hugging the beta ibex

Following my earlier post on Ubuntu’s upcoming release Intrepid Ibex 8.10, and having seen a few people on Planet Ubuntu and my very own buddy tuxmaniac, I thought of posting how good and bad ibex seems to be at datetime.now().

If you’re installing or upgrading ibex at this instant, you might end up facing a few issues that seems to exist commonly. We hope you really understand that you’re installing a beta version, which is exclusively for people who want to play with a clay horse which hasn’t yet hardened up enough for the big fat kid to ride. You may catchup with one of the following,

• The bootup failure regression bug, which seems to occur due to some bug in the iwl3945 drivers, causing the bootup to hang during the initial stages of splash screen. A cold reboot might actually help you bootup and people are working on it. I suffered this, but the probability of it is one in ten boots or may be even smaller.
• A few seem to have caught with the terminator bug, but it works fine for me. Only thing is that I wish there was someway to permanently turn off the titlebar for every split windows instead of doing it each time manually. May be I should report it somewhere
• A lot of people have reporting issues of Firefox crashing away when opening some heavy flash sites, but nothing is on youtube and hence it is good enough for normal browsing habits Still, it is under progress and hope it would get fixed soon.
• The sound bug is back with a bang, as it has always been a headache. I first heard it from Jace who tried Intrepid a few days before me and since then had been complaining that the sound goes off in the middle. Though I didn’t face it initially, yesterday suddenly my rhythmbox stopped playing songs and was just skipping the playlist. Fiddling around with the sound server settings didn’t help, only a reboot did. Am looking for the right bug to add more information to it.
• I also triaged some issue with laptop keyboards and mouse suddenly going out of action when in the login screen. But people are able to get into virtual terminals, kill gdm and try again. I haven’t hit this one, but am triaging a few of them (and their duplicates).
• Second Life got worse with the graphics nothing but a mess of high density colors. Am not sure whether it has something do with the upgraded version of SL for Linux which itself is in beta, or something to do with my desktop.
• I noticed Compiz Config Settings Manager to miss a Desktop Plane option, which was there in the earlier version, and this is my favourite option. When I tried Desktop Cube, it just didn’t work and I even lost the mobility to other workspaces. Hope it gets better with the future updates.

Now, if you are past these things, welcome to the wonderful world of Intrepid Ibex. Things that have improved,

• First thing you will notice during a fresh install is that the partition manager has improved and looks better now.
• Network Manager is working better, managing between the wireless at home and wired at office, but would be better if it can catch up back with the same connection after a power cut
• The New (Dark) Human Theme might be a relief for many from the usually detested brown one. But the theme has a few bad color choices, especially in firefox when some colors make the text completely illegible until I select them manually.
• Tuxmaniac reported something about Pidgin, but am still wondering what he meant

On the whole, this beta is a lot better than the beta(s) I have had so far from Ubuntu. When the final release happens, it’s gonna rock the world again and we’re working hard to make sure of it.

* 20 days more *

The Intrepid Ibex Beta

It’s just around the corner, your long trust worthy friend is taking a yet another avatar and arriving at your desktops soon. To celebrate 4 years of successful presence in your desktops, here comes another new release from the Ubuntu community, the Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. The brave wild goat is on the run towards your home and should land in your doorsteps by this moth end, ending 6 months of hard work that the wonderful Ubuntu community has put into it. The countdown has started… 24 days to go!

As a closest chance to taste it before it arrives, Ubuntu 8.10 Beta is now available for download. Get a copy and try it out. This can be another chance to contribute something back to your favourite Linux distribution, give us the feedback, test it out on your computers and report problems to us (ya, it’s beta and there can be issues here and there).

There are a few new things in Intrepid that are worth their mention…

Xorg 7.4 brings improved support for automatic configuration of input
hardware, such as keyboards and mice.

3G support: Network Manager 0.7 comes with a number of greatly anticipated
features, including management of 3G connections (GSM/CDMA) and PPP/PPPoE
connnections.

Guest sessions: the User Switcher panel applet provides a new option for
starting a Guest session.  This creates a temporary, password-less user
account with restricted privileges - perfect for lending out your laptop for
a quick email check.

If you belong to an official Ubuntu Loco Team, then you can pre-order Ubuntu Intrepid CDs even before it gets released and it will land at your doorstep within 2 weeks from the release date.

**Ubuntu India Team is not pre-ordering the Ubuntu Intrepid CDs because of the customs cost involved and to avoid the wastage of CDs it results in usually. We are otherwise pleased to burn you a copy of Intrepid given an empty media.
** Errr, that countdown banner javascript doesn’t seem to work with this blog. If I copy paste the<script> tag line, it just vanishes away when I save the page. *sigh*

i stopped eating omelettes

Ya, there is little pun here. I have stopped eating omelettes about an year ago. But that doesn’t directly relate anything to this omelette, though am in a confusion like many people I know are.

It is great to know that team foss.in is more determined to take foss.in in a way that it is not any more just another FOSS conference in India, but rather an incubator to fuel up things getting done, code churning up at the end of the event. This sounds great if you’re a code contributor to a FOSS project, or you’re running your own pet project or contributing to one of your friend’s pet project, or at least have an idea which needs to be coded to life. If so, this would be a great opportunity to get some people into it, work together and bring out something solid out of the 5 days. Having a place with wifi, food, coffee and resources (meaning people who can write code like you, may be even better code than you) for full 5 days is awesome opportunity and has never happened in India (or at least my two little ears have never heard of).

This is indeed an experiment which the team foss.in is bold enough to indulge into, considering the popularity they have with almost all walks of the community, from geeks, to nerds, to novices, to users, to students, to.. it goes on. It has also been a place where we had put names/nicks to faces, groomed of our friendship which was otherwise been restricted to mailing lists, irc and LUG meets. It was one place to find the real people behind what they are in the irc world. It was also a place for transformation, change of ideas and views about others and things, and a lot more. That’s why most people I know in the community has always been making it to this event for last 5 years.

There are two things to understand, first that the team foss.in has the right and freedom to determine how their conference should be developing into; if they want it to be an event at the end of which a recognizable amount of code comes out, then they can. I don’t want it to call a bad idea or a risky experiment or anything of that sort. In fact, they are experimenting, as good as playing with a knife, but you can’t learn to use a knife without cutting your skin once to twice, and unless you are going to be bold enough to try it out, learn to do it right, you are never going to do it. I wholesomely agree to their PoV that we indeed need such an event in India which fully concentrates on code, code, code.

Secondly, we always go to a place which has something for us. If it doesn’t we don’t go. It is as simple as that, if you find a reason to go, then please so. If not, may be you have better things in life to get done. But don’t criticize others for being a place not for you to go, even if it was in the past. Find an alternative which satisfies your interest and expectations.

Time to look at other side of the coin. If you have understood and somewhat agree with the above two points, all you have left out is introspect whether you need to be there this time. You need to find out whether you have a reason to be there. If you have, then go to next step and decide what you want to do when you’re there. But the problem (er, sorry I didn’t find a better word) is the diff between the reason to attend last year and reason to attend it this year is so large that a lot of people feel to have been neglected, even disregarded of their mode of contribution. This was fueled by the unfortunate comment that contributions such as localization, packaging and bug management are low hanging fruits, and the further justification of the same. This indeed left a bit of bitter in the mouth for many as they have been fully involved in these modes of contribution.

For the fact, half of the people I know in the Indian FOSS community are mostly non-code contributors and trivial code-contributors. If I consider myself, I haven’t done much other than my contributions to Ubuntu Bugs being a triager. Even if I don’t mind the PoV that what I do is a very very low hanging trivial fruit, I still have to wonder what am I to do if I decide to attend foss.in (other than being a volunteer, i.e.)? Also, I might be missing people who are also similar low-hanging-fruit contributors whom I had been with during the previous foss.in(s). The answer can be: write some code too, but it is not a wholly sensible reply to someone who himself chose to contribute through low-hanging-fruits. I do code, and that’s how I earn for my food, clothing and shelter. And this is one of the reasons I rather chose one of the so called low-hanging-fruit(s) as the way to contribute.

I have a month and 3 weeks to decide, so does many others and their decision might be having an influence on mine. Even if I find some better-things-to-get-done, I wish all success for the team foss.in and all those attendees of it who are going to work together for 5 days and get things done. Good Luck and would love to see this experiment of yours succeed. Go Rocking Guys!!