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
