Testing is fun! + FLOSS/Ubuntu meetup in Iceland next week, anyone? + SpreadUbuntu update

Testing is great fun!

Lately there has been a lot of activity in the Norwegian LoCo Team. We had a meeting last month , will hold a Jam in Oslo and have a great line-up of talks for our Lucid release party and have great goals to be achieved before the release for our web presence! More information on this can be read in this wiki page (Norwegian only.)

As I am, among others, responsible for the Testing part of our upcoming Jam I have started to do some real testing at home and for friends:

1. Ubuntu on a Tablet PC (Lenovo Thinkpad X60)
   I tried to get Lucid into this one, but it seems that the transition from hal to udev means a bit of work to get this working. I don’t know if  this is beyond my technical skills or I am just lazy, but I went the rational way and tried our stable release after the development branch failed miserably (I will be reporting those bugs later.)
   I really loved Karmic since lots of things work like a charm with this Tablet PC. It does require some effort to get everything (Wacom drivers, rotate buttons, fingerprint authentication ++) working, but with good and well documented help you can manage to get everything working as it should!
2. Faster Scheduler Alternatives to Mainline Linux Kernel Technology
   As some of you might already have heard there are different approaches to CPU and I/O Scheduling than those that are standard in the Linux Mainline Kernel (the Linus’ one) and that have a different approach about how a computer should work. This is true specially for Personal Computers. After all Linux runs on all kind of devices: from a watch to most supercomputers in the world so the way the kernel thinks of scheduling might be very adaptable in most cases, but specific uses cases as a PC might get better performance by having different approaches to activities and resource scheduling.
   The most famous and well known of these are the  BFS (Brain-Fuck-CPU-Scheduler) by Con Kolivas and BFQ (Budget Fair Queueing I/O Scheduler) by Fabio Checconi and Paolo Valente. Our community is so awesome that these are already packaged by my hero of the day so it’s just a matter of adding this PPA to your sources.list (and, of course, to have an idea of what you are doing) and getting the right kernel for testing. The same repo should work for Debian systems as well.
   I have to admit that the whole Ubuntu desktop experience feels different, more responsive and, nonetheless, faster with this additions! I have not run benchmarks on it yet.
   
3. Nokia N900
   I have not tested this device as much as I would have liked because the charger bay got ruined! So I charge its batteri in my old Nokia N810 and as I use it s a phone it is very irritating to test things and wait a couple of hours before the battery gets charged in the other device… So before I get the device fixed you will not be seeing the results of my tests. Sorry people. With the meego announcement this whole thing is less exciting (at least in my eyes) since the debian part of it will be gone (meego, as moblin is, will be RPM based.)
4. Upgrading to LTS on desktops and servers
   I have some machines running Ubuntu. Most of them are desktops and some of them are servers (isn’t every GNU/Linux machine a server?)
   Nowadays when I do sysadmin work I do it because its fun. I might not be the best sysadmin around, but again, I am a sales man playing with technology so it does not really matter that much as if I was making a living out of it. When I have my community hat I do have a high standard in my System operations responsabilities, but on my personal servers I am a bit more careless.
   As Lucid is the next LTS release I am interested in upgrading all my machines (Dapper 6.06, Hardy 8.04, Jaunty 9.04, Karmic 9.10) to Lucid. I have been preparing the ground for these updates and I will execute them all after the first beta arrives.
5. Lucid Testing
   I want Lucid to be the best possible OS. That’s why I am testing it in any PC I can have for ~10 minutes. A USB Live boot image is awesome for this! the release is shaping rather nice and it sure is the fastest un til now. In many cases it is the fastest OS I’ve seen… And that is not what I am used to say about Linux, at least it has not been so for the last 12 years.
   My focus under the Jam will thus be to test the Lucid development releases and fill bugs in LP wherever we encounter them. More information on the Oslo Jam will be published next week.

Going to Iceland next week!

I have always been a fan of Iceland and its people for years (it all started with Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre for something like two decades ago) and so I was quick to buuy my ticket when a good friend (Icelandic) of mine asked me to come along to celebrate his nephew’s Confirmation. I am not into Christianity or anything like that, but I do know when to grab a unique opportunity when it’s in front of me.

So I will be there having fun and can meet people interested in a stronger Ubuntu Nordic cooperation somewhere between the 10th and the 15th of  March. I am basically up for a drink of some sort, a FLOSS related chat with locals and advocacy experience exchange. Who knows: We might even get the Icelandic LoCo Team started?

Contact me through the comments or write me an email (details in my launchpad page) so we can get this rolling. Thanks in advance! 🙂

SpreadUbuntu and the new Ubuntu Branding

Well, I am going to leave that for another post. What I can say right now is that the focus of the team for what’s left of this and the whole of the next release cycle will be on:

• Cooperating better with, among others, the Artwork Team
• Being a driving force and point of contact for Ubuntu Guerrilla Marketing
• Hopefully the team is gong to have a week long sprint under the 10.10 UDS in Belgium (depends on sponsorship ++)
• Make a roadmap towards the graduation of the project (as in we want the Canonical owned spreadubuntu .com and .org domains and we will work towards that goal)
• Becoming official within the release of Lucid+1

And those where the news from me for now.

~ by huayra on 2010 March 5.