This must be a very exciting, christmas type day for many us that didn’t like the very rudimentary (or non-existing) work item support of launchpad’s blueprints and that hoped to get better and more convenient tooling for their daily work item maintenance for a long time.

Linaro heard you and is actively investing into adding convenience infrastructure that will hopefully make life of all of you work item poets much easier and more pleasant!

For some background, check out the launchpad blog post here: http://blog.launchpad.net/cool-new-stuff/work-items-in-blueprints.

Ubuntu our LEB and the overall Developer Experience on ARM are hot topics again for Linaro Platform Team this Connect (http://connect.linaro.org).

Be sure that you have checked and subscribed to your preferred sessions by the Developer Platform Team. Even if you cannot attend the event in person, there is no reason to not participate remotely. To make this even more convenient and interactive, Linaro will experiment with google hangouts this time. Be sure to check this out!

Here a convenience list of sessions by the DevPlatform Team announced by Ricardo Salveti a few days ago on linaro-dev:

Ubuntu LEB and LAVA: Current status and future planning for proper
image testing and validation
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-lava-and-ubuntu-leb-testing-validation

Improvements and future discussions for LTs and the Ubuntu LEB
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-lt-platform-discussions

Packaged Kernel CI: Current Status and Next Steps
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-packaged-kernel-ci-next-steps

Sysroots: Automation, Maintenance and Future Work
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-sysroots-automation-maintenance

U-Boot-Linaro Future Planning
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-u-boot-linaro-future-future-planning

Developer Platform: Future Planning
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-dev-plat-future-planning

Cross Build with Multi-Arch: Current state and future planning
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-cross-multi-arch-support

Maximizing the usefulness of the LEB for customers and members
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+spec/linaro-platforms-q112-maximizing-usefulness-leb 

Exciting stuff! The original post to the mailing list can also be found in the archives:

• http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/linaro-dev/2012-January/009919.html

almighty pitti was so nice to free me from the load of another 70 assigned launchpad bugs … together with the mozilla bugs i got rid the other day I finally got down to a bug list that i can actually manage.

rock on!

Today, doing a bit more investigation on cloud services that support ubuntu, I looked at atlantic.net.

Pleasant experience was the chat support feature on the atlantic.net website. I liked how quick the response time was to get a support contact into a real-time chat conversation. It was a matter of seconds rather than the typically long turn around when asking questions as a non-customer on a hosting site. Thumbs up to atlantic.net for this nice service.

Now, the reason for approaching support was that I wanted to understand what webservices API atlantic.net does offer to manage my cloud farm (e.g. firing up new instances, shutting down); basically similar to what we know from EC2 webservices API.

Interestingly enough the answer was that for now you would have to manually deploy new cloud instances. Hmm…

While thats a fair answer on it’s own, I really wonder now what use a cloud service have if you cannot programmatically scale your cloud deployment. Now, I am not really a cloud server guru, but doesn’t this defeat at least a main benefit of the whole cloud idea?

How would you manage a scalable cloud setup if you cannot script bringing up new cloud servers etc. and looking at it from the other side, why would you run a deployment that does not need to scale in the cloud at all?

What other use cases besides a scalable deployment is the cloud good for and what are your experiences using the cloud with manual deployment?

With Linaro 11.05 shipping initial LEBs for Ubuntu and Android and recent press releases referring to Linaro Evaluation Builds, I wanted to get out a first definition on what an LEB actually is, what the ideas behind it are and what technical implications the LEB program has on how we assemble and release our builds.

Definition:

Linaro Evaluation Builds are optimized clones of popular ARM/Linux distributions that come with production quality Board Support for Linaro Member SoC powered Low Cost development builds as well as Linaro Optimizations of kernel, tools and middleware pre-integrated.
=> https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/EvaluationBuilds

Some Visions and Objectives:

• LEBs ensure that ARM Board Support for Linaro member SoCs is readily available for popular ARM/Linux distributions (Android, Ubuntu) in the open
• LEBs ensure that Linaro Working Group Technology gets integrated, validated and optimized to work in distribution software stacks relevant to the market
• LEBs give independent product builders, innovators and ARM enthusiast a place to pick the SoC and software stack that best suites their needs without requiring a direct business relationship with a multinational SoC vendor to get started
• LEBs help to establish Linaro as THE open collaboration place where hardware vendors and distributions work jointly on solutions for common hardware enablement and performance challenges found when developing ARM/Linux based product
• LEBs require constant platform infrastructure and validation technology innovation that can be reused by Linaro Members and community to improve their overall engineering efficiency

Some Technical Implications:

• LEBs are distribution clones; this means while we augment them with Linaro middleware technology and hardware support, we do not try to improve the overall user experience
• LEBs are released monthly to ensure that Linaro and ARM technology finds its way to market early on
• LEBs take all the best board support that can be made available in the open (note: open != open-source here)
• LEBs will pick the best out of mainline kernels, Landing Team kernels or Member BSP kernels given they are reasonable up-to-date and provide considerable benefit over what is in mainline and linaro staging kernel WG staging tree
• LEBs have no hard requirements on the kernel version, LEBs pragmatically pick whatever is reasonably up-to-date and delivers the best hardware support value
• LEBs come thoroughly tested in our automated validation lab
• LEBs come with board enablement ratings on what SoC and Board parts are supported out of the box