I’m sitting here in the beautiful maple leaf lounge in Montreal, Quebec eating some pretzels. I have two more flights ahead of me before arriving in Dallas this evening and am eagerly anticipating being able to hit the sack early so I can be super energized for the start of UDS tomorrow. 
If you’re not attending UDS in person, be sure to participate remotely!
Hi Charlie,
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Charlie Kravetz <cjk@teamcharliesangels.com> wrote:
Due to medical issues, I have not been able to participate much in
the Karmic cycle. Unfortunately, multiple sclerosis is once again
complicating my life for some time. Tests have indicated other
issues, also, which will prevent me from participating in Ubuntu
Developers Week this cycle–
Charlie Kravetz
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I can’t say it enough. Your hard work on improving our QA processes, doing bug triage, and burning ISO after ISO to test is something probably many of us have taken for granted and not recognized enough. QA is often a thankless job but yet so critical. So Charlie, please take pride because without you we would have not been able to pull off Xubuntu 9.04 like we did. Your consistent dedication is truly admirable. You’re a true Ubuntu rockstar.
I’m sorry to hear that you’re unwell and hope you get better soon. On behalf of Xubuntu and in your honour, I’m pledging to donate $10.00 each month along with a one time donation today of $50.00 to the MS Society of Canada and a one time donation today of $50.00 to the National MS Society to do my part to help find a cure.
Please know that we’re all wishing you well and are eagerly awaiting your return to good health. Your unique humour and warm personality is truly missed.
JoeP wrote…My problem with the whole story was the news reporters. I can understand the lady not knowing what Ubuntu is, and that it even has Open Office already installed. I just got the feeling that the reporters were trying to cast Ubuntu in a bad light, or as a sub par offering from Dell. Maybe I am too thin skinned, but I felt the reporting was very bad. But that being said now most people (who are not FOSS users) that see the story will see Ubuntu/Linux as something trying to rip off Windows, and the people who do use it as a bunch of hateful/mean spirited immature people.
JoeP: The original story and follow-up blog post was very positive for Ubuntu in my opinion. The premise was that “Someone got an operating system they didn’t expect from Dell but in the end everything turned out well: the school said that their courses will work with any operating system and Verizon said they would send out a technician to help her.”. The bottom line: Ubuntu worked just fine, she just needed some help and hey… this looks pretty cool and its free!!
However now they followed up with how mean people were in response to a story that wasn’t even really about Ubuntu. Do you think those folk at the News Station or who heard about Ubuntu via this news story are going to want to try Ubuntu now? They’re going to think that they won’t be able to get help because they’ll be called “stupid”, “lazy”, and other mean names!!! People who made rude, mean comments have done a horrible disservice to Ubuntu and Linux at large! Those people are the true “Windows Robots”.
I’m sure most of us have heard about the girl who dropped out of college because she had trouble using Ubuntu. All I have to say is that I’m incredibly disappointed to hear about the reaction of some folks. Sending hate mail, personally attacking the young lady, etc. etc. isn’t very Ubuntu like at all nor very productive.
So very disappointed… : - (
We’re oh-so-close to Intrepid Ibex being released and I’m most certainly feeling the excitement building. This is the first full release cycle as the Xubuntu Project Leader and I must admit that I’ve learnt a lot about being a leader, managing goals and objectives, herding sheep (joking), developing community spirit, and making touchy decisions. In reflection, what I find the most exciting is the growth and maturity we’ve seen in the Xubuntu community over the last six months. We’ve gone from two to three active contributors to over ten! I can only imaging that we’ll continue to see the number of contributors to Xubuntu increase in Jaunty - hopefully at a similar rate. For those interested, a great way to get started is to hang out in #xubuntu-devel on Freenode and help test our cds in preperation of the release.
As for the actual product, Xubuntu 8.10 for the most part will be a more polished version of Xubuntu 8.04 with our biggest ticket item being an improved multimedia experience. We’ve made it easier to not only enjoy your music but also to manage your collection with the Listen Media Player. What about Samba you ask? Unfortunately it didn’t quite get finished in *time* but it did get finished and will be included in Jaunty. I imagine we’ll provide a backport or something similar within a few shorts weeks for Intrepid.
Looking forward to Jaunty, I’m pumped (and hope you are too, w00t w00t!). We’ve already got some great brainstorming going on and Xfce 4.6 will most definitely be ready for Jaunty.I’ll be sure to blog more about our plans for Jaunty once the Jaunty release cycle begins.
Wow. The Xubuntu Hug Day was a *huge* success. Xfce4 developers, Xubuntu developers, Debian folk, and members of the Xubuntu and Ubuntu community all came out to help test and iron out bugs in the Xubuntu beta. For our first hug day, I’m very happy and very impressed with the number of participants and bugs tackled. Huge Kudos to Charlie Kravetz for heading the initiative and doing an excellent job.
The most exciting part of it all is that a number of folks who used the hug day as an opportunity to get involved for the first time haven’t stopped! Seeing such growth in the contributing Xubuntu community is exciting and very encouraging.
Anyhow, Kudos to everyone who took part! I’m sure we’ll do these types of events more often!
Been busy busy as always :-). As of last Monday, I’m now an employee of Canonical as a Release Engineer for the OEM Services Custom Engineering Group.
Xubuntu is doing really well. We had our strategy document officially recognized by the CC at the last CC meeting (I’ll begin implementing the details September 1st). Furthermore, upstream relationships with Xfce4 are better than ever which I personally find very exciting. Finally, Xubuntu has finally reached a “critical mass” where as we have enough contributors that things get done without there having to be someone such as myself doing a bunch of hand holding. Go Xubuntu Team, Go!
Last but not least, I bought a kitten. Pictures will be available soon.
Wow. Time sure goes quickly. It has been a few weeks since my last blog post but there certainly hasn’t been a lack of things to blog about, just been super busy!
First off, I’m pretty proud to report that I’ve been able to fix a rather unfortunate regression in Xubuntu where when users logged in they’d sometimes (ie. it was an intermittent issue) just see a blue (or some other colour) screen and their mouse - nothing else would happen. This was being caused by a race condition resulting in a deadlock due to architectural issues in libxcb (which should be fixed completely hopefully for Intrepid). It was an interesting adventure and certainly was a tricky bug to figure out (lots of time spent in gdb, lots of research, lots of diagnostic tests, and lots of theorizing). It turned out that gnome-screensaver was sending a dbus message after it started but the Xfce4 xinitrc script didn’t run dbus-launch until later. When a program attempts to send a dbus message and no session bus is available, libdbus will automatically start one. This resulted in two dbus-launch processes being started and it aggravated libxcb into deadlocking when the second instance of dbus attempted to open the bilateral communication socket with X. I was able to fix the issue by making sure dbus-launch occurred before gnome-screensaver. Big thanks to Bryce Harrington and Scott Remnant for answering my questions and their attempts to help. Naturally, kudos to Google for being such a good little search engine. And yes, this fix has made it into the point release.
Another tricky bug was figured out by Lionel Le Folgoc. A regression was introduced when the gdm settings shipped in xubuntu-default-settings was synced with Ubuntu’s. This resulted in the proper xinitrc (/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc) *not* being executed. This is the source of the screensaver not starting and about five other bugs. I’ve uploaded a fix to Intrepid as well as an SRU (it is currently awaiting approval to -proposed) for Hardy. Lionel also did a whole truck load of SRUs to fix missing translations in packages due to our migration to universe. Thanks Lionel!
So, we were able to get the first alpha out the door for Intrepid. As you probably could guess, an important part of that process is testing. Currently there isn’t anyone in particular leading up the testing efforts for Xubuntu. If you’ve got some experience under your belt, I welcome you to approach him and we can discuss how you can be a big help to Xubuntu by leading our testing efforts for Intrepid.
Speaking of Intrepid, I’ve been thinking and also bouncing around ideas with Jozmak (the fellow you probably know as the Xubuntu artwork guy. great guy!). I think I speak for Jozmak when I say it would neat if we were able to start building a Xubuntu artwork community. Nothlit (who you’ve probably associated with Mythbuntu before) seems to be moving in just that direction (thanks Nothlit!!): He has created some mockups which you can view here: http://core.joejaxx.net/~nothlit/xubuntu/ - I think they’re looking pretty sweet and I’m looking forward to seeing a SVG. What do you guys think? Any art folk out there who would be interested in getting some art stuff going for Xubuntu? If there is anything I can do to help to facilitate the growth of such a group, let me know
Oh, Xubuntu Strategy Document you say? hehe. We had our final community meetings which went exceedingly well. I was very excited to have several members of the Xfce4 development team present who gave lots of helpful input. It also allowed for us to have an awesome discussion on how to work more effectively with each other which is always a mutual net gain. So, didn’t I target an earlier date to release the final version of the strategy document? Indeed I did and I assure you the wait is almost over! Keep watching this space.
So, before I jet I’d like to thank a few more folks (like usual). Radomir Dopieralski for his awesome support work in #xubuntu and help in testing several SRUs. Charlie Kravetz for getting the end of the month team report together. Jim Campbell (naturally) for getting the Xubuntu team meetings going again. Steve Langasek for being such an awesome release manager to work with. Last but not least, everyone else who has helped contribute to making Xubuntu such an awesome, rockin’ distro
Xubuntu meeting is going on in #ubuntu-meeting right now! Come check it out and take part!
You may have already heard about the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam from Jono but I’m excited to mention that Xubuntu and Xfce4 (the awesome, wicked desktop environment Xubuntu ships) will be participating too!
It is nice to see how the Xubuntu (and by extension the upstream) community has gotten to a point where it can participate in events like this.