Country Road, Take me Home

I’m still at the hotel waiting for my cab to the airport and am using the last minutes of free wifi connection before heading back to Italy.

This travel and great experience is over, I already said that, but in 10 days a new travel awaits me. I’ll be heading to the Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound, Canada (with other guys from GNOME and Ubuntu too) thanks to the GNOME Foundation, the kind GNOME Travel Committee and Shaun McCance (and I also think Intel for sponsoring us, but I’m not really sure).

I’m really excited about this travel and about the conference. We, with the GNOME 3.0 release plan, are facing a great moment for reshaping documentation, for GNOME and for all downstream projects out there that builds on GNOME. There is Mallard that is shaping out as the new format for writing GNOME documentation and we will learn more about it during the conference. I’m also going there with some crazy ideas about documentation for GNOME, you can read them here.

denttwitOn the third day of the conference I added an “Empathy documentation sprint”, I hope to have the chance to speed up a little bit the writing of the documentation for Empathy with the precious help of some professional doc-writers, since I would really like to have a 100% features-full documentation for the 2.28 release (there is also the possibility to have Empathy in Ubuntu for the next release).

I’m thinking also about adding a “Gwibber documentation sprint”: gwibber rocks, and if you dent (or twit) a lot you should try it. Right now gwibber doesn’t ship with documentation and since even this one has great chances to get included in Ubuntu for a full-social-web experience, I think it needs some love.

Now it’s time to take the cab. Again: thank you all UDS guys & girls, you really rock!

UDS: final round

UDS is (almost) over and what a week has it been! Wonderful!

Lots of good sessions, talks, news and previews and people! Today we had a lot of translations related sessions and we decided to take a picture with all the translation-really-involved people that there here.

So, here we are:

From left to right:

• Me
• Jeroen Vermeulen
• David Planella
• Adi Roiban
• Henning Eggers
• Kyle Nitzsche (OEM team with an eye on translations)
• Arne Goetje
• Danilo Segan

(For a bigger picture, when I get back home I’ll send you)

Al giro di boa

Oggi inizia il terzo giorno dell’UDS, siamo ancora in albergo mezzi assonnati: qui si dorme sempre di meno e si beve sempre di più… è un inferno!

Ieri giornata intensa: un sacco di talk sulle traduzioni con un ottima sessione di QA con tutto il team di sviluppo di Launchpad Translations: gli abbiamo fatto una serie di richieste/domande e ci hanno detto quanto fattibili possono essere e anche in quanto tempo potrebbero realizzarle. Alcune sperano possano essere realizzate dalla comunità quando Launchpad verrà rilasciato open source (manca ancora poco!), altre ci vorrà un po’ di più. Alcune anteprime che si vedranno tra non molto, forse anche meno di un mese, come una nuova interfaccia per “la gestione” del lavoro di traduzione su Launchpad: una specie di workflow migliorato (specie eh, non ho detto una gestione completa del workflow). Interessante sessione anche sulle traduzioni di UNR e sugli sviluppi futuri dei temi per Ubuntu.

Oggi interessanti sessione su GDM, Ubuntu One, le traduzioni di Kubuntu e Moblin. Un’altra giornata intensa all’orizzonte…

Second Day at UDS: checked

Second day of UDS gone, and what a day. The schedule is very tight and there are some tracks that unfortunately overlaps, so it’s not always possible to be part of everything that really interests you.

Started this morning with the LoCo Directory session where they showed us the almost-soon-to-be-released LoCo Directory, a central place with all LoCo teams links and information that will replace the huge and unmaintanable wiki page that we have now. A great work done by Daniel, Richard and Christophe.

Then on with the translations tracks, really cool ones. Met David Planella and the other guys from the Launchpad Translations development team that I have never met before (Henning and Jerome). Great sessions about how to improve our internal information exchange, great QA session with all the Launchpad devs, great talk on the UNR translation handling with Kyle.

Now head out for some tapas at Barceloneta!

UNR inside Ubuntu runnig in a VM

I wanted to try Anjal, the new tiny email client based on Evolution, for my Mini Dell 9. I use Evolution on my (almost)daily computer use, but using Evolution on a rather small screen is not the best thing that could happen, add also that when using Evolution with the Mini 9 and it starts running all my filters (70 so far) it slows down the system and sometimes it takes ages to run them all.

So Anjal seems the best option, but that meant to compile it from scratch and I dind’t want to install all the dependencies on my Mini 9: only 8 GiB (in total) of space on an SSD.

That’s were VirtualBox enter. Instead of really trying it on the Mini, I thought about reproducing a Mini environment on a virtual machine and test it from there.

The first “problem” is: installing ubuntu-netbook-remix with VirtualBox. You can’t obviously use the .img file as an ISO, but you have to convert it and create a VitualBox Disk Image. Thanks to the wonderful documentation shipped with Virtualbox, that’s easy. The command to use is:

VBoxManage convertfromraw INPUT.img OUTPUT.vdi

You can also use the –format {VDI|VMDK|VHD} option to specify the type of disk. Done that, I setted up two “hard disks” inside the new virtual machine: the master with an empty space for storing the installation and the slave with the .vdi file created before.

Run the virtual machine, press F12 to choose the boot options, select the slave disk and install Ubuntu as usual. Installation done, apply Ubuntu’s patches, install guest additions for VirtualBox (you have to reload after each step). The last thing to do, before starting the dependencies download and the compilation process, is to mimic the screen resolution of the Mini 9. And again, thanks to VirtualBox documentation you can do this with the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata “CustomVideoMode1″ “1024×600x24″

Add a small option on the kernel line in this case

vga =864

and also edit the xorg.conf.vobx file adding the 1024×600 resolution (this is not writte in the documentation, but I couldn’t make it work with that resolution, so I tried adding the options there, and it worked).

This is the first step, now I should dive into the compile thing, but outside it’s sunny and 28°C, so I’m heading to the beach!

Ubuntu va a scuola…

Se la montagna non va da Maometto… o forse era qualche cos’altro? Comunque, se la scuola non va verso Ubuntu, allora facciamo che sia Ubuntu a entrare nella scuola! O no?

Il 16 maggio, due ubunteri, Paolo e Dario, saranno a Pontedera (PI) per un’iniziativa legata al software libero, Ubuntu e alla comunità italiana di Ubuntu, tenendo dei talk su questi argomenti. L’Istituto Pacinotti di Pontedera, o per lo meno una sua classe, collabora da un po’ con la traduzione italiana di FCM (svolgendo un ottimo lavoro!) e avevano piacere di avere qualcuno della comunità per poter parlare “di persona” ai ragazzi, per coinvolgerli ancora di più.

Se siete da quelle parti, volete approfondire un po’ gli argomenti software libero, Ubuntu e la sua comunità, fate un salto all’Istituto Pacinotti!