notes from the mousepad

With the successful Beta release of Xubuntu 8.04, I got to thinking of some of the qualities that have always drawn me back to using Xubuntu.  I know that people have spirited feelings about their desktops of choice in the Linux world, but I thought I’d present a few reasons (8.04 reasons, to be exact) why Xubuntu (or Xfce in general) makes a good desktop environment choice, and why Ubuntu or Kubuntu users should consider using Xubuntu in place of their Gnome or KDE environments.

So, with all due respect to my Gnome- and KDE-using brothers and sisters, here they are:

1) Relative lightness - The Xfce desktop loads more quickly than Gnome or KDE desktops, and Xfce applications are built with an emphasis on lightness.  Xubuntu does have a handful of Gnome-based applications (and hence, some Gnome dependencies), but the developers avoid Gnome-lib heaviness where they can, and applications that require Gnome libraries have been only been chosen because they provide vital end-user functionality. 

2) Xubuntu is extensible - I used to work at a deli when I was in college, and my boss used to tell me, “You can always add more, but you can never take away.”  He was referring to putting ingredients onto sandwiches, but his statement can also apply to Xubuntu.  You can use the breadth and depth of the Ubuntu repositories to add extra features and functionality that you may want, but the heavier Gnome or Mono libraries aren’t built into Xubuntu’s core, so you can also stick with the lighter choices if the default Xubuntu system suits your needs.

3) You know what you’re doing - Let’s say you’ve been using Ubuntu or Kubuntu for a while, and know your way around a Linux environment.  You know mv, cp, ls, grep, what a “.whatever” file is for . . .  So you don’t need a distro that’s going to hold your hand quite as frequently.  Xubuntu provides you with most of the same features of Ubuntu, but also doesn’t get in your way with a GUI for everything.  This may not be an advantage for some, but may not be a nuisance for those who are knowledgeable about their systems. Continue Reading »

The Xubuntu documentation for 8.04 is done, and the doc-centered folks are now working on updating the wiki.  There are still quite a few holes in it for now, but we’re working fairly quickly.  I like the new menu bar.  It makes it easy to get around.

Also, I know it’s not much notice, but tomorrow (Wednesday, 2008-03-26) Jono Bacon is leading a Xubuntu-focused meeting in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on the Freenode IRC network.  The meeting will be held at 1900 UTC (2pm Chicago time).  We’re going to discuss Xubuntu’s mission and strategy, and discuss how to pull in some additional development and packaging help.  The Xubuntu team has had a bit of turnover as a result of some internal disputes over default package selection recently, and we think that coming to some kind of a consensus on our project goals will help focus our efforts and help put some of the conflict to rest.

I feel like Xubuntu is moving in a good direction, though.  Cody Somerville looks to be the person who will be leading the project, and he has a good idea of what Xubuntu is about, is technically proficient, and knows how to argue a point rather than getting mixed up in a bunch of jibba jabba.  All good qualities to have in a project leader.  (Cody also made that wiki menu bar on the Xubuntu wiki.)  As much as anyone pays attention to a wiki, perhaps having a well-set wiki with clear paths to help people start getting involved will help things along a little bit, too.

I’m preparing an interblags post that will contain 8.04 reasons for why Ubuntu and Kubuntu users should consider using Xubuntu (it might be more like 8.04 reasons why I like Xubuntu . . . I’m not sure), but it’s not ready yet.  I only have 7.04 reasons so far.  My post should be Hardy, not Feisty.

The Fedora folks continue to update their Xfce live-cd spin.  Since their initial efforts using Fedora 8, they’ve made some changes in the look of the spin - for example, using the default Fedora wallpaper and the Mist icon set.  Application selection (seemingly an on-going issue with Xfce-based distros - trying to balance being lightweight while still being user-friendly) continues to be ironed-out.

While I primarily work with Xubuntu, it’s great to see projects like Fedora and Foresight Linux embrace Xfce, too.  The more people that we can have using Xfce, reporting back bugs, and submitting patches, the better Xfce will be.

As an additional note, the Fedora wiki links to the upstream README file for xfdesktop.  It provides a few little-known customizations that may be of interest to some Xfce users.

Do you want to have the latest Xfce features and bugfixes without upgrading to the Xubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) development release? Sure, we all do, but did you know that you can get Xfce 4.4.2 on Xubuntu Gutsy Gibbon or Feisty Fawn just by using the Xubuntu team’s Personal Package Archive [1]? Neato.

Here’s how you do it:

If you’re running Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), type: “sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list” (without the quotes) and copy and paste the following lines to the bottom of your sources.list file:

# Xubuntu team personal package archive (Feisty Fawn)
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xubuntu-team/ubuntu feisty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/xubuntu-team/ubuntu feisty main

Be sure to save and close your file once you are done.

Similarly, if you’re running Xubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), type “sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list” (without the quotes) and copy and paste the following lines to the bottom of your sources.list file:

# Xubuntu team personal package archive (Gutsy Gibbon)
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xubuntu-team/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/xubuntu-team/ubuntu gutsy main

Again, be sure to save and close your file once you are done.

After you’ve saved the file, just type “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” into a terminal, and the Xfce packages in the Xubuntu PPA will be updated to their most recent versions. Enjoy.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~xubuntu-team/+archive

Fellow Chicagolander, nixternal, provided the Ubuntu-Chicago local community team with a few links to packaging-related articles that are available from some Debian and Kubuntu websites:

1) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#policy
2) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#devref
3) http://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals#maint-guide
4) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide
5) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PbuilderHowto
6) https://wiki.kubuntu.org/PackagingGuide/Lists/DocumentationResources

He sent them out to the mailing list in advance of a packaging session that’s being held this Sunday at the College of DuPage, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to cram into our session that day, but it should be a good start for those of us who aren’t familiar with packaging at all.  As someone who has primarily been focused on assisting with documentation, hopefully some day I’ll at least know how to package the set of docs that we create. 

Both this article and this article note how Ubuntu’s documentation needs to be better than it is. The first article describes (in the last point on the second page) that we should do more content scraping from the unofficial documentation (with permission) to improve our docs. We receive lots of requests for mentorship, so there certainly isn’t a lack of interest in helping out with documentation. The sprawling mass of wiki pages and forum tips is pretty enormous, though, and we need to specifically target the alternate doc sources a bit more. This process may even be going on already without me being fully aware of what is going on. (I do live in a sort of cave.)

One thing that stands out to me in the second article, though, is the point about release notes. We didn’t have release notes ready for the final Beta and RC of Xubuntu 7.10, and the final release notes for 7.10 weren’t put together until after the official release. We need to do better with that. I guess I’ll be studying up on what makes good release notes.

The Ubuntu documentation team has recently migrated all flavors of *Ubuntu documentation from Subversion over to Bazaar.  There are now separate branch repositories for each of the flavors, and instructions on how to download the repositories (and how to submit your changes) are up on the Ubuntu wiki.  Thanks to Matthew East and a few others for their work in getting this set up.

The Xubuntu documentation turned out ok for the Gutsy Gibbon release - it was certainly much better than it had been for the Edgy and Feisty releases, but we still didn’t reach our goals.  We did a lot of work on the docs, but without the efforts of Luzius Thöny at the very end, I don’t think that the docs would have been shippable.

Xubuntu Hardy Heron (Xubuntu 8.04) will be a long-term release, so I want to make sure that the documentation is top-notch.  The good news is that we already have a good base to work from (we don’t even have to copy everything over from Ubuntu from scratch like we did before), and we also have some people who have some documentation experience under their belt now.  This is good.

I’m not sure how else I’ll be able to contribute to the Xubuntu effort this time around.  I’ve started a new job that is more demanding than my prior jobs, so that has to take priority.  I’d still like to contribute to Xubuntu, though.  I enjoy it, and the people involved with the project.

I have been coordinating the ISO testing for Xubuntu since February of this year, and while it has really helped me to learn more about the release cycle, I am going to be changing jobs soon, and will not have as much free time. I’m also trying to contribute more to Xubuntu documentation, and that takes up my time, too. With those things in mind, I’m looking for someone who would be available to coordinate pre-release ISO testing for Xubuntu.

The good news is that this is technically a very easy task. It just requires an interest in testing and some time immediately prior to a release. Things can get hectic on the days leading up to milestone release day, but it is otherwise not too difficult.

A couple points:
- I will still test, but I just won’t be able to coordinate testing
- It’s not happening immediately. My new job starts on September 24th.
- I’ll help transition things to whoever wants to take this over. You won’t have to learn things from scratch.

Who would be good for this role? Here’s a few qualities and attributes that would be helpful for someone interested in being the ISO test coordinator:
- An interest in testing pre-release versions of Xubuntu
- A basic knowledge of the overall Xubuntu release cycle
- A computer with a cd burner and a decent (i.e., not dial-up) internet connection
- A spare computer, hard drive, or disk partition on which they would be willing to perform a test installation of Xubuntu
- Preferred: I think it’s easier for a test coordinator to coordinate things if they live in Europe (UTC-200 to UTC+500). This isn’t a requirement, but a person in Europe would be at home in the evening when test coordination activity is ramping up, and it’s much easier to coordinate activity from home than from the grocery store or your job.
- Optional: Test coordination could even be shared amongst a few people.

If you’re interested in heading ths up, please let me know. If you aren’t interested in leading things yourself, please mention this to your appropriate local community teams in case someone else may be interested.

After thinking things through for a while, I finally got around to making a few updates to j1m.net. Previously I had everything over on j1m.net/chi-ubuntu, but I’m moving my posting activities over to the root page of my site. I’m still working on Xubuntu (quite a bit), and I’m still a member of the Ubuntu-Chicago Local Community Team, but I just thought that it would be better to have a more general web presence. After all, what if I ever have to move to Florida or something? I wouldn’t want to have to change my site’s main url to be j1m.net/fla-ubuntu, so it’s best to make this change now.

As for the site’s appearance, I’m using a modified version of the Misty Looks Wordpress theme. I liked the layout of Matthew East’s page, so I’ve taken a fair amount (okay, alot) from that, and have otherwise mostly worked to make the page a little wider, and (in case you haven’t noticed) to give it the colors of Xubuntu. I’ll be tweaking the CSS to clean up a few elements eventually (the vertical spacing between the blogroll links is a little wide for my taste, and the way I’ve removed the header image is a bit of a hack), but the site looks good enough for now. It’s pretty straighforward in appearance, but I’m just really getting to know CSS, and hopefully I will learn more as I go along. If the site renders strangely on your computer, please let me know.

As for FOSS-related activities, we had an in-person meeting of the Ubuntu-Chicago Local Community Team last weekend. It was held immediately prior to the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group meeting, so there were a number of Chicago Lug members present, and at least one person from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s LUG was there, too. Although we frequently collaborate with members of the Chicago Lug, it’s good to see some opportunities to work with members of the UIC Lug, too. We’re going to be working up some educational sessions, and some informal hackfests with folks from UIC, and I’m looking forward to it.

Xubuntu Gutsy Gibbon documentation is coming along. I’m going to be doing some more work on it today. It’s my first foray into documentation, so it’s been fun trying to learn the ins and outs of docbook. Because we’ve used the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn documentation (thanks, Ubuntu!) we’ve had to remove or change Ubuntu-specific elements to suit Xubuntu, and we’ve had to make sure the documentation is current for this release. It hasn’t been too challenging, but I think we’re still trying to wrap our heads around the .ent files. I think we’re close, though.

Well, this is all for now. I hope the new site works well. Thanks for visiting.

Things have been pretty hectic lately. It seems like there’s always too much to do in Chicago in the summertime. I’m excited about what is in store, though. Freddy Martinez and I have been working on Xubuntu documentation, basing it largely off of Ubuntu’s Feisty documentation, and we have to submit our first set of patches soon. As it stands now, I’m mostly just making the actual text accurate for Xubuntu, but I still have a lot of questions about the docbook, and how certain docbook elements may be used to interact with Yelp, the Gnome documentation browser.

We also have to do some additional work on the specification for the Xubuntu Documentation Browser, or x-d-b, as it is being called. “Xubuntu Documentation Browser” is just a lot to type out.

This weekend is BARcamp Chicago, and it runs all through the weekend. For what ever reason, I didn’t know that it ran 24-hours through the whole weekend. Yeah. As if I’ll be awake for all of it.

I’ve applied for Ubuntu membership, but the next community council meeting falls at the exact moment of a meeting that I have to attend in Eagan, Minnesota, which is near Minneapolis. I’ve pushed myself to the end of the line of membership applications, hoping that they’ll be able to fit me in somehow. *fingers crossed*