One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer.  Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis.  MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to the PS3.  So I put together a package of a subversion snapshot in my PPA which should work on Intrepid.

With the newer package, it was pretty easy to get things working:

1. Install the mediatomb-daemon package
2. Edit the /etc/mediatomb/config.xml file and make the following changes:
   • Change the <protocolInfo/> line to set extend=”yes”.
   • In the <extension-mimetype> section, uncomment the line to map “avi” to “video/divx”.  This will get a lot of videos to play without problem.
   • In the <mimetype-upnpclass> section, add a line to map “application/ogg” to “object.item.audioItem.musicTrack”.  This is needed for the vorbis files to be recognised as music.
   • In the <mimetype-contenttype> section add a line to map “audio/L16″ to “pcm”.
   • On the <transcoding> element, change the enabled attribute to “yes”.
   • Add the settings from here to the <transcoding> section.
3. Edit the /etc/default/mediatomb script and set INTERFACE to the network interface you want to advertise on.
4. Restart the mediatomb daemon.
5. Go to the web UI (try opening /var/lib/mediatomb/mediatomb.html in a web browser), and add the directories you want to export.
6. Test things on the PS3.

Things aren’t perfect though.  As MediaTomb is simply piping the transcoded audio to the PS3, it doesn’t implement seeking on such files, and it seems that the PS3 won’t even let you pause a stream that doesn’t allow seeking.  With a less generalised transcoding backend, it seems like it should be trivial to support seeking in an uncompressed PCM stream though, since the byte offsets can be trivially mapped to sample numbers.

The other problem I found was that none of the recent music I’d ripped showed up.  It seems that they’d been ripped with the .oga file extension rather than .ogg.  This change appears to have been made in bug 543306, but the reasoning seems suspect: the guidelines from Xiph indicate that the files generated by this encoding profile should continue to use the .ogg file extension.

I tried adding some extra mappings to the MediaTomb configuration file to recognise the files without success, but eventually decided to just rename them and fix the encoding profile locally.

A Perfect Media Server

While MediaTomb mostly works for me, it doesn’t do everything I’d like.  A few of the things I’d like out of a media server include:

1. No need to configure things via a web UI.  In fact, I could do without a web UI all together – something nicely integrated into the desktop would be nice.
2. No need to set model specific settings in the configuration file.  Ideally it would know how to talk to common players by default.
3. Supports transcoding and seeking within transcoded files.  Preferably knows what needs transcoding for common players.
4. Picks up new files in real time.  So something inotify based rather than periodic reindexing.
5. A virtual folder tree for music based on artist/album metadata. A plain folder tree for other media would be fine.
6. Cached video thumbnails would be nice too.  The build of MediaTomb in my PPA includes support for thumbnails (needs to be enabled in the config file), but they aren’t cached so are slow to appear.

Perhaps Zeeshan’s media server will be worth trying out at some point.

I just want to spend a few minutes sharing a wonderful story that Stani Michiels emailed me about earlier and which he blogged about here.

Stani entered a competition in Holland to design a commemorative coin and produced an absolutely astonishingly beautiful entry, and one with aesthetics, class, metaphor and meaning. This in itself is incredible, but the whole shebang was achieved using Free Software and all running on Ubuntu.

See, you can make money with Open Source.

Folks, head over to Stani’s blog and tell him how cool he is.

So, finally, tomorrow is the day!

We’ll be partying @ FreeCode and have invited all of our customers, friends and family to join us celebrating the release of Intrepid and Ubuntu’s 4th birthday!

If you are nearby just come around and have fun with us. We’ll be having talks, an ubuquiz, a foosball tournament, demos of Intrepid, a mini-installfest and pizza and Ubuntu Cola for everyone! - Party starts at 17.00

I want to send a big THANK YOU to the whole Ubuntu Community: The world is  a better place, thanks to all of you!

Now, formalities: Visit the wiki, Ubuntu Norge,  the UbuCon@FreeCode page; see the UbuCon program,  and here’s the map if you want to know where it is.

Party on, the Ibex ROCKS!

      

Laura Cowen, Alan Pope, Dave Walker and Tony Whitmore present the seventeenth episode of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community Support Team.

In a break from our usual format, in this special episode from the “Creative Pro Expo featuring Mac Live Expo and Linux Live Expo” (yes, that honestly is the real name of the event!) we have:-

• An enlightening discourse about content management with Ryan Ozimek from the Joomla! CMS project
• An expansive interview with Simon Riggs from the PostgreSQL database project
• An enabling discussion with Tarus Balog from the OpenNMS network monitoring project
• An entertaining conversation with Phil Hands from the Debian project - a little known Linux distribution some of you may have heard of
• We also announce the winner of the competition. There’s no competition in this episode, because with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10 - we’re ALL winners!

As these segments were recorded during the Expo there is some inevitable background noise. We should be back to the quiet echo of Tony’s living room in the next episode!

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Follow us on Identi.ca http://identi.ca/uupc
Discuss this episode in the Forums

Laura Cowen, Alan Pope, Dave Walker and Tony Whitmore present the seventeenth episode of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community Support Team. In a break from our usual format, in this special episode from the "Creative Pro Expo featuring Mac Live Expo and Linux Live Expo" (yes, that honestly is the real name of the event!) we have:- An enlightening discourse about content management with Ryan Ozimek from the Joomla! CMS project An expansive interview with Simon Riggs from the PostgreSQL database project An enabling discussion with Tarus Balog from the OpenNMS network monitoring project An entertaining conversation with Phil Hands from the Debian project - a little known Linux distribution some of you may have heard of We also announce the winner of the competition. There's no competition in this episode, because with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10 - we're ALL winners! As these segments were recorded during the Expo there is some inevitable background noise. We should be back to the quiet echo of Tony's living room in the next episode! Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986 Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc Follow us on Identi.ca http://identi.ca/uupc Discuss this episode in the Forums

Well, it's too early to congratulate to the Release of "Intrepid Ibex" aka Ubuntu 8.10, but before the planet will be swamped with release posts, here from a very happy Ubuntu User, Contributor, Developer (with/for), SysAdmin:

THANK YOU!

 

Thanks for making me and other people happy. Thanks to any Contributor of Ubuntu. Thanks to the Launchpad Development Crew.

You all do a great work and you can be proud of yourself.

Just 5 Mins ago, my colleague (who is just sitting in the office with me) told me: "Stephan, I have to say "Thank You" to you, because you work on Ubuntu. A friend of mine just forced me to tell you that."

This is what drives me. People are thankful, that someone is doing the work on a piece of "art".

To quote Jorge:

YOU ARE AWESOME!

 

I'm trying to create a french version of intrepid for ubuntu-fr. But after tests, I'v found one major problem. Decompress and re-compress the iso, without doing any changes/modifications, resulting in an iso that can not launch gnome-session.

Here are steps :

• sudo apt-get install squashfs-tools mkisofs
• sudo modprobe squashfs
• cd ~
• wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/intrepid-desktop-i386.iso
• mkdir ~/live
• cd ~/live
• mkdir mnt
• sudo mount -o loop ~/intrepid-desktop-i386.iso mnt
• mkdir extract-cd
• rsync --exclude=/casper/filesystem.squashfs -a mnt/ extract-cd
• mkdir squashfs
• sudo mount -t squashfs -o loop mnt/casper/filesystem.squashfs squashfs
• mkdir edit
• cp -av squashfs/* edit/
• sudo umount squashfs
• sudo umount mnt

And now re-compress :

• sudo mksquashfs edit extract-cd/casper/filesystem.squashfs -nolzma
• cd extract-cd
• sudo mkisofs -r -V "Intrepid Fr" -cache-inodes -J -l -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o ../ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386-fr.iso .

Test the iso with qemu/virtualbox. Xorg cursor is visible, but xorg or gnome-session crash. Any ideas ?

Folks, we are really pleased to announce…Ubuntu Open Week!

Ubuntu Open Week is a week of IRC tuition and Q+A sessions all about getting involved in the rock-and-roll world that is the Ubuntu community. We organise this week for the beginning of a new release cycle to help new contributors get involved. Thanks to Jorge for helping to get the week together and for everyone who is helping to run sessions. Its going to be a fun week!

So, the most important details first - Ubuntu Open Week happens from Mon 3 Nov - Fri 7 Nov and takes place in #ubuntu-classroom on the Freenode IRC network. You can use a program such as XChat-GNOME in Ubuntu to connect and get involved.

So which sessions are scheduled? Well, the timetable is available here and the sessions include:

Monday

• Introduction and Welcome - Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community manager, will kick off the week with a short welcome and give you a quick tour of what to expect during OpenWeek.
• Ubuntu behind the Scenes - You have some ideas and want to see them included in Ubuntu but don’t know how or just wondered how the ubuntu developers make this awesome distro, this is the right place to know what happens under the hood.
• Reporting and Fixing Kernel Bugs - Leann Ogasawara will touch on kernel bug reporting best practices and getting fixes incorporated into the Ubuntu kernel.
• Ubuntu on Ultra Mobile PCs - Oliver Grawert will explain the ins and outs of getting Ubuntu on UMPCs
• Version Control with Bazaar - The very basics of using Bazaar. Learn how to take “snapshots” of your most important code and files..and how to roll back time to undo those changes.
• Bazaar: Beyond The Basics - Following on from Emma Jane Hogbin’s Bzr basics, DavidFutcher guides you through some of the more “advanced” Bzr topics.

Tuesday

• Edubuntu - Overview of the Edubuntu project, its purpose, and how you can get involved with this small, but vital community. “Do it for the kids”
• Packaging 101 - Daniel Holbach, who is very interested in the growth of the Ubuntu Development Community, will talk you through the bare bone essentials of Ubuntu’s source packages.
• Debian and Ubuntu - What is Debian? What is the importance of Debian to Ubuntu? How you can contribute to Debian?
• An Intrepid journey in Ubuntu Server land - a retrospective of the features that the Ubuntu Server team worked on during the last release cycle and an outlook on what will follow.
• Media Prodution on Ubuntu - A look at how Ubuntu can be used for all sorts of media, including photo processing and management, video capture and editing and audio recording and processing. This session will include a Q&A.

Wednesday

• Polishing a Package - Lots of packages in Ubuntu have outstanding bugs, and outstanding available patches. Emmet Hikory will demonstrate the process of ensuring that a package is the best it can be, including a review of available resources for package improvements.
• Ubuntu Netbook Remix Overview - Learn about Ubuntu’s offering for netbooks, with UNR Product Manager Pete Goodall and Engineers Bill Filler and Neil Patel.
• Upstreaming Bugs - Ubuntu is a collection of software from a multitude of upstream projects (Like GNOME, KDE, Linux, Xorg) that is put together and released every 6 months. In this talk I will talk about how you can help be a bridge between Ubuntu and these projects by ensuring that bugs, patches, and feedback gets from Ubuntu to them.
• Ubuntu Brainstorm Q+A, becoming moderator - You have some question about Ubuntu Brainstorm? You want to become moderator? This will be the right time to ask!

Thursday

• sabdfl Question and Answer - Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu will take questions from attendees in this two hour block.
• Wine - How to help with Wine, converting Windows applications into packages, Integrating Wine into the desktop.
• Verifying Stable Update (SRU) bugfixes - Walking through the process of verifying an update for released versions of packages.
• Cruft. What is it and why it sucks - An overview of cruft, how its made, how it is handled, what NBS is, how to do a removal
• Cruft Removal 101 Workshop - A crash course in removing cruft with actual packages staged in a PPA. Learn how to do from the pros.

Friday

• Fixing a bug in Ubuntu - it’s easier than you think - You want to get involved in Ubuntu, you’d like to fix a few bugs? Excellent, Daniel Holbach will show you how push the right buttons, talk to the right people and be part of the team.
• REVU Q+A - Open Q&A about http://revu.ubuntuwire.com (the website where new packages are reviewed for inclusion into Ubuntu).
• Translations and Internationalization with Launchpad - MikeRooney - A guide from start (an English-only application) to finish (a translated localized application) using Launchpad to coordinate and gather community translations.
• Kernel: From Intrepid to Jaunty - Ben Collins - A review of what the kernel team did different during intrepid’s development cycle, what we learned and what we plan to change in jaunty.
• Open Week Questions and Feedback - Jorge Castro - In this session we will get feedback from attendees on things you’d like to see in OpenWeek; what types of topics you would like to see next time and recommendations on how to make OpenWeek better.

I look forward to seeing you all there!

The following list is merely a small selection of scholarly articles listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge with "invisible hand" in their title:

• Beyond the Reach of the Invisible Hand
• The Real Invisible Hand: Presidential Appointees in the Administration of George W. Bush
• The Invisible Hand of God, Visible in the History of Chemotherapy
• Does the Latex Glove Fit the Invisible Hand? Application of Market Ideology to the Doctor/Patient Relationship.
• One-Armed Economists and the Invisible Hand.
• Subjective Image of Invisible Hand Coded By Monkey Intraparietal Neurons
• Exploitation - The Invisible Hand Guided By a Blind Eye: Confronting a Flaw in Economic Theory
• The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
• The 'Invisible Man' and the Invisible Hand - H.G. Wells's Critique of Capitalism
• The Dilemmas of Laissez-Faire Population Policy in Capitalist Society: When the Invisible Hand Controls Reproduction.
• Hong Kong Government Policy and Information Technology Innovation: The Invisible Hand, the Helping Hand, and the Hand-Over to China
• Helping Russian Students See the Invisible Hand.
• Hailing with an Invisible Hand: A 'Cosy' Political Dispute Amid the Rise of Neoliberal Politics in Modern Ireland
• Adam Smith's Invisible Hand Is Unstable: Physics and Dynamics Reasoning Applied to Economic Theorizing
• Offering an Invisible Hand: the Rise of the Personal Choice Model for Rationing Public Benefits
• From the Invisible Handshake to the Invisible Hand? How Import Competition Changes the Employment Relationship
• Invisible Hand Effect in an Evolutionary Minority Game Model
• Did the Invisible Hand Rock the Cradle?
• Internet: The Invisible Hand of Deliberation
• The Invisible Hand Has Already Wreaked Much Havoc - About Adam Smith
• Gaussen's Invisible Hand: The University Mechanics and Machine Inspector Moritz Meyerstein: An Instrument Maker in the 19th Century.
• "The Invisible Hand" of the Market or "The Ever-Present Hand" of Management (On New Discussions and Methods in the Field of Economic History)
• Statin Utilisation - Recognising the Role of the Invisible Hand
• The Universe's Invisible Hand.
• How Did the Invisible Hand Handle Industrial Waste? By-Product Development Before the Modern Environmental Era
• When Iron Fist, Visible Hand, and Invisible Hand Meet: Firm-Level Effects of Varying Institutional Environments in China
• Behavioural Genetics: Evolutionary Fingerprint of the 'Invisible Hand'
• The Hunting of Forbidden Books. Censored Books, Persecuted Books, the Story Written By the Invisible Hand
• Identification of Pareto-Improving Policies: Information as the Real Invisible Hand
• The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand: Anonymous Market Mechanisms and Dark Powers
• The Other Invisible Hand, Delivering Public Services Through Choice
• Reviving the Invisible Hand: the Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century
• Plant Science - The "Invisible Hand" of Floral Chemistry
• Suppressive Effect of Multimodal Surface Representation on Ocular Smooth Pursuit of Invisible Hand
• The Visible Versus the Invisible Hand - A Tension Inherent in Modern Economies
• The Invisible Hand and the Grabbing Hand
• A Close Eye on the Invisible Hand
• The Contracts of Credit in a Long Term Relationship From the Invisible Hand to the Handshake
• Chile's New Entrepreneurs and the "Economic Miracle": The Invisible Hand or a Hand From the State?
• The Invisible Hand or Hands Across the Water, American Consultants and Irish Economic-Policy
• How Would the Invisible Hand Handle Money
• A Helping Hand for the Invisible Hand
• Measuring the Speed of the Invisible Hand - The Macroeconomic Costs of Price Rigidity
• The Invisible Hand Turns Green - Using Economic Instruments to Conserve the Environment
• The Invisible Hand Made Visible, the 'Birth-Mark'
• Trembling Invisible Hand Equilibrium
• Guiding the Invisible Hand - Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin-American History
• The 'Invisible Hand Meets the Dead Hand High Above Washington D.C.'
• From the Invisible Hand to the Gladhand - Understanding a Careerist Orientation to Work
• Public-Sector Reform - Not So Invisible Hand
• Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand
• Economics as Ideology - On Making the Invisible Hand Invisible
• The Invisible Hand - Poetics and Narration of Verga, the Novelist
• Invisible Hand, Invisible Death
• The Invisible Hand Strikes Back - Motor Insurance and the Erosion of Organized Competition in General Insurance, 1920-38
• The Creeping Invisible Hand - Entrepreneurial Librarianship
• The Speed of the Invisible Hand
• From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet - Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development
• Invisible Hand, the Marijuana Business
• The Invisible Hand in San Francisco.
• The Invisible Hand That Feeds the Cults - Messianic Capitalism
• Can an Invisible Hand Palpate the Carotid Pulse
• Invisible Hand or Fatherly Hand - Problems of Paternalism in the New Perspective on Health
• Palm-Reading the Invisible Hand - A Critical-Examination of Pro-Competitive Reform Proposals
• The Market as Messiah: The Invisible Hand Strikes Again.
• Federal Legislation and Investment Policy - Far-From-Invisible Hand of Congress and Treasury
• Shaking Hands with Invisible Hand - Transitional Strategies for Global Social-Change - Questions and Issues
• Invisible Hand and Clenched Fist - Is There a Safe Way to Picket Under First Amendment
• Institutional Change and Quasi-Invisible Hand

And, finally:

• What's Wrong with Invisible-Hand Explanations?

Edubuntu at Ubuntu Open Week

My good friend Jorge Castro asked me to fill the last slot for Ubuntu Open Week. I’m a big fan of Open Weeks and participated in a few of the first ones. This time I’ll be talking about Edubuntu, one of most interesting and potentially impactful projects I’ve ever worked on. The session is November 4th at 15:00 UTC so please stop by if you’re interested in education or looking for nice little community to make a difference in.

Edubuntu Meeting

Coincidentally, the day after the Open Week presentation we’re having an Edubuntu meeting on IRC.
Where: #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net
When: 18:00 UTC on November 5th
What: check the agenda, but it will be broad pre-UDS discussion.

This is a great opportunity to get involved with Edubuntu and shape the future of an exciting project.

Politics

As I promised Jonathan Carter, I finally wrote a post on why I’m voting for John McCain. He wanted me to do it before the election, and I’m just barely making it. I was meaning to do it a long time ago but I’ve been busy trying to finish off my dissertation/PhD.

Posted in Ubuntu   Tagged: edubuntu   

Hello DC/MD K/Ubuntu Locoers!

I hope you are all excited for tomorrow’s Intrepid Ibex release. We’ve put a lot of work in to it since last May and it promises to be the best K/Ubuntu release yet!

As many of you know, I have been organizing usability activities with the DC Loco. A few weeks ago, we ran a successful pilot on the Cleveland Park Library computers with a few participants.

I would like to invite anyone who is interested to bring a friend or family member to participate on Saturday November 8th. If you want, you can guide your friend or family member through the activity.

We are currently testing the Photo Experience. If you have a digital camera, feel free to bring it with you to the test.

The Cleveland Park Library is a hop, a skip, and a jump (about 2 blocks) from the Cleveland Park Metro station.

Testing sessions should only take about 30 minutes, so feel free to bring multiple friends and family or stop by on your way to the Green Festival.

If you are interested, please sign up on the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DCTeam/UsabilityTesting

I hope to see you there!

Almost!

More testers wanted though, join us in #kubuntu-devel for the final sprint.

Anyone in the Austin, Texas area with an interest in Ubuntu, Linux, and/or Beer is welcome to join us on Thursday, October 30, 2008 to celebrate the release of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10). We will be outside, at the Draught House Pub, from 5:30pm - 7:30pm (map).
You might meet, face-to-face, some people who use your code, and some people whose code you use. If you've never been to the Draught House Pub, it's a unique, neighborhood-style pub, with scores of beer on tap and a great outdoorsy feel.

Note that this isn't associated with the Austin LoCo--I have not seen any formal plans from them for a release party. But there does seem to be another release party hosted by the AustinLUG at 6:30pm on 10th Street. My apologies for "forking" the party, but plans were neither coordinated nor communicated particularly well.

In any case, get out there and celebrate Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex by drinking some beer wherever you are ;-)

:-Dustin

We have significantly improved booting on degraded software RAID in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

Numerous Hardy users have requested a backport of this functionality to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

I'm pleased to announce that I have some very preliminary, working packages in my PPA, available for testing. See:

• https://launchpad.net/~kirkland/+archive
  
  • grub
  • initramfs-tools
  • mdadm

A couple of caveats...

1. Under no circumstances should these packages be used on any production-level, critical, or enterprise system.
2. These packages are not officially supported by Canonical, Ubuntu, or even really me.
3. These packages are provided exclusively for the sake of testing and debugging the functionality in advance of an official update being published.

That said, if you have some spare hardware or virtualization at your disposal, and you're willing and able to test these packages on a non-critical development/test system, I would appreciate hearing your experience.

The test case is essentially as follows:

1. Install Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS (Hardy Heron) onto a software RAID1 configuration
2. Update your package list, upgrade all packages, dist-upgrade, and reboot
3. Add my PPA to your /etc/apt/sources.list, update your package list, and pull my updated Hardy packages
4. Re-install grub to your RAID device, "grub-install /dev/md0" or whatever might be appropriate
5. Reboot with both disks (ensure this continues to work)
6. Reboot, with only the first of the two disks (you should be prompted if you'd like to boot or not; first test answering "No"; reboot and test answering "Yes")
7. Reboot with only the second of the two disks, and again test both the "No" and "Yes" behavior
8. Reboot with both disks attached, and one disk should be "missing" from the array since they are now out of sync, having each been booted independently. Add the missing disk back to the array with something like "mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb1", and let it re-sync.
   

If the above succeeded as expected, I'd like to hear about it. If it didn't, I'd also like to hear about it. Please post as comments to this bug report:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mdadm/+bug/290885
  

:-Dustin

Spoiler: This post has really nothing to do with Ubuntu or Linux, but it educates people, and Ubuntu educates ;)

The last weeks I had to fight with Windows Server...

We have some important document convert services running on Windows Server Installations, and sometimes, someone comes along and uploads documents with embedded videos or other strange stuff. Those documents can't be converted, but the (commercial developed) converter takes them anyways, but stays in somekind of coma.

Therefore, and I remind you I'm not a Windows Admin, really I'm not, I had to find a solution how to kill processes which are hanging around for some time (let's say one hour or so).

This is not as trivial as it sounds. I didn't find any solution with the installed by default command shell (cmd.exe). So, I remembered the name "Powershell". So, I gave it a try.

Installed powershell on windows 2003 test vmware instance, and read our new book guide to Powershell "Essential Powershell" Author: Holger Schwichtenberg.

First, the book is quite nice, it helps a lot, so if you are in need of a good overview of Powershell and what it can do for you, get this book. Admins in Germany will know Holger Schwichtenberg, because he is one of our more famouse Windows gurus.

But now for the real fun part, finding processes which are hanging around for one hour and kill them:

$processes=Get-Process <insert your processnames you need to look at> foreach ($proc in $processes) {         $hour_diff=(Get-Date).Subtract($proc.starttime).hours         if ($hour_diff -ge 1) {                 # $proc.Kill() -> kills the process for real, be careful!                 Write-Output "Kill It"         } else {                 Write-Output "Don't Do That"         } }

This is all. Looks a bit like Perl...and it feels like Perl too. So, actually MS copied a good admin part of Unix, well done.

You can do a lot more with Powershell, for sure, but those are the little devils you need everyday, especially when you deal with Windows.

And I have to admit, MS Powershell is one of the hilights of the last decade, when I still had to deal with Windows.

 

After the final freeze on Sunday I started looking at pre-release testing. I decided it was time for the kids to experience KDE4. This mostly affects the teenagers (we have two). Our five year old is happy if I open Kate for her and she can practice typing (she also loves Mr. Potato Head).

They've been using Linux as their primary operating system for about 3 years now. They like it OK, but get frustrated with the ocassional incompatibilites with the things their friends (all on Windows) do. The younger of the two has borrowed my Kubuntu laptop and taken it to school to give presentations using OOO.

The upgrade itself is an interesting story having to do with some hardware specific regressions that will end up in the Intrepid release notes (yeah for testing).

The cool part was last night when one of them (who is not very technically minded at all) turned to me and said, "Dad, guess what? I figured out widgets. They are SO cool!". It's the first time I recall her excited about something she could do on the computer. Dad thinks that is "SO cool".

KDE4 - Making computers fun again.

Erode IT Association will be hosting the Intrepid Ibex release event of Ubuntu Tamil Team on 09 Nov 08, Sunday. This will be a day long event where Intrepid Ibex will be released and the participants will be introduced to the basics of Ubuntu. Thanks to, Mr Raja, Erode IT Association’s Advisor  for taking efforts towards organizing [...]

Leading up to the Ubuntu 8.10 release, Ubuntu developers and quality assurance engineers have been very busy sorting bugs, deciding what can and should be fixed for the final release, and what cannot.  They make these decisions by estimating the importance of each bug, identifying whether it is a regression, assessing the risk of potential fixes, and by applying their best judgement.  Developers can then focus their efforts where they are most needed.

On the whole, I think that we do remarkably well at this.  In September, for example, the total number of open bugs in Ubuntu increased by only 70.  This doesn’t sound like much of an achievement, if not for the fact that in the same time period, 7872 new bug reports were filed.  The remaining 7802, or over 99%, were resolved (some duplicates, some invalid, some fixed, etc.).

The news isn’t all good, of course.  There are currently over 46000 open Ubuntu bug reports in Launchpad.  Even at this impressive rate of throughput, and even if we were to freeze all development and stop accepting new bug reports entirely, I estimate it would take over half a year just to sift through the backlog of reports we have already received.  There is a lot of noise in that data.

When 8.10 is released, as with each previous release, some users will be disappointed that it has a bug which affects them.  This is regrettable, and I feel badly for affected users each time that I read about this, but it is unlikely to ever change.  There will never be a release of Ubuntu which is entirely free of bugs, and every non-trivial bug is important to someone.

So, what do we do?  What should be our key goals where quality is concerned?  We don’t currently have a clear statement of this, but here’s a strawman:

Prioritize bug reports effectively.  It’s usually difficult to say whether a bug report is valid or serious until a human has reviewed it, so this means having enough people to review and acknowledge incoming bug reports, and helping them to work as efficiently as possible.  The Ubuntu bug squad is a focal point for this type of work, though a great deal of this is done by developers in their everyday work as well.  Projects like 5-a-day are a good way to get started.

Measure our performance objectively.  By tracking metrics for each part of the quality assurance process, we can understand where we need to improve.  The QA team has been developing tools, such as the package status pages, to collect hard data on bugs.

Improve incrementally.  By minimizing regressions from one release to the next, and making some progress on old bugs, we can hope to make each Ubuntu release better, in terms of overall quality, than the one before it (or at least no worse).  The regression tracker (which will hopefully move to the QA site soon) will help to coordinate this effort.

Ensure that the most serious bugs are identified and fixed early.  It’s important to the success of the project that we continue to produce regular releases, and showstopper bugs risk delaying our release dates and adversely affecting the next release cycle.  The release management weather report is one tool which helps monitor this process, though a great deal of coordination is required in order to provide it with useful data.

Communicate about known bugs.  It is inevitable that there will be known bugs remaining in each release, and we should do our best to advise our users about them, including any known workarounds.  The Ubuntu 8.10 beta release notes are a good example of this.

I think that to do well in all of these areas would be a good goal for quality in Ubuntu.

      

Open Source version Alt, aber wahr: Wer auch immer Projektarbeit leistet, weiss wie viel Wahrheit darin steckt.
Schaut Euch auch die neuen Karten an (unten).

Old, but true: Who ever does project work, knows how true this is.
Please take a look at the new cards as well (at the bottom).

via Adminlife

With just one day to go until Ubuntu and Kubuntu 8.10 are released, we are ready to celebrate.

Mike Rushton writes about the Massachusetts LoCo Team’s Intrepid Ibex release party:

So just want to make an official/overdue announcement that we'll be having our Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Release party this Thursday night, October 30th at 7pm. We'll be having it at the Globe bar and grill in Boston. Same place as the 2 previous parties. Bring yourself, friends, family, someone passing on the street or someone you shared a cab with. Laptops and netbooks are surely welcome as well to show off the latest version or if you need help installing upgrading. We'll try to have some cd's available for people to take home. There will be some snacks available and a decent menu to order other food and drinks. Hope to see you all there!!       

Just wanted to mention a few events I will be at this week in San Francisco:

• Wed 29th Oct - Larry Lessig’s book party - W Hotel, 181 Third Street, San Francisco, CA - 6.30pm - I will be there to celebrate the release of Larry’s new book, and meet other Creative Commons people.
• Thu 30th Oct - Ubuntu Release Party - The lower bar as you walk in on the left, The Thirsty Bear, 661 Howard St, San Francisco, CA 94105 - come along and hang out with at least Tom Haddon and myself for a few pints to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

Hope to see a bunch of you there.