I, Kaj Ailomaa, apply for upload rights for the Ubuntu Studio package set

Who I am

I'm a composer/musician, currently pursuing a career in IT, with a great passion for GNU/Linux. When I'm not sitting by the computer, or making music, I try to get outdoors running or cycling.

My Ubuntu story

Being a musician and a fan of Linux based distributions, I found some problems while trying to install a suitable system for audio production. This slowly lead to me getting in touch with the Ubuntu Studio community and becoming involved in its development. I had previously been interested in software development, but did not have much experience of the administrative process involved in organized software development. During my time in Ubuntu Studio I've tried to fix problems, in both the system, and in how to easier get people involved in developing it.

My involvement

• maintainer of linux-lowlatency

• part maintainer of the ubuntustudio-* packages (team effort)

• part maintainer of the http://ubuntustudio.org website (team effort)

• part of http://launchpad.net/~ubuntustudio-core, which owns all the other ubuntustudio lp teams.

• Planning and documentation for Ubuntu Studio development
• Bugfixing for packages in the Ubuntu Studio package set
• Member of the upstream Debian Multimedia Team, with the ambition to begin maintaining packages there, as a step towards integrating Ubuntu Studio development wisely with upstream.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I'm most proud of my work for linux-lowlatency, which is the core component needed for doing serious audio work on Ubuntu. Also, organizing the development procedure, and writing docs for it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio, making sure the introduction for new contributors to Ubuntu Studio development is as pain free as possible.

I'm also glad to have been involved in giving our developer Len Ovens feedback when he did most of the work on creating our ubuntustudio-menu package, which greatly simplifies finding applications for users. A further step is to find a way to make searching for applications just as easy in any DE, perhaps by using freedesktop categories. The work continues..

I'm myself currently developing the next version of ubuntustudio-controls, in python/gtk, which should greatly simplify user control of particularly the audio system. No code for it is released yet, though.

Areas of work

So far, I've been mostly involved in Ubuntu Studio development, making changes in ubuntustudio-* packages. The last years, the top contributors to that have been Len Ovens, Scott Lavender (the previous project lead), myself, and a few others.

Since we use the xfce desktop, we tend to cooperate with Xubuntu developers, and have had some assistance from them. Especially from Micah Gersten who has been kind enough to sponsor a major amount of our package uploads, Unit193 who is quite actively communicating with Ubuntu Studio devs, and of course, the Xubuntu team lead Pasi Lallinaho, who aside from helping out with development issues also is the designer of our official website theme!

Also, since I'm maintaining linux-lowlatency, and following the official SRU process in paralell with linux-generic, I'm working fairly closely with Canonical kernel developers, especially with Adam Conrad the release manager, and Andy Whitcroft, both of who have been a great help in setting up the maintenance procedure and showing me how it's done.

I've fixed bugs for both jackd and pulseaudio, and in the latter case I've been communicating with the very helpful David Henningson.

Maintaining Ubuntu Studio packages is a fairly easy job. And we'd rather not make changes to debian imported packages in the universe repository, unless necessary - mainly when needing to fix bugs before release.

Things I could do better

Ubuntu Studio really needs more contributors, in all areas, and that is something we in the Ubuntu Studio team need to improve. Documentation for Ubuntu Studio devs needs to improve as well, as a preparation for that. I myself will be around the project for as long as I need to, and it is important to have people like that, who have experience and understanding of the process, who can act as mentors for newcomers. My goal is to grow more people like that in our community.

Plans for the future

Ubuntu Studio is probably the most popular linux based distribution aimed at multimedia production, but my goal is for it to be more of a showcase rather than a custom distro. The goal is to make as much changes upstream as possible, making it easy to set up any Debian based distribution for multimedia production. We need to change how realtime privileges are granted for users and also simplify - from a user POW, how jack applications interact with the audio system.

General

What I like least in Ubuntu

From the standpoint I have, what I like the least is the trouble a user must go through in order to make Ubuntu, or any other Debian based distro, running acceptably for low latency audio operation. Finding and setting up applications is quite a choir. All of this can be fixed by creating standards, in some cases in Debian, some cases all the way upstream with the application developers.

Comments

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Endorsements

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TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===

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