Juggling your ARMs in Karmic (and no more excuses !)

If you are Ubuntu developer but are lacking ARM hardware to testbuild your packages on armel systems and you find using a virtual machine to much effort, i’m happy to tell you that there is a solution for you now !

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/BuildEABIChroot makes using a chroot for the armel architecture as easy as using a i386 chroot under amd64 if you develop for i386 but dont run Ubuntu i386 as a host system.

So from now on there are no more excuses for you to not help cleaning up the build failures on armel on the FTBFS list !

Please help us to develop the leading OS on armel and you will be rewarded with the best netbook OS to be used on the upcoming cheap and powersaving armel netbooks

To the ARMs

As you might know already Ubuntu is building for the ARMv7 architecture.
As an owner of an OMAP35x EVM board i have put some time into getting a usable development image together that can easily be installed onto a SD/SDHC card and be used on that board for Ubuntu development.

http://people.ubuntu.com/~ogra/arm/OMAP35x_EVM/ has the necessary instructions and links to get up an Ubuntu development system on your OMAP35x_EVM board, if you own such a device and want to help us with ubuntu development, now is the time to start getting involved !!!

If you have any questions about Ubuntu on ARM, feel free to drop by in #ubuntu-arm on irc.freenode.net at any time or use the ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing lists on lists.ubuntu.com

Names, names, names ….. and (boo) Vampires !

New name for (not so) old stuff…
The “ubuntu-mobile” image was introduced very late in the release cycle; as we got closer to the release more eyeballs started to look at it.
It was pointed out more and more often that such a generic name is a bad idea for an image; one assumption is that people seem to expect “ubuntu-mobile” to be something for a phone rather than targeting mobile computers.
As many community members pointed out in umpcportal comments as well as in personal mails, ultra mobile PCs are a more precise term for the target architecture of the image.
So four days before release the decision was made to go with the new name “ubuntu-umpc” instead of using the generic “ubuntu-mobile”.
A lot of thanks go to the release managers and specifically to Colin Watson for doing such a change in the last minutes before release.
You can find the renamed image at the usual place on cdimage.ubuntu.com.
Note that only the image name itself could be changed at this point. The meta-package is still called “ubuntu-mobile” until jaunty development starts.
If you use the alternate CD or DVD and want to install the task you still need to look for the Mobile task. The “ubuntu-mobile-default-settings” package also keeps its name until it gets jaunty love.

Give Blood!
On a more exciting side-note the Canonical Mobile Team is hiring, we’re thirsty for fresh blood! Stay tuned for details and if you are interested, interesting and eager to become a blood donor feel free to contact me on IRC or via mail any time to channel your application to the right people.

The ubuntu-mobile beta images !

Well … not really, since the ubuntu-mobile images are not in the official release list yet, but i’m happy to announce that we:

a) have a *beta quality ubuntu-mobile image* up today
b) all images are officially built in the ubuntu infrastructure on cdimage.ubuntu.com now, which results in:
c) daily ubuntu-mobile images !!!

The known installer problems with the first shot image are fixed, the image is fully installable, recent problems with the browser not starting were solved as well and a good bunch of improvements went in over he last week.
To mention only a few:
* onscreen keyboard support in the locked screen dialog of gnome-screensaver by default
* making the onscreen keyboard for apps that require password input usable
* support for a few more touchscreens, a proper calibration tool for evtouch based touchscreens
* and a lot more …

Lots of thanks go to all the people sending feedback to the ubuntu-mobile@lists.ubuntu.com mailing list, to all the testers and to UMPCPortal for the nice review. In the end its your image, we only build it, so keep up the great feedback
If your fix wasnt in the current image it might show up in tomorrows (or the one the day after) build, so stay tuned, we try to weed out all bugs we can until final release.

There was some confusion about the naming i’d like to clearfy, we have a page with the naming history and how it evolved over the different releases up here.
Essentially the ubuntu-mobile image is aimed at UMPCs with 7-9 inch touchscreens (though the feedback showed that many many people with eeePCs and netbooks use it too) while the ubuntu-mid image is aimed at 4-7 inch MID devices with touchscreens.

The daily image for ubuntu-mobile can be found at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mobile/intrepid/

The daily image for ubuntu-mid can be found at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mid/intrepid/

If you want to discuss the work with us, feel free to drop by on IRC in the #ubuntu-mobile channel at irc.freenode.net, we appreciate any feedback, or even come and participate in the weekly IRC meeting where you can also get (or provide) info about the project status and the work the different team members did the last week. The meeting takes place every Thursday, an agenda for the coming week can be found under the Current Team Meeting link on this page.

Future views …

DD made easy:
Since many people report problems with using dd we have the usb-imagewriter project (a screenshots link is on the page) that will enter the jaunty jackalope (9.04) archive, it is a simple frontend to dd to make writing our images from an ubuntu desktop to a USB Key as easy as possible (we are discussing a windows port as well, windows programmers wanting to participate, please contact me). A package for intrepid can be found in my personal package archive here (if i get around to it next week i’ll roll a package for hardy as well).

A new calibration tool in jaunty:
I started work on a touchscreen calibration tool for jaunty (9.04), here are some mockups:

Announcing the first ubuntu-mobile image

With the intepid development cycle the mobile team has split its efforts into producing two different images, one is the well known Ubuntu MID image targeting 4-7″ MID devices with 800×480 desktops using mobiln technology. This image is getting a lot of improvements over the hardy release during the intrepid cycle …
You can find the current daily build for it here.

The second image which i’m proud to announce today is the new gnome based ubuntu-mobile image that is targeting the bigger MIDs from 7-9″. This image is a first try and supposed to be the base for a well working touchscreen centric gnome mobile desktop on 1024×600 screens. For now it is running best on a samsung Q1 (since it was developed on such a device) and we hope to get valuable input from users with it. So we can make sure the applications run fine at this resolution and we can support all possible MID hardware of this class in the jaunty release.
Screenshots, installation instructions and the download link for our first shot image can be found here.

All images of the mobile team are built as live images nowadays so you can directly test them by booting from a USB key. Feedback and discussions are appreciated on the ubuntu-mobile@lists.ubuntu.com mailing list or via bugs. If you want to modify one of the images to your needs, see the HowTo section of the MobileTeam wikipages.

Life update and new blog

After i decided to finally not need my personal server anymore i somehow also stopped blogging, since i didnt feel like using a public blogging service …

Recently i often felt like having to tell stuff to the world, so here i am, back to life on wordpress.
Lots of stuff happened in the last year i spent without blogging so i’ll give a short bullet list of things…

* I never mentioned we moved from the little Eifel village we used to live in to Kassel

* LTSP was turned into a multi distro collaboration upstream project, fedora and gentoo joined upstream development (done collaboratively only by ubuntu and debian before) very closely and we work as a big team on the code ignoring distro barriers now. (opensuse sadly decided to fork off our code and work in their own corner on a kiwi based ltsp implementation… that doesnt mean its bad (it seems to work great) but we’d love to see them working upstream more closely with us). Here is a report of our first collaborative hackfest in portland last month (the next one is scheduled in early november in maine, if you are intrested to come, feel free to ping me).

* My work on the Classmte PC image is largely finished, if you have one of the granddaddies of all netbooks (yes it predates the eee) and are intrested in installing an edubuntu based image on it, ping me (i wont post the url publically here even though the site is available for everyone, to simply keep the load off the server)

* Doing all that subnotebook work with edubuntu somehow got me into the area of mobile devices where i do a lot of work now, in case you follow ubuntu development you might have noticed that we are switching to hal-input for Xorg. I noticed that somehow leaves out touchscreen users so i try to fix this regression before the intrepid release… In case you own a device with a touchscreen, please send me your lshal output and your working hardy xorg.conf and i will try to integrate support for your device.

* I got a warning that i am treating myself to bad …. Im out of hospital since two weeks now after having a so called TIA … living on coffee and cigarettes only over months doesnt work out, i cut down both massively, drink water like a drainpipe and started doing regular cycling as well as cooking. intrestingly the week of tests in hospital only turned out that i’m as healthy as i can be at my age, they didnt find nothing at all that could be responsible for teh incident beyond my way of life.

* LaserJock is back in edubuntu land … all my technical focused work the recent time left edubuntu somewhat in a maintenance only mode without much improvement, LaserJock recently returned and to push things forward again to get the educational bits and pieces in better shape.

* mdz blogs !

* Ubuntu mobile desktop … scotts post about Concept Distro somewhat fits with the (currently still exerimental) ubuntu-mobile desktop package …. a fully touchscreen manageable gnome based desktop system for 1024×600px based devices (i.e. the Samsung Q1 ultra) i’m currently playing with …

* I upgraded my mom’s laptop from edgy (6.10) to hardy (8.04.1) … no noticeable support calls so far

So i think thats the full set of most important milestones of my last year … i’ll try to be a well behaving blooger again from now on and hassle you less with such massive lists but keep single entries to single topics