Ubuntu Traffic #13 For 2004/11/19

By Benjamin Mako Hill

Table Of Contents

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Introduction

Threads Covered

1.	2004/11/10 - 2004/11/15	(57 posts)	Laptop Power Management Support
2.	2004/11/10 - 2004/11/15	(50 posts)	Anacron
3.	2004/11/10 - 2004/11/15	(5 posts)	GNOME Bittorrent Downloader
4.	2004/11/11 - 2004/11/16	(11 posts)	Hoary Hedgehog Array CD 1
5.	2004/11/11 - 2004/11/15	(7 posts)	Python 2.4 and Hoary
6.	2004/11/12 - 2004/11/15	(7 posts)	Language Packs Progress
7.	2004/11/16 - 2004/11/19	(53 posts)	Browsing Filesystem
8.	2004/11/13 - 2004/11/14	(4 posts)	Documentation Team Status
9.	2004/11/15 - 2004/11/19	(6 posts)	Ubuntu Security Notifications

Introduction

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of November 13 - 19, 2004. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

You can sign up for any of the mailing lists summarized here at http://lists.ubuntu.com. You can also join the IRC discussion summarized here in #ubuntu and other channels on the Freenode network: irc.freenode.net. Please join in and maybe you will be featured in the next traffic!

First, the following bits and pieces didn't get a full story but are worth mentioning:

Michael Banck built multisync packages which are lacking in warty with support for Evolution2 by applying fixes from CVS and rebuilding the Build-Depends chain. He also built a synce-multisync-plugin for syncronisation with Windows CE devices. The warty packages are up at deb http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/ubuntu/ ./ along with the necessary source.
Kristof Vansant asked, "When you receive a file with xchat this is placed in ~/.xchat2 wouldn't ~/download/ be better?" Jeff Waugh responded saying, "we're currently using ~/Desktop as the default download location for as many programs as we can - could you file a bug on xchat about this? We should fix that default."
John Hornbeck unveiled a subversion repository for the documentation team running on a private server. If you want access, you should contact John at hornbeck@freeshell.org but the accounts will generally be going out to people who are active on the documentation team already.
Brian Barr posted a great HOWTO on installing Warty Warthog onto Old World Macs. It's online in the wiki here: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/InstallOnOldWorldMacs
JP introduced a quick discussion on ubuntu-users about using LUFS (which supports FTP and other network filesystems) in Hoary. Michael Banck pointed out that LUFS was not longer being worked on upstream and that FUSE may be the better solution.
People started to receive their Ubuntu CDs this week and we saw a number of happy folks post pictures and and happy testimonials onto the list.
John Levin pointed folks to this great article where a Windows developer (!) gets sick of viral infection and installs Ubuntu http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/5905

1. Laptop Power Management Support
2004/11/10 - 2004/11/15 (57 posts) Subject: "Laptop power management support"
People: Matthew Garrett

Laptop-team lead Matthew Garrett posted an announcement to the ubuntu-devel list about laptop power management support in Hoary saying:

I've been doing some work on power management support. Note that this is all highly experimental, so proceed with caution. It may eat your disks.

There's two parts to this - kernel support and userspace support. Add:

deb http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~mjg59/laptops/ ./

to /etc/apt/sources.list and do:

sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.9-1-386 acpi-support

First, if you're using the i810 video driver, edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (or /etc/X11/xorg.conf if you're using Xorg) and in the driver section add:

option "VBERestore" "true"

Now edit /boot/grub/menu.list. Find the # kopt line and add resume=/dev/hdwhatever - it should point at your swap partition. For reference, mine is:

# kopt root=/dev/hda1 resume=/dev/hda2 ro

Now do sudo update-grub and reboot. The power button should now cause a suspend to disk. Boot again and it should resume (there may be a moderately long pause before the resume process starts at the moment - I need to spend some time looking at that).

If that works, try pressing your laptop's sleep button (normally Fn +Escape, Fn+F4 or something like that). Test this from X, not from the console. With a bit of luck, various messages will fly past and the machine will suspend to RAM. If the machine /doesn't/ suspend, please follow up with information about the last few messages.

Now try pressing the power button again (on some machines, you may need to hold it for a second or so). With rather more luck, the machine will resume and you'll have an X desktop again. If it doesn't, please follow up with the symptoms.

Known issues:

If mysqld is running, the suspend will be blocked. Stop it first.

Various machines refuse to resume from suspend to RAM, for reasons that are currently entirely unclear. If your machine hangs with a blank screen or simply reboots, then there's not a lot we can do right at the moment (though in the former case, there is some further debugging which can be carried out)

It's entirely possible that the laptop will resume but you won't have any video support. Again, follow up with some hardware information.

People followed up to request that the restricted modules be built against this kernel. There was a good deal of discussion and swapping of script output and hardware information to try get some recalcitrant laptops working.

Matthew Garrett posted a follow up asking folks to please check out the following wiki pages to add results to the second link:

2. Anacron
2004/11/10 - 2004/11/15 (50 posts) Subject: "anacron"
People: Scott James Remnant, Colin Watson, Thomas Hood

Scott James Remnant started a thread on the ubuntu-devel list on the addition of anacron saying:

I'd like to propose anacron for hoary main as part of the "Even More Totally Rad Laptop Support" umbrella.

For those who don't know what it is, it's a cron daemon that only runs the files placed in /etc/cron.daily, cron.weekly and cron.monthly. Ordinarily these are run by cron by entries in its /etc/crontab, but when anacron is installed these do nothing.

What anacron does over cron is remember when these jobs have been missed, and "catches up" when the machine is able to do them.

This works a lot better for systems that spent a lot of time powered off, or hibernating (such as in-bedroom desktops or laptops) and when combined with some ACPI support anacron is disabled while on battery power so you don't waste precious battery life by running updatedb.

Sarcastically, but pointing out a real drawback of the problem, Colin Watson asked, "Isn't that the "Make My Laptop Totally Slow Right After Boot When I'm Trying To Use It" umbrella?"

Scott James Remnant replied that the alternative was that none of these jobs ever get run. Elsewhere in the thread, Thomas Hood recommended that the team take a look at fcron saying, "Before choosing anacron, please evaluate fcron. The advantage of fcron is that it executes jobs as close to the specified date and time as possible. anacron does not do this; instead it interprets time specifications as intervals." Scott James Remnant replied saying:

anacron doesn't interpret time specifications at all -- it never reads the user crontabs, leaving it up to cron to do that. If you have anything in your personal crontab, that gets handled by cron assuming your machine is on at the time.

All anacron does is ensure daily, weekly and monthly jobs (scripts in the /etc/cron.*.d directories) get run if more than a day, week or month has passed since they were last run.

Scott then followed up to a question by Matt Zimmerman to say clarify that anacron will only run each job once even if 8 days have passed, for example.

3. GNOME Bittorrent Downloader
2004/11/10 - 2004/11/15 (5 posts) Subject: "GNOME bittorrent downloader"
People: Matt Zimmerman

Matt Zimmerman posted to the ubuntu-devel list with an announcement or reminder about a bounty to create a GNOME-integrated facility to download bittorrent saying:

Some time ago (prior to the Warty release), a bounty was posted in the wiki for the integration of a GNOMEish facility to perform bittorrent transfers. Note that Ubuntu now has an official bounty process, documented here: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/community/bounties/ which should be read by anyone considering working on such a project.

Having received some initial contacts from interested parties, I'm taking the next step in the procedure, to open a discussion to establish the exact specification for the project.

In this case, it seems that at least one project exists which may provide a substantial piece of what we need (gnome-btdownloader). However, it is not a requirement that the project be based on this application: the exact details of the implementation are left to the discretion of the implementor, within the parameters established by the project specification and the quality standards of Ubuntu.

The specification is expected to include at least the following criteria. A satisfactory submission will:

Be written in Python

Be integrated with the MIME system such that (for example) selecting a torrent file in Firefox or Nautilus will initiate a download

Use standard GNOME interface components

Be HIG v2.0 compliant

I'd like some input from the desktop team and the community on further requirements for this application, such that it will integrate nicely with the existing Ubuntu desktop. These additional ideas will be incorporated into the final specification.

Once the specification has been established, interested parties will be welcome to submit proposals, and we can continue with the process.

4. Hoary Hedgehog Array CD 1
2004/11/11 - 2004/11/16 (11 posts) Subject: "Array CD 1"
People: Colin Watson

Colin Watson announced that he'd finished putting together Array CD 1 with this message to Ubuntu users:

This is Hoary Hedgehog. Please ensure that your seat-belts are fastened and that your seat back is in the fully upright position. Pre-release versions of Hoary are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional breakage. It is recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Array CD 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images released once every two weeks or so, as images that are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Hoary. You can download it here:

http://cdimage.ubuntulinux.org/releases/hoary/array-1/

rsync://cdimage.ubuntulinux.org/cdimage/releases/hoary/array-1/

See http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/Archive for access instructions. I recommend rsync if possible, as you can then download future images based on this one to save bandwidth.

Some notable features in this release:

X.Org replaces XFree86;

Installs a UTF-8 locale by default;

Fully merged with Debian unstable, including debian-installer pre-rc2.

This is, quite literally, the first installable CD image to roll off the notional CD image production line, so you can expect a number of bugs. Among them are the following (so you don't need to bother reporting these if you encounter them):

Installer keymap defaults are broken (select "English" followed by "United Kingdom" and get presented with a default of "American English");

At the end of package selection, base-config displays a harmless error about not being able to remove laptop-detect.

If you're interested in following changes as we further develop Hoary, have a look at the hoary-changes list: http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/hoary-changes

Bug reports should go here: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/

5. Python 2.4 and Hoary
2004/11/11 - 2004/11/15 (7 posts) Subject: "python2.4 for hoary"
People: Matthias Klose, Jeff Waugh, Matt Zimmerman

Matthias Klose asked the devel list for opinions on what they should planning in regards to the Python 2.4 release in December saying, "python2.4 currently is available in the beta2 version. The release candidate is scheduled for November, the final release for December. I hope we can still sync the package / add the package at this time. If we want to include 2.4 in main, then maybe we could add it to main at a earlier point. I'm not (yet) talking of making the new version the default for hoary, just adding it either to main or universe."

Release manager Jeff Waugh said:

How likely do you think the release will be in December? Our upstream version freeze is late in the month, so it's pretty feasible if you think the deadline will be met.

If we're not going to use it by default (and include all the bindings for it by default), I think it makes sense to ship it in universe. That means we won't have to support it unnecessarily for hoary, but it will be available for use and testing if developers want to try it out. Plus, a complete, supported transition to Python 2.4 would be a good feature goal for grumpy.

The conversation drifted to the issue of binary compatibility -- of which they will be some breakage involved. Matt Zimmerman said, "Is there any question as to whether we would want to move to 2.4 by default, or only whether we should include it in main? I'd prefer to release with only one version of python if possible."

6. Language Packs Progress
2004/11/12 - 2004/11/15 (7 posts) Subject: "Which languages shall be supported with the lang packs, and how?"
People: Martin Pitt

Martin Pitt asked which languages shall be supported with the lang packs, and how. He also gave an update on the language language packs progress saying:

I prepared a very first rough patch for OO.o to support language packs. The current version can be seen at http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~pitti/ooo-ubuntu7.diff

It changes the dependencies for all openoffice.org-l10n-* packages from Depends: openoffice.org (with some version, but that does not matter here) to Depends: openoffice.org | language-support-XX. However, while doing this some questions arose:

IIRC we only want to support 10 to 15 languages. Nevertheless I think it does not hurt to provide alternative dependencies for all l10n packages anyway; if a particular language-support-XX package is not actually available, then the l10n package will behave exactly like the old version (without an alternative at all). Is this okay for everybody?

There are some sublanguages which have a more irregular name, like "pt" and "pt-br" (Brazilian Portugese), or "zh-cn" and "zh-tw". Ideally, d-i would just try to install "language-support-XX" if language "XX" was selected. But these special cases prevent this.

One possibility is to have just l-s-pt and l-s-zh and have the metapackage depend on all "sublanguages". A bit of a waste, but keeps the installer side easy.

Or we leave the language packs as they are now in above patch, but then need a mapping of all languages to their available special cases in d-i.

There was a bit of discussion that followed but nothing that led to anything extremely conclusive I can report here.

7. Browsing Filesystem
2004/11/16 - 2004/11/19 (53 posts) Subject: "Feature request: browsing filesystem in gnome "computer" menu"
People: Eric Feliksik, Jeff Waugh

One hot-button issue this week was kicked off by a message to the devel list by Eric Feliksik. Eric said:

Because of spatial nautilus, browsing deep directory structures can fill the screen very fast. I know it can be turned off, and I know I can right-click and "browse" a folder as well, but...

How about having an item in the "Computer" menu where you can browse the entire filesystem, IN the menu? I have seen it before, but don't know where. Maybe KDE or something.

I think it would be very useful. I imagine that when the user browsed the menu all the way to /wow/this/is/a/deep/directory/stucture/ , one might click the uppermost separated option "Open in a window" (the files and folders in 'structure/' are listed below that option) to open that folder in a window.

Or, one might click a file to run it with the default handler.

What do you guys think? Does it already exist for gnome as an applet? Would it make sense to include it in hoary?

Jeff Waugh replied saying, "I was considering adding a 'Browse Filesystem' item to the System Tools menu (under applications). We could add it to the Computer menu, though it's pretty long already. Let's revisit this when we come back to Computer menu changes."

The rest of the thread saw some folks airing their (strong) feelings about the virtues, or lack there of, of spacial view for browsing a filesystem.

8. Documentation Team Status
2004/11/13 - 2004/11/14 (4 posts) Subject: "Plan of action for the docteam"
People: Alexander Poslavsky, Matt Kirchoff

Alexander Poslavsky posted a plan of action for the docteam onto the documentation list which is a good window in the groups work there. His email read:

We have 3 weeks left before the conference in Barcelona. It would be good to make a schedule of tasks we want to finish before that conference.

We should ask ourselves:

What documentation needs to be in support e.g. the official Ubuntu documentation?

How organised is the wiki?

Should we divide parts of the documentation to different people who are responsible?

How can we better cooperate with the translators?

What is the current status of the documentation:

Positives:

We have a decent amount of documentation.

We have documentation in several languages.

Our documentation team cooperates well.

We have SVN now (see: https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/SubVersion), this can/will be used for our docbook documents.

Negatives:

A small part of the documentation is translated.

Our documentation team is small.

It is difficult for newcomers to know what they can do.

Not all the documentation is up-to-par.

In my opinion we should the following (please comment!)

The FAQ has been turned into DocBook, somebody should wrap it up.

Somebody should proofread and check the FAQ after 1.

the Howto's need to be cleaned up.

We need an index-pages for different parts of the wiki (we need dtml turned on in the wiki, Enrico will need to start bugging upstream for this).

We need good newbie-documentation, we have some like: https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocumentHowto and https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocBook We need it to make clear to newcomers what they can do and how they can do it.

What documents are really important? We need a page of these, these should be translated.

Gnome-documentation, how much work is it to up-date?

These task should be assigned and with a dead-line be finished, otherwise we will not be finished in time.

Sivan Green replied and said he would be interested in working on packaging work for the documentation team.

As a followup in a different thread, Alexander Poslavsky asked folks if they thought a shared task list in evolution would be a useful thing for documentation team members. The idea had a good reception on the list.

The other issue up for discussion on the issue of a document processing schemes. The summary of that thread, posted by Matt Kirchoff was:

Users shouldn't have to verify with us before posting docs on the wiki; requiring that would make extra work for us and would likely discourage people from posting. The wiki should be a virtual rough draft.

There should be some quality control mechanism, however. Sounds like we want edited/polished docs to be moved to an "official" area, such as the SVN DocBook repository.

9. Ubuntu Security Notifications
2004/11/15 - 2004/11/19 (6 posts) Subject: "[USN-25-1] libgd2 vulnerability, ETC"

Martin Pitt posted another weeks worth of Ubuntu Security Notification to the list notifying folks of another rash of bugs and pointing to their fixes. These included the following: