didrocks' blog

Time to celebrate, it's been now 4 years that I released the first version of my French book "Simple Comme Ubuntu" (which can be translated in "Easy As Ubuntu") focused on newcomers. This book tries to help them step by step in discovering the ubuntu environment (no command line, just graphical installation) through 350 pages, so that they can be more confident with their new operating system.

This book, under CC:BY-SA, is now at his 9th version^[1] (updated every 6 months as with Ubuntu releases). It's available in LaTeX sources, pdf format as well as a paper version. Release by release, I was able to make it out closer to the ubuntu release date, and from the last 2 years, the book was out less than 7 days after the release! For instance, the lucid version was announced the 4th of May 2010!

To fully follow the Free Software philosophy, the Launchpad project is here, and the book is versionned in bzr. Also, for a year now, "Simple Comme Ubuntu" is in the ubuntu repo (just install the "simplecommeubuntu" package) and you will be able to find it at /usr/share/doc/simplecommeubuntu/. The French community downloaded the book a lot, and we sold also some thousands of paper version too. This one is now on the front page of the French documentation wiki and we install it by default on the ubuntu-fr (French) CD remix to help newcomers (coming from the Windows world most of the time) to have the documentation and the Operating System (it's a shortcut on the desktop).

This book was the 2nd one of the framabook project, French project trying to build a collection of Free books (started in 2006) and we got some good press coverage in national newspapers.

Updating it so frequently by one person is a tedious task, I must admit, but I want first to thanks again all people who prereads and fixes my spelling mystake all over the years. Some people are reading it from the first version^[2] and they really deserve a big thank for their patience! My editor, In Libro Veritas, made also a wonderful work on the cover (would be great to make some wallpaper with the different covers we had), and also to the French community for their support during those years!

Next version will be Maverick "Simple Comme Ubuntu", a lot of changes are already in place!

Note: I'm forwarding this note as asked by kinouchou to publish it on planet ubuntu (original note there, I didn't translate it either).

Since December 2009, I have joined the accessibility and free software group at APRIL (Association Promoting and protecting Free Software in France). I only later started to be interested by the Ubuntu Accessibility team. Why have I started with APRIL, even though I spend most of my time caring about Ubuntu, will you ask? Simply because this group is using french, and my english is really not that good (don't trust this note, it was translated by a friend), and, my current knowledge of accessibility being relatively limited, I tend not multiply difficulties.

The main goal of this group is absolutely not to develop software, but to know what software solutions exist and to match up those who may need it with those able to make the changes that could be needed. Then, the fact that I am joining so many event on behalf of Ubuntu-fr becomes a true asset. This is how people from the Fedora or OpenOffice.org are now joining us.

On the Ubuntu side, the team, which had been badly stalling, was gaining back a new life. UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) has given me the opportunity to meet a few people from the team and to understand its overall startegy. 3 meetings were realted to accessibility: one on GNOME, which has been way too technical for me, I will therefore bypass it for now. A second one was questioning how to give a new life to the team. The third one, the one which will be my focus today, was one organized jointly with the design team. During this meeting, we decided to work on GNOME themes which would match up the requirements and desires of those who have to live with a disability. One way to do so would involve developing a survey.

We obviously need as many responses as possible to make this survey relevant. I therefore proposed to spread this to French speaking countries via the APRIL Accessibility group. The survey will not be limited to Ubuntu, but will address free software in general, and as it matches APRIL's goals, it could, through it, be propagated to other communities. We aim to finish the development of this survey before the end of June, in order to start spread during the RMLL days (Libre Software Meeting days) which will happen from July 6th to 11th in Bordeaux (yes, they also make wine there). One of the two focus area of this event being Accessibility, which would be sad to miss.

Ubuntu-FR and the Mozilla Foundation Europe being often in touch, it is felt natural to include them in this process. When the survey will be ready, they will gladly help translate it to many other languages. The efforts of the three groups can be joined and contributing together, it will prove once more what is very important to me in Free Software: collaboration.

Un très court billet^[1] dans le train de retour pour statuer que je n'ai pas eu/pris le temps de blogguer sur l'UDS maverick (Ubuntu Developer Summit) cette fois-ci.

Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas l'UDS, il s'agit de la rencontre biannuelle des développeurs et de la communauté Ubuntu pour décider de la direction à prendre pour les 6 prochains mois. Ce cycle, nous étions dans un hôtel près de Bruxelles et de (trop) nombreuses sessions en parrallèles étaient intéressantes.

S'il n'y avait qu'une seule chose à retenir^[2] : 10.10.10^[3]! Nous ferons tout notre possible pour que la prochaine release d'ubuntu maverick sorte le 10 octobre 2010^[4] et par conséquent, ubuntu maverick 10.10 sortira le 10/10/10^[5]… Les plus geeks d'entre vous auront fait la relation avec le nombre 42 en binaire :)

La réponse universelle sera donc dans maverick, beaucoup de changements passionnant, aussi bien au niveau du desktop/server que de UNE qui aura droit à une toute nouvelle interface, appellée "unity". Et c'est sans parler d'ubuntu light, de l'intégration avec le cloud, des améliorations d'ubuntu one…

Vous avez aimé lucid ? Le cycle de développement de maverick sera passionnant et un réel nouveau challenge^[6] pour Ubuntu et sa communauté, temps de s'y remettre !

It's another milestone that the ubuntu-fr French team has achieved this week-end. We had in Paris 5 000 attendees^[1] at the Karmic Koala ubuntu party!

After the ubuntu release party (just a few people, mainly ubuntu-fr directly related, joining to have a great time on a dinner) we finished to prepare the Ubuntu Party as our last sprint on Karmic. Only few core organizers^[2] but more than 100 of volunteers all over the week-end were present to give an hand on helping people, being at the different booths and others miscellaneous tasks!

This party was particular in the sense that Mark Shuttleworth visited us on Saturday, following the Party the whole day. Mark's kindness was greatly appreciated inside the community and a lot of people have been able to discuss with him. He also had, of course, some interviews at the radio and by press... The first day was concluded by his plenary session where a lot of questions has been answered too. We hope to be able to broadcast the videos very soon.

The public seems to have enjoyed this event and that was our goal! You can see below before the plenary when Tristan Nitot asked to "raise both hands if you use Ubuntu!"

We also had a roundtable on Internet neutrality which had attracted a bunch of people. Internet neutrality is unquestionably one of next hot subject that FLOSS has to dealt with great care.

As usual, our party tries to cover a lot of different activities for a wide range of public: obviously, people are able to install Ubuntu with a volunteer, but we also had a bug jam, workshops (drupal and "how to make a conference"), multiple multimedia demonstrations (gimp, video, music, compiz, cairo-dock), video games...

Some non profit organizations related to FLOSS also had a booth to show the whole "Libre" ecosystem to the visitors and present the philosophy behind Ubuntu, and more generally, the free software movement. Namely, April, Framasoft, FDN and La Quadrature du Net joined the pary!

As at each Party, we also had our ubuntu-fr booth with a lot of goodies : our French localized ubuntu CD, stickers, Tee-Shirts, Framakey Ubuntu-fr remix (USB key), our updated mug, Simple Comme Ubuntu (ubuntu book)... I'll specifically talk about them in the following days.

Conferences was also a great place to get and covered interesting topics as on other GNU/Linux distributions (debian, mandriva, fedora...), how to contribute, design experience at Canonical, free software in France... In a nutshell, more than 20 conferences over the two days.

We also gave different lessons on discovering ubuntu, GNU/Linux shell learning level 1 and 2, customizing your desktop...

Of course, Oxyradio covered the whole event and made possible the link with people who can't attend it.

5000 attendees is just awesome for a voluntary only non profit organization. Thanks to everyone who made this possible in a 4 months preparation. It's time to get some rest until we have to start again for another round!

Photos licenses:

* Tristan Nitot / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
* Nicolas Barcet / CC BY 2.0
* Raps / CC BY-SA 2.0

In our French ubuntu party organized by ubuntu-fr, we have approximately 20 free and ready to use computers for people to be able to try ubuntu on their own (we have someone around to help new users).

But that's a lot of wasted space for advertising our conferences, scheduled demonstrations, lessons we have during the party! So, the idea was to create a daemon notifying this, resulting in:

NotifyThis is here to fulfill this need. It's a desktop daemon (no pid file) using dbus for single instance and actions like pausing, stopping, forcing configuration file reload^[1]…

Source file is in XML (default in /etc/notifythis-data.xml):

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <notifythis xmlns='http://launchpad.net/notifythis' xml:lang='fr'>
   <notiftypes>
       <type>
           <name>lesson</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/apps/22/gnome-terminal.svg</icon>
       </type>
       <type>
           <name>conference</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/stock/22/stock_people.svg</icon>
       </type>
       <type>
           <name>demos</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/places/22/user-desktop.svg</icon>
       </type>
       <type>
           <name>miscellaneous</name>
           <priority>low</priority>
           <icon>http://awesomeurl/dialog-warning.svg</icon>
       </type>
   </notiftypes>
   <notifevents>
       <event>
           <title>Beginners lesson</title>
           <content>Lesson for beginners in 10 min</content>
           <type>lesson</type>
           <time>2009-09-27 12:33</time>
       </event>
       <event>
           <title>Advanced lesson</title>
           <content>Advanced lesson starting in 15 min</content>
           <type>lesson</type>
           <icon>http://unexistingurl/stock_dialog-warning.svg</icon>
           <time>2009-09-26 22:01</time>
       </event>    
       <event>
           <title>Awesome conference</title>
           <content>An awesome conference on Ubuntu will start in 5 min.\nKeep it hot!</content>
           <type>conference</type>
           <time>2009-09-27 23:54</time>
       </event>
       <event>
           <title>End of the event</title>
           <content>Well… I guess you will have to leave NOW!</content>
           <type>miscellaneous</type>
           <icon>/usr/share/icons/Humanity/status/22/stock_dialog-warning.svg</icon>
           <time>2009-09-27 23:55</time>
       </event>
   </notifevents>
 </notifythis>

What can I do in this notifythis namespace?

You associate an event instance (in notifevents/event ) to a notifytypes/type/name declared in the file. Types enables you to set some default priorities and icons to events. <Icon> refers to a path to an icon, which can be local to your computer or distant served by your preferred web server (http://…). In the latter case, NT will cache it for you locally. Consequently, using multiple times the same icon in different types or events will download it only once.

Title is used as… notification title and content as… content :) <time> is used to specify when the event will be notified. Categorizing your event is just a way to avoid multiple icon/priority definitions, but those two values can be overridden for a particular event simply specifying corresponding tag (<icon> for instance). If it can't be found, event type icon will be shown. If this one doesn't exist/can't be reachable either, a warning is spawn in log file and no icon will be displayed.

So, you can for your event, but it can be bound with any kind of other things like calendar, TODO items, and so on…

But well, as unscheduled event changes may happen^[2], you surely want to upload your xml file online and reload it in all NotifyThis daemon dynamically. It's possible too (and what we will do during our party).

In /etc/notifythis, you can set where the xml file is:

 # time in minutes beteen two xml file reloading, default is 30 minutes
 DELTA_BETWEEN_XML_RELOAD=30
 
 # xml files (separated by ';') by order of preferences.
 # It can an absolute or a relative path to this file.
 # It can be a network path (http://) too
 XML_FILES=notifythis-data.xml

You can even specify multiple XML_FILES and first found one will be use (like in XML_FILES=http://my/central/xml/file.xml; /usr/local/mybackupfile1.xml;notifythis-data.xml). XML file will be reloaded every $DELTA_BETWEEN_XML_RELOAD min (30 min if not specified) in each daemon. If no xml file is found, previous working configuration is preserved and a retry is done every minutes then.

By default, NotifyThis is a desktop daemon^[3] launched with a classical .desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart/. Log are in ~/.local/share/notifythis/notifythis.log

Well, NT uses Quickly to simplify project handling. I guess we should investigate in a desktop-daemon template, making properly the double forking, using dbus instead of a pid file and dbus communication to reload configuration file, stop, pause… this can be handy! We can perhaps add a way for a template to reference another template to avoid redefining same commands twice and gives an easy way to call them (without having specifying --template ubuntu-project, for instance).

Well, if you want to give it a try, NotifyThis 0.1 is out and is available in my ppa.

Hier, Christophe a posté sur le planet ubuntu anglophone quelques photos de Toulouse. Aujourd'hui, c'est au tour de Paris! Cet évènement est bien évidemment également organisé par ubuntu-fr.

Au programme:

• la testing jam sur la version béta de karmic très stable

• une bug jam, tout comme il y a 6 mois

• une documentation jam (afin de nettoyer et préparer les 7000 pages du wiki d'ubuntu-fr

D'autres photos et même un professeur inattendu :)

Comme annoncé précédemment, la documentation d'ubuntu-fr vient de passer en CC:BY-SA 3.

Ce grand pas dans la simplification des licences nous permettra d'avoir une politique de licence plus claire à l'avenir.

Or^[1], une nouvelle fois, sur un tel type de wiki ouvert à tous en écriture, nous tenons sur votre participation et votre plus grande vigilance dès que vous copiez un texte afin de respecter des licences et copyright des auteurs initiaux, concept au cœur même du logiciel libre.

Here we go! After 5 days of presentation on differents projects related to Free Software, the whole ubuntu-fr team is exhausted and happy of the result. This event is especially a great place to meet again and again friends of FOSS ecosystem (contributors, other distribution administrators…).

We also used for the first time the ubuntu-fr.org flag we got from ubuntu Peru taken at last UDS thanks to nxvl.

This edition was particularly oriented on migration and change management to FLOSS. Like each year, conferences, round tables, and workshops were proposed to the visitors during those 5 days. Therefore experts, beginners, professionnals or just curious people were able to find the interlocutors who had provided answers to their questions among the various addressed themes. Moreover there was the associative village where anyone could have a walk. Furthermore, people were invited to discover this universe which doesn’t just focus only on the IT domain. Indeed, the 10th RMLL was the opportunity to introduce new themes: "Free Hardware", and "Free Art & Culture".

Thanks again to all ubuntu-fr people present at the event. We gave 3 talks: one on organizing a Free Software event (by olive), one on ubuntu-fr organization (Christophe Sauthier) and the last one on the release process of Ubuntu (myself), following Lucas Nussbaum's speech on collaboration between Free software projects: the example between Debian and Ubuntu. No troll included of course. ;)

RMLL site.

Quelques heures avant de prendre mon avion pour aller à l'Ubuntu Developer Summit, à Barcelone en Espagne, voici un billet d'introduction, à ce que j'espère, deviendra une série quotidienne.

Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas, il s'agit de la grande messe bianuelle où les décisions pour la prochaine version d'Ubuntu sont prises. Développeurs de Canonical et de la communauté sont réunis ici, certains sponsorisés par Canonical pour le voyage et l'hébergement (comme notre président, Christophe Sauthier et moi-même) afin de discuter des différentes implémentations et axes de développement de cette version, le Karmic Koala pour cette occurrence.

Vous pouvez suivre en direct les différentes sessions de cette édition et même communiquer par IRC, si tout va bien :)

Pour ma part, je naviguerai entre différentes discussions autours de l'environnement de bureau (le desktop), le serveur et bien entendu, la communauté.

À demain j'espère pour un résumé de cette première journée.

PS : je ne passe que ce premier billet sur le planet april afin de ne pas spammer ces derniers :) et tous les autres sur le planet ubuntu-fr, vu que le sujet risque d'intéresser plus directement ses lecteurs. :)