Tony Yarusso's Blog

Well, I'm happy to report that the Minnesota LoCo successfully pulled off their first in-person event! Granted, this was nothing like the Venezuelan release party, but it will certainly do for now. We had about thirty people show up (one person reported counting 28, but we had some trickle in and out in the middle), which was half the capacity of the room and six times the number I was sure were coming ahead of time.

Overall, I'd classify the event as a good start, and a learning experience. Things didn't go exactly as I had envisioned, for a handful of reasons, but was still generally good. People were able to meet some other like-minded folks, a lot of people had questions that we were able to answer, and people seemed to walk away happy and enthused. I would have liked to have it be more social so people could mingle with the other folks there more, and have some development-related stuff I'll need to follow up with for the CSci students at some later date as we ran out of time.

On the way out, I was able to spend a few minutes talking with Jeremy from TCLUG, and we kicked around the possibility of working together on an installfest perhaps in mid-to-late January, so keep an eye out for updates in that area!

If you were there (or have heard about it from those who were), it would be helpful to hear what your thoughts were - things that were good about the event, things that we should consider doing differently next time, or even general ideas of things we should think about doing as a team, please be sure to share them!

By the way, many thanks to the University of Minnesota ACM student chapter for donating their time and access to get us a great room on campus to host the event.

Well, that time has finally come, and the latest release of Ubuntu, version 7.10, codenamed "Gutsy Gibbon" is finally out, officially, for real, as certified personally by members of the release team on IRC! Please use bittorrent to download it if possible, as the server load is immense (as you can imagine). Detailed torrent info with hashes is available here.

Now, while everyone is downloading, installing, seeding, and being giddy, I'd like to take a moment to point out the new features that interest me personally. This is of course no indication of which ones are most important, nor a comprehensive list - just what I like. :)

Gnome 2.20 Features

Form filling

This is pretty huge. The ability to fill out PDF forms is crucial for everything from annual tax filings to immigration applications, and it's extremely useful to have the default PDF viewer able to do this rather than needing a separate application.

Synchronized notes

I've been trying to get in the habit of using Tomboy to keep track of things. It's taking some getting used to, since I've been doing a lot of random Post-Its on the desk more, but it's nice. Now that I actually use Ubuntu in multiple places (home and school), being able to share those notes will be pretty handy.

Keyring unlocking

The NetworkManager bug where it has to ask for the gnome-keyring password on login has long been one of my pet peeves. From the description, it sounds like this release will be able to finally solve that problem (or at least make if very easy to fix on individual machines). Additionally, having all of the different kinds of passwords in one location (Seahorse) is nice and sane.

Help browser

Probably the biggest thing here for me is the speed aspect. I've always kind of wondered why yelp was a bit on the laggy side, and this will be a nice change. The theming thing is cool too, but I haven't decided yet how important that is to me here.

Screensaver messages

Okay, I'm honestly not sure how much use I'll get out of this feature myself, since I'm the only user of my machine and in a home environment, but it's still very cool. The biggest thing I see this being useful for is corporate environments, where people may be out of their cubicle for a few minutes and a co-worker just needs to leave a quick note. One less scrap of paper to clutter the desk with.

Ubuntu Features

Fast user switching

Great for situations such as home users where someone might need to get on every half hour to check something for a research paper, but doesn't want to disturb a family member doing other work for too long each time.

Graphical X configuration

Another long-standing wishlist item. Just another essential step in making Linux more accessible to the less technical user, who shouldn't need to resort to command-line config file editing for anything.

Fully automatic printer installation

Okay, I honestly don't have the foggiest clue how they managed to pull this one off. Regardless though, I certainly can't argue that it is very very slick. Someone feel free to enlighten me on IRC sometime about how this works.

NTFS writing

Another basic must-have for anyone dual-booting with a Windows machine. It's highly unfortunate that the community had to spend lots of valuable time reverse-engineering a filesystem just so users could access their data, but that's what you have to deal with when companies like Microsoft insist on using closed-spec nonsense that doesn't work with anything.

Encrypted hard disks in installer

Another long-standing wishlist item. While it's long been possible to create encrypted partitions, it took more work than it should. With the version of debian-installer from Etch, they're now supported right off the bat in the installation process (alternate CD only). This is handy for corporate users who have to be worried about company proprietary information, or anyone who doesn't particularly like the idea of the government seizing their laptop and sifting through all of their data.

Expanded automatic server options

No matter how you slice it, this is just nifty. Now I can get my web, file, and print server set up by just checking boxes, without getting any of the stuff I don't need. It's nice to see the ease and usability Ubuntu is known for on the desktop extending into the server market too.

So, get it and check it out for yourself!

Remember, if you're in Minnesota, join us at our release party on Saturday. We can provide you with a CD at that time if you'd like as well.

I am pleased to announce the final details for the Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" release party for Minnesota! We will be meeting this Saturday, October 20^th 2007, 7:00 - 9:30 PM. The location is room # 3-111 of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building, 200 Union St. SE, Minneapolis, on the University of Minnesota campus (courtesy of the U of M student chapter of the ACM). If you need help getting there, see this map.

Not sure what a release party is, or why you should go? Well, ours will be a loosely structured social event with a few key aspects:

• Meet other people from the Ubuntu Minnesota Team
• Learn about Ubuntu and free software, what it can do for you, and why you should consider using it
• See the slick new features of Ubuntu 7.10 on a big screen (we'll have a digital projector)
• Learn about the Ubuntu community and its processes, including how to get involved in development for university students who need to do software development projects
• Hang out and have fun

Whether you've been using Ubuntu for years, just installed it for the first time, or have never even heard of it but are curious about free open-source software, we'd love to have you swing on by and help answer your questions! See you Saturday!

Any questions about the event can be left as comments on this post, or sent to our team's mailing list.

I discovered a few hours ago that my key passphrase wasn't working. At first I thought I had simply forgotten it, but remembered that I type it in every time I send an e-mail (Enigmail in TB), so that is highly unlikely. However, I did have a system freeze earlier, and had to do a hard shutdown (blame ATI, enough said). My current guess is that in that process my secret key became corrupted. What I would like to know is, does anybody know a way to restore my ~/.gnupg directory to its status as of yesterday? My /home directory is on an ext3 filesystem on LVM, btw, so there should be a journal that can be played with, but I'm not sure how to manually mess with that. I saw some computer forensics tools in the repos, but have no idea how to use them. I have already tried doing a fsck, both the one automatically done on the boot after failure and a second with 'sudo touch /forcefsck' and a proper reboot.

If all else fails, I did create a .asc file prior, which I believe is what I need to revoke it if necessary. I would of course like to avoid this if at all possible, as I did have a small handful of full-trust signatures from a keysigning meetup that would likely be hard to redo. I'm on a bit of a schedule too, since I found out it wasn't working when I tried to build a package - rotten luck that.

Today we received word from various sources that the OEM giant Dell would be pre-loading Ubuntu on some of it's machines. It started with rumor, which got attention on its own, then a reasoned look at plausibility, and finishing with a credible source. Additionally, Dell's own web site began offering official support info. While I'll believe it when I see a page to order them on Dell's site, things look very promising.

So what?

Clearly, some of us get excited merely by the prospect of a significant news story involving our distribution of choice. However, some stories go beyond just having the media spotlight for a day. This, I believe, could be one of those. Since many of the usability, feature, and software availability issues in Linux have been taken care of in recent years, one of the largest things holding potential switchers back has been hardware, both the compatibility of Linux with their current hardware, and the ability to buy hardware with Linux already on it. Dell preloading would do a great deal to solve both.

By offering systems, Dell to some extent agrees to support them, at least to the extent of having fully functional hardware, which means there will be more big-brand machines that work fully after an initial installation. The pre-loading aspect could do wonders for bringing in the fringe groups, people who have somewhat considered Linux of some kind, but don't want to put a lot of effort into it. Buying a new computer, placing a ShipIt request, waiting for the CDs, and then walking through the installation, while not difficult, it more than many people would prefer to do. If properly marketed, pre-loaded computers from a highly recognizable source could be the thing that tips a lot of people over the edge to say, "Hey, why not?", and give Ubuntu a try. However, if Dell's "offering" of these machines is anything like Lenovo's of SuSE-loaded laptops (where you have to hunt all over the site only to find that you have to special-order them over the phone), little is likely to happen other than satiating a few geeks of the world. So, Dell, please display all options you offer prominently. Everyone reading this, if they do, link to the relevant pages so people become aware. Leave a link in the comments here too while you're at it.

To the frustrated computer users of the world, Linux has matured, and in my opinion, Ubuntu is one of many fantastic distributions to see for yourself with. Now the only matter left is how you will get your hands on it. It seems Dell will be adding one more possibility to the list.

Note that Dell is not the first to offer Ubuntu-loaded systems - it is notably simply by virtue of its size and market share. I would also like to draw your attention to the smaller, but more focused company System76, which specializes in Ubuntu desktops, laptops, and servers, and has been gaining a very positive reputation throughout the community.

[Edit: It seems Canonical changed its mind or something about whether this is public yet and has taken some actions to keep it quiet longer; Jono is asking around to figure out why that happened. Hopefully there will be official clarification and rectification of the censorship soon, but this is what we have to work on for now.]

[Edit 2: We have the clarification now: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/dell-to-offer-ubuntu and http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/05/01/13147.aspx are the official announcements.]

[Edit 3: The news got picked up by the BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6610901.stm]