubuntu bug fixing procedure) are disoriented by the fact that bugs, in LTS releases, aren't fixed (or they are marked as fix released if they aren't present anymore in next Ubuntu releases) if I'm still surprised that supposedly supported versions don't have bug fixes. You get these kinds of reports: - 7.10 is a great release - 8.04 is the worst crap I've ever seen, everything is broken - 8.10 is an amazing release, with all the broken crap in 8.04 fixed And you get a point in time where this becomes true: - 7.10 has mostly working software. - 8.04 has about half its software still broken - 8.10 has all those bugs from 8.04 AND 7.10 fixed, and all its software works - To get any of 2 or 3 dozen apps in 8.04 to work, you should upgrade to 8.10 - To get any of 1 or 2 apps in 7.10 to work, upgrade to 8.10 Ubuntu has had at least one release that was hailed as the biggest mistake in history, where the entire system seemed duct taped together and very basic functionality was largely broken. Python errors got spit out by things like Serpentine. Some apps crashed. The MP3 encoder crashed immediately if you fed it output from oggdec (gtkpod thus didn't function). The kernel wasn't even stable on some systems, due to a scheduler bug or something non-trivial along those lines. I think that was 8.10? When I finally upgraded, everything was still broken in the old version, and everything was working in the new version. Last I looked, everything was still broken in that version. My question is: do such versions of Ubuntu remain broken and dysfunctional until they're no longer supported? Is this proper? Or should fixes get backported to all supported releases AND LTS such that the oldest version always has the fewest problems, but also fewer features? The way I understand it, they go for consistency. Often fixing one thing can unintentionally break another, so large enterprises (which are technically who Canonical is targeting) will prefer to leave one known bug unfixed, rather than try fixing it only to find some other bug pop up which they then have to workaround separately. I imagine most home users would rather have the original bug fixed in the first place, but they're not the ones paying Canonical for support contracts. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Install Wizard 'Looks Too Complicated'
I agree with Daniel that combining all the screens goes to far, but I sort of like the concept behind Ryan's single-screen dialogue. How about something like this: Screen 1: Welcome Brief welcome message. Language - From what they chose at boot, dropdown list. Keyboard - Autodetected as it already is, dropdown list. Location/TimeZone - Autodetected, otherwise to Unknown [GMT], a button to open current map dialogue. Computer Name - textbox, default text ubuntu-desktop Screen 2: Installation Location The current partitioning screen, but simplified/hidden even more. Text like: Ubuntu will be installed beside Windows XP on this machine. How much space do you want to give to Ubuntu? A scroll box (in percent, I would think) of free space. A button that says Change which takes you to the current partitioning screen. Screen 3: Users Not sure how best to merge the import screen and the user-info screen, but I think they should both go into one screen here. Perhaps have a dialogue for create-a-user which opens by default (this allows manual entry or importing for all data). Then ask Create another user? (opens the dialogue again) or Done?. Screen 4: Confirmation Since the fourth screen doesn't really require much interaction, we could do some marketing with our three-step install or something along those lines. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Java deb package
Greetings... Is there any way to bypass the license agreement for the sun-java6-jre package making it possible to silently install the package? Thanks, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: T41 overwhelmed by compiz Normal and metacity
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:31 PM, LD 'Gus' Landis ldlan...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, Hard hang on ThinkPad T41 on Karmic Koala. Probably other older systems. The current default Change Desktop Background-Visual Effects in Karmic is Normal. On my ThinkPad T41, the Karmic version overwhelms the machine and causes a hard hang. I was able to resolve this on three separate machines, and accidentally discovered it when I had one machine that worked (two failed). I was able to get past this by immediately (after login) change the Visual Effects to None. In theory Ubuntu should detect if the hardware is capable, and enable or disable visual effects accordingly. If it fails to correctly detect this on you hardware, then this is a bug, and should be filed appropriately. Please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs So far, enabling compiz on T41 with Karmic causes hard hang. Enabling metacity causes unusably slow response (of Firefox for sure). It seems that disabling all of compiz and metacity is necessary for older machines. I'm not sure what you mean here. Compiz is the 3D window manager requiring advanced graphics cards (Normal and Extra settings). Metacity is a 2D window manager, (None setting) that should work practically anywhere. If you're running a graphical environment at all then you're likely running Metacity still, unless you manually switched to an alternative like Fluxbox or IceWM. All the best, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Broken session idling/power management in Karmic
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:39 AM, George Farris farr...@cc.mala.bc.cawrote: On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 09:36 +, Alexander H Deriziotis wrote: Is there hope for this to be fixed in karmic? I'm no developer, but I think that's very unlikely. It seems to me your best bet would be to try and avoid using the software which breaks the idle-indicators, or if that's too much hassle, just skip Karmic altogether and hope it's fixed in Lucid. Ubuntu does ship pretty bleeding edge software provided by upstream, so regressions are to be expected. It's only a 6 month wait after all. According to this logic nothing will ever get smoothed out and quite frankly we're all getting a little tired of that. What they should do is publicly mark this distro: We have just released Karmic, due to the many upstream technology changes such as HAL depreciation, inclusion of Empathy, etc, etc, please consider this a bleeding edge distro not meant for regular distribution. Business and regular users may want to consider sticking with an older release or waiting for 10.04 I've been using Ubuntu since Warty and I understand the logic in the Linux community of HAL isn't doing what we want, we're ripping it out and replacing it. I think that is a great thing, something we have over the other OS's, but don't paint Karmic as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Take 9.10 and tune it until it just works and then have a marketing frenzy. Trust me, working at the University and also running the Linux users group in the area, it would be much better to point at the release and say, see this is marked as a development version, you can expect fairly basic things not to work. People are happy with that, the press is happy with that, business is happy with that. What I would hate to see is, wonderful press release about Karmic, blathering on about all the goodness, only to have people rip it apart due to some fairly visible bugs. Lets just be up front about it and not drop any nasty surprises on people. I 100% agree. I like the concept of a six-month release cycle, but if it means shipping with bugs of this visibility and magnitude then there is something wrong. If we are going to ship with bugs like this, then we cannot in all honesty call it a stable release. Maybe calling the 6-month releases 'major development milestones' would be more appropriate, and leave the 'stable release' moniker for LTS releases only. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Broken session idling/power management in Karmic
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Peteris Krisjanis pec...@gmail.comwrote: Problem is quite simple - we don't have enough manpower to do QA. If we don't have the manpower right now then perhaps we should consider extending the beta or release candidate stage by a week in order to give the manpower we have enough time to solve the most significant problems? Yes, user testing matters, but having a a) spec with basic features defined Is their not already a page for this somewhere? I seem to remember seeing something like this on the wiki, but I can't find it anymore. If not, someone (with Canonical's blessing?) should create a brief list of basic features which must be working in 80% of cases before a release can be made. and b) small, but mobile team who can access to some ten of PCs and laptops with various configurations would be a next step. Cheers, Peter. 2009/10/28 Evan eapa...@gmail.com: On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 11:39 AM, George Farris farr...@cc.mala.bc.ca wrote: On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 09:36 +, Alexander H Deriziotis wrote: Is there hope for this to be fixed in karmic? I'm no developer, but I think that's very unlikely. It seems to me your best bet would be to try and avoid using the software which breaks the idle-indicators, or if that's too much hassle, just skip Karmic altogether and hope it's fixed in Lucid. Ubuntu does ship pretty bleeding edge software provided by upstream, so regressions are to be expected. It's only a 6 month wait after all. According to this logic nothing will ever get smoothed out and quite frankly we're all getting a little tired of that. What they should do is publicly mark this distro: We have just released Karmic, due to the many upstream technology changes such as HAL depreciation, inclusion of Empathy, etc, etc, please consider this a bleeding edge distro not meant for regular distribution. Business and regular users may want to consider sticking with an older release or waiting for 10.04 I've been using Ubuntu since Warty and I understand the logic in the Linux community of HAL isn't doing what we want, we're ripping it out and replacing it. I think that is a great thing, something we have over the other OS's, but don't paint Karmic as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Take 9.10 and tune it until it just works and then have a marketing frenzy. Trust me, working at the University and also running the Linux users group in the area, it would be much better to point at the release and say, see this is marked as a development version, you can expect fairly basic things not to work. People are happy with that, the press is happy with that, business is happy with that. What I would hate to see is, wonderful press release about Karmic, blathering on about all the goodness, only to have people rip it apart due to some fairly visible bugs. Lets just be up front about it and not drop any nasty surprises on people. I 100% agree. I like the concept of a six-month release cycle, but if it means shipping with bugs of this visibility and magnitude then there is something wrong. If we are going to ship with bugs like this, then we cannot in all honesty call it a stable release. Maybe calling the 6-month releases 'major development milestones' would be more appropriate, and leave the 'stable release' moniker for LTS releases only. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss -- mortigi tempo Pēteris Krišjānis -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: OpenOffice update
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Tim Gelvin timgel...@gmail.com wrote: When can we expect to see an update to OpenOffice? Depends on which version of Ubuntu you're talking about. Jaunty (9.04) is already released, so the version is unlikely to change unless a security vulnerability is found. Guidelines at [1]. Karmic (9.10) is very very close to release, and is now under final freeze. Guidelines at [2]. Lucid (10.04) will see an update as soon as syncing from upstream (Debian Unstable [3]) starts again. This will be fairly soon after Karmic is released. Hope this answers your question, Evan [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FinalFreeze [3] http://www.debian.org/releases/unstable/ -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Huge instability and insanely large memory footprint in 9.04
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Evan eapa...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 7:40 AM, Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt wrote: On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 04:46:21AM -0700, J. Lennard wrote: First I'm sorry to write what may appear as a rant, but I hope it is not considered so. I'm writing to express huge instability problems in Ubuntu 9.04. I migrated from ubuntu 8.04 (386) to ubuntu 9.04 (amd64) using a simple clean install. ... I don't really know where to start. During past month, my machine constantly went to trashing mode where the hard-disk light is constantly on and I can't access anything or even swtich to linux console for several *minutes*. This has occured more than four times although all I usually run is a pdf viewer, an mp3 player, emacs, and firefox with simple html pages (not even gmail, flash, etc). Do you have any swap space? I've got an Asus EeePC 900 with 1 GB of RAM. Twice now I've experienced the same thing: constant disk I/O, huge latencies for any desktop task (switching windows, launching terminals). I suspect a bug in the Linux VM subsystem, since *I was not running out of memory*. Usually about 40-50% of my RAM is in disk cache---I keep track of memory usage via a GNOME panel applet. On those occasions cache size was shrinking, completely free memory was increasing, all application pages were being constantly swapped out and back in causing constant disk I/O (which is painful on an SSD). The fix was to create a temporary swap file in /tmp: sudo -s dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swapfile bs=1M count=1024 mkswap /tmp/swapfile swapon /tmp/swapfile Instantly the system became responsible again, after using ~400 *kilobytes* of swap. I can only assume that having 0 swap space confused the VM somehow and kicked it into a full-on panic let's free all the ram we can mode. This swap file disappears after a reboot, and so far the problem hasn't recurred, so I didn't bother setting up a permanent swap partition (I'm afraid to destroy my SSD too quickly with constant writes---this already happened once thanks to ext3's journal). I have had this occur several times to me on a quad-core with 3GB ram (and 6GB swap), but only ever when resuming. If I suspend with all free memory used by cache (according to the Gnome panel applet), then occasionally on resume it spends ~5minutes unresponsive with massive disk IO before coming up. When it does come back everything is fine, except that all of that space which was cache is now completely empty. I set my vm.swappiness value to 0 (because I so rarely need it), so while I'm definitely not running out of swap space, I can see how swappiness=0 might cause the same sort of effect. I haven't found anything odd in the logs so I never filed a bug, but if it's happening to other people in other situations this bears investigating. I will open a bug on this as soon as I have time. This bug finally reoccurred, and I caught something in the log files this time. The bug is at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pm-utils/+bug/438889 Mine appears to be in pm-utils, so I doubt it's the same as yours Marius, but it may be a more fundamental problem with the kernel's memory management. It's worth taking a look at in any case. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Huge instability and insanely large memory footprint in 9.04
On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 7:40 AM, Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt wrote: On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 04:46:21AM -0700, J. Lennard wrote: First I'm sorry to write what may appear as a rant, but I hope it is not considered so. I'm writing to express huge instability problems in Ubuntu 9.04. I migrated from ubuntu 8.04 (386) to ubuntu 9.04 (amd64) using a simple clean install. ... I don't really know where to start. During past month, my machine constantly went to trashing mode where the hard-disk light is constantly on and I can't access anything or even swtich to linux console for several *minutes*. This has occured more than four times although all I usually run is a pdf viewer, an mp3 player, emacs, and firefox with simple html pages (not even gmail, flash, etc). Do you have any swap space? I've got an Asus EeePC 900 with 1 GB of RAM. Twice now I've experienced the same thing: constant disk I/O, huge latencies for any desktop task (switching windows, launching terminals). I suspect a bug in the Linux VM subsystem, since *I was not running out of memory*. Usually about 40-50% of my RAM is in disk cache---I keep track of memory usage via a GNOME panel applet. On those occasions cache size was shrinking, completely free memory was increasing, all application pages were being constantly swapped out and back in causing constant disk I/O (which is painful on an SSD). The fix was to create a temporary swap file in /tmp: sudo -s dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swapfile bs=1M count=1024 mkswap /tmp/swapfile swapon /tmp/swapfile Instantly the system became responsible again, after using ~400 *kilobytes* of swap. I can only assume that having 0 swap space confused the VM somehow and kicked it into a full-on panic let's free all the ram we can mode. This swap file disappears after a reboot, and so far the problem hasn't recurred, so I didn't bother setting up a permanent swap partition (I'm afraid to destroy my SSD too quickly with constant writes---this already happened once thanks to ext3's journal). I have had this occur several times to me on a quad-core with 3GB ram (and 6GB swap), but only ever when resuming. If I suspend with all free memory used by cache (according to the Gnome panel applet), then occasionally on resume it spends ~5minutes unresponsive with massive disk IO before coming up. When it does come back everything is fine, except that all of that space which was cache is now completely empty. I set my vm.swappiness value to 0 (because I so rarely need it), so while I'm definitely not running out of swap space, I can see how swappiness=0 might cause the same sort of effect. I haven't found anything odd in the logs so I never filed a bug, but if it's happening to other people in other situations this bears investigating. I will open a bug on this as soon as I have time. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Huge instability and insanely large memory footprint in 9.04
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 7:46 AM, J. Lennard lennar...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi list, First I'm sorry to write what may appear as a rant, but I hope it is not considered so. I'm writing to express huge instability problems in Ubuntu 9.04. I migrated from ubuntu 8.04 (386) to ubuntu 9.04 (amd64) using a simple clean install. It's not a rant as long as you detail your problems and don't yell Ubuntu Sucks every sentence just because :) First, I'd like to mention that I have *zero* proprietary drivers (nvidia blobs, etc) or extensions (flash) installed. Good to know. I don't really know where to start. During past month, my machine constantly went to trashing mode where the hard-disk light is constantly on and I can't access anything or even swtich to linux console for several *minutes*. This has occured more than four times although all I usually run is a pdf viewer, an mp3 player, emacs, and firefox with simple html pages (not even gmail, flash, etc). It sounds like you've run out of ram and started swapping, but with only those apps open there's no way you should be using 1 GB of memory. I can't really understand how this can happen. Several times, and after a day or two of use, firefox, with *one* simple html tab open took 340+ MBs; that's insane. Evince took 120MB while only a single pdf file was open. Even Xorg was taking RAM around a hundread megabyte.[1] Firefox has some memory issues, however I believe they were actually worse in the 2.0 version that shipped with Ubuntu 8.04. The good news is that 9.10 will ship with Firefox 3.5, which has resolved 99% of these issues. Ram usage for X really depends on the driver. On my system, X takes ~120MB on boot, but never grows significantly beyond that (proprietary ATI driver). Without the proprietary driver it starts much lower, but climbs slowly over time. The intel drivers in 9.04 are known to be generally terrible for various reasons (also fixed in 9.10), so if you have an intel card then that's the likely culprit. I can't speak for evince. The second problem is that the GUI is *really* slow, and I use *zero* visual effects. Switching between workspaces is very sluggish where I see parts of firefox in my audacious window for about half a second while switching between workspaces. Switching between applications (alt+tab) is not smooth at all. Again, if you have an intel card, I'd be tempted to blame it on the graphics drivers. I wasn't closely following that part of the 9.04 cycle, so I can't speak for why we ended up shipping a somewhat broken driver in a supposedly stable release, but if someone with a bit more knowledge of what happened wants to step in and explain, please do. The third thing, which is disastrous and never occurred to me before using Ubuntu (and I've been using Ubuntu since Ubuntu 5) was constant and *systematic* audio skipping while doing *any* task. Heck, I swear simple switching between workspaces sometimes lead to several audio skipping. That's weird. Pulseaudio has been around since 8.04, so this is definitely a regression. I guess all you can do is file a bug (include your audio card model) and hope it's fixed for Karmic. I'm sorry, this is my worst Linux experience ever, but thankfully Ubuntu 8.04 works beautifully here that I'm thankful after all. It's really sad my favourite OS reached this level of instability and bloat, but hey, I at least have 8.04 till 2011, which I couldn't ask for more. This is not a typical experience: 9.04 is the first Ubuntu release *ever *which I am staying with for more than one cycle, simply because it has been so stable for me :) I would say you simply had really bad luck with your combination of hardware. It doesn't excuse the fact that regressions shouldn't happen, but please don't assume that the distro as a whole has reached that level of instability. I hope you have better luck with 9.10 or 10.04. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: ubuntu ubiquity
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Thiago Braga Santanathiago.braga.sant...@gmail.com wrote: I need to know how to pass a pressed.cfg file as an argument for program ubiquity. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbiquityAutomation should help you get started with that. When I'm trying to install, it stops at step 7 without displaying any error. The preseed.cfg file is attached. You do not have a partition recipe set. Please note for future reference that attaching /var/log/syslog, /var/log/installer/debug (if present), and /var/log/partman, in addition to the preseed file, will help us debug any further problems you have. Also, in an email sent directly to me, you asked if it was possible to configure networking via ubiquity. It it not possible at present. You'll need to do an install via the alternate CD for that. Hope that helps, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: get some cursor and themes off
2009/7/17 solaris manzur sl.sola...@gmail.com: canonical should improve some cursors in ubuntu or get them off, the idea is to have a masterpiece linux distribution in all aspects Could you elaborate on your idea, solaris? Are you speaking of mouse cursors or something else? -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 5:46 AM, Andrew Sayers andrew-ubuntu-de...@pileofstuff.org wrote: I think the model we're heading towards with the signpost is that the wiki page contains questions that have been asked before, while IRC and the wiki discussion page are for new questions. Makes sense to me. Add the forums to the new questions section. If it works, I think #ubuntu might want to look at the signpost model. Being able to click I have a problem with my hardware - video card - NVidia card - unsupported NVidia card would satisfy a bunch of users without needing direct support, and would make it easier to direct people towards the level 2 tech support channels. Done right, a signpost-like model could also ensure that level 2 support requests are well formulated. Leaf nodes for unknown problems might look like this: BEGIN WIKITEXT === Modern NVidia card with no known issues === Your problem is not covered by this guide. Go to #ubuntu-video and say I have a problem with my modern NVidia card (TYPE). This card has no known issues. My problem is: PROBLEM. Make sure to replace TYPE and PROBLEM with the type of card you have and the problem you're having with it. END WIKITEXT This gave me an idea for a small application (probably PyGTK) that could be included in Ubuntu under SystemHelp somewhere. It would collect all the various help docs currently available in SystemHelp, as well as all the wiki pages that are applicable (/Support/release/... or whatever structure is decided on) and provide a signpost menu based on those. Additionally, if the user gets to the bottom of the signpost and their problem isn't solved or they have additional questions, there could be an option Get live help. This would collect useful information first, and then run a script which automagically launches an irc client with everything set up, and into the right level 2 channel. As example, if user Bob is having trouble with no sound, he goes to this application. He gets shown a page (scraped from the wiki) on checking volume levels, and other common problems. He then clicks on the My problem isn't solved, get live help button. It would use apport-collect and stick a folder on the Desktop with useful information, then connect him to irc on the #ubuntu-sound channel. This way the signpost can be automated, the user doesn't have to understand IRC beyond type message and hit enter, and the user already has a collection of useful information available for the helper to peruse. About people asking already-answered questions - As I half-suggested in another post, I think the second-order problem here is that many approaches make it easier to post than to search. I would recommend forums drowning in deja vu to try putting roadblocks between the user and the send message button. Preferably, these roadblocks should be in the form of search buttons :) Agreed. The easiest way to get help should be to DIY. Preferably we would make DIY easier, rather than making live help harder. I also think there's a third-order problem here: developers don't have to-the-eyeball strategies for delivering their content. Expecting users to trawl through old posts seems intuitively reasonable, but the evidence is that it doesn't work that way. Here's a nice demonstration that convinced me of the need for software to deliver information right into the user's eyeball. It doesn't work unless you actually do it, so please have a go - I promise it's not a trick. BEGIN DEMONSTRATION For this demonstration, you'll need a thumb and a digital watch. Hold your thumb at arm's length and stare at your thumbnail for a moment. Then place your watch over your thumb, such that the seconds counter is over your thumbnail. With your thumb still at arm's length, stare at your thumbnail and count the seconds going by. You should be able to count the seconds easily. Now place your watch to the left of your thumb, such that the seconds counter is jammed against the side of your thumbnail. With your thumb at arm's length, stare at your thumb and try to count the seconds go by. You might be able to detect when there's a change, but will be completely unable to read the numbers. 90% of the rod and cone cells in your entire eye are pointed at an area about the size of your thumbnail. So information just one thumbwidth away from the point you're focussing on is almost impossible to take in. END DEMONSTRATION To solve the third-order problem, I recommend putting the above demonstration in front of developers' eyeballs :) Trawling through old posts is problematic simply because there are so many which are irrelevant or unsolved. It's really annoying to search the forum for a problem, see that the third or fourth hit is *exactly* what's happening to you, and then find out that nobody ever answered the post. Ideally there would be a way to convert a forum post marked as [SOVLED] into a wiki article. In a
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Charlie Kravetz c...@teamcharliesangels.com wrote: On Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:14:53 -0400 Evan eapa...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 5:46 AM, Andrew Sayers andrew-ubuntu-de...@pileofstuff.org wrote: I think the model we're heading towards with the signpost is that the wiki page contains questions that have been asked before, while IRC and the wiki discussion page are for new questions. Makes sense to me. Add the forums to the new questions section. If it works, I think #ubuntu might want to look at the signpost model. Being able to click I have a problem with my hardware - video card - NVidia card - unsupported NVidia card would satisfy a bunch of users without needing direct support, and would make it easier to direct people towards the level 2 tech support channels. Done right, a signpost-like model could also ensure that level 2 support requests are well formulated. Leaf nodes for unknown problems might look like this: BEGIN WIKITEXT === Modern NVidia card with no known issues === Your problem is not covered by this guide. Go to #ubuntu-video and say I have a problem with my modern NVidia card (TYPE). This card has no known issues. My problem is: PROBLEM. Make sure to replace TYPE and PROBLEM with the type of card you have and the problem you're having with it. END WIKITEXT This gave me an idea for a small application (probably PyGTK) that could be included in Ubuntu under SystemHelp somewhere. It would collect all the various help docs currently available in SystemHelp, as well as all the wiki pages that are applicable (/Support/release/... or whatever structure is decided on) and provide a signpost menu based on those. Additionally, if the user gets to the bottom of the signpost and their problem isn't solved or they have additional questions, there could be an option Get live help. This would collect useful information first, and then run a script which automagically launches an irc client with everything set up, and into the right level 2 channel. As example, if user Bob is having trouble with no sound, he goes to this application. He gets shown a page (scraped from the wiki) on checking volume levels, and other common problems. He then clicks on the My problem isn't solved, get live help button. It would use apport-collect and stick a folder on the Desktop with useful information, then connect him to irc on the #ubuntu-sound channel. This way the signpost can be automated, the user doesn't have to understand IRC beyond type message and hit enter, and the user already has a collection of useful information available for the helper to peruse. The only issue I can find with this approach is that many new users are coming from windows. Have you tried using windows help? It does use an approach similar to this, and I would be afraid that many of those users will dismiss this as soon as it starts. Everytime I have attempted to use the help in windows, the Q A ends with frustration on my part when it says basically can't figure out what is wrong. If those new users can be convinced this will not be the results every time in Ubuntu, this could be an excellent help system. You have a point. Hopefully the addition of a Get Live Help button will mitigate the problem though. Even if the automated help doesn't give any useful suggestions, it should be able to reliably determine where it ought to put you in IRC. How bad would it be for it to say Sorry, the automated system couldn't solve your problem. Please wait while I connect you to a human who should be able fix it. ? -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:28 PM, C de-Avillez hgg...@ubuntu.com wrote: On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 12:47 -0400, Evan wrote: The only issue I can find with this approach is that many new users are coming from windows. Have you tried using windows help? It does use an approach similar to this, and I would be afraid that many of those users will dismiss this as soon as it starts. Everytime I have attempted to use the help in windows, the Q A ends with frustration on my part when it says basically can't figure out what is wrong. If those new users can be convinced this will not be the results every time in Ubuntu, this could be an excellent help system. You have a point. Hopefully the addition of a Get Live Help button will mitigate the problem though. Even if the automated help doesn't give any useful suggestions, it should be able to reliably determine where it ought to put you in IRC. How bad would it be for it to say Sorry, the automated system couldn't solve your problem. Please wait while I connect you to a human who should be able fix it. ? I can see something like this working -- as long as the requester gets paired with one single person, in a PVT IRC session (or something similar). If we just drop the requester into, say, the #ubuntu channel, then we will not have accomplished anything. I was thinking somewhere in between. Dumping them into a generic channel is definitely wrong, but I don't think doing individual pairing is necessary either. As long as they're going to a channel a few levels down (#ubuntu-graphics-ati for example) then there should only be a few people looking for help and a few people helping at any time. Additionally, is it possible to check the 'population' of an IRC channel? If so then the program could do a check, and if no-one was there it could say: Sorry, the automated system couldn't solve your problem. Additionally, there is no-one available for live help on your topic at this time. I have posted a message to the Ubuntu support forums containing the necessary information to help solve your problem, and you will be notified via email when a response is posted. An overview of the program flow would look something like: 1. Asks a few questions, similar to [1] to determine the area and type of problem. 2. Scrape the related wiki pages (as well as prepackaged help docs) with suggestions and related problems, and display them to the user in a nice and friendly way (eg Your problem may be [this]: try [this] to find out. If [this] is your problem, do [this] to solve it.) 3. If none of the wiki helps work, the user clicks My problem isn't solved. Click here to get help from a real human being. 4. Run apport-collect into a nicely labeled package on the desktop, and notify the user that Some useful information for diagnosing and solving your problem has been collected into file X on your desktop. Please keep this file handy while working on the problem. 5. Checks the proper IRC channel. If there is someone there, open an IRC client into that channel. If there isn't, go to 6. 6. Automatically post problem to proper forum, and attach apport-collect package. Alert the user: There is no-one available right now for live help on your topic. Your problem has been posted to [give link]. You should get a reply within two days. You will be notified by email when a response is posted. Again, as commented on this thread some times already, we at least need some basic requirements as far as *documnetation* is concerned: (a) comb through the forums, bugs, answer.launchpad, and others for issues worth being cataloged; (b) organise them in a more user-friendly search structure (subject matter, keywords, version, level of expertise required, etc, etc). (c) re-word and clean up (including adding a reference to the original source). I've done a little looking, and we probably don't want to be using the wiki for this at all. If I understand the descriptions correctly, we should really be working on reorganizing and cleaning up [2]. Perhaps once [1] is a little more complete, it could become the homepage for [2]. [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Signpost [2] https://help.ubuntu.com/community -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Onno Benschop o...@itmaze.com.au wrote: On 03/07/09 11:44, Andrew Sayers wrote: when someone comes to you with a problem, first fix the presenting problem, then fix the second-order problem that caused it, then the third-order problem, and so on back to the original source. Although this significantly increases the amount of work per issue, it's more than offset by the reduction in the number of issues. This approach speaks to me in many ways. As the manager of an IT help-desk for 5000 seats in the mid-90's I instigated a regimen where user problems were fixed by users. The way that worked is that the IT professionals were discouraged to just click and fix a problem, they had to explain to the user what caused the issue, how they got themselves into the problem, and how to dig themselves out. This met with lots of opposition. * Users were upset that phone calls took longer than click and fix. * Management was upset that call queues were escalating and that number of resolutions processed were declining. * Helpdesk staff felt unloved because they couldn't just be a hero and fix the problem. It has been said that I'm a stubborn person and I persisted. After 3 months, something really interesting started happening. The number of calls to the help-desk started declining. Initially management thought it was because users were so fed up waiting that they stopped calling us. Further investigation indicated that users were having less problems. They were more confident, more knowledgeable and more able to help themselves. The kinds of problems we started seeing on the help-desk were meta-problems, not click and fix problems. Interesting solution, although I think it depends on how many people you're trying to help. We probably get enough *new* people needing help that the time spent would be self-defeating. Sure, that one person would be less likely to need help again, but in the meantime two new people show up and don't get any help because you're busy explaining to person A. Ideally, each time someone came up with a problem, the support person would write up a wiki article (or similar) with the full explanation, and then just copy and paste the link. It costs just as much time up front, but once a solid base of wiki articles are built up it should be able to move even faster than giving click and fix solutions. Again, an officially defined structure for the wiki would be nice. Perhaps something like wiki.ubuntu.com/Support/ release/category/article-title It seems to me that emails to this list alone show an increasing trend towards support style questions. We could coordinate a response effort, say, emails coming in on Monday are dealt with by one person, Tuesdays, by another, etc. Spread the load among several sign-posters. How scalable this is across the community, I'm unsure. I think that's too structured for a community-driven effort. If Canonical wants to hire people to monitor #ubuntu-signpost, and structure it like that, then great. As a collection of volunteers though, that's too much of a precise commitment. I try and help out when I can, but my schedule is never defined enough for me to dedicate a specific block of time to it. IIRC there is a company in the Netherlands (I forget its name), that decided that more than 15 employees was too many. Keeping track of each other becomes too hard, being social with all colleagues is too complicated, accounting becomes a means in itself, etc. If the company grows to that size, it's sales territory is split in half and the company is split in half. Rinse and repeat. We could do a similar thing with IRC channels, though I don't know if that would result in users flocking to the single place where people are responding - we see it today where people come into #ubuntu-server because no-one's responding in #ubuntu Very interesting company. Again, I would think that a lot of the problem is that #ubuntu is just overcrowded. Ideally it would be a signpost as well. Unless you're a volunteer directing people, we want to try and move you off of the signpost and to the proper subchannel ASAP. As soon as more than x people actively seeking help are on a channel (not sure how many in this case), it becomes hard for new people on the channel to get attention. The trick would be to get the volunteers onto the right subchannel so that when someone on #ubuntu points the user to #ubuntu-sound, there are a couple of people on #ubuntu-sound to help them. Otherwise, they'll just go back to #ubuntu and start complaining. I have a fair amount of experience speaking to large groups but I've been trying to think how I might apply those skills to teaching a class of say 1000. How do you do such a thing on a mass scale? IRC is a useful tool to talk to lots of people online, but it's hardly useful as a means to show someone what's on the screen now and what it means.
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
Hi all, 2009/7/2 Tim Hawkins tim.hawk...@mac.com: I would agree that The yahoo Answers model represents a wisdom of the crowds approach, and you are correct in your assessment that this can lead to distortions. [...] On yahoo answers many of the responses that are chosen as top answers, are subjective in nature, a well written individual who writes a convincing or populist response to a question, but supplies completely wrong information, could easily be promoted over a response that was less polished, but however factually correct. Perhaps in the hypothetical Ubuntu system, wildly popular answers could be periodically reviewed by gurus. I would propose that we have a better metric for selecting the best answer, in that the person posing the question could select the answer that fixed the problem for them, again this ties in with the task orientated nature of this approach. A question like how do i get the audio level to persist on my aspire one would generally solicit a number of answers, but only if the answer fixes the problem for the questioner should it be chosen as the best answer. [...] I like this. So maybe a rating system more along the lines of, Did this answer fix your problem?, instead of, Digg it. Regards, Evan R. Murphy -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Andrew SB a.star...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Evan R. Murphyevanrmur...@gmail.com wrote: I would propose that we have a better metric for selecting the best answer, in that the person posing the question could select the answer that fixed the problem for them, again this ties in with the task orientated nature of this approach. A question like how do i get the audio level to persist on my aspire one would generally solicit a number of answers, but only if the answer fixes the problem for the questioner should it be chosen as the best answer. [...] I like this. So maybe a rating system more along the lines of, Did this answer fix your problem?, instead of, Digg it. Some thoughts: This sounds just like Launchpad Answers to me. How would the idea you're talking about differ? What could we do to encourage more people to use LP Answers? What does it lack, or is it simply a matter of promotion / awareness? I've been subscribed to this list and filing bugs for over a year now, and I hadn't even heard of Launchpad Answers before now. Maybe I live under a rock, but I think promotion / awareness would go a long way. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
2009/7/3 Evan eapa...@gmail.com: I've been subscribed to this list and filing bugs for over a year now, and I hadn't even heard of Launchpad Answers before now. Maybe I live under a rock, but I think promotion / awareness would go a long way. I dream about a much tighter integration of all the community discussion tools. (The fact that such an experienced contributor could not know about Launchpad Answers is very telling about our room for improvement in this area.) If a question is answered once on Ubuntu Forums, what if it never had to come up again on IRC, Launchpad Answers or a mailing list (or again on the forums), and vice versa? The obvious difficulty, of course, is implementation: How do you accurately index all of these diverse media (IRC channel logs, Ubuntu Forums and mailing list archives, Launchpad Answers questions, etc.) and elegantly connect them to one another. I would love to help make this happen, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough to get it started, or even how possible it is today. 2009/7/3 Patrick Goetz pgo...@mail.utexas.edu: This sounds like a potential application for Google Wave. Google Wave is right up this alley, at least in theory. Great discussion, Evan R. Murphy -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Evan R. Murphy evanrmur...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/7/3 Evan eapa...@gmail.com: I've been subscribed to this list and filing bugs for over a year now, and I hadn't even heard of Launchpad Answers before now. Maybe I live under a rock, but I think promotion / awareness would go a long way. I dream about a much tighter integration of all the community discussion tools. (The fact that such an experienced contributor could not know about Launchpad Answers is very telling about our room for improvement in this area.) If a question is answered once on Ubuntu Forums, what if it never had to come up again on IRC, Launchpad Answers or a mailing list (or again on the forums), and vice versa? The obvious difficulty, of course, is implementation: How do you accurately index all of these diverse media (IRC channel logs, Ubuntu Forums and mailing list archives, Launchpad Answers questions, etc.) and elegantly connect them to one another. I would love to help make this happen, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough to get it started, or even how possible it is today. We also seem to have a duplication of effort on several fronts. At last glance we have: - mailing lists - IRC - wiki - launchpad - launchpad answers - forums Launchpad is for bug reporting and tracking, beyond that I have no idea where the actual division of responsibilities lies. Perhaps clarifying that (ex: Wiki is for Howtos only, forums are only for ...) and then providing a meta-support page for each topic would help. So somebody looking for help from Ubuntu gets directed to support.ubuntu.com/Audio. This would have links such as: I want to know how to do something (wiki) I want to report a bug on the topic (lp) I think I have a bug but I'm not sure (lp answers?) I have a question or suggestion concerning the future of the topic (devel-discuss) None of the above (#ubuntu-signpost) On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Steven Danna sdan...@u.washington.eduwrote: For the latter, we should have a review group to: * look at the questions/answers, and * verify correctness, * edit if needed (clarifying the question and answer), and * classify the question following a (given) taxonomy. Following from here: * once a question/answer has been reviewed and approved, it could be locked against changes, and clearly marked reviewed (seal of approval); * an action this answer is wrong should be provided, with a text entry for explanations. This action should be available for *every* Q/A, irrespective of status; * the taxomony should be widely published, and adhered to everywhere (*including* Mallone). This would provide us with consistency. The Wikipaedia classification [1] would probably be useful to us, at least as a starting point. Other examples are the ACM classification [2], the AMS one [3], etc, etc. Hi, I do quite a bit of work on Answers and I think that some of your suggestions are good. But many just wouldn't work very well for the type of questions that mostly up on answers.launchpad.net. Most users are not very good at articulating a problem. Hence in many questions you will see a back and forth between the question asker and answer contributors. Many of the early answers will be wrong because it is often very difficult to determine the /actual/ problem the user is experiencing. This situation is made worse by the fact that because there are not many answer contacts in languages other than English, most people are posting questions in their non-native language. This looks like another possible location to implement the sub-channels and meta-channels. Again, permission management becomes an issue. What I do think needs to happen, is that we need to make greater use of the FAQ functionality within Answers and there should be a way for somebody other than the question asker to mark a question as correct, since they often just mark whatever the last message in the conversation was or the don't mark any answer. Agreed. This would also be useful in the forums, but that leads to quite a lot of overlap. Again, an official division of responsibilities between channels would be nice. - - - Something else worth considering is the ability for people (perhaps only the authors) to move threads around between services. I post something in the forums, find out it isn't my fault (it's a bug), press a button, and turn it into a launchpad report, complete with all the information the forum had already gathered. Ditto for between all the other services. I think that would be really useful. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
Coincidentally, Bryce recently posted a couple of blog posts dealing with Me too storms on launchpad [1]+[2] which are related. I don't claim to be an expert on this, but as I see it the problem comes down to channels. Various channels of communication can hold different numbers of active participants before they become flooded, and conversation becomes impossible. It is possible to have only a couple of people on the same phone connection (unless some of them are in the same room, which is somewhat different), and quite a few more on irc. Even more are possible on a mailing list because it becomes easier to ignore threads which you aren't participating in (especially with gmail's thread view). However, even mailing lists become saturated with too many users. The two obvious ways to scale are to make better channels, which can hold more people without saturation, and/or to make more channels. To my mind, we would be best served by making more (nested?) channels, with a sort of meta-channel for each category, which is only for directing users to the right subchannel. I know this sounds sort of confusing, so let me provide an example based on the ubuntu forums. A brand new user is having trouble getting sound out of their speakers, so they go to the forums. They're not familiar with the way they work, so they post in the Something isn't working metaforum. Someone who knows a bit about the forum system gives them a brief explanation and conveniently moves their post down a level into the Audio subforum. Again, someone in the Audio metaforum (who presumably knows something about audio) tells them it's a driver issue, and moves their post a level deeper into the Drivers subforum, where someone who knows about the audio driver stack picks it up and helps them. If they can't solve it, perhaps they realize it's more a mixing issue, and moves the thread sideways to the appropriate location. More experienced users can, of course, go straight to the proper subforum if they know where it is. The idea is that someone who knows a lot about audio drivers can hang out down there, and only has to deal with pertinent questions. Someone who doesn't have specialized knowledge but likes helping/teaching can hang out higher up and direct new users to the right subforum. I have no idea if this would work, I just whipped it off the top of my head, and I have no idea how it would work with systems like Launchpad or the mailing lists, but it's at least an interesting concept. Something else to ponder. Just my two cents, Evan [1] http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080/drupal/me-too-storms [2] http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080/drupal/me-too-storms-solutions -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Andrew Sayers andrew-ubuntu-de...@pileofstuff.org wrote: Evan wrote: snip - metaforums and subforums I like this idea in principle, but in practice I'd be worried about messages being pushed back and forth between forums - your sound driver breaks, and the audio forum pushes your question to the driver forum, which pushes you back to the sound forum, ad nauseum. That's a good point. The first thing that comes to mind is requiring karma to move a post any direction but down, however that seems to like it could get overcomplicated and over-restrictive quite quickly. Besides being much harder to write for the forum coders. I suspect the answer might be simpler than this. I've been hanging around the beginner team this week, and a frequent complaint seems to be that people post without searching older threads (or sometimes even older posts in the same thread). Adding a duplicate-checking feature to the beginner's forum (like we have for bugs in Launchpad) might make a significant dent in the number of duplicate threads. There is a 'check if already posted' button beside the title in the New Thread page, but it probably doesn't get used much by beginners. Perhaps asking Are you sure your problem isn't one of these... before actually creating a new thread? - - - I think the best place for the nested meta-channels would be on IRC. IIRC this already happens to some extent (there's a long list of specialized channels at [1]), but it would probably help if we created a few more subchannels, formalized the naming structure for them, and designated #ubuntu a meta-only channel. Again, there are definitely issues with this, but it seems a better fit than trying this on forums or mailing lists, and it's by far the easiest to implement / revert, depending. [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat#Channels -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: RFC: binary compatibility between short cycles
I started a discussion somewhat along these lines quite a while ago. My original plan started quite different from yours, although it morphed into something actually quite similar based on various feedback. The archive link is at [1] for reference, but I'll copy the body of my final revision here for easier reference: Divide Ubuntu (packages development) into two sections: - The core (X, the Kernel, etc.) - Minor versions - are released with each normal release. - are developed in the current six-month cycle. - include only features that can be fully and properly implemented in a single six-month time frame. - Major versions - are released with each LTS. - are developed in a two-year cycle. - include all of the larger features that take longer than six months to implement. - The focus for core will always be on stability. If something can't be implemented and tested properly for the next minor release, it is dropped to the next major release instead. - The apps (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, etc.) - Rolling release cycle - Freeze for every LTS on last stable version It's fairly complicated, but it seems to satisfy most of the requirements: - large corporate environments get a stable, constant release every two years. - home users get up-to-date applications on a stable base. - those who need a very stable base but up-to-date apps can install the LTS but then switch to the rolling apps repository. - developers aren't rushing to cram a complex feature into six months. The original focus of my plan was actually to introduce a rolling repository for user-facing applications (I don't remember which app it was that prompted the discussion), but it sort of grew from there. The general consensus at the time was that people who wanted up-to-date apps were best served simply by enabling the backports repository, and that if things weren't moving through the backports queue fast enough then volunteers were always welcome. I also have to note that while Gutsy was a mess (for me at least) everything since has been quite stable, so my complaints about instability in the Core have also disappeared. If I understand correctly though, your plan is to ensure binary compatibility between minor releases, so that moving from version x to version y wouldn't require a rebuild of package z if there is no new version of package z. There are some interesting benefits to this, especially to third-party developers, but as you mention there would be a larger load on maintainers of Infrastructure packages. Also, I would like to have a more precise definition of Infrastructure packages. Anything with a public API seems rather broad, but I believe necessary to maintain complete compatibility between releases. It is a very interesting idea, and I look forward to seeing how it develops. Evan [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2007-December/002803.html -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: gparted, ubiquity and other packages left behind by karmic a2 installer
On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 11:41 PM, Nathan Dorfmann...@rtfm.net wrote: Just installed karmic alpha 2, and noticed that a few packages that should have been removed at install are left behind. These include gparted, ubiquity, casper and a couple of others. Ubiquity's package description even states: Installing this package on a normal system is unlikely to be useful. Has anyone else observed this? No, I just tested this myself and was unable to reproduce the behavior you experienced. Are you sure the installation did not crash near the end, and enough of the system was in place to allow you to boot? You would not have seen the installation finished dialog, if this were the case. If you are able to reproduce this issue, please file a bug against ubiquity (http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+filebug), and attach the log files following the procedure documented at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUbiquity/AttachingLogs , plus the output of `dpkg --list | grep ubiquity` from the installed system. Thanks! -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Tim Zakharov tzakha...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 12:16 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). Seeing as that's optional, yes you did. I find the copying useful since well...if it didn't copy them, it'd be like GThumb, pretending to organize my camera (not actually changing the filesystem by the way, just pretending) and not getting the images onto the computer. You'd have to manually copy all the images from the camera to the hard drive, then run GThumb/F-Spot. In that case, why are they set to start when a camera is plugged in or an SD card inserted? They'd be rather useless for the getting stuff of the camera usecase (the usecase implied by their autolaunching). In my case, I keep all photos on a large external drive to conserve space in my home directory, and import only the thumbnails into f-spot, so I must remember to uncheck this box each time, or it copies over the full jpgs to home/tim/Photos. This would quickly wipe out my free space, and needlessly make a duplicate of each photo (I already keep backups on another system). So in my case, as with Vincenzo, it is a feature I don't like. I happen to quite like this feature, since I use it to copy pictures off my camera and onto disk while importing them into F-Spot, and I think that ought to be a fairly common use case. I would vote against removing this feature, however perhaps the default should be to have it unchecked. Someone should talk to upstream on that. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Better clipboard management?
I have been looking for a good gnome clipboard manager for a while now, and glipper never quite seemed to cut it. I hadn't heard about parcellite until last night, but I gave it a whirl and it seems perfect. This would be a good addition to Karmic (if it isn't too late) especially since it's so light. I'm not too keen on their default shortcuts though; perhaps Ctrl-Alt-C would be better to bring up the menu since it's so close to the regular copy and paste commands? Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Browser chat (was Re: about empathy as the default IM application)
2009/6/17 Danny Piccirillo danny.picciri...@ubuntu.com: Wow, yeah that was a long time ago...definitely grab the newest version using the WebKit and Midori PPAs. It's really great and it's GNOME too. I find it to be much faster and sleeker than Epiphany, and seems to have more features. IMHO, it's just designed better. It is certainly not ready to take on Firefox, but in the long term, it certainly could. I would encourage everyone to give it a shot using the newest version Midori (or Epiphany) vs. Firefox What would Midori need to replace Firefox? It has plugin support, so let's forget about the number of actual plugins (similar to Empathy vs Pidgin, it would be unreasonable to expect that gap to close before we make a change), since the major ones seem to have been ported. What does Firefox have that Midori doesn't which keeps it from being the default browser in Ubuntu? (Let's also forget for this discussion that Epiphany is the default for GNOME and pretend that Midori just replaced it) [...] 2009/6/17 Mackenzie Morgan maco...@gmail.com: [...] Personally, I think Epiphany Webkit for Ubuntu and Arora for Kubuntu would be *great* because then the default browsers for both would render things the same (and very well, at that). They're both light fast, though as I said...I still would like a way to use extensions. Does everybody think it's wise to replace Firefox as the default browser? I can understand that more lightness in a browser may be desirable, not sure I fully understand the rendering issue (could someone elaborate on that, please?), but Mozilla and FF in particular seem like such great FOSS achievements to me that they may be an important alliance for Ubuntu to maintain. Just came across this Brainstorm idea on the same topic (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/229/), but still wading through the many comments. Regards, Evan R. Murphy -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Whatever happened to...
In the Intrepid cycle, there was something going on where it would add a last good boot option to grub instead of all the old kernels in order to keep the list cleaner and shorter. It was dropped quite close to release because of some unfixed bugs, and seems to have disappeared. Whatever happened to that? Is it still on the table for some future release, or is it dead? In the Jaunty cycle, there was the option to encrypt the users entire home folder with ecryptfs. It too was dropped late due to some unfixed bugs. Is it still on the table for Karmic assuming the bugs get fixed, or is it dead as well? I personally would like to see both of these feature, and I'm curious what happened to them. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)
I have been hesitant to add my voice to this discussion thus far, but I think there has been some confusion as to what we are debating. There are really two entirely separate issues at stake, and it would be nice to clarify them. The first issue is how various things such as disk space should be counted, either in base 2, or in base 10. The second issue is how we can distinguish between base 2 and base 10 in the user interface. For what it's worth, I think we should count everything in base 10 and use the proper SI unit prefixes (KB, MB, etc). Most normal users have no idea what base 2 even is, and this is at least consistent with packaging for HDDs etc. Perhaps have an option to switch to base-2 mode (with KiB and MiB prefixes) for those who know what it means. Just my two cents. Regardless of the final outcome however, they really are two separate decisions to be made and should be treated as such. I would like to therefore call for an unofficial vote. On the issue of user-interface, and KB vs KiB, please clarify whether you would always prefer KB, or you would prefer using KB for base-10 and KiB for base-2. On the issue of labeling, the choices are to always use base-2, always use base-10, or decide it on a case-by-case basis depending on other factors (like HDDs using base-10 size labels already). I hope this email does not simply add to the confusion this thread has already generated. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: What's wrong with Ubuntu's policy?
2009/5/21 Markus Hitter m...@jump-ing.de: [snip] From the article: We go the extra mile in double qualifying all updates (that one would see in stock 8.10 and 9.04) and only publish those that are rock-stable. To me, this sounds much like a fork of Ubuntu, just without a new name. Stick with 8.04 as a base, re-do all changes from there on. Have fun with people mixing up Canonical-Ubuntu with Dell-Ubuntu. [snip] 2009/5/22 Daniel Chen seven.st...@gmail.com: [snip] Downstreams should feel free to adopt whatever policies suit them. (Think Ubuntu's downstream relation to Debian, and Debian's downstream relation to all upstreams.) Well, it would be great to avoid all the duplication of effort we can. If Dell really is double-testing updates for stability, the results of those tests could be useful to Ubuntu proper, so long as they're willing to share. Whatever energy Dell is putting into the prep of their Ubuntu machines should be coordinated as much as possible with the community, IMO. I hope my comment is welcome here. I don't think I've introduced myself to the list before, but I've been following for some time. Best Regards, Evan R. Murphy -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: What's wrong with Ubuntu's policy?
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Markus Hitter m...@jump-ing.de wrote: Am 21.05.2009 um 19:11 schrieb Martin Pitt: Shipping a new machine with hardy plus some extra Dell repo for new stuff is just fine for them, if that's how they see they can benefit their customers best. Arguably they should ask us to do official backports and use those, but since we don't throw a lot of QA at them, they don't lose much with doing them themselves. From the article: We go the extra mile in double qualifying all updates (that one would see in stock 8.10 and 9.04) and only publish those that are rock-stable. To me, this sounds much like a fork of Ubuntu, just without a new name. Stick with 8.04 as a base, re-do all changes from there on. Have fun with people mixing up Canonical-Ubuntu with Dell-Ubuntu. AFAICT, they are simply taking the updates which Canonical releases and testing them on the specific hardware configurations which they sell with Ubuntu. There are few enough different hardware pieces that this is a good way for them to avoid the occasional accidental regression. Just my two cents, Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: More CPU Scaling Problems
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 2:30 AM, Stefan Lesicnik ste...@lsd.co.za wrote: On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 2:08 AM, Evan eapa...@gmail.com wrote: 1. What does Ubuntu use to scale CPU frequencies? Does it use the kernel method, as described at [1], or something else? 2. Did the method change between Intrepid and Jaunty? I ask these two questions because in Intrepid it worked fine out-of-the-box, and in Jaunty it's been doing some really creepy things. I originally started looking at this because the ignore_nice_load default value (discussed previously) appeared to have changed. I wanted to change it back, so as per the instructions at [1] I added the proper lines to my /etc/rc.local file. The value was ignored, and I filed a bug regarding it at [2]. I recently decided to change the default state of my cores from ondemand to powersave, and since I saw no easier way to do it, I added another few lines to rc.local. These also appeared to be ignored. Since I can change the governor manually using the same cmd I added to rc.local, and I know rc.local is being properly read, I knew something was fishy, so I did a few experiments. This is what I determined: every few minutes, something changes the governor on my CPU cores back to ondemand. I have a relatively vanilla install of Jaunty 64, and I know I haven't installed anything extra that should be touching my cpu governors (feel free to prove me wrong on this). Both the gnome monitor applet and /sys/devices have been used to change the governor, and both agree that it changes back. The ignore_nice_load value doesn't seem to change, but the fact that it's being ignored seems like it's probably related. Is something funny going on, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Evan [1] http://www.pantz.org/software/cpufreq/usingcpufreqonlinux.html [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cpufreqd/+bug/368809 Hi Evan, I am not sure (i looked at it briefly a while back), but I think its using HAL. Thats why /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-cpufreq runs as a process. Therefore the corresponding stuff is probably in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-cpufreq.fdi, and you can use the hal-get-property and hal-set-property commands to query and set. If you want to do other stuff, i think killing that hald cpufreq process should let you then... (although there may be a safer saner way to do this) Stefan I don't know if that's right. I've attached my cpufreq.fdi file, and as you can see, it's pretty empty. I've never worked with Hal before so I can't say for sure, but I don't see anything relating to governors or frequencies in there. I looked up Hal on google and found something interesting at [1], but I keep getting DBus access denied errors even when I run dbus-send with sudo. I've never worked with DBus before either, so just to be sure I've copied the whole text of my call and the response below: eapa...@evan-ubuntu:~$ sudo dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal --print-reply /org/freedesktop/Hal/Device/CPUFreq org.freedesktop.Hal.SetCPUFreqConsiderNice boolean:false Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Rejected send message, 1 matched rules; type=method_call, sender=:1.83 (uid=0 pid=4979 comm=dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal --pr) interface=org.freedesktop.Hal member=SetCPUFreqConsiderNice error name=(unset) requested_reply=0 destination=org.freedesktop.Hal (uid=0 pid=2935 comm=/usr/sbin/hald )) I read somewhere that Karmic will be migrating from Hal to devicekit. Does that mean that this whole thing is going to change again when I upgrade? Evan [1] http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/hal-spec/hal-spec.html#interface-cpufreqhttp://people.freedesktop.org/%7Edavid/hal-spec/hal-spec.html#interface-cpufreq 10-cpufreq.fdi Description: Binary data -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
More CPU Scaling Problems
1. What does Ubuntu use to scale CPU frequencies? Does it use the kernel method, as described at [1], or something else? 2. Did the method change between Intrepid and Jaunty? I ask these two questions because in Intrepid it worked fine out-of-the-box, and in Jaunty it's been doing some really creepy things. I originally started looking at this because the ignore_nice_load default value (discussed previously) appeared to have changed. I wanted to change it back, so as per the instructions at [1] I added the proper lines to my /etc/rc.local file. The value was ignored, and I filed a bug regarding it at [2]. I recently decided to change the default state of my cores from ondemand to powersave, and since I saw no easier way to do it, I added another few lines to rc.local. These also appeared to be ignored. Since I can change the governor manually using the same cmd I added to rc.local, and I know rc.local is being properly read, I knew something was fishy, so I did a few experiments. This is what I determined: every few minutes, something changes the governor on my CPU cores back to ondemand. I have a relatively vanilla install of Jaunty 64, and I know I haven't installed anything extra that should be touching my cpu governors (feel free to prove me wrong on this). Both the gnome monitor applet and /sys/devices have been used to change the governor, and both agree that it changes back. The ignore_nice_load value doesn't seem to change, but the fact that it's being ignored seems like it's probably related. Is something funny going on, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Evan [1] http://www.pantz.org/software/cpufreq/usingcpufreqonlinux.html [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cpufreqd/+bug/368809 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Rhythmbox Notifications when not minimized
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Jan Claeys li...@janc.be wrote: Op maandag 04-05-2009 om 19:52 uur [tijdzone -0400], schreef Evan: Is there an option to display notifications even when the Rhythmbox window is open? No idea, but... Did a bit more poking around. Long story short, there isn't. If not, I imagine it would be a trivial hack, and would like to take a stab at it myself (either via recompiling or writing a plugin). Would somebody please point me in the right direction? I think it's best to ask upstream for help with implementing it. Turns out to be very trivial to do. I cut out one if statement and recompiled and now it works beautifully. Hasn't affected anything else either. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Rhythmbox Notifications when not minimized
I noticed recently that Rhythmbox wasn't notifying me when a new song was played. At first I put it down to bad integration with Jaunty's new notification system, but then I found [1]. I have recently started leaving Rhythmbox open full-screen on another workspace so I can get to it easily, but it's out of my way otherwise. However, I would still like notifications as I spend most of my time on other workspaces. I took a quick look through gconf, but couldn't find anything. Is there an option to display notifications even when the Rhythmbox window is open? If not, I imagine it would be a trivial hack, and would like to take a stab at it myself (either via recompiling or writing a plugin). Would somebody please point me in the right direction? Evan [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/219880/comments/5 -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: CPU Frequency Scaling and Niceness
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Marius Gedminas mar...@pov.lt wrote: On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 04:18:42PM -0400, Evan wrote: I just updated to from Intrepid to Jaunty, and I noticed something curious. I believe this is a bug, but even if it isn't, I thought it should be raised. If a cpu (or core) is set to Ondemand and an application with a high nice value is running: - In intrepid, the cpu remained scaled down - In jaunty the cpu scales up to 100% I found a website [1] which does a good job of explaining it, and I tried setting my ignore_nice_load to 1, but nice processes still scale the processor up. Unless I am mistaken, this is a bug. What information should I attach to the bug report? Why is it a bug? According to Matthew Garrett, to save power, you want to finish executing a task as soon as possible, which means running for a shorter time at 100% speed. http://mjg59.livejournal.com/88608.html I understand that, however there are cases where restricting very nice processes is useful. My point is that it isn't doing something that it says it should do. That is, by definition, a bug. I have reported it at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cpufreqd/+bug/368809 Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
CPU Frequency Scaling and Niceness
I just updated to from Intrepid to Jaunty, and I noticed something curious. I believe this is a bug, but even if it isn't, I thought it should be raised. If a cpu (or core) is set to Ondemand and an application with a high nice value is running: - In intrepid, the cpu remained scaled down - In jaunty the cpu scales up to 100% I found a website [1] which does a good job of explaining it, and I tried setting my ignore_nice_load to 1, but nice processes still scale the processor up. Unless I am mistaken, this is a bug. What information should I attach to the bug report? Evan [1] http://www.pantz.org/software/cpufreq/usingcpufreqonlinux.html -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: CPU Frequency Scaling and Niceness
Reposting to full list. Sorry Felipe. On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Felipe Figueiredo phils...@gmail.comwrote: Evan wrote: I just updated to from Intrepid to Jaunty, and I noticed something curious. I believe this is a bug, but even if it isn't, I thought it should be raised. If a cpu (or core) is set to Ondemand and an application with a high nice value is running: - In intrepid, the cpu remained scaled down - In jaunty the cpu scales up to 100% Why do you think it is a bug? I would guess the intrepid scaling governor was too strict instead. The nice behaviour AIUI is that the nice process is slowed/halted until the CPU is available, but as soon as it is, it should be used, shouldn't it? The bug is more that even when I set ignore_nice_load to 1 manually, it still doesn't do it. Unless there is something else which is supposed to be overriding that setting, this is a bug. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: CD burning: Audio, mixed, and MP3 CDs
2009/4/12 (``-_-´´) -- BUGabundo ubu...@bugabundo.net Olá Evan e a todos. On Saturday 11 April 2009 02:54:14 Evan wrote: Auto-transcoding in rhythmbox has been on my wishlist for a long time. If someone familiar with the Rhythmbox code would be kind enough to point me in the right direction, I'd be willing to work on it for Karmic, time permitting. Upstream development for Rhythmbox has halted. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2009-February/msg00023.html That's disappointing. Is it being replaced by something else in gnome, or is it just the developers losing interest? Again, I'd be willing to look at it, but I don't have anywhere near the experience to start maintaining it on my own. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: CD burning: Audio, mixed, and MP3 CDs
On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Mackenzie Morgan maco...@gmail.com wrote: On Friday 10 April 2009 7:28:33 pm John Moser wrote: Other than that, anything I throw at it gets burned to the CD. Ability to lay out a directory hierarchy and playlists would be nice too, but pretty much it should just burn files to the CD in an audio format I've set. If that format is MP3 and no others, it should convert anything I give it to MP3. If it's a mix of input and supported, it should go by my preference. Nice idea. Makes sense. On further extension, teaching Rhythmbox to transcode when transferring music to a player (I think Banshee does this?) would be nice too. I second that. Auto-transcoding in rhythmbox has been on my wishlist for a long time. If someone familiar with the Rhythmbox code would be kind enough to point me in the right direction, I'd be willing to work on it for Karmic, time permitting. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1
2009/4/5 Remco remc...@gmail.com On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 9:29 PM, Mackenzie Morgan maco...@gmail.com wrote: There's already an option in System - Administration - Software sources to have updates installed automatically. There's also cron (the reason my mom's computer gets updates at all). Are there any problems with enabling automatic updates by default? Most users don't care about updates to the point that they never install them. And even if they would open the update manager, they would more likely just install all updates than select the updates they want. Hell, that's the way I work! How many people actually benefit from any interaction with the update manager? The way Microsoft does it, is that it asks (enabled by default) to install updates on shutdown. I don't know how that would be better than completely automatic updates. Remco I'm inclined to think automatic updates would be a more fitting default for Ubuntu as well. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1
2009/4/5 Remco remc...@gmail.com On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 9:29 PM, Mackenzie Morgan maco...@gmail.com wrote: There's already an option in System - Administration - Software sources to have updates installed automatically. There's also cron (the reason my mom's computer gets updates at all). Are there any problems with enabling automatic updates by default? Most users don't care about updates to the point that they never install them. And even if they would open the update manager, they would more likely just install all updates than select the updates they want. Hell, that's the way I work! How many people actually benefit from any interaction with the update manager? The way Microsoft does it, is that it asks (enabled by default) to install updates on shutdown. I don't know how that would be better than completely automatic updates. Remco I'm inclined to think automatic updates would be a more fitting default for Ubuntu as well. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1
On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas m...@canonical.comwrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi Evan Evan wrote on 31/03/09 23:19: While apt, synaptic, update-manager, and gnome-app-install all do decent jobs of providing front-ends for package management, there are a few issues and common feature requests which bear taking a look at. This is a strawman, so feel free to rip it apart as necessary. In Canonical's Design and User Experience team we've just (this morning) started tackling the issue of package management in general, so your message is excellently timed. 100% coincidence. Honest. PolicyKit Synaptic runs fully as root. Unless there is a specific reason not to, should it not be migrated to PolicyKit? Queuing The ability to start an install process, and then decide to queue another app to install / update after the first is finished. Parallelism Starting the install process in parallel with the download process as soon as the first packages are finished downloading. (I got this idea from brainstorm, but I can no longer find the relevant idea.) All good ideas. I've added them to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AppCenter#Desired%20attributes. Thank you. I didn't know it had a wiki blueprint already. I'm not sure what we ought to be changing or replacing, but I would think we want to write a replacement for apt as the backend, and a replacement for whatever provides the progress-bar in the GUI? We'd need to get into a lot more design detail before deciding anything as fundamental as whether apt needs replacing. Agreed. The front end would display two progress bars, one for download and one for installation. Hopefully that isn't necessary. I shouldn't see two progress bars for something that, from my point of view, is a single task. I'm not so sure. If they are going to be happening in parallel, then they will have different % complete values. You could combine them, but I think that would jump around enough to be confusing. As a note, I see two separate progress bars in Windows app installers all the time. For all I know this could be their usability issue, and not something to emulate, but I'm just saying that it is done. It would also display a queue of what's to come (perhaps with little Xs to cancel something if you change your mind). It would be a seperate window in it's own right, It wouldn't be necessary to put the queue in a separate window. It could be a viewable item in the main window, as it is in Miro for example. I hadn't even considered this, but it does make sense, especially if (as the blueprint suggests) there will be only one GUI for all four of the current ones, and thus no separate command sources to consider. If this becomes the case, I would ask for the ability to hide all but the install progress so that it doesn't take up as much screen space. On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Martin Olsson mn...@minimum.se wrote: One gigantic improvement would be downloading package deltas instead of whole .DEB files. I don't think this is necessarily that hard to do in a reliable fashion. I assume you already thought about that and it might be out of Ubuntu's scope (i.e. better developed separately and then integrated into Ubuntu once it's stable). AFAIK this idea has been kicking around for years but nobody has ever really gotten around to it. I agree that it is a bit out of scope (especially for Karmic), but I would really like to see this implemented at some point. I heard a rumour that upstream (debian) was looking at it, but nothing since. Can anybody fill in a few more details here? Another, much much simpler, feature request I have been thinking about is to make installing updates faster by letting the download and install parts run in parallel. With the current code I first see my network capacity being maxed out with CPU and HDD activity at nearly zero, then network activity stops and the machine starts to tax the CPU and harddrive. Once a package plus it's dependencies are downloaded, I don't see why that package cannot be allowed to start it's installation / upgrade while the rest of the packages are still being downloaded. This is what I meant by Paralellism in my original post. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1
While apt, synaptic, update-manager, and gnome-app-install all do decent jobs of providing front-ends for package management, there are a few issues and common feature requests which bear taking a look at. This is a strawman, so feel free to rip it apart as necessary. Modal Dialogues All three of the GUIs currently use modal dialogues for the actual download/install process, and this is considered a usability issue AFAIK (I'm not a usability expert by any stretch of the imagination, please correct me if I'm wrong). I believe most people would like to be able to continue browsing available applications, or reading changelogs of updates while the packages are downloading and installing. PolicyKit Synaptic runs fully as root. Unless there is a specific reason not to, should it not be migrated to PolicyKit? Queuing The ability to start an install process, and then decide to queue another app to install / update after the first is finished. Parallelism Starting the install process in parallel with the download process as soon as the first packages are finished downloading. (I got this idea from brainstorm, but I can no longer find the relevant idea.) I'm not sure what we ought to be changing or replacing, but I would think we want to write a replacement for apt as the backend, and a replacement for whatever provides the progress-bar in the GUI? The backend would accept regular apt-style commands, and would take care of: - determining the optimal order for download to allow parallel download and install - seperating the download and install processes and running them in parallel - queuing new commands separately by download and by install - if a new command requires a download, and the old command has finished downloading, start the download for the new command right away even if the old command is still installing - if a new command counters an old command that is still queued (eg remove a package that hasn't actually been installed yet), remove both commands from the queue. The front end would display two progress bars, one for download and one for installation. It would also display a queue of what's to come (perhaps with little Xs to cancel something if you change your mind). It would be a seperate window in it's own right, perhaps with the ability to minize to tray. This means that you could: 1. open update-manager 2. open gnome-app-install 3. start an update with update-manager 4. start installing an app with gnome-app-install 5. read the changelogs for the updates in update-manager 6. close update-manager 7. browse through other applications in gnome-app-install 8. close gnome-app-install And through the entire process, the actual download/install would be happening in an entirely seperate window, affected only by steps 3 and 4. And that's the concept. Again, this is a strawman, so criticizm is welcome. Evan -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
