Ubuntu Wiki

I'm Scott Ritchie. You can usually find me on Freenode IRC or the Ubuntu Wine forum as YokoZar. I keep a blog that you should read, which is syndicated on Planet Ubuntu. I also have pages on Launchpad, Wine's Wiki, and Wikipedia. I am a MOTU, and while my chief interest is maintaining the Wine package and everything that is related to it, these days I find myself doing a lot more. View recent uploads in Launchpad.

I want good, usable software everywhere in Ubuntu, especially Wine -- users shouldn't even need to know they're running it. My goal is to help make Wine easy and effective enough to be an official supported package in Ubuntu. Like most developers, however, I make myself useful throughout the entire Ubuntu project, doing everything from filing bugs in other packages to drafting entire blueprints to working on the Sponsorship Queue.

Summary

If you want to get a closer idea of what I'm working on right now, you can check out my microblog and follow me on Twitter/Identi.ca

• MOTU
• Responsible for all things Wine in Ubuntu

• Moderator of [http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=313|Ubuntu Wine forum]]

• Not just the Wine guy

Interests

• I am working to improve Gnome, integrating Wine as a seamless part of the desktop. I work upstream a lot at Wine, and while there are a few others interested in usability, I'm the one who volunteered to make the changes needed outside of Wine itself.
• I would also like to improve Gnome in general - the UI design experience I have gained over the past five years in free software will be very helpful for this.
• I am a community developer, and will gladly sponsor any new package or bug fix you have, or even help you get started on packaging.

• I am helping design the user experience for the nascent Glou project so that it will be very easy to play games with your friends, even if you don't yet know which friends or which game.

• I am helping recruit modelers and improve the UI of the collection of games for the Spring engine. If you were a fan of the original total annihilation, you may be very interested in helping me free the Balanced Annihilation mod by creating models.

Targets for Karmic

• New branding packages

• karmic-wine-integration Blueprint!

I believe I can do all these in time for Karmic:

• Allow uninstallation of Windows applications through Gnome-App-Install. This way we can put all software removal in one nice, convenient place. This also allows us to eliminate the rather out of place uninstaller in the Applications->Wine menu.

• Create a good System->Preferences->Windows Applications menu to replace the relevant parts of Winecfg.

• Move Applications->Wine->Browse C:\ Drive to the Places menu and give it a consistent icon

• Once these three are done, we can remove their counterparts in the Wine menu and collapse it so the user needs fewer clicks to get to their application. So instead of Applications->Wine->Programs->Foo Company->Bar, they could instead just do Applications->Wine->Foo Company->Bar

• Get Gnome to display icons embedded into executable files. You put in a CD, and even if you have Wine installed the program has an unhelpful default icon instead of the one it normally does in Windows.

• Create a good right click->properties menu for individual executables. Here the user would be able to modify what windows version they run in, and whether that application should be able to make itself full screen or be forced into a particular window. Currently in order to run Diablo 2 in a window a user has to mess with winecfg or run a cryptic terminal command.

History of me in Ubuntu

How I got to Ubuntu

After some bad experiences attempting to contribute to Debian, I was pleasantly surprised when Jeff Waugh came directly to me and asked me to sign up for Ubuntu. That was back in the Hoary days, and I've been directly helping ever since. In the past, my contributions had mostly been making the Wine packages at winehq.org, however now I do far more. Making Wine work just right for the user involves improving many different parts of the system, and now that I am a MOTU I can work on most of them directly.

Becoming a Gnome developer

I want to make Wine the best it can be, and that means integrating it seamlessly into the Ubuntu desktop. This means a lot of work in both Wine and Gnome. After attending the Wine developer conference in 2008, I was able to convince the developers to make Wine present an interface to the system for good integration and configuration. However, someone else would have to write the changes to the desktop manager to actually make use of that - I volunteered for the job.

WineTeam

Currently, I'm the only active member of the Ubuntu Wine Team. There are about 50 people who have joined the Wine Team by clicking on launchpad, however they haven't provided any actual package improvements. At this point the team is largely unused.

Ubuntu tasks I've done that I want to remember

If it's something Wine related in Ubuntu, odds are I'm responsible for getting it done. But, like all Ubuntu developers, I occasionally dabble in other areas that I often forget about. This is a partial list of those things.

Karmic cycle

• [http://yokozar.org/blog/archives/142|Clean up the restart notifier in update-manager]

• Create a wine1.2 package with a recent Wine beta and begin merging some of my integration work in
• Create a gnome-exe-thumbnailer package to show embedded exe icons inside a generic "application" container
• Package the game Kernel Panic and the Spring engine it runs on.

Earlier

• Discuss the merit of having a "mute shutdown sound" checkbox when shutting down (if there is one)...or at least having no shutdown sound by default.

• Get community help making a free replacement to the tahoma.ttf font, like what Red Hat did with some other Microsoft fonts here: http://www.alldaycoffee.net/story.php/125

• Amd64BitWinePackage - my attempts at making a 64 bit Wine package that can run 32 bit apps.

• Nano, not vi, needs to be the default text editor for console programs throughout universe. A good example is mutt - a fairly intuitive program, until the user attempts to send an email with it and then gets dumped into a command line vi editor, where I myself couldn't even figure out how to save and quit after about 20 minutes of work. If this isn't the case with some application it is a bug

• Integrate the fancy icons posted to the mailing list by another user earlier (also need to upload a zip file somewhere since the archive is dead). Already using one of them for the Launchpad branding

• Fix shared-mime-info upstream and in Ubuntu so Wine can open .msi files: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/229062

• Upload libtorrent-rasterbar (it's still waiting for debian sponsors, and debian import freeze is soon)

• Include the Wine Gecko in the package somewhere rather than have Wine get it off the internet

Other interests

• I've been teaching myself Python for the purpose of conducting my own research into mathematical analysis of different voting systems. I plan to develop this research further as I head into grad school, and publish results as they come. I even see myself writing a book at some point, albeit that's around 4 years into the future.

• I've recently graduated college, and am actively searching for work. There's nothing I'd love to do more than work full time on Ubuntu, Wine, and supporting users at this point. I'm completely willing to work pursuing bounties for the specs I've created.
• I enjoy reading and writing short essays. Powerful writing is like a clear interface. You stop noticing the words, and instead just get the ideas.

See ScottRitchie/Work for more wikipage

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