Archives par mot-clé : Trucs & astuces

Ubuntu Planet, Trucs & astuces, Ubuntu, GNU/Linux

Making new Ubuntu users happier

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When you upgrade to Ubuntu after release, or when one of your friends, family or colleagues installs it for the first time, I trust they will like many of the new features or just appreciate finding everything they need in their new Ubuntu installation. I also trust in some cases they will encounter some of the known issues which at this point (1 week before release) may not be fixed and may not make it but we need to know about. Imagine when someone mentions an issue and you can say « Yeah, I know about it. » and « I reported that bug » / « It’s in the release notes » / « We’re working on it » … « This morning’s updates fixes it » !!!

Don’t miss this opportunity !!!

Ok, this is not as exciting as getting your fingerprint reader to work or customizing window close/maximize buttons positions…

If you consider using Ubuntu 10.10 when it releases (or already do), upgrading to it, or suggesting anyone around you doing so, this would be a good time to read the Maverick Technical Overview 🙂 Making new (or existing, upgrading) Ubuntu users happier also means knowing about its issues before hand, and deciding if you stick to 10.04 LTS, wait a bit longer before upgrading, or else. How else can you help improve such knowledge ?

As many may know, most of Canonical workforce is distributed, but we often get together in sprints where we attack a specific subject. During this week at the Montreal Canonical office we’re having a special event around the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 release. We’re literally sprinting until Friday, on a very busy week during which we’ll wrap-up all the information we have from weeks of testing, bug reporting/triaging, support issues reported by customers, escalated issues, knowledgebase solutions, and more.

Lots of fun! Specially when Boris is around 😉

For our sprint this week in the Montreal support office, my team is focusing on desktop issues within the following areas, among others:

* Networking (wifi, drivers, sharing, printing..)
* Boot / install / post-install issues (upstart, GRUB*, casper..)
* Video (multi-head, setup, legacy drivers..)

Other teams are focusing on server, cloud, and more. It’s interesting Desktop and « other » areas intersect in what most would generally call « corporate » use of Ubuntu – mass deployments, OEM issues, etc. So we’ve also learned to never underestimate even the tiniest Desktop papercuts 🙂

You can see some of the issues and bugs we consider worth knowing before hand in this Delicious bookmarks feed. If you’re interested in contributing to this list, consider using Delicious and tagging with « maverick » and « bug ». We’ve also chosen some more tags representing tasks around them, for example « relnotes » for those issues already in the release notes and « norelnotes » for those without an entry, but which we consider would benefit from being there. Most importantly, please consider filing a bug against the Ubuntu Release Notes project if you feel something should be there to help evaluating going to Ubuntu 10.10.

You will instantly become a better person, I promise.

Back to what we’re doing this week, this is a bit different than most sprints in that we’re not specifically targeting finding a solution for most issues, but rather workarounds or maybe just even making a small note land in the Maverick Technical Overview (which will later become the Release Notes). Given our workflow, we’re also reporting bugs as we go, but I view that mostly as a labor of documenting existing problems, not necessarily advancing their resolution directly – at least not during this week.

So if you have a particular pet peeve that is not in our release notes or Delicious feed, please let me know, I am always interested and curious to share such information.

 
Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, Communautaire, GNU/Linux, Logiciels Libres

An invitation to join Ubuntu’s Q&A group on Shapado.com

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This is an invitation to anyone interested in joining a multi-lingual, freely-licensed Ubuntu Q&A site to check http://ubuntu.shapado.com.

As a disclaimer I should mention that I work at Canonical as a senior support analyst for Ubuntu support (both desktop and server) and I also train other people to provide Ubuntu support. I am also the admin and creator of the Ubuntu group in Shapado (10 months ago). So I constantly switch my community and professional hats 🙂

I use the Answers system in Launchpad extensively (including its FAQ facility) but it lacks two big features:

  • Non-English language support – also known as « l10n » or « localization« . That would be Bug #81419.
  • A reputation / trust system

As you can see that bug report is in an odd deadlock. My interpretation of it is Answers and Launchpad itself were not planned from the beginning to be multilingual. It’s so big now that this can’t be done quickly or easily.

The reputation system or « making Launchpad more social » is a huge feature request too, perhaps traditionally out of scope for such technically-oriented online resources (at least in the traditional Free / Open Source communities). It’s also something I am missing from my daily interactions with customers when providing commercial support.

So when I learned about Shapado I found a nice tool that could complement my advocacy needs, and some more. How is it different than Launchpad’s Answers ? To me, it’s primarily the language support, but many other features are a bonus.

Regarding the recent proposal to have an Ubuntu community in Stack Exchange, see How does Shapado compare to StackExchange ?. I honestly don’t want to join yet another English-only site that runs on non-Free software that I can’t fix or translate myself. I can’t ask anyone around me to do that either. That proposal was forwarded to the LoCo Teams contacts mailing list, asking team contacts to forward it. I am sorry but as an Ubuntu Member and Ubuntu QC contact I won’t do that. I am sticking with my principles for now, and using any free, open source alternative I can get.

So if you’re interested in using Shapado for Q&As in English but also French, Portuguese and Spanish (for now), see http://shapado.com/pages/faq and http://ubuntu.shapado.com.

If you’re interested in setting up your own local, localized Shapado Q&A server, see the installation instructions, the question asking about Ubuntu/Debian packages, and the Shapado « needs-packaging » bug report.

Here is more information on Shapado:

In true dogfood fashion, one can report bugs or make suggestions at http://shapado.com directly, just by using the « bug » or « feature-request » tags 🙂 There is also a more traditional bug tracker.

How does Shapado compare to StackExchange?

 
Ubuntu Planet, Ubuntu, Trucs & astuces, GNU/Linux

How to upgrade to Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) ?

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Introducing… The Ubuntu Upgrade Wizard 🙂

If you’ve wondered how to upgrade from from 8.04 LTS or from Ubuntu 9.10 to Lucid Lynx (soon-to-be 10.04 LTS), you may find the above link useful.

It’s a little experiment in documentation built in « Choose-your-own-Adventure » fashion. I don’t mean to replace any official docs but I’d like to have comments if anyone thinks it’s useful or how to improve it.

Upgrade Wizard wiki guide

Please note this is NOT an applications – it is only a wiki guide meant to be followed by clicking on corresponding links!

I am using this as part of a set of internal tools for support (as Canonical staff are encouraged to upgrade to beta versions during development cycles) but also as a community tool to help follow best practices.I’ve also integrated links to IRC and the Answers section of Launchpad – I believe integrating live chat and the question/answer facility may help too.

The target here is beginners but also experienced Ubuntu users that seek an easy way to help someone upgrade.

Let me know what you think.

BTW I’ve focused on 8.04LTS and 9.10 but if anyone is willing to document upgrading from the other versions using the same conventions just let me know.

 
Trucs & astuces, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, Mozilla, GNU/Linux

Thank you Ubuntu Québec and Facebook

Télévision de Radio-Canada is a Canadian French language television network. It is owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, known in French as Société Radio-Canada, or just « Radio-Canada », for the rest of us. – from Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago they launched a new web site, tou.tv, making « available » all their TV shows (or most of them)… in Flash 🙁

Never mind it’s 2010 and HTML5, Ogg Theora and in general open standards and formats are the talk of the day on most web development sites… Flash 10 is a bad enough choice as it is, but apparently tou.tv’s team just forgot that Linux existed.

Within hours of the launch Ubuntu Québec team members started complaining on the mailing list and on tou.tv’s Facebook group. We wrote to their admins, provided details, wrote to the ombudsman, got canned replies for all communications. We then put together a Facebook group, and started inviting people to join and we shared our findings (now all on a public wiki). 451 people joined the group which is an amazing number for Quebec province, given the context. I never ever thought I’d use Facebook for open formats and Linux support advocacy in such a way!

Only one programmer from the tou.tv’s team first acknowledged the problem, then asked for testers. That’s it, total silence from the tax-payers-funded TV network and website.

Within hours of the initial launch people on the mailing list had analyzed the streaming protocol, the Javascript code, etc. and ruled out problems there. To our amazement, a single commented line was preventing any shows to be displayed. Someone put together a GreaseMonkey script, someone else tested it… we went online on IRC to coordinate testing + blogging. Bottom line is we came up with a workaround. A week later tou.tv finally applied minimal fixes to unblock the Flash display on Linux systems.

The site is not perfect and now other minor issues subsist, and yes, I wish open formats were an option. For now I just wanted to thank Ubuntu for providing not only an incredible operating system but also an amazing community that made all this possible 🙂 I also wanted to thank the Free Software Foundation as we used several resources from them such as the Defective by Design web site to explain the problems associated to using DRM-like implementations of web TV sites, and the problems of not using open formats, such as Flash.

I also wanted to send a big FAIL to Radio-Canada and tou.tv’s team. To this day they don’t even mention Linux on their FAQ.

You can also find more details about this little victory of ours in my original blog post in French.

Your taxes at work!

 
Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet, Trucs & astuces, GNU/Linux

Gobby server in 3 steps

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I was tasked to examine different options for internal collaborative editing in a small project, for only a few documents and even fewer people.

I knew there was a Gobby server in Ubuntu but didn’t know it was this easy to setup. I quickly found out about Gobby-Infinote (Gobby using the new Infinote protocol) and Infinoted (server). It was really nice to be able to go to the #infinote channel on Freenode and ask questions one-on-one to the actual developpers and validate my tests! Thank you!

From Gobby’s website:

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

I performed my tests on an Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit desktop.

  1. On all client systems, install the gobby-infinote package
  2. Then on the server system, install the infinoted package
  3. Once the server is installed, either:
  • If you trust your local network and don’t want any security, launch the server using: 
    infinoted --security-policy=no-tls

    or

  • If you’d rather have encryption, TLS is available. Use: 
    infinoted --create-key --create-certificate -k key.pem  -c cert.pem

The keys creation is automatic, and you can launch the server just using:

infinoted -k key.pem  -c cert.pem

You can also specify such options in ~/.config/infinoted.conf as noted on Infinoted’s wiki (which I plan to update with some of my notes). I am not sure yet what’s best to start the server automatically at system’s startup, I am told upstart should handle this. I’ll probably file a bug or investigate that further later.

Of course your server system can be a desktop, and you can run Gobby from that same system. Once installed clients should go to Accessories > Internet > Gobby Collaborative Editor (0.5).

You will also need to install avahi-daemon so the Infinote Gobby server availability is advertised through your local network and it’s shown among possible choices in your Gobby clients.

If you have setup TLS and you double click one of the available servers that use it, you will be presented a warning as you have a self-signed certificate:

The « other » Gobby in Ubuntu is a previous, stable version (package: gobby). Its server companion, sobby, is not the focus of current development efforts.

The main differences I found are:

  • Optional TLS encryption
  • Undo ability (which required rewriting the sync protocol)
  • Interface improvements
  • Ability to delete files
  • Folder hierarchy creation now possible
  • Graceful recovery & offer to save when the server « disappears » or when someone deletes a file
  • Zeroconf support – so the server « advertises » itself on a LAN, no more IP/port info needed

The current client version in Karmic is 0.4.92 but 0.4.93 is already in Lucid and 0.4.94 is looing up.

Find out more here: