In a recent effort to recruit more teams to the US Teams Project we have resorted to using Digg 
. If you would like to help us spread the word about US Teams and localized Ubuntu support across the US please take a second and Digg the following link.
Thank You
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I wanted to throw this out there for anyone in the area or able to possibly make it to the Utah area in early September.
Utah has a thriving tech and Open Source community and we’ve all put our heads together to plan the first annual Utah Open Source Conference, Sept 6-8. I will be one of the presenters for the conference and I’d love to see a lot of you there.
I’ll be presenting on the power of community, and also outlining what we’ve done locally and with the US Teams Project. No good project can be successful without a community around it, and I’m going to show how you can harness that for projects large and small.
I’ve got a quick update tonite concerning coming into day 2 of using Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy”. A few things that I’ve found so far…
I’ll have another tutorial coming up soon. Forgive me for being lax on them. I’ve been at OSCON / vacation
Attending Ubuntu Live this last week really inspired me to take a look at my community contributions and see what I can improve on. One of the areas that I would like to improve on is bug testing and development contributions. The first way I want to do this is testing and reporting for Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy”.
So, I have upgraded my machine and will be posting updates both here and to launchpad. While Gutsy is still in alpha we still have enough time to make changes and improve on the most critical things. By the time it gets to Beta and release client in many cases it is too late.
If you know what you are doing (not afraid of the command line and have a fallback machine if needed), you can use the following command to safely upgrade your machine to Gutsy. REMEMBER, GUTSY IS STILL ALPHA SO DON’T EXPECT A LOT OF SUPPORT DURING THIS TIME. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, BUT KNOW THAT YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS AT THIS POINT ARE CRITICAL.
ALT-F2: gksudo "update-manager -c -d"
Good luck, please post any oddities to bugs.launchpad.net, and we’ll see you in October with a final product!
I was reminded this week of something that I often show people but I have never actually written down in a post. This may be old news to some of you, but when has that stopped me in the past!?
Now I should preface this with a warning that my boss pointed out to me. He says “the system beeps for a reason–it’s trying to tell you something–you should leave it on.” Now that is out of the way I’ll go ahead with how to disable the PC Speaker, which removes the often annoying beeps. It should be mentioned that this should work on any distribution, and is not Ubuntu specific.
Removing the driver
The system speaker is controlled by a driver in the Linux kernel. This allows the pc speaker to beep at you for different reasons or at different events. If you remove the module which drives the speaker, the beeping goes away, as the machine no longer knows how to interface with that device.
This can be done manually with a command such as:
sudo modprobe -r pcspkr
or you can set it as a persistent change by adding the module to your system driver blacklist, available at:
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
simply append the line “blacklist pcspkr” for that driver to be disregarded at every boot.
If you’d like to manually re-insert the module use:
sudo modprobe pcspkr
Enjoy the quiet!
Among the many cool things that I’ve learned this week at Ubuntu Live there is one that I’m definitely going to keep using! Quickly, before I get started, I need to link back to the Ubuntu Forums post that started this whole thing. There is also a lot more examples and extensions on the wiki, seen here. Unfortunately, outside of these, there is very limited documentation on the web for this tool, so you wont find much more than what you see here. If you do please post a comment with a link.
There are a few steps to this full tutorial so get comfortable and follow along.
Installation
To get the features of this tutorial we will need to install a quick package. It’s pretty small and should just take a minute or two to download and install. Use the following command, or install the package using your favorite package manager:
sudo aptitude install devilspie
What exactly does this package actually do? From the package description:
This tool will find windows as they are created and perform actions on them, such as resizing, moving to another workspace, or pinning them to all workspaces.
In english? You can basically set rules for your favorite applications and make sure they load on the appropriate virtual desktop, at the certain sizes, etc. This has been something that I wish I had for a while and never really looked into. A have a nice organization of applications between my desktops, but all done manually. This automates the whole thing instead.
Configuring
Now that we’ve got the package installed we need to set the configuration of what we’d like it to do.
Create a new directory to store your new devilspie-related configuration file (yes, once you start using this you’ll create more and more–you want them organized). Use the following:
mkdir ~/.devilspie
After this is created we’ll create our custom configuration for the regular applications we launch. For example:
vim ~/.devilspie/firefox.ds
Paste in the following config to your new file:
(if
(is (application_name) "Firefox")
(begin
(set_workspace 2)
(maximize)
)
)
Basically what this is doing is watching for anything launched using the application_name “Firefox”, and give it the following features and options. It’ll load it on virtual desktop number 2 and set the window to maximize. Pretty basic, but so far this has been impossible in gnome. Of course if you’d like it to always load on virtual desktop 1,3,4, etc simply change the number to your preference.
Some more examples for common applications that I use listed below:
vim ~/.devilspie/thunderbird.ds
Paste in the following config to your new file:
(if
(is (application_name) "Thunderbird")
(begin
(set_workspace 3)
(maximize)
)
)
..or for beep-media-player to be on all desktops:
vim ~/.devilspie/bmp.ds
(if (is (application_name) "Beep Media Player") (pin))
…you get the idea. If you’d like to create your own custom rules create a new file in the .devilspie directory and create a debug.ds file. Within that file put:
(debug)
The next time you run devilspie it will read any of the files within .devilspie, which will now include this debugging option. You will see from the debug output the detected application_name of each currently running application. If you don’t know the proper name to use for creating your own rules you may want to use this debug option to help you along.
Persistence
Lastly I’m sure you’ll want these features to run all the time, so you’ll need to set the devilspie application to autostart. You may want to add devilspie to your “Applications > Preferences > Sessions”, which will make it start each time you log in, and read your created window customization options.
Troubleshooting
If you notice your rules don’t seem to be working try the following:
Enjoy. Please leave comments with customizations that you’ve made below. Considering the lack of documentation for this project a good list of examples would be great!
Well it’s the last day here at Ubuntu Live and things have gotten much more quiet. Today is limited to the tutorials, which it seems many people opted out of. I wanted as much geek as I could get, so I’m here for all I can. Things that I’ve picked up this morning after the “Debian Packaging” tutorial.
If you would like to participate in packaging leave a comment or send me an email. If I am able to come up with some kind of step-by-step on participation it would be great to involve as many people as I can in the process.
I’m now preparing for the ‘dash & bash’ tutorial on scripting. Hopefully I learn some cool new tips here.. and learn to maybe clean up some of my scripts
Well I’m finally home now after the second day of Ubuntu Live. I’m actually more more tired than I expected I would be. Geeking it out for two days straight (morning to night!) can be more tiring than you’d think. I’m so very glad I’ve attended though. I’ve met some really cool people and learned some cool stuff. Ubuntu really is on the forefront of the computing industry in many ways. All the cool tools are available to us as users, and the direction of many things are up to us via our feedback and contributions. It’s been a fun ride so far!
A few things that I’d like to mention. I have a lot of notes from todays presentations that I would like to pull apart and blog about, but not tonite. Tonite I’m tired. I want to vent. I want to relax.. and my brain is too mushed to come up with anything comprehendable (as you can read from this post.) I’ll put something together over the next few days.
One thing that I did want to mention is the great work the US Teams Project is doing. I attended Jono Bacon’s presentation today and he mentioned us with appreciation. The work that we’re doing and the success we’ve had so far has been a huge success, and Ubuntu / Canonical really sees that. They have been very impressed with what we’ve done so far and I want to thank the guys that have been working so hard on the project. I’m sure if I list names I may forget someone, for which I apologize, but credit is needed where it’s due. People that are really responsible for the success, in no particular order: Vorian, atoponce, etank, boredandblogging, Joe_Cot.. and more. Like I say, this whole project is successful based on all of your contributions, and I really do appreciate them all. We are making amazing strides and don’t forget that the work you’re doing is important and appreciated.
We do need to keep working however. The success we’ve had so far is only a part of what we can continue to do. The future holds a lot for us, and its not far out of our reach. Keep up the great work everyone. Expect the tutorials to start up again soon. Just give me a few days to recover.
Also thanks to everyone that has stopped me at the conference and mentioned how much they appreciate this blog. It means a lot and I’m so very glad it has been helpful. I hope I can continue to be a help into the future.
“This project is about people.” I think this sums up the Ubuntu project really well and was part of the introduction from Matt’s keynote presentation. The real importance–the real measure of our success–is the people within the project.
Matt showed a slide during his presentation that outlines how the Ubuntu release plan, development milestones and releases all point at the community. This is how Ubuntu has been so successful. The community comes first!
Based on the needs of previous releases Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty” has been a huge success with many, many improvements. Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy”, which will be released in Oct, will support 3D-desktop, multi-monitor support, laptop power profiling and more OUT OF THE BOX. This is, again, based on much of the previous feedback from the community and the continued contributions.
A few things to point out about Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty” on the server level that have led to its initial and continued success:
Some additional features being looked at for Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” server:
I know many people have wondered how the upgrade path will work between LTS releases. Matt reports that there will be an LTS to LTS upgrade option when the time comes for Ubuntu 8.04! This is very good news and I’m excited to see how it works when the time comes in early 2008.
Q : Will there be a future for SELinux in Ubuntu or will it strictly use AppArmour?
A : Currently AppArmor seems to be the best solution for Ubuntu at this point, but if there is enough feedback for SELinux we will look in that direction.
All in all a very good presentation by Matt Zimmerman, Canonical and Ubuntu’s CTO. The future looks bright for Ubuntu and it will continue to look that way based on your contributions.
Based on the general feedback last week on spam filtering for WordPress I have removed the Math Comment Protection plugin (caused problems, errors for some users) and implemented the Bad Behaviour plugin. From what I hear of Bad Behaviour it sounds like it should be able to replace some of the existing plugins, but we’ll see how things go. If you are unable to access the site after this change (granted you can’t read this if that is the case) please let me know (try to change browsers, etc). If it does end up blocking users we’ll see what we may have to change.
Thanks — I’ll have more updates about Ubuntu Live later today.