Ubuntu Phone Video Demo
Today I recorded a video demo of Ubuntu running on the Galaxy Nexus and showcasing much of the progress in May to turn the phone into a usable daily phone for early testers. The demo shows recieving a call and text, web browser, social networking integration, multitasting, a number of the apps, messaging menu, and more.
Here it is:
*Can’t see it? Watch it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q566IGyVB0o#!).*
Smart Scopes Update
One feature that didn’t land in Ubuntu 13.04 was the new Smart Scopes functionality in the Ubuntu dash. This feature greatly widens the scope (pun intended) of the dash returning results for a wide range of online services as well as local results. The whole system was re-architected to be more efficient, and designed to scale across our multi-device strategy.
Although the feature didn’t land in 13.04, the team assured us that it would land in the 13.10 cycle early yet it hasn’t appeared yet. I reached out to the team to get some clarity on why this hasn’t arrived yet, and *Thomas Strehl*, engineering manager for the feature has provided an update:
> When we tried to complete scopes for 13.04 back in March we also introduced some issues which needed quite some time during April to resolve. Especially, resolving the result update flickering and completing all reviews with design (mostly related to previews) took us until the second week of May; that was after our sprint in Oakland. During a review session with Mark Shuttleworth at the sprint it became also apparent that the current way we do scopes isn’t exactly the right one, so we started investigating the right approach also in preparation for a scopes sprint end of May. That preparation work in combination with some more fixing and a lot of merging (around 10 branches), bumping versions etc and having `mhr3` leaving for vacation slowed down the progress until 17th of May.
> Trying to get everything landed was then suddenly blocked by too many autopilot failures which then turned out to not be the scopes fault but rather a regression when upgrading autopilot 1.3 (as well as problems in jenkins for a few days). Good news is that all those issues had been resolved last week, meaning that after autopilot was fixed the reported autopilot issues of scopes went below the required threshold.
> However, it still hasn’t landed as of today, as everything has been prepared for making the switch from raring to saucy so a big chunk is waiting for landing, including the scopes (as discussed at vUDS, everything needs to be moved at the same time as autopilot 1.3, hud touch are backward incompatible). To land all this all dependencies (libhybris, ofono, …) of the entire stack have to be resolved first and tests need to continue to pass. We will get there soon…`didrocks`, `sil2100`, `rsalveti`, and `cyphermox` are heavily working on it as we speak.
So, in a nutshell, things have been delayed due to an intricate web of dependencies, the switch to saucy, and some infrastructure gremlins. Fortunately though, we should see this land soon. Thanks to the team for all their efforts, and to Thomas for providing a thorough update!
community.ubuntu.com
For some time now we have wanted to improve the community pages on [ubuntu.com](https://www.ubuntu.com/). While the pages there provided an overview of the community they really didn’t serve us or our new community members very well.
At UDS in Copenhagen back in November we agreed to work on a project to build a new set of community pages, but in a more scalable and accessible way, and in a way that is easier to maintain and improve. We worked together as a community to coordinate a docs jam, to identify what content was needed, start building some of the core material, put together a WordPress instance, get it themed and prettified, and then review the content and get it trimmed, concise, and accessible. The final result is fantastic, detailed, and provides a wonderful springboard for contributing. I plan on having a regular session at every forthcoming UDS to discuss improvements and refinements to the pages to ensure they serve our community well.
Many people contributed their time to this project, and I want to offer my thanks to everyone who helped drive it forward. I want to highlight one person in particular though, Daniel Holbach on my team, who I gave a very explicit goal of pulling together these many threads into a completed product by the end of May. Daniel deftly delivered this coordination with our community contributors, while also balancing the many other projects he is coordinating too. As ever, fantastic work, Daniel!
You can visit the site by simply going to [ubuntu.com](https://www.ubuntu.com) and clicking the Community link at the top. 😉
Ubuntu Phone Dogfooding Update
A while back I [blogged about dogfooding Ubuntu Phone](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/2013/05/17/dogfooding-the-ubuntu-phone-my-early-experience/); that is, *eating our own dogfood* by using it on a daily basis. I have been tracking this [here](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BaconDogfood).
The phone team were setting the end of May as a goal for getting the phone into this daily driver state, and they have delivered most of what is needed.
In summary:
* The phone OS is reliable and doesn’t crash.
* Making and receiving calls works great. The phone now switches the screen on and off when you get a call/SMS, it switches to the phone app when you get a call, and switches the screen on and off when on a call based upon the proximity of your ear to the screen.
* Sending and receiving text messages works great.
* The messaging menu works great. Missed calls and texts appear there and I can reply or call back directly from messaging menu. I can also view my SMSes in the conversations list in the phone app.
* Connecting to wireless networks works well.
* Mobile data has landed but currently needs manual configuration to be used. I am waiting on the phone team to publish how to test this. **UPDATE**: Read how to test this [here](https://plus.google.com/u/0/100264483712374857174/posts/3o1tjYo9Ghx). They will be working on automating this next.
* Power management is much better; when the phone is not used for 30 secs the screen is automatically shut off.
* The camera works great (with flash) and photos appear as expected in the gallery. There is a shortcut from the camera app to the gallery.
* The browser works well, now has a progress bar and overlayed history based upon the URL entered.
* Orientation support has been added to a number of apps (phone, gallery, notepad, browser etc) so when you turn the phone the UI adjusts.
* You can now easily add an unknown number as a contact.
* Most of the fake apps and contact data have been removed.
All in all great progress is being made and I am continuing to use my Galaxy Nexus full time and now most of the bugs that made it a little difficult are fixed. As soon as mobile data arrives that will make life much easier, and the missing link for me is GPS, but the team are working on a location service to serve GPS needs.
Fortunate
My parents came out to visit this week and I took a week off work to spend with them. We had not seen them for 18 months in person (pregnancy and babies make travel to England rather challenging), but we Skype video-chat pretty regularly. It was the first time they were meeting Jack and they absolutely *fell in love* with him. The feeling was definitely mutual on the baby side of the bargain.
It was a *fantastic* week. We took a weekend trip to Tahoe, had an evening with Erica’s dad and her brother and his girlfriend, another evening with Erica’s mum and step-dad, and of course, plenty of time with them with Erica, Jack and I.
They left to go back home today.
This afternoon I have felt rather empty; I miss them both.
I am tremendously thankful for my life, and thankful every day for my beautiful wife and baby, and my wonderful British, American, and Italian families. I knew I would feel this way when they left, but an awesome week with my family was well worth it for a shitty few days missing them.
Sometimes the empty moments just make you realize how full your life really is.
Mum and dad, I love you both, and can’t wait to see you in September. 🙂
May 2013 Ubuntu Developer Summit Summary
Recently we had our online [Ubuntu Developer Summit](https://uds.ubuntu.com/) where we discussed a range of topics, defined next steps, and documented work items. The very last session at the event was an overall summary of the tracks (you can watch the video [here](https://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-1305/meeting/21823/closing-plenary/)), but I wanted to blog an overall summary too. These notes are quick and to the point, but they should give an overall idea of decisions made.
## Client
* Content Handling –
* Siloing apps.
* Main applications will define a “main repo” and provide an API to deliver, share and access the data in the main repo.
* X.org
* Want to update to 1.14 or even 1.15 if the video ABI doesn’t change.
* System Settings
* Focus on the phone settings defined [here](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemSettings).
* Scopes
* Scopes that didn’t land in 13.04 should land within 2 weeks.
* Several scopes will be migrated from Python to either C++ or Go for memory purposes.
* Chromium
* Expressed interest in moving to Chromium as default for a better user experience. Gathered feedback on the possible move. Next steps are to take discussion to the mailing list.
* Unity 8/Mir Preview in 13.10
* Want to have a preview of Ubuntu 8 (Phablet UI) running on Mir as an optional session (installable from universe or PPA, most likely).
## Foundations
* Reviewed the current 13.10 release schedule found several changes made in 13.04 that mistakenly hadn’t been carried over, such as later freeze dates and one fewer alpha; Adam Conrad will be syncing all this up and sending mail to the ubuntu-release list for review.
* We discussed the positioning of the development release in light of some conversations last cycle, and put some more flesh on the design for making it easier for people to follow along with the development release all the time.
* This cycle, we’ll be bringing up a new 64-bit ARM architecture based on cross-building work done last cycle, and we’ll update developers on that once we get closer to the point of starting up builds in Launchpad.
* Moving forward with click packages. Fleshed out ideas on source package provision, integrating with existing client package management stacks, and clarifying some other things like the security model.
* For image based upgrades, the team held a demo and Q&A for the current proposed solution, which is split into client, server, and upgrader; client is going well and expected to land by the end of June, server is currently blocked on infrastructure but should be ready around the same time, and Ondrej Kubik has been making good progress at tweaking the CyanogenMod recovery environment for the upgrader.
* Firmed up the plan for packaging Android components for Ubuntu Touch images.
* Upstart will be used as the standard way of spawning desktop apps for Unity on touch devices and ideally on desktop too (Unity 7 and 8). This will let us make sure we only have one instance per app, and will make it easy to apply AppArmor, seccomp and cgroup confinement consistently to all apps.
* Defined a goal to reduce the amount of time it takes to prepare, test and make a Checkbox release, automating more of the process. This will benefit people who use the Checkbox tool as part of their daily work. It’s possible that Checkbox may move to Universe, although this needs some more discussion.
* The server certification tools are being reengineered to use the new plainbox engine as their core. This will preserve the existing UI, but we’ll have co-installable packages with the new core, and will eventually switch over to the new tools.
* The cert tools and test suite are being upgraded to work well on ARM for our hyperscale and mobile work, fixing any issues so we can get full, clean test runs on ARM servers. MaaS will be used for provisioning, and tested as a part of the ARM server solution.
* We will be basing the primary kernels for 13.10 on Linux 3.10, but will strongly consider 3.11 depending on timing. For Ubuntu Touch devices, we already have kernels available for Nexus 4 and 7, and plan to also bring up kernels for Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 10. We’ll provide a 13.04 hardware enablement kernel in the 12.04.3 point release.
* In terms of Ubuntu Touch power management, we have some preliminary baselines against Android on Nexus 4 and will replicate those on other devices, although they won’t be entirely meaningful until things like Mir land. We’ve written some new utilities such as eventstat to track down problems here. On power management policy, we agreed key requirements for the system power manager and we’ll extend powerd to serve our immediate needs.
## Community
* Community Roundtable:
* Approved LoCo teams are no more, will be verified teams.
* Bringing back fortnightly leadership meetings.
* Ubuntu Advocacy Kit is driving to 1.0.
* Gathered UDS feedback.
* Ubuntu Community Website
* Great discussion which clarified everybody’s involvement in the project.
* Clear roadmap for completing the content and design in the next few weeks.
* Design and web team have the templates we need to finish the work.
* No discussion with IS yet around deployment – this will be coordinated next week.
* Ubuntu Womens Session
* Several events planned to get more people involved and the word out (Career Days, UOW, etc.).
* Discussion about a women in technology themed event at CLS.
* Ubuntu Status Tracker
* The status tracker is many things to many different teams, but we managed to figure out a number of issues we can tackle, which should make everybody’s lives easier.
* Removal of kanban view.
* Add links from team pages to milestones pages.
* Set up a meeting to discuss setting up an “ongoing” dev series.
* Ubuntu On Air! Discussion
* Issues with supporting multiple hosts.
* Discussion about building support into summit and re-using vUDS components to support more shows and multiple hosts.
* We want to open it up to more contributors, so we get more variety into the shows.
* Development Onramp for Touch / Unity Next
* Goals to improve docs.
* We will track contributions to all the projects to see how we improve.
* Increased focus on testing, coordination with the SDK team.
* Documentation Team
* Update Getting Started Page, review current docs and previous mailing list feedback.
* Regular doc review cadence and more health check meetings.
* Focus on content in the UAK.
* Ubuntu Enterprise Desktop Discussions
* Another meeting will be planned to get more input from users of enterprise desktops.
* Some common issues were identified and discussed:
* outdated cfengine package
* access to Firefox/Thunderbird packages before publication (resolved)
* support for livemeeting/linc
* More Ubuntu Touch images
* We identified the current blockers and will simplify thingsby using an image without firmware blobs, so they can be added by a local tool afterwards.
* After the rebase to saucy we will also update the docs accordingly.
* Kernel images for devices will first live in PPA, afterwards probably in universe.
* Regular Ubuntu Development Updates
* Organise regular Ubuntu on Air Hangouts to which we invite people from news sites as moderators.
* Briefly summarise work from the last week(s).
* Ask engineers to demo/showcase interesting developments.
* Do Q&A sessions.
* Also invite members of governance teams along.
## Cloud and Server
* Openstack Next Steps
* Looked at some high level areas for this cycle, avoiding digging into areas covered by other sessions. We decided that at current, moving over to Git for our packaging work doesn’t add value. We also agreed to clean up on some cruft within the packaging branches.
* Cloud Archive Status Check
* Decided we had to support Grizzly for 12 months, which exposes a 3 month support gap from the backing Raring release. Need to discuss with the security team about how to fill this gap. Reviewed proposal for SRU cadence and tentatively rubber stamped.
* Better co-ordination around trumping by Security dates, specifically if it covers more than one project.
* Looked at using updates as a reason to increase our messaging.
* 12.04.x images with LTS Enablement Kernel
* The cloud images currently only contain the Precise (3.2) kernel. Discussed adding the kernel HWE stack to cloud images. We need to document how to enable backports, clearly state the support, and possibly tool cloud-init to handle updating the kernel on boot if folks need a more recent kernel on boot.
* We will not be creating new images with the HWE kernel for the default images. The HWE kernel will be used for Clouds that have a high velocity of change in the Hypervisor (i.e. Windows Azure). For the regular images, we will investigate tooling in cloud-init and other places to make the ingestion of the HWE kernels easier, such as enhancing the documentation, allowing for easier enablement of backports, and making it easier to enable the HWE kernel at boot time.
* Cloud-Init for Vagrant
* We will create a good Ubuntu development workflow for Vagrant users (cross platform OSX, Windows). Ben Howard will investigate cloud-init tooling as well as the best method to enable the DKMS modules.
* Cloud Init & Cloud Image Development for Saucy
* We will define the development work to improve cloud-init and cloud images for the saucy cycle.
* Discussed work on pre-cloud init phase, vendor hooks, cloud init plugin, and rebuding tools.
* Juju Core Development
* 1.10 version of juju available in backports for 13.04, and should be available in precise backports soon.
* Look for releases in juju/dev ppa updating weekly, juju PPA monthly, and have stable release go into backports (couple of times per cycle).
* OpenStack Hypervisors
* HyperV support is currently untested.
* VMWare support in charms, but not primary supported charms.
* We need a matrix to demonstrate interoperability and support of each variation.
* Need to work out additional hardening support.
* Openstack QA
* Building on our great history, moving away from per commit hardware testing to a more fluid multi virtualised separated environment, allowing greater interoperability testing. Hardware Cert term showed interest in getting more involved. The scope of this will be ratified when the interop matrix is created.
* Flag Bearer Charms
* Will improve flag bearer charm integration testing.
* Implement list of reference charms.
* Develop Percona backup XtraBackup flag bearer charm.
* Document flag bearer and reference charm criteria in best practices.
* Discuss flag bearer charms on mailing list.
* Charm Policy Review
* Add into policy for a charm to provide a config option to specify the version. The other items such as installation location (ie /srv), implementation of common subordinates, backups are to be added to best practices. The 3 ack on charm reviews is still under discussion.
* Split Juju docs best practices and policy sections.
* Audit Charms
* Discussed re-reviewing the current charms in the charm store to ensure accurate readmes, tests, functionality, rating, categories, and icons. The workflow was discussed for queues, and which charms to tackle first.
* Charm Development Tooling
* Discussed gathering all the different charm development tools into one central package. These charm development tools include charm-tools, charmsupport, juju-gui,openstack-charm-helpers. Folks also discussed how the tools could be improved, and used as a singular set.
* Juju Framework Charm for Server Application Technologies
* Discussed further building out of the Django, Rails, Node.js, and possibly Java.
* Improve Juju Documentation
* Make a better user and charm developer experience for juju.ubuntu.com/docs. Discussed getting a permanent beta site going, methods to get documentation contributions. Hopefully a revamped docs will be in production in the next couple of weeks, and if not we’ll have a beta site very shortly (days).
* Juju Charm Testing
* Currently jenkins.qu.u.c has graph testing showing reliable results. Marco will be landing integration soon (days), with a more formal testing framework to follow (weeks).
* Some ideas discussed were to gate charm store commits on testing, showing testing status in the GUI, and pre-deployment testing. Test examples will be made available along with a charm testing school.
* Add User Feedback loops and Social Networking to Charm Store Charm Pages
* Discussed making sure users have a method to give and receive feedback on a per charm basis. We currently have social networking (+1s, Likes, Tweets) in addition to downloads, quality rating, bug links, and testing status. Some ideas were to get clarification from design on showing social networking numbers, as well as a ‘leave feedback’ form.
* Juju GUI Development
* Discussed development done, and upcoming work. Covered ideas such as design, bundles, diagnostics, user data, juju feature parity, maintenance and support.
* Improving QA for seeded server packages
* Established three distinctive areas of testing, these are upstream test suites which typically run at build-time, integration tests via dep8 and service level testing which often requires multiple nodes and is conducted using juju.
* We established that there is the regression test suite that can be included in many of the packages directly, with the requirement that we package some of the common ubuntu testing libraries.
* Discussed some areas of standardisation for dep8 testing.
* Fastpath installer work for 13.10
* Established what FPI is, and the processes which are part of it.
* Fast Path installer will be delivered as a installable package in Ubuntu, most likely in python. The interface to it will we yaml formatted configuration.
* OpenStack Charm work for Saucy/Havana
* Migrate all charms to be python based.
* Consolidation into new charm-helpers nextgen library.
* Complete SSL/HTTPS support into charms.
* Integration of wiki and help documentation, upstream series aligned with upgrading notes.
* Design around how proprietary+1 plugins will be integrated into core charms for Cinder and Quantum.
* Investigate alternatives to mysql
* Agreed that the best course of action was to maintain mysql for this cycle, and try and support other flavours of mysql getting into Ubuntu via Debian.
* Ceph activities for Saucy
* Dumpling release will be out in August (co-incides with FF for Saucy) so will be target for this release.
* Lots of incremental improvements in efficiency and performance, full RESTful API for RADOS Gateway admin features, block device encryption for data at rest.
* ceph-deploy (upstream cross platform deploy tooling) will be packaged.
* Implementation of more automated testing during Saucy.
* HA Openstack charms V2
* Reviewed the current state of HA support in Openstack charms. Percona has volunteered to charm their offering, allowing great coverage by their mysql HA variant for active/active clustering.
* Work also on active/active and brokerless messaging options (ZeroMQ) and incremental improvements for service check monitoring in load balancers.
* Cluster stack (Corosync/Pacemaker) to be reviewed and upgraded for Saucy in preparation for 14.04.
* MongoDB activities for Saucy
* File Main inclusion report for Mongo to support Ceilometer and Juju use cases. Raise a Micro Release Exemption (MRE) to the techboard, as point releases are bug fix only.
* Upstream armhf enablement patches. Re-sync with Debian. OpenSSL license exception.
* Virtualization Stack Work for Saucy
* If debian libcgroup maintainer finds time, we’d like to merge cgroup-lite into libcgroup. For per-user configuration, first make it default-off optional, conditional on userns sysctl being enabled.
* LXC work is going well on track to 14.04 (and lxc 1.0) roadmaps. For this cycle, we’d like to get user namespaces enabled in the saucy kernel with a new off-by-default sysctl controling unprivileged use, and complete the ability to create and start basic containers without privilege; add console, attach and snapshot to the API, complete the create API function, and convert all of the lxc-* programs to use the API; write a libvirt driver based upon the API, and a patch to enable testing it with openstack; write loopback and qcow2 block device drivers; Get the subuid (user namespace enablement) patches into the shadow package; discuss with the community the maintenance of stable trees; improve the API thread safety; and work our distro lxc tests into the upstream package (akin to how it is done in netcf).
* In edk2, we want to contribute to the implementation of the ability to save and restore nvvars from the ovmf bios from qemu. We’ll fix the apparmor bug preventing the block device mounting in libvirt-lxc, which is blocking use of that feature by openstack.
* We intend to merge libvirt at least at version 1.0.6, qemu at 1.5, and hopefully xen 4.3. We’ll follow up on citrix’ plans for xcp. The blueprint lists additional xen work planned. We’ll also look into default use of openvswitch bridges in libvirt.
## Quality Assurance
* Core Apps
* Autopilot testcases written for ubuntu core applications will be checked to ensure they pass before auto-landing updates in the ubuntu touch images.
* The quality community team will help core application developers develop a suite of manual testcases for each ubuntu core application. These will be run as part of the verification process for the 1.0 stable release of each application.
* Testcases
* Add testcases so all default desktop applications for each flavor are covered.
* Expand and improve server testcases to allow more participation by those who might lack domain specific knowledge and/or hardware.
* Growth/Experience
* Make available documentation more accessible by linking to it from the tools we use for testing, like the qatracker.
* Continue holding testing ‘how-to’ and knowledge sharing sessions during UDW, UOW, as part of UGJ, and on ubuntu on air.
* Add testing achievements to the ubuntu accomplishments project.
* Ubuntu Touch
* Ubuntu Touch images will be smoke tested using the pending/current model already in use for other images. This ensures no image is published for general consumption that doesn’t pass a set of tests ensuring basic functionality of the image.
* Current Ubuntu Touch autopilot tests for the core applications will be investigated for use as part of these smoke tests.
* The concept of smoke test is going to be expanded to cover a no regression build.
* Autopilot
* Autopilot 1.3 is now released and will be available in raring and saucy. No quantal support is planned. Precise support is being examined, but requires further investigation and backporting work.
* Autopilot developers will now be available on #ubuntu-autopilot — no need to always ping thomi! 🙂
* Mir
* Planned tests for stressing mir to ensure good behavior during stressed conditions for things like OOM, memory leaks and race conditions.
* Stress tests targeted to be run as often as possible, but might be limited due to time constraints of wanting to run the tests over a longer period of time.
* UTAH
* UTAH will be expanded to include automated upgrade testing capabilities. UTAH jobs will be created for bootstrapping base images, for performing upgrades, and running post-upgrade tests. The old auto-upgrade-testing tool can still be used by flavors if desired.
* Dashboard
* Create high-level views of the state of quality in ubuntu by aggregating results of test runs. This will allow for ‘problem’ areas within ubuntu to be more easily identified and targetted for further testing or investigation by interested parties. You can follow this work on the QA dashboard [here](https://reports.qa.ubuntu.com/).
* Upstream
* autopilot-gtk will now be maintained by the upstream QA team. Bug fixes and outstanding issues will be solved in order to allow for the autopilot desktop tests to run
* Once running properly, the autopilot desktop tests will become a part of daily image testing
* Continue development on umockdev to add support for more exotic networking tests (eg, 3G) and research sound testing
As ever, you can track progress on work items on [status.ubuntu.com](https://status.ubuntu.com) and we hope to see you at the next UDS in three months. 🙂
New Song
Since Jack was born my music has taken something of a back seat. Recently I got the itch to write a new song and here is my first metal tune since he was born. It is an instrumental named after his onesie with chimp feet. I wanted to enjoy writing a song that spins around a little bit without the need to make it radio-length. As such it weighs in at just under 7 1/2 minutes. Anyone want to make a music video for it. 😉
I wrote and recorded this in my home studio and played the guitars and bass; drums are programmed this time around. Licensed as [CC-BY-SA](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).
[Download It Here](https://ubuntuone.com/2heBWcsd6Q1V468aAXt3KW)
Respect in Community Discussion and Debate
Recently there was *yet another* storm in a teacup that distracted us from creating and sharing Ubuntu and our flavors with others. I am not going to dive into the details of this particular incident…it has been exhaustively documented elsewhere…but at the heart of this case was a concern around the conduct in which some folks engaged around something they disagreed with. This is not the first time we have seen disappointing conduct in a debate, and I wanted to share some thoughts on this too.
In every community I have worked in I have tried to build an environment in which *all* view points that challenge decisions or decision makers are welcome with the requirement that they are built on a platform of *respectful discourse*; this is the essence of our [Code Of Conduct](https://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct). Within the context of an Open Source community we also encourage this engagement around differences to be expressed as *solutions* with a focus on *solving problems*; this helps us to be productive and move the project forward. This is why we have such a strong emphasis on blueprints, specs, bugs, and other ways of expressing issues and exploring solutions.
Within the context of this most recent issue I saw three problems (problems I have seen present in other similar arguments too):
1. Irrespective of the voracity or content of an opinion we must *never forget* to be respectful and polite in the way we express and engage with others, irrespective of whether you are a volunteer, Canonical employee, or otherwise. Respect must *always* be present in our discourse, irrespective of the content of our opinions; without it we become a barbaric people and lose the magic that brought this wonderful set of minds together in the first place. There is simply no excuse for rudeness, and inflammatory FUD that has no evidence to back it up other than presumed ill-intent serves nothing but to demotive folks and ratchet up the flames, as opposed to resolve the issue and make things better.
2. Trust needs to be earned, but trust should always be built within the wider context of a set of contributions and conduct. Unfortunately some folks consider decisions they disagree with to be a basis for (a) entering into a paranoid debate about the “*real reason*” the individual or company made that decision (and typically not believing the rationale provided by said decision-maker) and (b) seemingly forgetting about all the other positive contributions that the person or company has contributed. I can assure you there is no nefarious scheme at place at Canonical; our goals are well known in the community. If I felt Canonical was fundamentally trying to demote and shut the community out, I wouldn’t work here; I have no interest in working for a company that doesn’t understand the value of community, and I am not worried about finding suitable employment elsewhere. I work at Canonical because I believe our goals with Ubuntu are just and the company’s commitment to our community is sincere.
3. Ubuntu is *not* a consensus-based community. Consensus communities rarely work, and I am not aware of any Open Source project that bases their work on wider consensus in the community. It would be impossible and impractical to notify our community of every decision we make, let alone try to base a decision on a majority view, but we do try to ensure that major changes are communicated to our leaders first (this is something we have been driving improvements in recently). We always need to find the right balance between transparency and JFDI, and sometimes the balance isnt’t quite there, but that does not mean there is some kind of illuminati-ish scheme going on behind the scenes.
Ubuntu is a community filled with passionate people, and I love that we have folks who are critical of our direction and decisions. If everyone agreed with what we are doing, we would not always make the right decisions, and our diversity is what makes Ubuntu and our flavors such a great place to participate.
As I said at the beginning of this post, it is important that all viewpoints are welcome, but we have to get the tone and conduct of some of these debates under control. The sheer level of sensationalist and confrontational language that is often in place in these disagreements doesn’t serve anyone but hungry journalists looking for page hits.
Now, I am not suggesting here that anyone should change any of their viewpoints. If you vehemently disagree with an aspect of what we are doing in Ubuntu or at Canonical, that is fine and of course, welcome. What I am appealing to everyone though is to *treat others like you wish to be treated*, with respect and dignity, and lets keep the sensationalism out of our community and focus on what we do best…building a world-class Free Software platform and its rich ecosystem of flavors.
Dogfooding the Ubuntu Phone: My (Early) Experience
As many of you will know, our goal is to [get the Ubuntu phone in a state where it can be used on a daily basis for testing](https://theravingrick.blogspot.com/2013/05/woof-woof.html), and importantly, finding bugs, UI issues, and other details that help us to refine the overall Ubuntu Touch experience. Progress is [on-track for the end of May](https://theravingrick.blogspot.com/2013/05/at-end-of-april-we-set-goal-to-have.html).
I decided to start dogfooding a little early (please remember, we are shooting for the beginning of July to be broadly in shape for dogfooding, so if you try, don’t expect things to be ready right now), so today I put my SIM card in my Galaxy Nexus with Ubuntu Touch and things are working pretty well so far. It seems that my data is no longer getting wiped on image updates, which helps testing significantly, so I am [regularly upgrading with the daily images](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Install).
*As ever, if you decide to test, you are doing so at your own risk…don’t be surprised to see bugs, crashes, and potential data loss (although I have not seen any data loss so far)*.
Some notes about my experience dogfooding:
* Making and recieving phone calls works well. I am using T-Mobile as my network.
* Sending and recieving texts works well too. Messages appear chronologically.
* Contact syncing is not in place but Sergio [blogged about how to sync your contacts from Google](https://sergiusens.github.io/posts/google-contacts-on-ubuntu-touch.html). This has made my phone infinitely more useful and rather nicely, it pulls in the avatars too so I can see who is calling me. 🙂
* Browsing and connecting to wireless networks works well.
* The browser works well overall, although currently requires wifi (3G browsing coming soon).
* Camera works well (for still photos, video not implemented yet) and I can browse my pictures in the gallery.
* Many of the community-written [core apps](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/CoreApps) are present and working. Calendar lets me save and browse calendar events (although syncing with a calendar service is not there yet). Weather shows me the weather for my area right now and a week long forcast. Calculator is working and largely feature-complete. Other core apps are on their way to the daily image soon.
* Overall the core Unity UI is working well. I can search for apps, load them, quit them, multi-tasting works well, and the indicators work (for adjusting volume etc).
The primary blockers in my way right now for normal use out and about are:
* The screen does not auto shut-off. This means if the screen gets turned on in my pocket it never turns off and the battery dies.
* Speakerphone not wired into the UI yet.
* Can’t set the time on the phone yet. Also, the alarm feature in the clock doesn’t work; I need this to get me up in the morning. 🙂
* Not so much a blocker, but the phone is still filled with example material and contacts. They need to be removed.
All of these are on the TODO list for completion by the end of the month.
I have been filing bugs for a bunch of the issues I am seeing on a day to day basis and the team are working hard to hit the end of May goal. Overall progress is looking good.
Although I have been using the daily images for quite some time on a phone without a SIM card, using as an actual phone is even more motivating than before. I can feel the phone coming together and when we get many of these issues fixed, it is going to deliver a far superior experience than the Android phone I was using before.
Getting the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit to 1.0
A while back I started a project called the [Ubuntu Advocacy Kit](https://www.launchpad.net/uak/). The goal is simple: create a single downloadable kit that provides all the information and materials you need to go out and help advocate Ubuntu and our flavors to others. The project lives [here on Launchpad](https://www.launchpad.net/uak/) and is available in [this daily PPA](https://launchpad.net/~uak-admins/+archive/uak). If you want to see the kit in action just run:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:uak-admins/uak
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install uak-en
Now open the dash and search for “advocacy”. Click the icon to see the kit load in your browser.
We discussed the UAK this week at UDS and I want to get the kit to 1.0 level of completeness. This doesn’t require a huge amount of work, just getting a core set of content written up in a concise, simple, but detailed fashion. I want to complete this work and then get the kit up on [loco.ubuntu.com](https://loco.ubuntu.com) as something people can download to get started advocating Ubuntu and our flavors.
I have [created a blueprint to track this work](https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-s-uak-first-release) and I am stubbing out a bunch of pages in the kit for pages that I think we will need as part of a 1.0 release.
## And why are you telling me this?
Well, I am looking for help. 🙂
If you enjoy writing and have a knowledge of good quality advocacy, I would like to invite you to write some content. If you can just reply to this post in the comments (or anywhere else I tend to look, such as email or IRC), we coordinate who works on what and I will update the blueprint where appropriate.
Thanks for reading!