October 2007 Team Reports

If your team is not making team reports, see these guidelines for how to do so.

The Fridge

• Upgraded Fridge software to latest Drupal release
• Created a new Fridge Theme
• Removed broken and unused modules from the main page
• Updated the Syndication module to include all supported forms of syndication and placed it at the bottom of the left column to maintain site consistency
• Improved speed and number of articles posted, including 10 Rocking Features in 10 Days

Technical Board

Meeting minutes from 2007-09-25 follow.

Agenda

• ubuntu-core-dev application for Soren Hansen
• impromptu tracker review

Members Present

• Matthew Garrett
• Mark Shuttleworth
• Matt Zimmerman

Summary

After a wandering discussion about the challenges facing Ubuntu Server, community and Canonical developers and the project in general, Soren's application was approved. Please welcome him as our newest core developer!

Mark Shuttleworth raised Tracker for discussion, which is the subject of an ongoing email exchange between the Board, upstream developers and Ubuntu developers. There remain some bugs affecting Tracker which make it unsuitable for release with Ubuntu 7.10, but the developers involve hope to have them resolved in time to keep it in the release. As a contingency plan, Tracker can be easily disabled by default via gconf if the problems are not corrected in time.

MOTU

• Cesare Tirabassi became MOTU after working hard in the MOTU team for just a few weeks.

• Travis Watkins became MOTU after working hard in the MOTU team for quite a long time.

• Søren Hansen joined the ranks of Ubuntu Core Developers.

• Having been with Ubuntu for quite a while, Philipp Kern finally is part of the MOTU team.

• A couple of bugs have been fixed in ubuntu-dev-tools (ppaput, pbuilder-dist, update-maintainer).

• Having been away for a while, Jonathan Patrick Davies MOTU membership was re-activated again. Welcome Back!

• The Telepathy team has brought us a new MOTU team member: Laurent Bigonville who has done kick-ass work already, and will make Telepathy rock even harder in the Hardy cycle.

Ubuntu-IRC

• We have not had a meeting yet this month, however the following was decided via discussion in #ubuntu-ops and over the ubuntu-irc ML.
• #ubuntu+1 was closed following Ubuntu's release and users forwarded back to #ubuntu. It will be re-opened when development begins on Hardy proper, and the channel can have a purpose.
• #ubuntu-effects was closed because compiz fusion is now officially supported, and as such will be dealt with in #ubuntu. Those using compiz outside the repositories of Ubuntu are suggested to ask in #compiz-fusion which is where the channel now forwards.

Ubuntu ServerTeam

Present and discuss ServerTeam/HardyIdeaPool page

dendrobates announced the creation of the ServerTeam/HardyIdeaPool wiki page as a way to keep track of suggestions for HardyHeron in the server area. Everybody is welcomed to add short ideas to this page. The ideas will be used to plan discussions during the next Ubuntu Developer Summit. dendrobates sent an email to ubuntu-server to ask more input from users and advertise the HardyIdeaPool page. The response has been good. As of now, ideas shouldn't be added to the wiki page anymore. Specification are currently created in LP and the schedule for UDS Boston is being finalized.

Ideas should be sent directly to rick clark to get them included in the UDS discussions (<rick DOT clark AT SPAMFREE ubuntu DOT com>).

Setup TeamReporting

mathiaz said that TeamReporting has been setup with the help of dantalizing and that the ServerTeam has a section in the monthly report.

New tasksel tasks

soren gave a quick update about the new tasksel tasks: print-server, samba-server, postgresql-server and mail-server were added to the ubuntu-server CD. dendrobates mentioned that test cases need to be written to cover these new tasks and added to the ISO tracker. mathiaz added them during the RC and final testing period.

Official MTA in Ubuntu

soren gave an update about the official MTA in Ubuntu. It was agreed that settling on a default MTA is a good idea and also that it should be postfix. We probably won't change packages to *only* change that, but if we're changing a package (and hence carrying a delta to Debian) we'll do it. Also, we'll try to convince Debian to do the same. Technically, it'll be done by adding a meta package called something like default-mail-transport-agent, which will be prepended each time something depends on m-t-a. default-mail-transport-agent will then in Ubuntu depend on postfix. Debian might choose exim4. soren will send an email on debian-devel about the change when work on Hardy will start.

Use of backport for samba

mathiaz raised the issue of using dapper-backports to provide the latest version of samba. Every now and then, bugs are filed in launchpad that ask to upgrade samba (or other packages such as mysql) to the latest version available. In the case of samba, the main issue is that dapper version doesn't support vista clients. A long discussion followed about backporting, the use of the -updates pocket and the fact that dapper-backports is not supported. No consensus was reached.

It boils down to which version of samba should be pushed in -updates. This issue will be discussed during BarCamp in Boston as upstream samba developers will be there.

mathiaz also reported that he started to package samba 3.0.26 for dapper and may push it in dapper-backports.

Bug Triagging

mathiaz went through samba bugs. He also mentioned that the automatic expiring feature in LP highlighted the fact that we still haven't gone through all bugs in packages and that further work is needed in triaging bugs related to ubuntu-server.

Iso testing

The ServerTeam has tested both the RC and final isos for Gutsy. Anyone wanting to help with iso testing should register with the iso testing tracker at https://iso.qa.stgraber.org/ and subscribe to the Ubuntu Server testcases. Everytime a new build is available, tester will be notified.

Reviewing the Server Guide

sommer and pschulz01 did some great work in reviewing the server guide. They have a list of improvements, however it's too late for Gusty since there is a Freeze for documentation. mathiaz suggested to add a section in HardyIdeaPool about documentation.

mathiaz also clarified that the community documentation in not frozen and wiki pages under help.ubuntu.com/community/ can still be edited and improved for Gutsy.

AppArmor status

mathiaz gave an update about AppArmor. The new kernel module has been uploaded and he is happy about the state of AppArmor. keescook is also satisfied with the state of AppArmor in Gutsy.

LDAP authentification

dendrobates announced that libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap have been accepted into main and are in the seed. As a result ldap-client-config and auth-client-config are in Gutsy and LDAP authentication is officially supported.

Screencast Team

• Meeting held on 24th Sept: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam/Meeting20070924

• Applied to become an official team. Rejected at 3 votes to 2.

• Started spec for Screencasts In Ubuntu

• New screencast contributions received and uploaded for Xubuntu
• Updated the site with new translations of subtitles (many Romanian ones for example)
• Filed RT #29230 to get screencast hosting moved "in house" to better manage the drupal install of the site
• Experienced site slow down due to popularity of screencasts and inappropriate hosting configuration
• Had hosting of static content moved to a separate xen domain (also part of rt #29230)
• Discussed ways to improve screencast request and processing prior to production.

Mythbuntu

• Release of the beta, and rc for Mythbuntu 7.10
• Bug fixing
• Formed new development channel #ubuntu-mythtv-dev to separate development and support from #ubuntu-mythtv

• Opened up forums at http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=301

• Preparing final Mythbuntu 7.10 release for shortly after Ubuntu 7.10 release

Ubuntu X Team

• Fixing several high profile bugs (like 127008 and 127101)

• Wrote X/Debugging - The Ubuntu X Debugger's Handbook

• Discussing Hardy plans

Mobile Team

• Status report for week 2007-09-27 to 2007-10-04

• Build infrastructure

Worked on fixing the infrastructure so we can have non-public images with proprietary bits in them.

• Mobile development environment

Handed this off to Steve Kowalik

• UME kernel

Added lpiacompat flavour for mccaslins Tested the lpia and lpiacompat kernels on Samsung Q1 and Crownbeach Fixed some configs - VM86, stock DRI, madwifi support, etc.

• Moblin Image Creator

Switched over to using LPIA when creating platforms and targets. Some GUI improvements were mad

• Moblin.org

Packages are now being built with LPIA architecture.

• Moblin Applets (moblin-utilities)

Three remaining plugins expected before Oct 12: volume status bar, brightness status bar, and touchscreen calibration applets. The first two will be taken from gnome-applets with all the bonobo interface code stripped out, the last will come from gnome-control-center's mouse caplet combined with evtouch code.

• Applet Updates
  • Network: Network and Date/Time are now just links to the gnome-system-tools executables.
• UI and Apps

  • UI

    • Grid-layout / html Home Screen: Much progress on this home screen UI this week.

  

  • We can now show and start applications. This is based on the same gtkmozembed plugin that hosts the current flash UI. I built the changes into mobile_basic_flash package which name should be changed eventually to reflect its new abilities (e.g. mobile_mozembed_home), but will wait until after gutsy so that we don't have to introduce a new package at this late hour. Switching between html and flash is just a matter of pointing to a different startup page. Package will be ready for use on moblin this afternoon. Will work to get it into UME soon after. Still could use a couple of official graphics for background from Ken.
  • Clutter Home Screen:
    • Initial code drop exists on moblin.org, but not yet integrated into home screen. You can build and play with:

     'git clone http://moblin.org/repos/projects/moblin-clutter-home.git/'

    • To launch on desktop, start application with "desktop-launcher -w" otherwise it will take over your desktop. I requested libclutter-0.4.2 related libraries for gutsy. Not sure if it is too late for approval. This process took a long time

    Theme: Not sure of the status of the theme. Need to get that finished. I know there are some new components that should be considered such as home screen button backgrounds. Bug with current flash UI: We are trying to resolve a big bug with performance when the current UI is running. CPU is 10-35% when just idle on flash UI and application startup on crown beach is dismal. We think we tracked it down to something that occurs when "loadConfig" is run in flash. Hopefully this is a simple fix. We also found a bug when the flashUI didn't start successfully and a setTimeout call was triggered every 1/1000th of a second.

    Apps Chat: No progress I know of since the owner is out of the office this week. Media Viewer: Some new features have been added but currently the package is broken. Will get back running soon. Still needs UI makeover which Jason is working full-time on. Our goal is to give it an extreme UI makeover by mid next week. Other comments:

    • I built LPIA build this week and tried to run Claws. It didn't seem to be Hildonized. Need to figure out why. I plan to create a UI spec with suggestions on things such as menu layout for common elements (File, View, Settings, About, Quit) and toolbar icon sizes, etc.

    • To Do:

      • 1 Get Grid-layout UI usable. Any day now. I assumed it would be yesterday but ran into small bugs around changing the background repeatedly. Should checkin today. 2 Make sure we resolve the performance bug. Hopefully this goes away with the non-flash UI. We will still try to resolve, but it will fall to a lesser priority. 3 Go through remaining UI elements and finish bug fixing for gutsy launch. Mainly: marquee needs tweaking, theme needs to be completed. 4 Start work to get clutter UI to a usable state so people can start commenting and we can discuss the exciting post-gutsy future of the home screen!
• Thermal Extensions

Still on track for delivery around WW41/Week of Oct 8th

• Graphics Driver

Development on track for possible schedule pull in. Intel is working internally to determine new delivery date

• USB Client

Continued work on bug fixing and validation of both driver and utility software.May be able to pull in schedule and make this available early. Intel is working internally to determine new delivery date.

• Midbrowser Status

Implemented UI changes to preference tabs. Jimmy is working on replacing the network proxy setting with gconf.

Investigated "panning" support for Midbrowser. Found out that someone has implemented "panning" support for Minimo, I Will see what it takes to incorporate that into Midbrowser.

Analyzed incoming bugs. Will be in bug fixing mode in the next couple of weeks.

• IRC Summary 4th October

Mithrandir welcomed David Mandala as the new UME Project Manager. His role will be to take over from mdz in managing the engineering team for Ubuntu Mobile. He also welcomed Steven Kowalik who's joining UME full-time working on mobile and Loïc Minier, who will be working 50/50 on desktop and mobile.

There were no Action Items from the last meeting.

Mithrandir requested that status reports were sent earlier than 'the last minute' to the list.

Bob Spencers request for libclutter-0.4.2 in Gutsy was approved by Mithrandir

mdz wanted it noted that we are in an increasingly deep freeze for ubuntu 7.10 while this shouldn't affect development on mobile-specific components too much, changes to shared components will be scrutinized the release goes out on the 18th, after which things will soften again

Mithrandir believes moblin-media will be in the repo's tomorrow and requested Happy Camp to let him know before pushing stuff into the repo's so that work is not duplicated

The broken kernel and the problem of testing kernels on lpia will be discussed at UDS. amit said requiring MID testing is an easy and cheap solution - all it requires is a .deb package being tested on real hardware and that part of the problem was the sudden turning ON of lpia for MIC builds although this was in the schedule. The lesson to be learned is make changes as early as possible.

Mithrandir thought it might be interesting to see midbrowser builds based on gecko 1.9 and asac will decide on this

• Status report for week 2007-10-04 to 2007-10-11

• Moblin Chat

Add moko finger scroll feature to roster view. Integrating empathy-0.14 feature is half way. It's big change and have to do piece by piece and verify one by one. One big thing might be first support of Voip support from empathy upstream. Voip integration is still under way.

• Moblin Applets Volume status bar applet: Added a volume status bar icon and slider based on the mixer applet from the gnome-applets package. Removed the bonobo and Panel Applet interfaces and replaced them with the Hildon status bar API. Also removed all dependencies on gstreamer and replaced it with direct calls to the /dev/mixer device. Screen Brightness status bar applet: Added a screen brightness status bar icon and slider based on the brightness applet from the gnome-power-manager package. Removed the bonobo and Panel Applet interfaces and replaced them with the Hildon status bar API. Also removed any dependencies on the gnome power manager and replaced the low level brightness calls with DBUS calls directly to HAL. Touchscreen configuration control panel applet: Danny Varner has been working on adding a touchscreen configuration utility to moblin-applets. He has identified the evtouch calibration utility as the best source base and has adapted it for use on moblin. The utility will make changes to xorg-samsungq1ultra.conf and control the /dev/touchscreen driver. Soft Keyboard support in the keyboard control panel applet: Jian Han has added a new tab to the keyboard configuration applet which allows for configuration of the soft keyboard. The user can select whether or not to autolaunch the soft keyboard and can select its layout.
• Moblin Image Creator
  • Add an "uninstall" Makefile target which does the same thing as the "cleanall" target. If the sources_cfg file has an error in it, we want to crash. Otherwise people don't realize that they made an error in their file Create a sample ~/.image-creator/sources_cfg file if none exists. Use the linux-lpiacompat kernel for the Mc Caslin kernel Disable the internationalization init stuff, since we are not using internationalization at the moment. Updated the README file with information on how to speedup image-creator using a local mirror of Ubuntu Remove the -q/quiet option since we aren't honoring it. Maybe in the future we can bring it back. moblin-media is the new name for mobile-player, updated the FSETs accordingly. Added a config file option to control the verbosity of the tar command during save/load projects. The default verbosity is silent.
  • Troubleshot issue with ume user not being created correctly, traced it down to an error in the user-setup package. Tollef was nice enough to work with the package maintainer to get that fixed.
• Mobile Kernel

lpia flavour moved to custom build to allow easier patching configuration bugs related to MSS, PSB fixed.

• USB Client Status

Alpha USB Client driver available in Moblin on November 2, 2007.

• Mobile build infrastructure:

We now have the ability to provide builds which contains bits which are not in the archive, which then makes it possible for us to provide builds with the Adobe flash player, etc.

• UI

UI Grid-layout / html Home Screen: Working now. Recognizes theme and background change. Requires hildon-theme-mobile-basic for button button background graphics. Still to be done:

• - Set the default theme as this UI reads the theme from gconf and currently UME default theme is the non-existent Human theme. - show some small animated gif when application is launching - listen for notification when application has completed launching to turn off animation - Request upload into gutsy

• If you install the latest mobile-basic-flash package from moblin.org you will get this UI by default.

Clutter Home Screen: Have got it working on my Q1 after getting the hardware accel driver. Clutter 0.4+ libraries have been included in gutsy

• Current issues:
  • - Touch screen isn't sensitive enough to give me the light iPhone touch feeling. I often have to use my fingernail to grab the objects - UI is jerky. When you try to roll the objects left/right they stall, then burst. - actor objects often get misplaced and then bunched at the beginning - location highlight at the bottom of the screen is misplaced - big animation look a little to Apple-MAC like. We'd like to get it to look more like a rolling ring of icons

    - the /etc/xdb/menus/*.menu file doesn't match well with our applications. We need to add a "MobileApp" category to applications and filter them for showing on the home screen - when launching the applications the code to detect if it was successfully launched is imperfect

Theme: Chatted with Ken about theme. He is highly frustrated with our current status and apparent miscommunication. Need to resolve how to get something in the short term and then fix the long term process issues.

• Bug with current flash UI: We found and fixed the performance but with the flash UI.

• Media Viewer: Have new graphics we are trying to put into application/UI. Many new features working now including thumbnail view.

Other comments:

• - I built LPIA build again this and still no Hildon Claws. We put a couple of guys on this to try and get a last-minute upgrade of basic features and it would be nice if we could see the Hildon version in our images.

From last week's To Do:

• 1) Get Grid-layout UI usable. Any day now. I assumed it would be yesterday but ran into small bugs around changing the background repeatedly. Should checkin today. (Done) 2) Make sure we resolve the performance bug. Hopefully this goes away with the non-flash UI. We will still try to resolve, but it will fall to a lesser priority. (Done) 3) Go through remaining UI elements and finish bug fixing for gutsy launch. Mainly: marquee needs tweaking, theme needs to be completed. (Still in progress) 4) Start work to get clutter UI to a usable state so people can start commenting and we can discuss the exciting post-gutsy future of the home screen! (Lots of work ahead)

• Midbrowser

A new Midbrowser release has been uploaded to the Gusty repository this week. Test and Bug fixing mode. Working on enabling the prefs extension to replace network setting dialog with gconf.

• Thermal Extensions

Code entering Internal validation cycle Scheduled for external release Nov 2, 2007

• IRC Summary 11th October

bspencer mentioned that two Flash performance bugs were resolved...one was setTimeout (fn, 1) which got called every 1/1000 of a second when there wasn't flash and the other was in was in the flash movie itself where each icon loaded a startup animation in the background that was running. So if you had 10 icons, you also had 10 running hidden movies

A launching application bug has highest priority now (when launching an application multiple times, multiple instances are created instead of just the 1)

The default HTML UI is scheduled for upload to Gutsy on Monday although the default hildon-theme-mobile-basic is now in the archive

Private builds were mentioned as a way of stuffing anything which isn't in the archive into a build.

mdz raised the question of the awkward period where there is a lot of churn in hardy, prior to the first milestone and wondered whether we can just tolerate that, or if we should make some arrangements to temporarily continue development based on 7.10 in order to keep things moving....the solution chosen was to continue to build on Gutsy, supplemented by a PPA, during the transition from gutsy to hardy

lool to prepare new hildon-desktop and davidm, tfheen to test it

Peter_u3 to talk to telepathy upstream about new libtelepathy.

• Status report for week 2007-10-11 to 2007-10-18

• Mobile kernel status

No change

• Thermal Extensions Status

Linux kernel changes for thermal extensions released for validation. Internal code review is complete and rework completed. Validation cycle started Planned external release: November 2, 2007

• USB Client Status

Availability of USB Client driver has slipped to November 5, 2007

• Chat

No update

• Theme

By modifying hilon-theme-layout-4, a new hildon-theme-ume-basic package is delivered which accomodates all new pictures added for marquee-plugins and moblin-media and new layout in addition to standard gtk/hildon widget pictures.It has advanced the existing hildon-theme-mobile-basic because it's the first time we use hildon-theme-layout-4 and hildon-theme-tools to automatically build the huge pieces of pictures for a theme from a single template picture. Todo, after Ken adds marquee/media pics to template picture and new layout.txt, I will update hildon-theme-ume-basic and hildon-theme-layout-4 accordingly.

• Midbrowser status

Continued with test and bug fix. Worked with Jimmy to check-in the mobile-media-player-browser plugin. From now on, when you click on a media link, the moblin media player will be used to view the media content. We found a patch for the prefs extension from Suse. This will allow the browser to use gconf to handle network setting. We tested it and it appears to work.

• UI Hildon Desktop: We wanted the latest hildon-destkop code from upstream into gutsy and worked to get this to happen, but in the 11th hour we weren't able to verify and fix all the issues. Many thanks to Loic Minier for his help getting together. We did updated hildon-desktop to add some small patches to show the volume and brightness controls in the statusbar. We are now in a position to relook at hildon-desktop and do some cleanup, etc.

  Grid-layout / HTML: HTML version of UI in gutsy is simple but functional. Still needs rework to remove the mobile-basic-flash/applications directory and add a "MobileApp" category (or something similar) in the normal .desktop file Clutter Home Screen: Moving forward and will get some focus this week. Still has too many bugs to be usable. Theme: See status in Peter's email. Apps

  • Media Viewer: Working version into gutsy with some new graphics. Our misunderstandings of how theming and images should work have delayed a more beautiful solution, but we're making headway. Still fixing many bugs and misunderstandings in how we want it to look/behave. Suggestions welcome on media player. Design and Look/Feel: If we are going to have applications with a common look/feel, simple ,finger-friendly navigation, and be polished and professional looking (NOT open source application look), we are going to need to dedicate real time to improve core applications. We need to agree how to get to this stage. Until then our collection of apps looks quite ad hoc. Overall, a big thanks to Matthew Garrett who patiently helped us get our components into gutsy. We are planning ahead now so we don't require such last-minute help in the next release.

  IRC Summary 18th October

davidm first meeting as chair

lool said the new upstream releases brought many many changes so merging was taking some time...hildon-desktop saw a major rewrite in Hildon 2...need to update all our modules; this is a pre-requisite to send our fixes upstream

tfheen to get download area for proprietary builds set up

modifications dine to hildonized apps and who should own them..the example cited was claws and the design smagoun sent to the list this will be reviewed at UDS

Also Testing will be reviewed at UDS

There will be further discussion of Application development and upstream at UDS ...particularly in relation to merging changes upstream

Don_Johnson to report back on Expected USB Client functionalities

Ubuntu Women

• There was no meeting yet this month, however, the following issues were discussed in our mailing list:
• Lyz is working on a joint effort with the Ubuntu Classroom Project
• Vid is working on an article about Ubuntu-women for the full-circle magazine
• Lyz is preparing a session about Ubuntu-women for the Ubuntu Open Week

US LoCo Teams Project

• October Report and Metrics October Report

  US LoCo Teams celebrated the release of 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Gutsy Release Parties and continue to beyond the release date October 18th, 2007.

  Engaged in discussion, for a second time, on how teams handle money and reduce exposure to liability. This was discussed during the US Teams October 04 meeting.

  A US Teams meeting was held on October 04 mostly to discuss how teams handle money and reduce exposure to liability. Minutes for October 04 Meeting Oct 04 Meeting Logs

  Ubuntu Florda Team was officially approved as of September 27th, 2007.

  Ubuntu Massachusetts Team is an officially approved team as of October 9th, 2007

Full Circle Magazine

• Short meeting held on Saturday 13th October - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuMagazine/FullCircleMeetingLogs/MeetingSeven

• Editor has a fresh install of Gutsy and did reinstall of scribus-ng for issue #6, this unfortunately installed 1.3.4 which is very unstable so from issue #7 we will return to 1.3.3.9, sorry for the inconvenience to the translators.

• Chinese, Italian and German translations of issue #5 now up at http://www.fullcirclemagazine.org

• Next meeting scheduled for Saturday 10th November with #7 deadline being the day after (Sunday 11th November). #7 scheduled for release on Friday 30th November.
• James Savage is in talks with a writer who would like to write a series of GIMP articles.
• Have received a few new articles and an excellent interview for #7.
• Full Circle Podcast Proposal will end soon and the winner will be announced on Wednesday 31st October.
• A list of current team members has been added to the last page of the magazine.