Scottie posted an entry earlier about the new Ubuntu branding. I’ve been meaning to make a very similar post, but I’ve had lots more important things to do the last two weeks.

For those who have missed it, Canonical announced the new branding and artwork on the day of the User Interface Freeze for the Lucid development cycle. The decisions around the new branding have been met with some controversy, and as Scottie pointed out, some awkwardness around it. I’ll try to sum up my views about it in this post.

Purple / Aubergine

One of the major changes in the artwork is a change from the yellowy-brown colours to purple and orange. Most of the highlights are in purple, so is the terminal background. The aubergine (purple) is supposed to signify the corporate and the commercial aspects of Ubuntu, while the orange represents community.

I love the way the background is slightly transparent by default. The compositing capabilities in Ubuntu is powerful and should be showed off. The amount of transparency is also just subtle enough that it shouldn’t bother people who usually prefer a solid background. I think the colour is horrible though. I’d go as far as to say it’s offensive, I can write that off to personal taste though. The really bad thing about it is that it changes your default profile to the so-called “Ambiance” theme automatically without any warning. At least it was easy to delete and my older, much more aesthetically pleasing terminal was restored.

Button Positions

The button positions have been a bit more controversial than the actual colours. Personally, I didn’t like it at first but it only took a few hours to get used to it. It was the same when I used OSX for the first time, the positions feel weird at first but they grow on you fast. I don’t think the button positions will be a problem for users who use Ubuntu pretty much exclusively. Not all my machines are on Lucid yet, so it’s been a pain to move between machines that have the controls on the left and that have them on the right. I can imagine that having the controls on the left may be a major annoyance for someone who uses the one system at home and another at work.

Besides that, many applications are set up to have the close button at the top right, and it’s usually not configurable. Scott mentioned something similar with regards to tabs, here’s an example in an OpenOffice document:

Font / Logo

Besides the announcement on the day of UI Freeze, the new Ubuntu font is still not complete either. This means that some derivatives (Edubuntu, for one), doesn’t have a new logo yet since the “e” and “d” letters haven’t been finalized yet. We’re also waiting for a new logo from Canonical, it’s a bit painful that this couldn’t have been better communicated or planned in advance.

Scott wonders why few other people have talked about this, but it’s not the first time Canonical has made big changes on or just before a freeze. It’s probably not the last either. I don’t think people are comfortable providing feedback, especially at the risk of being labeled as a bad apple that just wants to complain about stuff and especially if it won’t change anything.

Changes

Having said what I have so far, I’m all in favour of making big, bold changes. If Canonical puts this much effort into the design of every release, and if they can find a way to involve the community as well (turn their cold purple hearts a bit more orangy), then I think Ubuntu will make major strides in usability and design that ultimately, everyone else would want to copy.

Today marks the birthday of one of my favourite free software projects and software, the Apache HTTP server.  Why do I like it? It’s well supported on many platforms, well documented and it’s one of those pieces of software that almost never really gives me any hassles and does what it promises too. It was also one of the killer apps that drove Linux adoption in the early days before it had as many uses as it has today.

The Apache Foundation blog has a great entry on this birthday and the project’s history, detailing out some important dates and also memes that are now widely used in free software communities pretty much everywhere, for example, the -1/+0/+1 voting style was established by the Apache community that people in the Ubuntu community for one would be familiar with. Talking of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth who founded the project was also the first person to package and maintain the Apache server packages in Debian. Today Debian (and its derivatives) is one of the greatest systems to run Apache on, especially since it’s configuration makes it so easy to drop in additional configuration using tools such as Puppet and also the Debian’s packaging system.

Happy 15h’th birthday Apache and thanks for all the years of great software so far!

For the past few months I’ve been working on the LTSP-Cluster team at Revolution Linux. Today we’re releasing the website so that we can tell the world what we’ve been doing!

LTSP-Cluster is a set of tools and plugins for LTSP that allows you to extend LTSP so that it can scale up to hundreds of servers and thousands of LTSP clients. It has a nice web interface for your LTSP configuration, does load balancing between your servers and more. It can even connect your LTSP thin client to a cluster of Windows terminal servers or NX servers, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re deploying LTSP soon, you’d probably want to investigate LTSP-Cluster, and I’m not just saying it because I’m involved in the project

It’s licensed under the GPLv3 license and supported by the LTSP community, you can also get commercial support *wink* *wink* from Revolution Linux where plenty of very skilled people are ready for your LTSP related needs.

As Scott posted before, the Edubuntu Bug day went quite well last week. This coming Thursday (21 January) we’re doing a Wiki Hug Day to to focus our efforts on fixing things in the Edubuntu wiki namespace, it includes:

• Fixing broken links
• Removing horribly obsolete or broken pages
• Moving pages which are in the wrong place
• Prettifying pages
• Mark pages that may need to be on the Edubuntu website instead
• Any other improvements we can think of

We’ll officially be starting the wiki hug day from around 12:00 UTC to accommodate the time-zones of our current contributors. It will be co-ordinated in #edubuntu on the freenode network. If you’re familiar with Edubuntu and know a thing or two about wikis, feel free to join in and get involved!

Happy 2010 everyone!

I’m not sure how I’ll ever top the 2000’s, it was quite an action packed decade for me, it’s sometimes hard to believe that in 2000 I was still in school

I haven’t made any big goals or plans for 2010 yet, I guess I’m happy with the direction things are going at the moment,  in short I plan to:

• Stay in Canada for a few months (probably over 2 visits)
• Get my motorbike license (appointment is for 1 March)
• Up my Ubuntu involvement more. Revolution Linux gives me at least a full workday a week for Ubuntu related stuff so this shouldn’t be hard
• Continue getting fitter- been doing great at the gym recently and I’ve been going 3-4 times a week for the last 2 months

I feel very good about this year, hope it turns out great for everyone!

Edubuntu 2.0

I should really blog about Edubuntu more. The Edubuntu project initially kicked off nicely, but with time as things changed things ended getting somewhat stale. Earlier this year we decided to rebootstrap the project. Edubuntu Project 2.0 is real and we’re getting some really good momentum going. We now have a new Edubuntu Council voted in, of which I’m really happy to be part of again. Revolution Linux also gives me and Stéphane some time to work on Edubuntu related things which is really awesome!

Tonight we had quite a good meeting, I posted a dump of the notes to the edubuntu-devel list.

What’s happening for Lucid

• Scott Balneaves is working on parental control features that will be included in upstream Gnome (he is now an upstream Gnome developer as well)
• Stéphane and myself will be the release contacts for Lucid
• Live LTSP session for the Live DVD, if this works in time for Lucid then many packages can be dropped from the alternate installation
• Menu editor based on groups
• We’ll attempt at revamping the artwork for Lucid, if we can’t get nice artwork in time we’ll fall back on Ubuntu artwork rather than have outdated Edubuntu specific artwork
• Sabayon is now in a really good state, Scott has done lots of work on it and it’s teachers should now find it very useful
• Nanny has been uploaded to the archives in the last week, it will be used to implement parental controls in Lucid
• With the Ubuntu archive reorganization, there will be an edubuntu-dev group with upload rights for the appropriate packages. We’ll sort out most of this after the holiday season
• Netbook edition: We’d like the option of installing a netbook edition from the Ubiquity, which basically entails installing a few UNR packages such as maximus and the netbook launcher. I’ll write a spec for this in the coming week

Community

We’re planning some hug days! More details and announcements will follow on the Fridge, etc. For now write these dates in your diary:

• 12 January 2009: Edubuntu Bugs Hug Day
• 21 January 2009: Edubuntu Wiki Hug Day

We’ll spend some time specifically for documentation as well, most likely in February some time.

We want to extend to other projects more. Currently Stéphane is working with the Guadalinex-edu people. I’m going to be working with the Qimo project to get their packages in Ubuntu. Scott  is working to become a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer and David van Assche is an OpenSuse-EDU developer so we’re making some progress with our relationships to other projects. We need someone to liaise with the Sugar project, so if anyone is willing to get involved with that please give us a shout!

Our next Edubuntu meeting is on 29 December at 19:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on the freenode network so if you’re interested in getting involved you’re welcome to join in. If you can’t make it, meetings times will be made available on the Ubuntu Fridge.

Happy holidays!

Last night I attended the Quarrelsome Quince Geekdinner (wow it’s the end of November already!?). It was ok. The talks were good, Adrianna Pinska (aka confluence) did very well on the kareoke slideshow which was titled something like “The Winners of Safety at Work” which was a bunch of funny slides of people improvising at work mostly doing dangerous things. She did a great job since the slides were almost too easy since they were funny on their own, but she managed to be really quick on her feet and make up some really good stuff.

The food at Cafe Max were great and Delheim sponsored the wine. Even though the food and wine was good, I go to the geekdinners more for the geek part than the dinner part. I spent some time catching up with Andy about everything from off-line Wikipedia, tuXlabs, Ubuntu-NGO, Quebec, Canada and the French. I also got some mini-photography lessons from Joe and played with his nice Canon camera (which is why I haven’t took too many shots) but I’m sure he’ll have them up soon. After the geekdinner was officially finished I sat with Jeremy, Simon, Adrianna and Michael a bit, we looked through Jeremy’s xkcd book which was quite cool, besides having all the strips from the xkcd site, it also has lots of cool little puzzles that all fit together. Not sure what happens when you solve them all, but I want one of those books too now! They also talked about some of the problems in their Pyweek game called Rinkhals and somehow listening to them talking about problems in Python is always interesting even when I don’t completely understand. I have a lot going on this weekend but I’ll try to get to the CTPUG meeting tomorrow, I’ve only been to two of the CTPUG meetings before but I’ve always wanted to get more involved.

Oops, drifting a bit off-topic there, the next Geekdinner is at the end of January and if you’re interested you can subscribe to the announce mailing list where the details will be announced. Thanks to all the people who organised it!

For the Karmic release, Ubuntu-ZA had 4 release parties that took place in Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Pretoria and Brandford, that’s 4 release parties in the country for one release- a new record for our LoCo Team! I attended the Cape Town event at UCT yesterday which took place in the Shuttleworth Lab. Michael Gorven talked about netbooks and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I briefly went through the new features page on the Ubuntu website and did a little demo on gnome-shell. Lots of ISO images and repositories were copied around from external hard disks, the LEG mirror and from the Freedom Toaster (which didn’t work so well anymore later when one DVD writer was hot swapped :p).

There were some people who expected a bit more of a product-launch type event. I guess we need to get more markety type people involved so that we’ll have more fanfare next time, overall it was nice to see some familiar faces and finally meet some people that I’ve only known on the IRC channels and mailing lists before. David Rubin, our newest co-leader has already volunteered to organize the next release party for the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) release. We had some chat about Lucid and people are generally happy about a release that is more focused towards bug fixes rather then new features.

One Year of Independence

A little more than a year ago I wasn’t very happy, I managed to get myself stuck in a job I didn’t like working for a company I didn’t like in a city I didn’t like. It had compound effects that caused me more problems, I decided to take the plunge and start my own company, giving me the freedom to work on the things that I want to work where I want to and when it makes sense to do so. Yesterday it was exactly a year since I’ve done that when I founded Zanix, and looking back it’s been the single best decision I’ve ever made so far. I won’t deny that it was incredibly risky, but I don’t have any dependents or very big responsibilities (well, beseides perhaps my homeloan) so it turned out a good time in my life to do so. There’s been some rough spots especially with the accounting side and in some cases payments taking long to get to me, but I’ve learned a lot and it’s been a great experience so far, so far 2009 has been one of the best years I’ve ever had.

Revolution Linux

Over the next year I think things will be even better, over the last few months I’ve been talking to the nice people at Revolution Linux, and we worked out something that will allow me to run my current business and work for them almost-full-time. From my perspective I think it’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario, I don’t have to drop any of my projects and have a steady job working on things I really enjoy at the same time. My job title is literally “Ubuntu Developer/Analyst”, and I’ll be working on all kinds of Ubuntu and LTSP related things. Their head office is in Sherbrooke, QC which is close to where the LTSP hackfests happen so I’ll be spending lots of time up there. You don’t have to live long in Canada to be able to apply for a residency, so I might even go live there for a while, it will certainly make traveling around easier than on a South African passport. Sherbrooke is also driving distance from NYC so perhaps I might even go to Debconf next year. I’m not sure exactly how much time I’ll be spending everywhere yet, but I’ll know more myself once I stay there a few weeks after my work visa is approved.

Changes in involvement in CLUG and Ubuntu-ZA

I’m stepping down from the CLUG committee and also as co-leader of the Ubuntu-ZA loco team, since I’ll be traveling a lot next year and probably won’t be around that much, I’ll still be around virtually on the lists and on IRC and contribute here and there, but I’d rather leave the leadership roles to people who are active locally. Ubuntu-ZA elections are currently taking place on Launchpad and the CLUG AGM is taking place later this month where a new committee will be elected.

Just a few minutes ago, I finally became a MOTU! MOTU is short for Masters of The Universe (which is also the name for the old He-man comics and TV series, if you can remember that) and it’s the team that maintains the universe component packages in Ubuntu.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Karmic I got renewed energy to persue my dreams to become a MOTU and had lots of encouragement. I spent some time with Stéphane Graber who showed me LTSP Cluster. It’s an impressive set of tools that he’s been working on that the company he works for develops. He said that I could maintain the LTSP Cluster tools in Ubuntu which should help a good deal towards me becoming a MOTU, I was thrilled and made it my goal to become a MOTU before Karmic was released. Little did I know that I would become a MOTU on the actual day that Karmic is released. At least I won’t forget when I became a MOTU

Thanks to all the MOTUs who have been helping me along the way, Stéphane and also for Jordan who taught me plenty of acronyms (not only for MOTU but also for Debian) and all the people who would answer my questions on #ubuntu-motu (especially ScottK, persia, RainCT, Soren, Hobbsee, \sh, sorry if I left someone out) and also Oli and Daniel who helped me a lot as I got started.

I’ve always had lots of plans for ‘one day’ when I become a MOTU. The timing is quite good so I hope to deliver a number of nice things in universe for Ubuntu 10.04!