Tony Yarusso's Blog

Okay, you know the drill by now.

Affects: APT

Issue: While apt is fantastic in it's current design, it is still targeted for the one-way client-server topology of the "old internet", if you will. As anyone who tried to download or upgrade on Gutsy release day knows, both the main server and most mirrors, both archive and CD mirrors, were extremely bogged down, almost to the point of completely unusable. While this is great news in terms of Ubuntu's popularity, it's not so great for the users trying to access those servers, nor for the people/organizations providing them who have to pay for the bandwidth.

Now, the solution seems obvious: leverage the power of peer-to-peer technology to spread the load out among Ubuntu's now vast user base. There are already torrents available for the CD downloads, and these normally work quite well - provided users are aware of them (and everyone did a great job this time around making a point to urge people to use bittorrent when possible, so that's great). However, this doesn't help those who wish to do a network upgrade rather than getting a new CD.

So, what I would like to see implemented is developing a way of integrating P2P technology, preferably the bittorrent protocol, into apt, and making this either extremely easy to enable (and quite obvious to the user that it exists and that they should use it), or perhaps even the default mechanism. Another option would be to have release dates somehow programmed in, and have users' machines switch to the torrent version of operation around release day, but use http the rest of the time.

There are two tools I am aware of that have started trying to address this issue. I have heard that the latter is a more advanced implementation of the solution, but I'm not sure.

See also:
http://sianka.free.fr/ - Apt-Torrent
http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/ - DebTorrent

See my first post in this series for an explanation. In short, I'm tossing out some of my personal remaining gripes and hoping someone finds them worthy of their time to address in the next six months.

Affects: Ubuntu alternate installer (debian-installer), and encryption options (partman-crypto, dm-crypt, LUKS)

I was pretty excited when I found out that install-time encrypted partitions would be possible in Gutsy. Unfortunately, after going through the installation process a few times and trying to use the system afterwards, I don't think it's really ready. I've identified three issues I would like to have addressed, one each of high, medium, and low severity to me. The bug reports are the best descriptions this time I think. Essentially for this one, take what has been implemented and make it production-ready, as an LTS release deserves.

See also:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-crypto/+bug/155987
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cryptsetup/+bug/110970
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cryptsetup/+bug/139057

See my previous post for the explanation of this series. Basically, I'm throwing ideas out and hoping I get a bite (aka volunteer) to make them happen.

Affects: Rhythmbox

Issue: Rhythmbox should have full iPod support. Banshee, Exaile, and Amarok already do - why not RB? Yes, I know you can play your music with it, and even transfer files, but when transferring files Rhythmbox does not update the database, making them unplayable by the device itself. I'm guessing this is probably relatively simple to fix, especially if the different players are all able to share similar code for these kinds of tasks, but I guess I don't really know.

See also:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/rhythmbox/+bug/109192
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/109192

So now that Gutsy has been released, I've started thinking about 8.04 "Hardy Heron". I know it's soon for most users, but I know the developer types will be meeting for UDS in just a few days to start planning the roadmap for the next release, so it's a good time for this post. I asked Hobbsee what the best way to go about getting personal wishes done (as I don't have the coding skills to do them myself), and the response was "find someone who cares" - meaning, try to pique the interest of someone who has the skills and finds it personally interesting to them too, then try to work together to implement it. So, that's what I'm trying to do - throw out some of the thoughts I have for things that can be improved, and my hope is that someone, somewhere will see each item and contact me, saying "Hey, that's a good idea; let's talk". I'll start with something relatively simple - here goes!

Affects: Drivel (Desktop blogging client for Gnome)

The issue: Currently, it is only possible to indicate a single post "category" within Drivel. As the regular readers of my blog will know, I often have multiple categories. Therefore, I would like to see the simple dropdown available now replaced with a dropdown that has checkboxes rather than just a flat format. If someone can tell me how to make mockup screenshots perhaps that would better describe what I'm thinking of, but you get the general idea.

See also:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/drivel/+bug/151475
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/drivel/+bug/151475
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311023

Well, I'm happy to report that the Minnesota LoCo successfully pulled off their first in-person event! Granted, this was nothing like the Venezuelan release party, but it will certainly do for now. We had about thirty people show up (one person reported counting 28, but we had some trickle in and out in the middle), which was half the capacity of the room and six times the number I was sure were coming ahead of time.

Overall, I'd classify the event as a good start, and a learning experience. Things didn't go exactly as I had envisioned, for a handful of reasons, but was still generally good. People were able to meet some other like-minded folks, a lot of people had questions that we were able to answer, and people seemed to walk away happy and enthused. I would have liked to have it be more social so people could mingle with the other folks there more, and have some development-related stuff I'll need to follow up with for the CSci students at some later date as we ran out of time.

On the way out, I was able to spend a few minutes talking with Jeremy from TCLUG, and we kicked around the possibility of working together on an installfest perhaps in mid-to-late January, so keep an eye out for updates in that area!

If you were there (or have heard about it from those who were), it would be helpful to hear what your thoughts were - things that were good about the event, things that we should consider doing differently next time, or even general ideas of things we should think about doing as a team, please be sure to share them!

By the way, many thanks to the University of Minnesota ACM student chapter for donating their time and access to get us a great room on campus to host the event.