Re: Announcing release 3.48 of reposurgeon
> If every developer sent this list an email every time there was a new release Imagine the alternative, a single source of release information for 20,000 packages. -- finger painting on glass is an inexact art - apologies for any errors in this scra^Hibble ()/)/)() ..ASCII for Onno.. On Fri., 4 Oct. 2019, 00:51 Ralf Mardorf, wrote: > On Thu, 3 Oct 2019 12:22:16 -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote: > >If every developer sent this list an email every time there was a new > >release, this email list would become usable. > ^^^ >^^ a Freudian slip ;) or > intended? > > -- > “Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.” > > ― Charles Ives > > -- > 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: Ubuntu Domain Server
On 23/10/09 07:04, Chris Jones wrote: But we shouldn't be encouraging the use of a GUI inside a server environment simply because it breeds dumb users. While I agree that users, well sysadmins (and I use the term loosely) are getting dumber in the world, I don't think it's because of a GUI. I have seen plenty dumb things in CLI environments - Netware used to be a CLI environment and I saw much that made me shudder. In the good old days of DOS you could do plenty of dumb things with its CLI. I don't think that the GUI is breeding dumbness as such. I'm sure that it's a contributing factor. Education is the key. It's always been the key, and it will continue to be the key. When You Earnestly Believe You Can Compensate For A Lack Of Skill By Doubling Your Efforts, There's No End To What You Can't Do. For me if a GUI helps me solve a problem by explaining what's going on, it's done its job. A final thought, which I've not come across. In the early '90s, Apple had an OS called AU/X, which was a murder between BSD and UNIX. It had one redeeming feature. If you were on a CLI and you typed a command and pressed Apple-Enter, you'd get a dialog that provided you with a GUI to that command. It allowed you to compose a command and on completion, you'd be back at the CLI, ready to run the tool. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 Domain Server
On 23/10/09 10:33, Ryan Dwyer wrote: So then that brings up the question of what web based tool should be used. Ubuntu Server has chosen eBox as that tool. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 Domain Server
On 20/10/09 15:24, Ryan Dwyer wrote: What are your thoughts on having a server product that competes with Windows Server? Something which has a GUI, is very easy to manage and works best with Ubuntu workstations. In light of some of the other comments in this thread, I'd like to make an observation, which may or may not hold true. I personally prefer the CLI for many, if not most, tasks. The reason that I do is because I have an understanding of what is going on for the tools that I use. The reason that a GUI is nice, is for those times when the understanding is poor. For example, I'm still trying to get my head around how LDAP and Samba work together to make a Domain Controller. I've read lots of documentation on the subject, but the overall picture some how still eludes me. A well built GUI can remove some of the complexity in the implementation and management of such a complex environment. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the Windows or KDE approach that everything in the system has a check-box or a menu option. I'm talking about how a GUI can simplify the complexities of such an environment. (This is not intended as a swipe on KDE, just that I've never liked the thundering horde of options it provides - I use a CLI for that.) If all the processes on a server were simple, we wouldn't need system administrators. That's unlikely to ever happen. I think what you are trying to discuss is a way of making server administration less complex. I think that you feel that a GUI will assist in that, and to some degree it will. I think it is admirable that you want Ubuntu to be used by more people, but I'm beginning to wonder if you're asking the right question. What I think you're asking is for a simpler way to manage a complex system - and for me that comes with installing sensible defaults. Perhaps your blueprint might attempt to describe functionality, rather than a GUI. If you're not careful you will be building ebox or webmin all over again. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 Domain Server
On 20/10/09 15:24, Ryan Dwyer wrote: Hi everyone, What are your thoughts on having a server product that competes with Windows Server? Something which has a GUI, is very easy to manage and works best with Ubuntu workstations. It could have benefits over Windows, such as: - Ability to store disk images on the server, then boot workstations with a live CD and image them in just a few minutes. That way your workstation is already configured with the software your business uses. - Ability to audit information automatically. Ubuntu workstations could send the output of lshw and dpkg -l to the server, which keeps track of it all. Auditing is important in every business. I don't know of any automated way to do this in Windows without paying for third party software. - Ability to run commands on all/selected workstations, such as installing new software. The server could connect to Ubuntu workstations using SSH or through a network agent. My theory is that people trying Ubuntu Server are probably Windows administrators and find it daunting that there's no GUI. If they don't turn away then, they turn away when they discover there's 48 chapters of Samba documentation to read through just to get a functional domain server. Very few administrators would see this as a viable replacement for their Windows server. I believe targeting this market is the key to having Ubuntu take over the desktop. Businesses will use Ubuntu servers and workstations if there are great benefits over Windows equivalents. This results in everyday employees experiencing Ubuntu at work, which leads to Ubuntu being used at home. Someone created a wiki page with similar ideas but it appears to have been abandoned: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDomainManagementServer Please reply with your thoughts. -Ryan I think this is a fantastic notion. I think that EduBuntu does most if not all of this. I think that if we could build a drop in Domain Controller that also speaks to Windows machines, we'd be on a winner. Many years ago (when I was still running Debian), I wrote an article about this: http://itmaze.com.au/articles/cio/ -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 Domain Server
On 21/10/09 10:45, Ryan Dwyer wrote: Can anyone recommend what my next step should be? Should I post it on brainstorm.ubuntu.com http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com or make a blueprint in Launchpad? I'm working on a spec at the moment. -Ryan Brainstorm will help determine if this is a good idea. A Launchpad blueprint is a place to start documenting precisely what you want to achieve and why. So, it depends on what you want to do. If you want someone else to do the work, you need to convince them that it's a good idea. If you want to help make it happen, you should write down what it should entail. Of course these two options are not mutually exclusive :) Cheers, -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 09/07/09 01:28, C de-Avillez wrote: 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. My experience in this scenario is that if you go down the path of individual pairing that paired support person becomes the single contact point for that user from then on. It happens today when a support request gets resolved the user comes back with while you're here, or can I ask you this in private, or you helped me so much yesterday, can I ask you another question or any number of variations on that. While in itself rewarding, I find myself avoiding the channel for the next week because I'm someone's new best friend - which is not constructive, nor is it productive. The fundamental issue I think that exists is that everyone's an expert. My 73 year old mother in law is running Hardy on her laptop. Yesterday she told me that there was a friend in the village where she lives who is a computer expert who will help fix her printer problem. I hope that she knows enough to know that formatting the hard drive and installing Windows is not helping, and I know that she doesn't know the administrator password, so fixing is strictly limited in scope, but I'm not looking forward to Sunday Lunch a month from now if you know what I mean. I'd love to come up with a support structure where her plan of attack is not: Reboot the computer, phone Onno The only way that I see out of that is to help users find out how to help themselves. Mostly this is a confidence thing. Generally I install Ubuntu in consultation with the user and explain to them that they have not been given administrator rights until such time as they understand what the implications are. I have several users who have progressed to that stage, but others who will never get there. In the mid-90's there was something called the International Computer Drivers Licence, which had the notion that you could certify user skills. Perhaps we could find ways of certifying or grading skill levels and distribute the support load closer to the end user, rather than centralise in one location. I've been toying with the idea of starting a road-show that teaches computer meta skills in small groups, face to face. The challenge for me is to figure out how to deliver that and how to pay for it. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 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. What I don't know is how to translate that into a global community that has an insatiable thirst for support. 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. 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 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. It also requires that students have a set-up where they can follow along in real time. Using electronic white boards, or webinars, or streaming video all feel pretty clunky to me and hardly the way to help so many. I've also wondered if 5 minute vod/pod casts might be a way to help solve particular issues. The argument for is that it's a digestible chunk of monkey see, monkey do, but all the FAQ's and wiki documentation to date doesn't appear to stem the flood of questions that seem to already have an answer, so perhaps the teaching needs to focus on how to help you help yourself. The individual comments in this thread are heartening and indicate to me that there are others thinking about this. What I don't know is if the proposed methods can scale more than a single order of magnitude, which is not even close to being enough to deal with a bell-curve that is heading this way. It would be really productive if we can come up with a process that leveraged the size of the community, but I'm yet to figure a way that we can pass it on. Thoughts? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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
Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
As Ubuntu becomes more and more popular, the resources we use to communicate within our community become saturated with the sounds made by new and learning users. This is not a new thing, nor is it undesirable, but unless we find ways to deal with the increasing background noise, we have a real chance of drowning. To be clear, I'm not saying that we need to hide from users, nor that we should build islands that isolate us from their efforts, but that the systems we use today do not appear to scale well. Spend a few moments in #ubuntu and you'll be surrounded by many users with questions and few with answers. The same is true in the Ubuntu forums, the mailing lists, launchpad, etc. Searching for issues that need resolution will often result in many hits that are people adding me too messages, or adding incorrect advice, which then in turn results in more posts. This is getting worse. That is, the noise is increasing. The power of our community is that we provide access to all comers, but that's also our weakness. Not everyone is an expert and not everyone will ever be an expert. Some who think they're experts are not, despite their well meaning attempts at providing pages that show users how to fix something by doing something in a non-Ubuntu way causing bug reports that don't exist from users who followed the advice. Should we find ways of distinguishing expert advice? Who decides what constitutes an expert? What I've written thus far scratches the surface of what I'm attempting to convey. I've been trying to write this email for six months, and I can only provide two anecdotes to attempt to describe in another way what I'm getting at. * In 1990 I was a participant and contributor to the usenet group Alt.Best.Of.Internet, or ABOI. When AOL joined us online, ABOI was swamped with users posting anything and everything to the group. Despite our best and sustained efforts, the group died in the onslaught of excited new Internet users who overwhelmed us. * Today it was suggested that what I'm getting at is the phenomenon that standing in the middle of a noisy street is a very hard place to concentrate on anything. You really need to find a place where you can close the door and think. While closing the door is simple enough, it defeats the purpose of sharing our efforts in a combined effort with the user community. I'm not attempting to proscribe how to resolve this, what I'm attempting to do with this email is start the discussion about how we might go about planning for success. What are we going to do about the exponential growth in Ubuntu success and exposure? How are we going to continue to flourish and grow while the masses arrive with their questions and bug-reports? Perhaps I'm seeing something that isn't there. Perhaps others are already thinking about this and I've just come along to add more noise to that discussion - if so, I'm sorry. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 03/07/09 08:00, Tim Hawkins wrote: Would the production of a system similar to the Yahoo Answers approach help with some of this, Yahoo Answers awards points to answers that are chosen as top answers for various questions, and in essence becomes a living FAQ. Its more task orientated than the wiki, as its based on a question/answer form. Its less intimidating than the forums as its not a discussion space. The points system encourages people to contribute to increase their karma or their peer status, particular participants's points levels could for example be used to award emblems for particular levels of engagement, such as expert, guru etc. Potentially points could be used to award resources on the upcoming Ubuntu One system, or other ubuntu related resources. It would be in Canonical's interest to encourage participation to make product adoption more widespread. Any thoughts?. I have seen Yahoo! Answer posts where two answers were supplied by two different people. The wrong answer was voted as the best answer. Just because the masses think the answer is right, doesn't make it so. karma can be a useful indication of activity, but in my experience it's no indication of expertise. And typically, using launchpad as an example, experts don't seem to get a lot of karma, since most of their activity is in the preparation of a single launchpad action, a patch, or an answer, or whatever. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: shameful censoring of mono opposition
As a reader of this list I have to confess that the tone of the emails being sent appear to have degenerated into name calling and I have to confess that I'm not particularly interested to spend my voluntary spare time reading messages between people abusing one another. Perhaps I'm naive in thinking that a technical argument can be had in a civilised tone. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
On 25/05/09 21:01, Andrew Sayers wrote: Jan Claeys wrote: A lot of people run unstable during alpha beta, but many do it in a VM or on an old spare system. That doesn't help find regressions that are hardware-related, of course, and in general those systems might not see the same sort of use that people's main computers see. And to be honest, I don't see how we can make more people use alpha versions on their I need this for work system... Recycling my chroot idea from before, how about encouraging people to install Alpha versions in a chroot? You could use localfs to graft your real /home in if you wanted. A bit of grub trickery would even let you boot right into the chroot, with the alpha kernel, when you had enough free time to give it a go. - Andrew The challenge I see is that there appears to be a mind-set disconnect between workstation and server users. A half competent server administrator is expected to understand that there are going to be unhappy users breaking down the front door if something happens to their data, so there is a self-regulating conservatism within the upgrade cycle - less upgrades means less heartache. I don't see the same attitude within the desktop community. There seems to be this notion - evidence to the contrary - that a desktop user will protect their own data and backup before they upgrade. Not only that, a glaring hole appears if you consider the example notion of a snap-shot before an Evolution upgrade, so you can downgrade. What happens to the email that is sent and received between the snap-shot and the down-grade? As I've said earlier in this thread, I'm contemplating an all virtual desktop. I'm also looking at abstracting data storage as much as possible, that is, store documents in a virtual SAN, store email on an IMAP server, store development code within xyz repository and use my virtual desktop as client to my virtual server(s). This may well seem overkill, but I've been bitten too many times by clients being upgraded that I am beginning to suspect that the decrease in overall actual speed will be well surpassed by the increase in data security. We talk over and over again about application/data separation, but until applications do that for real - we have a long way to go. Data is important and I have to say that I see little evidence within individual applications that it is taken seriously - almost like not willing to accept that their little program is used by real people for real purposes. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
On 15/05/09 23:27, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: Il giorno ven, 15/05/2009 alle 16.34 +0200, Markus Hitter ha scritto: As popularity increases, more vendors will attempt to provide drivers at launch dates of new hardware. For now it's a reasonable strategy to buy hardware which is at least half a year old or which is binary compatible with such older hardware. Unfortunately, this is sometimes the worst advice to give. It seems to me that in some cases both ubuntu and upstream silently, unconsciously, collectively agree that old hardware should just die. Let me explain it better: it is frequently the case that such hardware gets broken across a release and remains broken for the whole release; in next release something gets adjusted and something else typically gets broken. The living proof is my laptop (toshiba tablet m400) whose entire hardware is claimed to be supported since at least 3 years. And it is, in fact, once you fiddle with the software. Since Dapper I NEVER saw an ubuntu release into which everything worked out of the box on this laptop. In EVERY release something was repaired, but something else regressed to broken. I reported all the regressions during alphas or sometimes betas, but in some cases there is just no need to get either ubuntu's or upstream's attention on certain regressions. This too has been my experience. I stayed with Gutsy as long as I could for that reason. My ThinkPad had a working [Access IBM] key, which for some untraceable reason stopped working, ditto for the PCMCIA reader. The Intel video card used to support independent desktops, but no longer. On the positive side, one day WiFi magically started working after an update - it still drops out, but I've all but given up after countless hours of debugging my own hardware. I think part of the problem is that no-one can be an expert on everything. I'm a software developer, have been for 30 years. I make income by solving problems for my clients. When I buy new hardware, it's in my interest to get it right - less headaches, less support, more time to fix actual business-level problems, rather than crawl under the desk problems. Regressions seem to be hard to track and hard to pin-point. For example, I don't use my PCMCIA reader regularly. I tested it when I first installed and when I next needed it, about four months later, it wasn't working and no amount of trouble shooting would make it so. Problems like that don't show up immediately. On the other hand, I used the [Access IBM] key to lock my screen. When I walked away from my desk one day, it didn't lock. Four hours later I was no closer to figuring out why it wasn't working and the amount of lost income related to the single broken key far outweighs it's benefit. I still press Ctrl-Alt-L, and only the left Ctrl-Alt because it costs too much energy to figure out why something just stopped. What I'm saying is that I understand that finding hardware problems is hard and supporting the vast array of hardware is nigh-on impossible, I think that unless we find a way to become more disciplined about regressions, this problem will only get larger. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
On 14/05/09 19:57, Markus Hitter wrote: Am 14.05.2009 um 13:16 schrieb Vincenzo Ciancia: If every case can be argued to be uncommon, why worrying at all with fixing bugs? No bug affects all users. Good point. Having no common case means bugs have to be taken seriously independent of how many users are affected. If each bug affects only one percent of the users, there likely won't be any users left with a smooth experience, after all. This exact point has me currently attempting to solve the problem of hardware incompatibility in another way. I'm looking at buying a Powerbook, and running my desktop as a virtual machine under OSX. I have no desire to become an OSX user, but the pot-luck user experience I've personally experienced with Debian and Ubuntu over the past decade with incompatible hardware has me often pulling my hair out. Buying pre-installed Ubuntu machines or Linux Compatible hardware has also not been a pleasant experience. I've personally had incompatibilities over the years with: wifi, sata, raid, ethernet, sleep, keyboards, video drivers, mice, scsi, pcmcia, palm, nokia, ipod, ptp, usb modems, ups, cd, dvd and bluetooth headphones, to name the ones that readily come to mind. There are days when I wonder if Linux will ever get ahead of the curve. As popularity increases, expectations mount, bug reports increase, noise level goes up, work-load goes up, dissatisfaction goes up, morale drops, momentum stalls, and then - fubar. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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 Requests
On 14/04/09 23:32, Nikolay Kazmin wrote: Hey all, I am a master CS student and during my little start-up initiative I encountered a problem, which I believe must also be in the open source world. How do you decide which feature to implement next? Normally you would have limited resources and a ton of feature ideas, some of them came from the user, some of them came from the developers, some are there for other reasons, but in the end you can only implement a small subset of them. Is there a structured way to handle this(like trac for bugs), any tool support, how do you do that in ubuntu? I came across this problem recently and I still haven't found any good solution, I am seriously thinking of making some web based tool to do that as a master thesis project. Do you think this would be a good idea or is it just me :) ? Best Regards and thanks for you time, Nikolay Kazmin Well one stab at that is to use Ubuntu Brainstorm: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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
mirror moved, apt-get/aptitude barfs
Today I finally got to the bottom of why apt-get/aptitude update was failing. The owner of an Australian mirror has moved the files to a different server. Apart from updating the sources.list, and updating the bug that supplied the URL to the mirror in the first place, apt-get doesn't appear to be following a 302 redirect. Is this expected, normal behaviour, or am I seeing something unusual? Is there anything that the mirror operator has neglected to do, or something else? The ISP is Australia's largest, Telstra BigPond: The original mirror (203.46.104.10) was: * http://mirror.gamearena.com.au/ubuntu/ The new mirror (203.46.104.19) is now: * http://mirror.files.bigpond.com/ubuntu/ Comments, suggestions? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: mirror moved, apt-get/aptitude barfs
On 14/04/09 22:40, Onkar Shinde wrote: On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Onno Benschop o...@itmaze.com.au wrote: Today I finally got to the bottom of why apt-get/aptitude update was failing. The owner of an Australian mirror has moved the files to a different server. Apart from updating the sources.list, and updating the bug that supplied the URL to the mirror in the first place, apt-get doesn't appear to be following a 302 redirect. Is it really a 302 redirect? Typing http://mirror.gamearena.com.au/ubuntu/ in browser it looks like meta-refresh based redirect. When I do an apt-get update the error returned is 302 Found - going to the URL in a web-browser was what brought the understanding that there was something else going on - and I saw the meta redirect there too. I just did another test, if I visit: http://mirror.gamearena.com.au/ubuntu/dists/intrepid-security/universe/binary-i386/Packages.gz That redirects with a 302 Found to: http://mirror.gamearena.com.au/ Which has the meta redirect on it. Seems that the mirror itself is just redirecting everything to the same URL, rather than to the new location as a 302 indicates. Perhaps a 404 Not Found would be more appropriate? Is this expected, normal behaviour, or am I seeing something unusual? Is there anything that the mirror operator has neglected to do, or something else? The ISP is Australia's largest, Telstra BigPond: The original mirror (203.46.104.10) was: http://mirror.gamearena.com.au/ubuntu/ The new mirror (203.46.104.19) is now: http://mirror.files.bigpond.com/ubuntu/ The mirror (old or new) is not listed in the official list on page - https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors From where did you come to know about the mirror? The mirror has been around for a while and references to it are found in various Australian forums, most notably, whirlpool. I've just posted a message to the Bigpond and Linux/BSD forums there to advise users that this mirror has changed. As for an official status, I had added it to a similar request for a NZ mirror to be added. I've just updated that to reflect the new location of the mirror. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-apt/+bug/139768 Thanks for the link to the list of mirrors. I was unaware of the mechanism of registering an official mirror and today I will contact Telstra Bigpond and see if I am able to talk to the group responsible for the mirror to see if they would like to be registered as an Australian mirror. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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
KDE update
Can someone please explain to me why I'm asked to download 32.2Mb of an update that has as a description: No change rebuild to satisfy build dependency for kdepim security update What I'm really asking is these three different questions: 1. Why am I downloading something that is no different from the previous version. As I understand the packaging system, any update to kdepim should be more than able to cope with being part of a specific version using depends and requires. 2. Why am I downloading that much data for just version number changes, if that's really all that is changing? 3. Why am I downloading these updates when I don't actually have kdepim installed at all? I'm all for keeping my system up-to-date, but this seems like such a waste of time and effort for all involved, more like a $EA or NOP from 6502 days ;-) PS: Running intrepid -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: KDE update
On 04/03/09 17:58, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: On Wednesday 04 March 2009 3:50:32 am Onno Benschop wrote: Can someone please explain to me why I'm asked to download 32.2Mb of an update that has as a description: No change rebuild to satisfy build dependency for kdepim security update What I'm really asking is these three different questions: 1. Why am I downloading something that is no different from the previous version. As I understand the packaging system, any update to kdepim should be more than able to cope with being part of a specific version using depends and requires. The dependencies are listed in the package. To change the dependencies inside the package, the whole package has to be re-issued. Uh, yes. I suppose my point was that a dependency change, a single line in a text file, meta-information, shouldn't require the installation of the whole package. 2. Why am I downloading that much data for just version number changes, if that's really all that is changing? Because the entire thing is one package. Nope, there are 10 different packages, all with the same description. 3. Why am I downloading these updates when I don't actually have kdepim installed at all? Not Kontact, Kmail, Korganizer...? Not that I can find or recall installing. Don't get me wrong. I understand what is happening, even why it's happening from a technical perspective. What I fail to understand from a this is just wrong perspective that it's technically the way it is - which is why I posted to the list. I didn't want to get into the incremental packages discussion, but I thought that this was different enough to warrant at least some conversation about the meta-information associated with a package. I realise at present the meta information is also part of the .deb files but apt doesn't know about .deb's, so I presume it's getting the information from the pkgcache.bin file which I suspect is directly built from getting the package lists from a mirror. What I'm saying is that the dependencies are in that information, so there doesn't appear to be a need to download the .deb to install it if nothing inside the .deb actually needs changing. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: Is disabling ctrl-alt-backspace really such a good idea? - no.
On 13/02/09 10:41, Charlie Kravetz wrote: Okay, I have been reading this thread from the beginning. It seems like those making the most noise are the same individuals with the knowledge and ability to easily add the ability to use C-A-B back. Why should the thousands who do not need the ability be forced to have it to make it easier for the few that want it to be able to use it? Do you not customize your systems? This is just a very quick fix to re-enable the keypresses for yourselves. The many thousands who could care less are not even on the mailing list. Have we got actual evidence that the thousands who do not need the ability actually have a problem with C-A-B, or are we having this debate just because there are a few who *think* there is a problem? Just because it can happen, doesn't mean that it does - or have we just received a spate of bug reports from users who lost data when they pressed C-A-B? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Bigpond NextG at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: Open Office problems
On 10/12/08 08:44, Michael Bonertz wrote: I'm running kubuntu Intrepid. I have ppa.launchpad.net in my apt sources files. This morning I did an upgrade that was available, and it was largely Open Office stuff from that site. After the upgrade, Open Office doesn't work. It starts up and tells me it needs to retrieve a file from a crash, and whether you tell it yes or no, it crashes. I had to comment out the launchpad source and reinstall Open Office 2.4 to get a working version. I prefer running 3.0. I can install 3.0 from source, or directly from Open Office. Would rather use version in the repositories. Any ideas? The packages distributed via ppa.launchpad.net are personal packaging archives, and you will be specifically linking to one archive created by one developer or team. These archives are specifically *not* Ubuntu/Canonical archives and are not supported. If you are having trouble, the best way to get support is to ask the publisher of the ppa you subscribed to. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - o...@itmaze.com.au -- 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: crash in bluetooth-properties
On 28/09/08 08:19, Eric Anopolsky wrote: Hi, I'm getting a crash in an application installed by a package with this email address listed as the maintainer, so here's my bug report. Using the bluetooth radio built into my laptop, pairing my mouse happens without any issues. When I try to pair my keyboard, here's what happens leading up to bluetooth-properties crashing. This sounds like an issue I saw last month where the pass-phrase request times out - so if you type fast during pairing, it all works. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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 install options
On 23/09/08 23:32, HggdH wrote: Additionally, there is JeOS [1], which is a minimal install for a server. Regards, ..hggdh.. [1] http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/jeos As I understand it, that's a server for virtual hardware, not actual bare-metal. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Firefox newly insists on showing an EULA
On 15/09/08 18:52, Markus Hitter wrote: Hello all, readers of this list might be interested in the discussion here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/269656/ It's about a new requirement from the Mozilla Foundation, how End User License Agreements (EULAs) are against the spirit of free software and the GPL, how click-through requirements affect the user experience and about wether Firefox should be replaced with a differently branded equivalent: In summary the issue is this: 1. There seems scope for Canonical to negotiate with Mozilla to make this go away. 2. The EULA seems to attempt to protect something that is covered under the GPL Preamble. 3. The EULA seems to be referring to a binary that wasn't created by Mozilla. 4. Allowing this EULA is the thin-end of the wedge to others wanting to pop-up something. The bug links[1] to this text which I think is important: [1] http://www.toad.com/gnu/sysadmin/index.html#firefox-eula-sux [..] In particular, they kept repeating, Fedora has a EULA, so why shouldn't we?. That seemed to be the main reason for it. I have news for them. Fedora doesn't have a EULA any more. The reason it doesn't is because I complained about it, and made the case to their management, lawyers, and release manager, that: * They don't need a EULA, trademark law applies anyway * It's free software so people can go in and remove the EULA anyway (which in fact I did, so I never agreed to it) * Putting EULAs into Fedora was causing all sorts of unsavory characters to go see, Fedora is doing it and stick EULAs into their own distros -- EULAs that contain really objectionable provisions. * I don't want my relationship with Fedora/Mozilla to be governed by a one-sided contract written by them. I want it to be governed by the laws, which are already one-sided enough. The Fedora Project Leader, Max Spevack, was nice enough to send me a note thanking me for making it go away. Getting rid of it was on his list of battles to fight, but he had had some more pressing things ahead of it. He also pointed out that if you did a text-mode install, it never presented you with the EULA anyway, so if Red Hat's lawyers had been serious about really, really demanding that every copy of Fedora was accompanied by a signed contract with the end user, their releases weren't doing that anyway. So it's gone now. It's been gone since Fedora 7. [..] Could this point a way forward that might allow Canonical to negotiate with Mozilla about this? I think that other proposed methods of resolving this are much more destructive and that Canonical can point at the user response that is beginning to emerge. I do not understand what the EULA is actually trying to protect and why. Which particular threat is perceived that needs protecting with this EULA? I wonder if the whole thing covered under this paragraph in the GPL Preamble: [..] Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. [..] The opening statement in the EULA is most puzzling, this sentence appears to be the basis of the license: The accompanying executable code version of Mozilla Firefox and related documentation [..] Last I looked, our distributed executable code wasn't created by Mozilla at all, it was compiled by a compiler running on a Canonical/Ubuntu server from source-code supplied by Mozilla, that is, Mozilla didn't supply the executable, so this license makes little sense. I suspect that the EULA comes from the downloadable .exe files used to install under Windows and that it is a hang-over from that. One comment[2] points that the EULA came from the installer - which we never used - and that it was moved to be more visible. [2] http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2008/05/23/firefox-eula/#comment-367 To me this issue is the thin-end of the wedge, next we'll have a EULA for which ever developer wants to have a EULA. I realise that not all applications will go down this route, but if this stands as a precedent, then we're likely to be bombarded by pop-up EULA's and we'll no longer have the option of installing software within (large) organisations without having a lawyer present. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED
Re: Minutes from the Technical Board, 2008-07-15
On 20/08/08 16:40, Soren Hansen wrote: On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 06:43:16AM +0800, Onno Benschop wrote: If you recall the google research about hard drive failures you will have remembered that SMART is no indication of impending failure. And if you recall the very same research, you will have remembered that SMART *does* indicate of impending failure. The conclusion of the study was that if SMART says that he drive is about to go bust, it's very likely to be true. However, if SMART says everything is fine, that's not necessarily true. And your last sentence is precisely why I raised my point in the first place. The abstract from the report reads: [..] we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. And that is my point, individual drive failures, that is, those on a single machine, which is what we were discussing if I'm not mistaken. Now if you want to add SMART statistics to the landscape-sysinfo tool that Gustavo is working on, that's a whole different thing. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Minutes from the Technical Board, 2008-07-15
On 20/08/08 05:39, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Sayers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think there's an elephant in this room - why are we running fsck at all? b) If it's to check for dying hardware[1], it can be disabled for all but the oldest hard drives[2], and even then is better replaced with a badblocks check run while booting continues Define oldest, please. I actually think SMART (and a GUI to handle it, if one doesn't exist) is rather important. Bad Blocks may not tell you much nowadays, but SMART can tell you when sectors have been reallocated, hinting at a dying drive. The disk I replaced in January after SMART flagged it was 18 months old. If you recall the google research about hard drive failures you will have remembered that SMART is no indication of impending failure. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Minutes from the Technical Board, 2008-07-15
On 20/08/08 06:43, Onno Benschop wrote: On 20/08/08 05:39, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Sayers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think there's an elephant in this room - why are we running fsck at all? b) If it's to check for dying hardware[1], it can be disabled for all but the oldest hard drives[2], and even then is better replaced with a badblocks check run while booting continues Define oldest, please. I actually think SMART (and a GUI to handle it, if one doesn't exist) is rather important. Bad Blocks may not tell you much nowadays, but SMART can tell you when sectors have been reallocated, hinting at a dying drive. The disk I replaced in January after SMART flagged it was 18 months old. If you recall the google research about hard drive failures you will have remembered that SMART is no indication of impending failure. Link: http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Automatic fsck
On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 11:52:25AM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote: == Filesystem checking / AutoFsck == A suggestion was made to the technical board that Ubuntu could be smarter about how and when it performs filesystem integrity checks (fsck). Decision: This should be discussed more widely in the developer community Action: Scott to start a thread on ubuntu-devel/-discuss One thing that I have not seen in this discussion is the notion that fsck might be modified to run incrementally. Another that I did not see is the idea that fsck can be run using -n (though ReiserFS and minix aren't supported at the moment). If fsck is run in the background and a notification is sent to the user/administrator if corruption is found, then active intervention can be recommended. At present to me it seems that there are at least three different use cases with different expectations: 1. Ubuntu-desktop user with a desktop machine that is switched off regularly. 2. Ubuntu-desktop user with a laptop that is mostly suspended and is only rebooted on crash or kernel update. Complicated by the fact that a laptop may be running on a battery. 3. Ubuntu-server user with a server that is only rebooted on crash or kernel update. I see with some alarm discussion about reducing the frequency of running fsck. I'm running an ext3 laptop and I'm seeing quite regular corruptions that require an fsck run to fix. (It may be related to a particular kernel, but I've not yet got to the bottom of that.) Fundamentally, in my opinion, fsck is a housekeeping process that is required on a regular basis to ensure the sane state of a file-system, no matter which one you use, errors do happen, even if there are no bugs (ha!), we're talking about tiny magnetic fields affecting the information on a hard-drive - this problem is only going to get bigger with increased storage density. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Tahoma (or, Does anyone have a copy of Microsoft Office 97 Developer Edition?)
On 08/08/08 03:43, Conrad Knauer wrote: I think I've found a solution to the Tahoma Bold font not being generally redistributable for the msttcorefonts package. As I wrote on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/msttcorefonts/+bug/50529 --- I discovered something interesting that I thought I should contact you about: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/169813/EN-US/ Microsoft Office 97 Developer Edition includes a Setup Wizard that you can use to create a Setup program that users can run to install files for a custom application. [...] The files available for distribution allow you to distribute an application developed using Microsoft Access to users who do not have Microsoft Access. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/163535/en-us a list of the files that you can redistribute with a run-time application which you create using the Microsoft Office 97 Developer Edition Tools [...] TAHOMA.TTF TAHOMABD.TTF Does that mean what I think it does? :-) --- Does anyone on this list happen to have a copy of Microsoft Office 97 Developer Edition to test that out with? :) CK IANAL, but as I read that: *If* you create a run-time with the Microsoft Office 97 Developer Edition Tools, *then* you can redistribute TAHOMA.TTF TAHOMABD.TTF with said run-time. I suppose you could create a run-time that said Hello World, and distribute that with the two files, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant :) -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Extremely large -data packages
On 29/07/08 01:31, (``-_-´´) -- Fernando wrote: Olá Jack e a todos. On Saturday 26 July 2008 12:14:15 Jack Coulter wrote: Alright thanks both of you for the advice, right now I've already got both in my PPA (I had the limit increased to 3GB, of which I am very grateful for :D) I'll upload these packages onto revu (hopefully it won't break) and see if they can eventually make it into Ubuntu's repository. Regards, Jack Coulter Just let us know the PPA archive so we can test drive some of those games! What you mean the one that you get when you search Launchpad for Jack's name? All the details are here: * https://launchpad.net/~jscinoz/+archive -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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
kernel image updates and dependencies
Hi, A recent update to the kernel in my Gutsy laptop, from 2.6.22-14.21 to 2.6.22-15.54, prompted by Update Manager has caused VMware to stop working. This is likely because the vmware modules have not yet been updated from 2.6.22-14 to 2.6.22-15. I've lodged a bug about this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-meta/+bug/242505 My question is this: * How is it possible that this update was installed at all? Isn't this exact issue the reason we have dependencies at all? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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-marketing] Making Canonical's/Ubuntu's contributions more visible
On 27/05/08 18:11, John McCabe-Dansted wrote: To my mind the biggest contribution downstream projects make is saving developers time. My experience suggests that it if you are a developer and you want to spend less time fighting your distro and more time doing actual productive coding, then Ubuntu is one of the better choices. +1 As an IT consultant I've been able to contribute more to Ubuntu than any distribution or project before. I can submit bugs, create patches, provide user help and participate with a very low entry point. I can become a member of a team Over the years I've contributed to other projects, but never felt that it was noticed - I'm not talking about a thank-you, just that when you made a contribution, it was picked up, looked at, critiqued and used where appropriate. Ubuntu does this better than any other group of people I know. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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-marketing] Making Canonical's/Ubuntu's contributions more visible
On 28/05/08 08:30, Onno Benschop wrote: On 27/05/08 18:11, John McCabe-Dansted wrote: To my mind the biggest contribution downstream projects make is saving developers time. My experience suggests that it if you are a developer and you want to spend less time fighting your distro and more time doing actual productive coding, then Ubuntu is one of the better choices. +1 As an IT consultant I've been able to contribute more to Ubuntu than any distribution or project before. I can submit bugs, create patches, provide user help and participate with a very low entry point. I can become a member of a team Over the years I've contributed to other projects, but never felt that it was noticed - I'm not talking about a thank-you, just that when you made a contribution, it was picked up, looked at, critiqued and used where appropriate. Ubuntu does this better than any other group of people I know. Hmm, seems I got distracted when hitting send here :| What I meant the first paragraph to say was this: As an IT consultant I've been able to contribute more to Ubuntu than any distribution or project before. I can submit bugs, create patches, provide user help and participate with a very low entry point. I can become a member of a team where I can contribute to a specific aspect of the project on a code and policy level. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: make information for installing Ubuntu from a USB flash drive easily accessible
On 20/04/08 15:36, Jerone Young wrote: I think what he means is adding a page that is easily accessible to you know .. the average guys. These are not on any of the offical pages. Would be nice (and probably more environmental friendly) if more users knew that you could use a USB key to install. After hitting send I realised that my contribution to the list and Alexander's request was not as constructive as it could have been. For that I apologise. Your follow-up email offers me the opportunity to remedy that. The first step to an official page is to create an unofficial page. I should also point out that the gap between official and unofficial is almost arbitrary in the age of integrated search engines. If you present a page that contains a well documented and thoughtful process, that is peer reviewed, that contains test cases and follows documentation standards, then your unofficial page will be of a similar reach and utility to your intended audience. Perhaps you and Alexander should join forces and create a page documenting the process on the wiki. Once the document has been drafted and once you've had a few people test it and comment on it, you might present the completed page here and ask the question again. I suspect a more fruitful path is that you might discuss your drafted page with the documentation team. It may well be that your page grows and becomes part of the official documentation, or it may just retain its unofficial status - this really should be of limited concern in my opinion. Once a process is documented it becomes available to the wider community and that should in my opinion be what drives your contribution. A USB flash installation may be vital for you, perhaps it's even vital to others, but unless it's documented, it doesn't exist. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: make information for installing Ubuntu from a USB flash drive easily accessible
On 20/04/08 02:06, Alexander van Loon wrote: To make a long story short, please read my weblog post: http://alexandervanloon.nl/english/?p=8 Summary: Please make information for installing Ubuntu from a USB flash drive easily accessible. Currently the download page - http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloading?release=desktop-newestarch=i386mirror=http%3A%2F%2Fftp.snt.utwente.nl%2Fpub%2Flinux%2Fubuntu-releases%2Fdebug=download-button= - already contains links to pages on help.ubuntu.com explaining how to check MD5 sums and how to burn the ISO image to the CD. Please write a similar page for help.ubuntu.com with easy instructions for installing Ubuntu from a USB flash drive, and link to that page from the download page. For writing these easy instructions, please take a look at this page - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick - and copy only the easy method of doing it with the script, and these - http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/04/09/usb-ubuntu-804-installation-from-windows/ - very easy instructions for doing the same on Windows. I'm willing to help with writing that page with instructions, if it will be linked to from the download page. Without wanting to be to blunt and given that there is nothing wrong with your keyboard - witness your post to the list - why not add a page to the wiki yourself. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Problem with Grub being installed in MBR as default (GG)
On 08/04/08 04:39, Nigel Henry wrote: I'm just installing another instance of Gutsy Gibbon on one of my drives, and as you say the Advanced button is there on the confirmation page you mention above, but can easily be missed, as I did on my first install of Gutsy Gibbon, and ended up with Gutsy Gibbons Grub overwriting my FC2 Grub that was in the MBR, with chainloaders to other distros on the drive. Yes. Gutsy Gibbons Grub had all the kernels listed for FC2, Debian Etch, and Debian Lenny, but as the the kernels for Debian Etch, and Lenny are the same, it would be a bit hit and miss as to which Debian version I would be booting. Personally I think it would be better to have a separate page for the bootloader, as on other distros, and where you have choices presented to you as to where you want to install the bootloader. In most cases the default of installing to the MBR would be ok if you were a first time user of the distro, but for those of us that have dual/triple installs on the drive, options as to where you want to install the bootloader, I'm sure would be appreciated. Words fail me. Personally I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the developers who wrote software that was able to detect kernels across at least 4 operating systems, (Etch, Lenny, FC2 and two instances of Gutsy). As for the suggestion; adding 30 seconds of effort to 99.9% of installations for the benefit of 0.1% of the users seems a step backward, both for Ubuntu and society as a whole. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu
On 15/03/08 10:33, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: Well, there aren't any ext3 defrag tools anyway (ok maybe a few userspace ones, but that seems unusual), so we can avoid *that* bit of the argument, but there is NTFS support, and that definitely *does* need to be defragged. You don't mean formatted perhaps ;-) -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: madwifi-source
On 21/02/08 20:28, Matthew Garrett wrote: The madwifi code is already in linux-restricted-modules, so there's no benefit in providing a separate source package as well. I understand that, however, if you have a machine that has a card that is not supported by the linux-restricted-modules, you would use module-assistant to create a module to match your kernel. If you had the madwifi-source package, you could patch it and compile a module in such a way that it would continue to be maintainable, rather than get the source from madwifi.org, unpack it, make and make install it and have unknown files scattered all over your file-system. Of course it's possible that my understanding of the above is incorrect, in which case I would like to know how users are expected to manage this situation. Finally, if the madwifi-source isn't available, then I suspect there's a bug in module-assistant, seeing that it still has madwifi as an option. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: madwifi-source
On 22/02/08 07:22, Emmet Hikory wrote: From a maintenance perspective, it is significantly easier when there is only one copy of any given source in the archive. While it may be a little more complicated to download the source providing linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` to patch, a full solution needs to either be integrated with this source, or a result of a breakdown of this source, rather than the reintroduction of code duplication for each set of modules, with the attendant support issues related to which version of the module happens to be installed on a user system, etc. [..] [..] More generally, module-assistant needs a cleanup after many of the duplicated sources in individual -source packages were removed. I completely understand that we don't want the same source in two places, but I would have thought that linux-restricted-modules depended on madwifi-source (and others), but that appears not to be the case. All I could see was a relationship with NVIDIA and AVM Fritz! hardware. Alternatively, can we kill two birds with one stone, that is, update module-assistant to download linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r `-source and compile the appropriate module(s) from that, or is that idea heading for a world of hurt? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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
madwifi-source
Is there any reason that madwifi-source is not available under Ubuntu? I'm basing this on the following research: This link shows that madwifi-source is not available:http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/madwifi-tools -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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
madwifi-source
** Grumble, don't you just *love* keyboard short-cuts that kick in when you try to paste something ** Is there any reason that madwifi-source is not available under Ubuntu? I'm basing this on the following research: This package shows that madwifi-source is not available: * http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/madwifi-tools This answer shows that the source is only available in Debian: * https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/17182 This bug shows that module-assistant lists it: * https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/module-assistant/+bug/136852 -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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 include a part of Wine ... why include wine at all?
On 14/02/08 07:53, Daniel Hollocher wrote: I have a different but related question: why is a wine package included in the Ubuntu repositories at all? Its 5 months old, and the winehq website not only has a package built specifically for ubuntu gutsy/whatever, but they have their own repository that will allow your install of wine to be automatically updated. I understand that much of ubuntu software is upgraded on a 6 month basis to ensure compatibility, but why include wine in that process when the wine devs are probably doing a better job? Dan PS - I'm very curious to the response, since I feel that similar criticisms can be leveled at other packages in the ubuntu repos. You could make the above argument for all available software anywhere, ie: * Why ship a kernel when you can download it from kernel.org * Why ship Firefox and Thunderbird when you can get them from mozilla.com * [.. etc..] While it might look like I'm being flippant, I'm not. I'm serious. The whole point of putting together a distribution is that the sum of the parts is greater. That goes for wine as much as any other application / code. The release schedule that Ubuntu uses is better than any distribution I've seen anywhere, period. Your understanding that much of ubuntu software is upgraded on a 6 month basis to ensure compatibility does not ring true to me. If you understood it, that is, really understood it, then you would know that wine isn't an island. It relates to all the software around it, the kernel, the windowing system, the hardware abstraction code, etc. Ensuring Compatibility isn't just wine, its the whole lot. Now long-time Ubuntu users know that this process isn't 100%, that is, unexpected things still happen, incompatibilities still creep in and bugs still get unearthed, but at least you're working within a known problem scope, that is, the goal-posts move every six months, but they don't move every minute, which is what you're proposing. So, does that answer your question? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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 include a part of Wine ... why include wine at all?
On 14/02/08 09:32, Daniel Hollocher wrote: Again, wine in ubuntu is unsupported and outdated. Perhaps some prior research would be appropriate before you shoot from the hip: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/motu-council/2008-January/000720.html -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: LVM on hardy's live installer?
On 03/01/08 12:29, Lex Hider wrote: Jan Claeys wrote: Op dinsdag 01-01-2008 om 12:28 uur [tijdzone -0500], schreef Mackenzie Morgan: On Jan 1, 2008 7:14 AM, Lex Hider [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there any plans to enable LVM for the live cd installers for hardy? The Alternate CD has, as far as I'm aware, always had it, but I don't think the Live CD ever did. I think it was in the live-CD during development for some time, but never in a final release. I'm not that interested in whether or not previous releases had it. My main concern is: if it fairly simple to add LVM support to the live CD, can we implement it for the Hardy release? When I talk of LVM support, I don't mean by default, I mean having the option to mount my LVM partitions, or create new ones, through the custom partition dialogs. Lex. Rather than add these packages to the Live CD, I would suspect that a simple set of instructions would do the trick, as AFAIK apt-get install (et al.) is available to you on a Live CD, giving you the functionality you require. Of course I might be completely wrong :) -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Appropriateness of posts to this list (Was Re: evince crash)
On 04/12/07 01:28, Christofer C. Bell wrote: I think allowing the developers of the distribution, those who have a real stake in the success of the software in its entirety, to decide where to focus their efforts is superior to allowing the mob to decide what's important. I also think that using straw-man arguments to make your point is a mistake. The end-user has just as much stake in the success of the software in its entirety as a developer. Some may even argue that they have more stake in its success because ultimately they're using the distribution as a tool to get their job done. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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 installed by default?
On 04/12/07 17:30, Markus Hitter wrote: As drives come partitioned off the store, why should a normal user have a need to change this partitioning at all? Well, for one, how are you supposed to tell Ubuntu that you have just installed a new HDD? (Other than opening up fstab and editing it :) gparted (or any partitioning software) is a pretty dangerous tool for the unexperienced user. Two, three wrong clicks and the whole system is gone to a state where only expert users can recover data. Sure, that is true, but then you could say that about a whole lot of tools. For example, if you were to type sudo rm -rf / into a terminal window, then you'd also loose a fair whack of your system. My point is this, there are many tools that have the chance of killing your computer, let alone 17 year old drivers in a car on a freeway where a wrong move could really wreck your day. Just because there are things that are dangerous... -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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
Gutsy partner repository
Today I had an unexpected experience which I thought would be appropriate to share here. On several installations I have previously installed Feisty and after adding the feisty-commercial repository, added vmware-server. Today I tried the same under Gutsy. I expected that it would work the same. It didn't. Fortunately this particular installation was a new one, but I was in the process of making preparations for upgrading several other Feisty installs to Gutsy where this would have seriously broken those running installs. Now, I realise that feisty-commercial is now called gutsy-partner, while inconvenient, this translation isn't terminal, but vmware-server does not appear in that repository. It is possible that I erred in adding the commercial repository to Feisty, though I was under the impression that adding that repository was exactly what I was supposed to do. What concerns me more is that we're talking about a distribution version release here, not like say from Unstable to Testing under Debian, we're talking about moving from one stable release, Feisty to the next release Gutsy. How can I as an IT solutions provider install software that will continue to be packaged and supported? At the moment, the best knowledge seems to be to download an .rpm and use alien against it, hardly a satisfactory solution in my opinion. Next I'll be recompiling kernel modules, and then I might as well run Gentoo :) Don't misunderstand me, I'm not having a go at the team responsible for packaging vmware, I'm trying to understand where my expectation and reality experienced a disconnect resulting in this unsatisfactory experience. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Our best foot forward
On 15/11/07 22:55, Patrick wrote: Has Canonical carried out studies with new users of different technical abilities? This might be a good thing to do. After a Newbie installs Ubuntu where do they go first? How is their experience in the first hour. To woe Windows users I think the first hour or so needs to be entirely painless. The studies you're describing are usability studies and a recent posting on this list started discussing how to notify users about how to install non-Ubuntu software and how to interact with them. That discussion as well as this one indicate that there is scope for a lot of work in this field. I'm sure that some work has been done, though I suspect it was conducted within the Gnome / KDE realm, rather than within a distribution. I've not yet had time to look further into this, though it's on my to-do list. I'm pointing this out because I'm (or was :) an Interactive Multi-Media developer (that is when the term was coined in the early 1990's and scripting was done with Hypercard and later Supercard) from way back. As a member of a leading team at the time we did research on how to interact with the user and how to get their attention - short outcome, it's hard :) When I have a spare moment I'll go back to my old documents and colleagues and see what I can dig up. I agree that a user experience of a computer needs to be entirely painless, but as an industry we're currently heading in the opposite direction, that is more and more complexity. In the time that Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines were the bible of how to interact with a user - before it was Embraced and Extended by Microsoft, one of the best comments I remember was: If the program can figure out what the answer to a question is, or if the information already exists, or if the question has already been asked, don't bother the user with it. The post-install scripts follow this reasoning pretty much, though I'm fuzzy on how it's implemented for most packages. Whether or not any of the above will actually woe a Windows user is a whole different discussion :) Cheers, -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Our best foot forward
On 15/11/07 02:51, Patrick wrote: Hi Eoin and list I agree that shell scripts are not for beginners. Really I think Ubuntu is already really good for the beginners, although a different bred of OS , I don't see what is more difficult then let's say windoze. However for a beginner administrator, let's say someone who is trying to set up a small business network, an FTP server etc, it is a different story. Take me for example, I still would not call myself an expert but I have come a long way from last year. Last year I set up an FTP server(VSFTP) it took me 1-1.5 days. Now I can set one up in 15 minutes because I know what to do. I read through the online tutorials and I was instructed to type vi /etc/vsftpd.conf. I then had to learn how to use vi(which I hate). Then I had to figure out that the tutorial probably should have said sudo vi /etc/vsftpd.conf. To boot VSFTP was not my first choice there was another open source one that turned out to not be very good. I was discouraged and then tried setting up Webmin which took more time to learn and in the end did not really do want I wanted it to do so I went back to manual editing. I have a small business. Things are gong well enough this year but last year was a real struggle. 1.5 days really hurt. I can't stand close source software but the better business move would have been to pay $100-200 on a closed source one click install windoze App. There is tons of great open source software out there but we have to lower the barrier to entry. We are fighting Billions of dollars and political influence, we can't just be as good as windoze we have to be a lot better to get noticed. If someone had a script like this for me it would have really helped: #!/bin/bash echo we are going to install vsftpd sudo apt-get install vsftpd echo you will need to edit the following configuration file to get this working\ please change the listen to address to your ip\ if you want more then anonymous access please add a user name and file permissions sudo gedit /etc/vsftp.conf echo now we need to start the server sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd start echo please check your your FTP server now by typing= ftp your-server ip I think a new administrator could get a server off the ground in an hour or so and at no cost. His/Her boss would say great this cost me $20 (or whatever the hourly wage is). If I was the new administrator last year and I made $20 an hour, my boss wold have said this cost me $240. We should have paid for that Windows one click app. Ubuntu is awesome but maybe it needs to be easier for administrators. I would be happy to write a dozen of these scripts but I will need help to develop a big repository. Thanks-Patrick As a business owner I understand exactly what you're saying here, but I think that what you're proposing as a solution will not actually assist. Fundamentally, the script(s) you're describing as I see it, are really a command-line based walk through of a tutorial. The problem is not getting vsftp installed and configured, the problem is that you don't know how to do it (yet). One approach to that is education, that is, documentation that assists you in the process. Making a shell script to do this is a complete waste of energy because you're going to end up making a script framework that can deal with instructions, text, information, branches, mark-up, examples and other exceptions. Guess what, that's what a WIKI already does. So, while I agree that setting up an FTP server shouldn't be hard, the problem is not the one click installer, we already have that, it's called Synaptic, the problem is configuration and documentation. Now, there are a few things that you personally can do about this: * Write bug reports that indicate why the current installation of vsftp didn't work out of the box, because the whole idea of this fan-dangled package manager is that it just works. There are pre-install and post-install scripts included in many packages. Perhaps all that is needed is to add or fix some functionality in those. * You can contribute WIKI pages to document the process, from selecting the appropriate package, with reasons why you tried others and found them to be wanting, what you did to make it work and how you achieved success. In my opinion, those two single things would be much more helpful than writing a script to walk you through the installation process. Cheers, -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
Re: Our best foot forward
On 15/11/07 09:07, Patrick wrote: Hi Onno and List I am not sure I have made my intentions clear. First of all, Ubuntu's package management system is easier and less hazardous then a windoze-one-click-installer program, my helper script idea was just to focus on the configuration and if necessary, post installation commands(i.e sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd start). My helper script idea was not meant to eliminate wikis and online tutorials. I think you may misunderstand the post installation scripts. Currently most don't ask any questions, but they have the ability to do that. In answering the questions prompted by the post install scripts, you're walking through the tutorial that the developer (or packager :) put together. There is a whole (mostly invisible) hierarchy of levels of prompting built into the package system today. So, my point still stands. If you have a package that doesn't work out of the box, that's a likely candidate for a bug report. Just in case my meaning isn't clear. I'm not disagreeing with your assessment or commenting on your skill level. I'm attempting to point your frustration at the mechanisms in place already to leverage your input and benefit from them. Ultimately bug number 1 still needs to be closed. Cheers, -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Our best foot forward
All of what you write exists: * A package that is not installed but run from the bash prompt is captured with a comment like The program 'foobar' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install foobar This functionality should be installed by default (not sure from which version of Ubuntu), but if you don't have that functionality, then the command-not-found package will activate it: sudo apt-get install command-not-found * You can view tasks in Synaptic by choosing Edit - Mark Packages by Task... * To reconfigure a package: sudo dpkg-reconfigure foobar, perhaps it would be useful to add this functionality to Synaptic. Your 'compiling packages' example, while understandable, is in my opinion misplaced. You would not consider this option in Windows or OSX for the vast majority of end-users and even system administrators. That you're using documentation for Linux and applying it to Ubuntu is akin to using documentation for PalmOS and applying it to Symbian. I'm not saying that you cannot compile stuff in Ubuntu, that is obviously possible, but it's also possible on most other operating systems. Many users coming from non-Debian based Linux environments come with the 'baggage' of needing to compile things. That's not the Debian-way, nor is it the Ubuntu-way for many reasons - too wide to go into here right now. So, again it comes back to documentation and education. Personally I think this kind of conversation is healthy and useful within Ubuntu. I cannot speak for others in this community, but your comments are constructive and thoughtful and in my opinion you should not be ashamed of your contributions. Ultimately the pilot of a 747 needed to fly solo for the first time. Said another way, to be experienced requires experience. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Easier and more reliable ISO downloads, with error correction
On 07/11/07 07:14, Phillip Susi wrote: Caroline Ford wrote: Some ISPs block bittorrent of course. Vodafone UK is one of them. I had great problems downloading openoffice.org for windows as they *only* use bittorrent as a distribution mechanism. You should browbeat such an ISP, not cave in to their draconian will. Vigorously complain and if they do not stop, take your business elsewhere. Giving in and using http instead just encourages them to continue to think that they can screw you over any way they want. While I understand what caused you to write this paragraph, perhaps you might consider a scenario where bittorrent is completely inappropriate. I am connected to the Internet via a 2-way vSat connection. This is an asymmetric connection, in my case 1024kBit/256kBit. If I were to use bittorrent to download something, my satellite uplink would quickly swamp my downlink at any share-rate, making the transfer absolutely horrendous. Bittorrent may well be useful in some environments, but not in all, nor is every ISP who restricts you trying to screw you over any way they want. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: regular fsck runs are too disturbing
On 17/10/07 01:33, Phillip Susi wrote: Onno Benschop wrote: My point is this, an fsck is an 'out of band' check, that is, a check that doesn't rely on other things. It means that while theoretically a file-system maintains its integrity, in practice it cannot. fsck is a useful tool that needs to run regularly and every 30 mounts is pretty reasonable in my opinion. And that is where I completely disagree with you. The reason journals were added to ext3 was to avoid the need to fsck after a dirty unmount. If the fs does not need checked after a dirty unmount, why does it need checked after 30 clean mounts? In practice, in my experience, modern journaling filesystems DO maintain integrity. Also see the plethora of servers out there running ext3 with hundreds of days of uptime. They NEVER run fsck because they are never rebooted, and they suffer no data loss. I am subscribed to the list, there is no need to send this to me directly. I have personal experience where a modern journalling file system (ext3) does *not* maintain integrity. I have now had three cases where the journal corrupted for no particular reason, causing the kernel to remount my drive read-only. A read-only and non-destructive read-write test failed to uncover any problems. My point was, and it still stands, theoretically a file-system maintains its integrity, in practice it cannot. fsck is the tool that catches the difference between theory and practice. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: 4 More days...
On 15/10/07 07:31, Scott (angrykeyboarder) wrote: till the release of the most bug-ridden Ubuntu release yet (unless the devs go into overdrive in the next few days)! I have to say that I was quite offended by your statement. It's not constructive in any way and it does not reflect the amount of effort, both paid and unpaid, put in by the community. If you're frustrated with the development process perhaps you should find another way to contribute to its success. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Restricted tab-completion is annoying
On 11/10/07 23:51, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: The shortest path to solve usability of this would be to complete restricted for the first tab, and all files for the second. When I have file extension corrected, I love unzip to complete only .zip files. But this will always be in the way in many occasions. Just pressing tab again should extend the completion level. Vincenzo +1 -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: regular fsck runs are too disturbing
On 11/10/07 02:36, Phillip Susi wrote: When was the last time you had a fsck find and fix errors? I have two machines that have been running reiserfs for 2 years now and have never had to fsck, and on the rare occasion that I am bored and feel like forcing one, nothing wrong is found. That would be two days ago, before that, a month ago. Hmm, might need a new HDD :( My point is this, an fsck is an 'out of band' check, that is, a check that doesn't rely on other things. It means that while theoretically a file-system maintains its integrity, in practice it cannot. fsck is a useful tool that needs to run regularly and every 30 mounts is pretty reasonable in my opinion. The user interface it presents is a different conversation altogether. Predictability and cancellation would be good ideas to implement. I should also point out that I've been working away at a 'dirty flag' check for the dosfsck tool, but thus far an implementation has eluded me. (That and severe time constraints while I get ready for the onslaught on the World Solar Challenge web site :) -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Activate Desktop-Effects: Yes/No-Button?
On 27/09/07 16:32, Oliver Grawert wrote: hi, Am Donnerstag, den 27.09.2007, 10:25 +0200 schrieb Milosz Derezynski: I second that, it's quite non-intrusive and can be seen (or rather is) a one-time installation option per new user. i wouldnt call something you punch into the face of every new user nonitrusive ... note that compiz wont be used if the HW doesnt support it. ciao oli One of my clients sent me this quote about Choice: Choice causes indecision. Indecision causes uncertainty. Uncertainty causes doubt. Doubt causes animosity. Animosity causes rejection. Alex Polglaze 26/09/04 -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Activate Desktop-Effects: Yes/No-Button?
On 27/09/07 17:04, Dominik Wagenfuehr wrote: Alex wrote: One of my clients sent me this quote about Choice: So maybe dictatorship is the only real form of government... This tends to be a little bit to political so back to topic please. But your client maybe does not want to have a choice. Many users want... This is the reason their choice of operating system is Linux... Greetings, Dominik Uhm, My point was that if you give people lots of choice they don't know what to choose. There was nothing political about my statement and it was specifically about giving a user a question that they needed to make a choice about an answer. You have to remember that more and more people are using Ubuntu. Many don't understand the difference between Windows and Linux, let alone the impact of choosing to activate Compiz or not. This proposed question about activating Compiz or not makes sense in a testing environment, but after that phase of development the code should be robust enough to figure out the correct answer, and if it's not robust enough, that means it wasn't tested widely enough. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: That need to close bugs?
On 12/09/07 04:39, Alexandre Strube wrote: I want to raise something here... One of the things that made me take some distance from daily ubuntu development was a raid of newer people which closes the bugs for whatever reason. If the bug is not good enough for them, they close. This is more or less an example: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43354 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/43354 yes, the guy did not provide the information required. Does this mean that the bug vanished magically? No. In fact, the prism54 status is REGRESSION from feisty to gutsy. But why would I bother to post a bug, just to be closed for any reason? (This is only an example. There are several others) Alexandre, It is good that you raise this issue in my opinion. I too have seen this kind of behaviour and wondered what to do about it. I wondered if adding a comment to the bug would help, but found no particularly transparent or productive way to engage the person closing the bug. I'm almost wondering if it's happening because you get karma from closing a bug. From my perspective, closing a bug like this adds to the workload because now there needs to be effort in combining and locating duplicate bugs, some of which have been closed like this. It makes the overall bug-list smaller, but it does in my opinion not create a better signal to noise ratio. I have seen cases where the combined mass of partial information was enough to locate the source of a bug. A better approach in my opinion would be to mark the bug as needs info and leave it alone. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Updating software between releases - where backports/SRU isn't enough
On 29/07/07 10:59, Tim Hull wrote: My issue is basically that issues with hardware support pop up that are fixed after release (for example, my aforementioned suspend issue). This issue looks simple enough on the face of it, but as you will surely know, added support for a new piece of hardware comes at a cost. In some cases hardware is depreciated, or supported in another way. A PATA device might be implemented as IDE or as SCSI as new hardware support becomes available across newer releases of the kernel. This is why what you ask for is illogical in my opinion. An LTS release should be stable. You cannot expect and should not expect that an LTS release implements new functionality. You cannot expect that developers roll out support for a new gadget by backporting it into an older kernel in an attempt to support something new while retaining old expected behaviour. From a support perspective, an LTS user needing support for a new gadget should in fact compile and install separately. If I am supporting such a machine, I should be aware of the extra fix required to be able to implement support for this new gadget that was released after LTS launch. As I said, most of the Install Ubuntu on XYZ articles include compile X or install from unsupported repository Y. It seems like there is room for improvement here - most users would encounter a scenario like this and run. Getting updates like Firefox, etc was a secondary concern - though I still think there should be a way to do so simply within the package system. I'm not going anywhere near the notion of updating Firefox on an LTS. If you want that functionality, then there are backports and you should be on your own. Let me say again. The whole point of an LTS release is that it is stable. New hardware released after the launch of an LTS release should not be supported except in unusual circumstances. An LTS release should only ever have security and severe bugs applied. It is possible that you're agreeing with me, but that we're coming at this from a different angle. Kind regards, -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Launchpad bug workflow change
On 20/06/07 04:56, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote: What I did not mention in my first mail (just confirmed this with the LP developer), is that the groups who can set the different states will now also change. [..deleted..] A developer can: * Move the bug from Triaged to ToDo or push it back to a previous category. So, I'm a member of the general community. I have taken ownership of a bug, I'm working on it, and I cannot set it to ToDo, Triaged or In Progress? How do I manage the bugs I'm working on, and more importantly, how do I tell everyone else that I'm working on them? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Launchpad bug workflow change
On 20/06/07 05:59, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote: Onno Benschop wrote: On 20/06/07 04:56, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote: What I did not mention in my first mail (just confirmed this with the LP developer), is that the groups who can set the different states will now also change. [..deleted..] A developer can: * Move the bug from Triaged to ToDo or push it back to a previous category. So, I'm a member of the general community. I have taken ownership of a bug, I'm working on it, and I cannot set it to ToDo, Triaged or In Progress? When you say 'a member of the general community' do you mean not in ubuntu-qa and not a developer (I ask because people from the volunteer community are also in those groups)? If you are not then it it's correct that you cannot set those states. This change gives more structure to the bug flow in that it will be more clear what is meant by a given state. Yes. I'm not a member of any groups. So, I think you're saying I should become a member of those groups :) How do I manage the bugs I'm working on, and more importantly, how do I tell everyone else that I'm working on them? If you are trying to reproduce it or asking for more information from the submitter then this will be clear from the comments and you can set it to Incomplete. If you are not a developer then it is misleading to set it to In Progress because nobody is actually working on the fix and it may never be fixed. Well, no I'm not a developer, err, I am, but not in the Ubuntu context. If I'm working on a bug in say dosfstools, or gphpedit, then there is no need for another developer to spend time duplicating my work. To be accurate, I've not released any actual fixes (yet), so I've not had a problem where I needed to submit a fix. So to say that nobody is working on the fix, sort of makes me a nobody :-) Perhaps a better question for me to ask is: Do I need to become a member of any specific groups to fix bugs in Ubuntu? -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Using standardized SI prefixes
As I see it there are two ways of resolving the difference between KiB and KB. * Use Rosetta to update the text and fix the output so that it now reads KiB. This would be relatively simple to do, but not actually helpful longer term. * Fix the source code that calculates KB by doing a bit shift[0] and instead dividing the number of bytes by a power of 10. [0] I'm assuming that most applications will calculate how many Kilobytes/Megabytes are used by dividing by a power of two. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Using standardized SI prefixes
On 12/06/07 15:37, Christof Krüger wrote: Just because something has been done wrong for a long time doesn't make it right. People who know the inconsistencies get used to them and do not want to change it because it may be inconvenient for them or it simply sounds stupid to them (what an argument!). However, this means that _every_ new generation of students and hobbyists has to go through learning the inconsistencies if we change nothing. Hooray, confusion till the end of times! But if we pushed the use of SI-prefixes, the computer-gurus would have to get used to the new system but following generations would profit from having a consistent unit system. In my opinion this is something that is worth the effort. The problem with such big changes is that a critical mass is needed to benefit from this new system and the faster it is achieved, the shorter the confusion-period will be. I think that the open source community should participate since consistent and unambiguous conventions are a good thing (TM). Christof Krüger Until you wrote these two paragraphs I was not particularly interested. Your email prompted me to read some more. Now I'm happy to be counted in the camp of those that chant standardise. (Of course now I'll be laughed at because of using kibibytes, but you get that :) To be fair, I suspect that the use of kibibyte in spoken language would be phased out over time. Perhaps the IEC did pronounce them out aloud so we would all be embarrassed into using the SI units :) And just in case anyone else was as confused as I was, wikipedia cleared it up for me: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibi (Ironically, my spell-checker had never heard of a kibibyte :) -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: alias tar=tar --backup ?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 18/05/07 06:18, Micah Cowan wrote: A user, timothy, describing his difficulties at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/113154 describes his frustration as a new user, in discovering the hard way that tar's default is to overwrite existing files, causing him to lose important data. While I'm opposed to fixing the problem in tar itself, as traditional usage frequently relies upon this behavior, I don't see why we couldn't make the experience of using tar interactively a little safer, by providing a default alias for tar in /etc/skel/.bashrc that backs-up existing files. Comments? Ironically, I suspect that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. A similar overwriting happens with the mv command. I strongly suspect that you can make an argument either way. In the days of yore, DOS had similar behaviours with the copy command. What I see here is a classic example of an expectation mismatch. The new user expects the computer to almost honour their data, the more experienced user expects the computer to do what it is told. There is something to be said for your proposal, if we keep in mind the do no harm approach, but then you would need to do that for all such commands. That is a long and slippery slope to head down. Perhaps another way of resolving this is that any and all GUI tools should warn or not overwrite unless specifically told to, and the command line tools should do what their man page says that they will. Perhaps when a user launches a terminal for the first time, a dialog pops up that says something along the lines of: Commands entered within a Terminal screen may not work as you expect. Sometimes a command will overwrite files without warning you. If you are unsure, use the 'man' command to find out. Of course a completely different approach would be a file system capable of roll-back, and in doing that, a user may well benefit from the backup services such a solution offers. Finally, you could probably create a safe terminal, but personally I do not think that this is a good idea because then you would have a tar command in a safe environment (with a --backup flag) and the same tar command in the unsafe environment, causing a deferred mismatch of expectation with potentially bigger harm down the track. - -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) - -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. - --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGTNxb7KM5a8raIGERAhGHAJ45v209OVwzS3vF9TZcGBnoIJAJIgCfTWT1 n6Kq6O5la6zS1CexEg0YqVw= =tDNi -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
Re: RFC: alias tar=tar --backup ?
On 18/05/07 08:25, Micah Cowan wrote: Jan Claeys wrote: Op donderdag 17-05-2007 om 15:18 uur [tijdzone -0700], schreef Micah Cowan: A user, timothy, describing his difficulties at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/113154 describes his frustration as a new user, in discovering the hard way that tar's default is to overwrite existing files, causing him to lose important data. While I'm opposed to fixing the problem in tar itself, as traditional usage frequently relies upon this behavior, I don't see why we couldn't make the experience of using tar interactively a little safer, by providing a default alias for tar in /etc/skel/.bashrc that backs-up existing files. I think GUI archive tools should ask or backup before overwriting by default, but changing the behaviour of command line tools might cause problems. Well, the nice thing about aliasing it instead of actually changing the tool's behavior, is that it will only effect interactive sessions, and can easily be overridden/removed by the user. From a usability perspective I would feel that you're changing expected behaviour for existing users. I also note that there are no active aliases in my current (Edgy) installation, and that the ones there are commented out. If you're going to do this, will you do an audit of all the packages available within Ubuntu to make sure that they too don't overwrite things? As I said, doing the right thing is hard. Personally I don't think the path you're advocating will make it better. Education is the key. Of course, you could come up with an alias like tar_backup and update the man page to reflect that. A completely different approach could be that the calls that actually write to a file check that the file does not exist. You could activate this with a system-wide flag, but I strongly suspect that this would be more work than the few words it took for me to write the idea. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: SPEC: Support existing dirty flag on a (v)FAT file system
On 21/03/07 14:28, Mike Fedyk wrote: Onno Benschop wrote: On 21/03/07 03:32, Mike Fedyk wrote: Onno Benschop wrote: As more and more users have access to USB sticks, external drives, digital cameras and larger drives that co-exist with other operating systems, dosfstools needs to participate in the existing file system integrity procedures, rather than just fix every (v)FAT partition it encounters. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SpecificationDosDirtyFlag It is not mentioned, but I assume you intend to support the standard flags to check a filesystem even if the dirty flag is not set. Is that right? That is indeed the intent. It exists in the spec under Implementation, but I concede the wording could do with some work: A flag should be created to force a check on a clean file system for command line use. Ok, be sure to use the same flags used by fsck.ext3 as they translate to vfat. Mike Unfortunately I cannot use the same flags, because it is already used. I updated the spec to suggest -c for check clean, because -f is in use. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06 - E115°50'39 (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: New feature: easy codec installation, please test
On 05/02/07 08:08, Andreas Schildbach wrote: Maybe I should not have made such a broad statement. You are right, the feature will help many non-skilled people. On the other hand, there are many environments (like companies) that simply don't want their users to install packages (or plugins, for that matter). In the end, the companies are responsible for the software that is installed on their computers, and certain packages are not installed in Ubuntu for good. Take the MP3 gstreamer package(s) for example, they are not contained in main because of possible patent problems. If a user installs it on a company's machine, that company might get sued by the patent holder. Or the user might install an unstable package (one of the ugly ones) and then have problems and calls the companies helpdesk without knowing that its the unstable package causing the problems. I would suggest that in the scenario that you put forward the corporate desktop user would not have permission to install anything, so this would not be a concern. -- Onno Benschop Connected via ADSL (Kalgoorlie, WA)... -- ()/)/)()..ASCII for Onno.. |?..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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
