Have you already heard about the new shiny TI OMAP4 CPU ? If you haven’t yet and are interested in ARM stuff you surely will very soon. Ubuntu will additionally to the already known OMAP3 images release images for the OMAP4 architecture with the 10.10 Maverick release.

Yesterday www.pandaboard.org went online and you can sign up now for the early adopter program.
Ubuntu on the panda will be the best Ubuntu ARM experience you ever had thanks to collaborative efforts the Ubuntu ARM and TI developer teams made.

With the new hardware release of the beagleboard XM that comes with 512M of RAM there finally exists a beagleboard that can run a full Ubuntu desktop really snappy making it more than just a a developer toy.

With 10.10 the Ubuntu ARM team also introduces the brand new type of preinstalled images. Once written to an SD card they expand themselves to the full size of the card on first boot and run the shiny new OEM config welcome screen (kudos to the installer team for that one)

But thats not all thats new in ARM land …

Are you an Ubuntu developer and interested in ARM … but never really started because carrying a bare board with you everywhere makes you recognizable as a geek immediately ?

There is help !!!!

About 4 weeks ago Toshiba brought the Nvidia Tegra2 based AC 100 to the stores in Europe it is a neat ARM Netbook that comes with a fully locked down android preinstalled …
Very fast people started to ask about Ubuntu or debian or any other Linux on the device … but indeed it comes with android …

Within a few days a developer community formed around teh AC 100 … and after a week the first possibility to gain root on the preinstalled android was found …

Now 4 weeks later the awesome guys from the #ac100 freenode IRC channel published a fully working Ubuntu ARM image for it … while still using the android kernel, the users pace is completely Ubuntu Netbook … with a few drawbacks (no sound, the HW buttons do not work yet and other little annoyances)
I’m confident these guys will soon figure out all remaining issues …

If you own such a Netbook, you can find the Ubuntu image and installation instructions at http://ac100.gudinna.com/

Kudos to such an awesome community effort and as Ubuntu ARM developer I’m proud to see the first distro running on it is Ubuntu (this post is written on it, using drivel on the Ubuntu Netbook install)

Since we literally only had a few weeks and it is already been late in the release cycle when we started the images will have more rough edges than the other ARM images we provide. Also the board only has 256M of RAM so using a Netbook image, even though it is already slightly optimized for low-end systems and ARM usage it will surely use swap on your system if you try it out.

But hey, we made it after all and this will be the base for some really awesome OMAP images in the next releases.

A lot of thanks for endless patience with the “late guys” have to go to Steve Langasek, our release manager for taking the time to review code even after the freezes.
Other thanks for help and for sometimes poking the beagles nose into the obvious go to Loïc Minier and Colin Watson and to anybody else who made that happen in such short time … once again i’m happy to recognize the sholders of the biggest giants around under my feet !

So if you have a Beagleboard, go to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/Beagle any try out one of the images, if you dont have one yet, GET ONE !!!
Its fun and you can help out ubuntu on ARM !

PS: There is an untested kubuntu-netbook image here, i heard the kubuntu guys would be happy to hear if it works or not

The armel live image boots got 33% faster and got a shiny new face (see below)

about two years ago we got a huge solar thermal heating system for our house which worked fine for the first summer … until it overheated … we sadly had fallen out with the heating contractor since he screwed up a lot of unrelated stuff in the house making us very unhappy and we got never around to find a new guy for it (beside that i wanted to learn to handle all of the system myself)

so after two winters where we rather heated the house with wood in the fireplace and the heating only worked at half power, this year i had to burn all my vacation days that stacked up over the year in december havin nearly a full month of holidays … alongside we had one week where it really got cold and i really didnt feel like chopping wood again

so i decided to put up my scottish accent and spend as much time as needed with the three 1000 liter tanks and their pipes and valves in the engine room until i get that damned thing to fly at warp 10

after a week of fiddling and studying i finally found out that the guy had wired up half of the system wrongly, valves that the control system triggered to open were closing instead, water flowed through pipes it wasnt supposed to, heat got routed into places where it wasnt stored etc …

so after two days of rewiring i suddenly had the heaters warm and cosy in the rooms, while the heating boiler wasnt running 24/7 anymore but only when heating up was needed and properly stored its heat in the big tanks, yay !!

the control unit is mounted in the worst place one can imagine in the basement room. you cant easily reach or see it. to see a sensor or valve value you have a little wheel you need to scroll up and down. you can only see about three values at a time on the display and indeed it’s usually three unrelated ones. so i spent my days scrolling this darn wheel up and down most of the time, standing on one leg in a very inconveninent position …

after i had the system back to normal and had a warm office again i started googling a bit and i found there is a usb datalogging unit for that box and the bill for teh system suggested that i even own it !

i found the little box after searching a day for it in another room in the basement hidden behind some pipes (no idea why the heating engineer had put it there or why he didnt bother to tell me it exists) … funnily it didnt work at all … guess what, the two cables running into it were indeed flipped …

after fixing that i actually got some data packets on my laptops USB port, yay !

googling even more i finally found that someone called Holger Römer had written some linux software to properly recieve data from it and he uses it on debian and ubuntu !
(i’m about to package it but there are some issues like missing license files etc in the source tree before i can do it)

i spent another day to write a little script that generates html from the data in 5 second intervals, worked out an hydraulic plan in inkscape that i put in the back of that data and installed all that on a spare computer i had lying around with a minimal ubuntu and lighttpd.

since i travel a lot and for the fun of it, i also wrote an rsync script that syncs the sensor and valve status data to a public place in longer intervals, so i can actually check the system while travelling the world (just click the picture above and you can actually see the current data)

so that was my little holiday adventure i wanted to share. if you have a similar system and are intrested in getting the script or the inkscape file to create your own hydraulic plan, feel free to contact me. i’m happy to share and i actually plan to move forward with that stuff up to a point where i can have proper mrtg graphs that you can combine to optimize the system, a desktop tool to do all that from your local machine and indeed i want to turn the website into an interactive webapp i will put on a touchscreen next to the heating so you can actually steer the system through it, but that will be work for another holiday season.

what really amazes me is that all this is possible with ubuntu and its open source tools. my little adventure wouldnt have been possible without all the work you guys do every day on the distro and on the thousands of open source projects. thanks so much to everyone whose software helped me to make that little project become reality …

or to say it in ubuntu: ‘I am warm as I am because of who you all are’

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

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

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.

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:

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.

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 1024x600px 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