asac casa: Home of Alexander

Congratulations: Ubuntu 12.10 is out - well done!

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:34:50 +0200

Congratulations: Ubuntu 12.10 is out - well done!:

So Ubuntu 12.10 got released! What a milestone! I am again impressed by what the Ubuntu engineering force manages to do in a 6 monthly cycle. Also, I felt the disruption for Ubuntu users was very low during the quantal development cycle. Way to go folks!

Well done and enjoy UDS in Copenhagen! I will be there, so say hello and cheers!

SUCCESS: Install Quantal on my UEFI desktop PC

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 19:52:47 +0200

Over last weekend I finally found the time to fiddle with UEFI stuff to make my desktop machine dual boot windows and quantal. Until now it was operating as a pure Windows Gamer PC.

I tried a few times in the last couple of month, but never could allocate the time needed to figure why the installer didn’t properly set the machine up for dual booting.

Now this weekend I found out that I had to create a fat32 partition and mount it manual during install at /boot/efi. With that the Ubuntu installer did the trick of properly adding ubuntu to the efibootmgr and setting things up properly.

Bottom line: All the core work for getting Ubuntu experience right for “normal” UEFI support seem to be there and it’s just going the final and often painful mile of tweaking the install experience to get it right for most cases.

Looking forward to see how the Ubuntu installer team will come up with something smart to streamline this process for everyone and delivering a straight forward install method to get to a nice UEFI based dual boot setup.

The cool-way: Linaro runs a first _Virtual_ Connect Conference using G+ hangouts and youtube

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:26:03 +0200

Be sure to check out this event and mark your personal favorite sessions in your calendar.

All the details you need have been nicely written up in the official announce:

http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/2012/08/07/linaro-announces-virtual-connect-q3-12-13-17-august-2012/

CU next week!

Lava Test (writing) Tutorial - Linaro Connect Q2.12 training

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:00:00 +0200

Lava Test (writing) Tutorial - Linaro Connect Q2.12 training:

Here comes a very good guide on how to get started integrating new tests into LAVA.

This tutorial gives a quick intro on how to setup a local, virtual test dev environment on your Ubuntu machine and then gives the reader a hands on intro on how to integrate and develop LAVA tests locally. Further, it shows how easy it is to submit such a job to the LAVA lab.

Thanks for Andy Doan and the LAVA team for running the training session and writing it up.

More to follow for sure!

shotwell: 2048px publishing for unlimited picasa/G+ storage

Sun, 06 May 2012 12:50:00 +0200

@G+ users: Ever wanted to use shotwell to mass-publish your pics taken with your high resolution camera to picasa? Ever found that you cannot publish using the max pic size that gives G+ users unlimited storage (2048px) easily?

If so: I made a tiny patch for shotwell that allows you to do exactly that and prepared a package for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (precise). You can get it from my ppa: https://edge.launchpad.net/~asac/+archive/ppa with just a few clicks/commands away:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:asac/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install shotwell
sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:asac/ppa

Here a screenshot of what it does:

Hope this is useful for some! Have fun!

Update: uploaded an untested backport for Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) to the same ppa. Report back how things go!

Update: trivial patch from my package forwarded to shotwell issue tracker http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5210

I am sure I don't get mercurial's (hg) branches and heads concept...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:23:50 +0100

I am sure I am moronic, but …

hg clone http://dev.mutt.org/hg/mutt
destination directory: mutt
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 6202 changesets with 17611 changes to 532 files (+8 heads)
updating to branch default
369 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

gives me a fresh copy claiming that it updated the ‘default’ branch.

Now…

asac@thinki:/tmp/test$ cd mutt/
asac@thinki:/tmp/test/mutt$ hg branch
default

confirms that somewhat, but…

asac@thinki:/tmp/test/mutt$ hg log -l1
changeset:   6201:c26dbc7021f4
branch:      HEAD
tag:         tip
user:        TAKAHASHI Tamotsu <ttakah@lapis.plala.or.jp>
date:        Tue Dec 20 22:24:35 2011 -0800
summary:     Updated Japanese translation

already seems to think its the HEAD branch and…

asac@thinki:/tmp/test/mutt$ hg branches
HEAD                        6201:c26dbc7021f4
mutt-1-4-stable             5160:9c9fbf98fbda
mutt-1-4-stable-NEW_NOICONV 2871:2946ce6c56c9
mutt-1-2-5-1                1839:1da8b126c870
mutt-1-0-stable             1203:982532ae8410
mutt-0-95-exp                682:90944f375844
mutt-0-94                    411:a60586461eb8
mutt-0-93                    146:6934de2f9f48
muttintl                       2:5b142858393a
default                     5034:f467353f5657 (inactive)
mutt-1-2-stable             1835:8b0b9f06f1ba (inactive)

tells me the default branch is a) inactive and b) a different revision.

I feel that ‘default’ is probably something like a magic label referring to a somehow configured default branch in the repository (e.g. HEAD in this case), but then I couldn’t figure a) how to set which branch ‘default’ should refer to and b) what the real ‘default’ branch above is about and why I cannot get that revision checked out with ‘hg checkout -r default’.

I tried searching the hg web documentation and found confusing things like concepts of branches, heads and dragons etc. in mercurial…

So now I wonder: is hg harder than git?

If anybody knows about a crisp and clear write up on how to use hg branches/heads properly, please drop a comment. At best such intro would be targeted at the use case of maintaining a longer term running downstream repository with a regularly rebased? branch…

Linaro invests in blueprint work items - Launchpad grows convenience

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:14:00 +0100

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.

Developer Platform & Ubuntu sessions at Linaro Connect Q1.12

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:17:00 +0100

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

The screenshots in this post capture a preview of raw results...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:01:00 +0100

Ubuntu Middleware Smoke:: X11/unity

Ubuntu Middleware Smoke: WIFI

The screenshots in this post capture a preview of raw results coming out of LAVA for the basic WIFI and X11 smoke tests currently developed by Ricardo’s DevPlatform Team. I like what I see so far! For now, my only suggestion on that is that the names of the tests could be improved a bit :).

So, what’s left to finish things up in time for 12.01 release?

Dave Pigott from the LAVA lab team to set up initial instrumentation for automated WIFI and bluetooth testing in the LAVA lab
Ricardo and team to finish and cut a first release of our Ubuntu middleware smoke test suite and set it up to automatically tests the ubuntu LEB images.
Release team to add reviewing and monitoring the middleware smoke test results to their continuous release process and the final build sign off.

Quite exciting stuff; stay tuned!

If you are interested in how to add automated tests like this to LAVA, check out the current code in bzr:

Linaro Multimedia WG samplemedia repository

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:55:00 +0100

Linaro Multimedia WG samplemedia repository:

Couldn’t remember the URL for the open-source multimedia test repository maintained by Linaro’s Multimedia WG for a while now. Google didn’t come up with a good direct hit either, so here it is:

http://samplemedia.linaro.org/

Here you can get open-source video and audio content encoded in various formats and codecs. Linaro engineering and community can and do use this to verify their enablement, codec and integration work.