A while back I bought some UniFi access points. I hadn’t gotten round
to setting up the Network Controller software to properly manage them
though, so thought I’d dig into setting that up.
To help keep myself honest, I wanted to set up automated test runs on a
few personal projects I host on Github. At first I gave
Travis a try, since a number of projects I
contribute to use it, but it felt a bit clunky. When I found Github had
a new CI system in beta, I
signed up for the beta and was accepted a few weeks later.
While it is still in development, the configuration language feels lean
and powerful. In comparison, Travis's configuration language has
obviously evolved over time with some features not interacting properly
(e.g. matrix expansion only working on the first job in a workflow using
build stages). While I've never felt like I had a complete grasp of
the Travis configuration language, the single page description of
Actions configuration language feels complete.
Last week I gave a talk at Perth Linux Users
Group about building IoT projects using Ubuntu
Core and Snapcraft. The video is now available online. Unfortunately
there were some problems with the audio setup leading to some background
noise in the video, but it is still intelligible:
When the Ubuntu Phone project was cancelled, I moved to the desktop
team. The initial goal for team was to bring up a GNOME 3 based
desktop for the Ubuntu 17.10 release that would be familiar to both
Ubuntu users coming from the earlier Unity desktop, and users of
“vanilla” GNOME 3.
While working on a feature for snapd, we had a need to perform a
"secure bind mount". In this context, "secure" meant:
The source and/or target of the mount is owned by a less privileged
user.
User processes will continue to run while we're performing the
mount (so solutions that involve suspending all user processes are
out).
While we can't prevent the user from moving the mount point, they
should not be able to trick us into mounting to locations they
don't control (e.g. by replacing the path with a symbolic link).
The main problem is that the mount system call uses string path names to
identify the mount source and target. While we can perform checks on the
paths before the mounts, we have no way to guarantee that the paths
don't point to another location when we move on to the mount() system
call: a classic time of check to time of
use race
condition.
One of the options available when configuring the my ThinkPad was an
Infrared camera. The main selling point being "Windows
Hello"
facial recognition based login. While I wasn't planning on keeping
Windows on the system, I was curious to see what I could do with it
under Linux. Hopefully this is of use to anyone else trying to get it to
work.
The camera is manufactured by Chicony Electronics (probably a
CKFGE03
or similar), and shows up as two USB devices:
At the end of 2012, I moved from Ubuntu One to the Unity API Team at
Canonical. This team was responsible for various services that
supported the Unity desktop shell: most noticeably the search
functionality. This work initially focused on the Unity 7 desktop
shipping with Ubuntu, but then changed focus to the Unity 8 rewrite
used by the Ubuntu Phone project.
Ubuntu One was a set of
online services provided by Canonical for Ubuntu users. It provided
cloud hosted storage for files and structured data, synchronised to
the user’s local machine. The Ubuntu One service was discontinued in
2014.
One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of
the Ubuntu One Developer
Documentation web site. While there
are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state
where it is a lot easier for us to update.
I have been working on updating our
authentication/authorisation
documentation and revising some of the file
storage
documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients). To help
verify that the documentation was useful, I wrote a small program to
exercise those APIs. The result is
u1ftp: a program that exposes a user's
files via an FTP daemon running on localhost. In conjunction with the
OS file manager or a dedicated FTP client, this can be used to
conveniently access your files on a system without the full Ubuntu One
client installed.
Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad
source code and produced the first source code analysis
report.
There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g.
-3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look
about right. If you're interested in what sort of effort goes into
producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look.
In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel's tracker backend to
function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the
API. It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to
Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way
Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker.
The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file
for the "org.freedesktop.Tracker" bus name so that if the user has not
chosen to run the service (or has killed it), it won't be automatically
activated. Unfortunately, instead of just calling a Tracker D-Bus
method, Rygel was trying to manually activate Tracker via a
StartServiceByName() call. This would fail even if Tracker was running,
hence my assumption that it was a tracker API version problem.
I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look
at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few
months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who
wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for
Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA
here:
Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of
existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch. It is the
first Debian package I've put together from scratch and it wasn't as
difficult as I thought it might be. The tips from the "Teach me
packaging" workshop at the Canonical All Hands meeting last month were
quite helpful.
Last week, we released the source code to
django-openid-auth. This is
a small library that can add OpenID based
authentication to Django applications.
It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including
the sprint scheduler
Scott wrote for the
last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the
code.
Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses
on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using
Django's
django.contrib.auth
authentication system. As such, it is usually enough to edit just two
files in an existing application to enable OpenID login.
One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the
UPNP/DLNA media
renderer. Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is
a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis.
MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that
could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with
Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that
there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to
the PS3. So I put together a package of a subversion snapshot in my
PPA which should work on
Intrepid.
From 2004 to 2008, I worked on the Launchpad
code hosting site for Canonical. As well as providing hosting for
third party Open Source projects, the site is central to the Ubuntu
project: doing everything from bug tracking to managing the package
repository.
I arrived in Prague yesterday for the Ubuntu Developer
Summit. Including time spent in
transit in Singapore and London, the flights took about 30 hours.
As I was flying on BA, I got to experience Heathrow Terminal
5. It
wasn't quite as bad as some of the horror stories I'd heard. There
were definitely aspects that weren't forgiving of mistakes. For
example, when taking the train to the "B" section there was a sign
saying that if you accidentally got on the train when you shouldn't
have it would take 40 minutes to get back to the "A" section.
Since upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy
I've occasionally been seeing the following notification from GNOME
Power Manager:
I'd usually trigger this error by unplugging the AC adapter and then
picking suspend from GPM's left click menu.
My first thought on seeing this was "What's a policy timeout, and why
is it not valid?" followed by "I don't remember setting a policy
timeout". Looking at bug
492132 I found a
pointer to the policy_suppression_timeout gconf value, whose
description gives a bit more information.
I am at Narita
Airport
at the moment, on the way to Boston for some of the meetings being held
during UDS. It'll be good to
catch up with everyone again.
When Storm was released, one of the
comments made was that it did not include the ability to generate a
database schema from the Python classes used to represent the tables
while this feature is available in a number of competing
ORMs.
The simple reason for this is that we haven't used schema generation in
any of our ORM-using projects.
Furthermore I'd argue that schema generation is not really appropriate
for long lived projects where the data stored in the database is
important. Imagine developing an application along these lines:
I got round to upgrading my desktop system to
Gutsy today. I'd upgraded my
laptop the previous week, so was not expecting much in the way of
problems.
I'd done the original install on my desktop back in the Warty days, and
the root partition was a bit too small to perform the upgrade. As there
was a fair bit of accumulated crud, I decided to do a clean install.
Things mostly worked, but there were a few problems, which I detail
below:
The new Canonical Shop was opened
recently which allows you to buy anything from Ubuntu tshirts and DVDs
up to a 24/7 support contract for your server.
One thing to note is that this is the first site using our new
Launchpad single sign-on infrastructure. We
will be rolling this out to other sites in time, which should give a
better user experience to the existing shared authentication system
currently in place for the wikis.
It hasn't been long since the last gnome-vfs-obexftp release, but I
thought it'd be good to get these fixes out before undertaking more
invasive development. The new version is available from:
If the phone does not provide free space values in the OBEX
capability object, do not report this as zero free space. This fixes
Nautilus file copy behaviour on a number of Sony Ericsson phones.
Fix date parsing when the phone returns UTC timestamps in the folder
listings.
Add some tests for the capability object and folder listing XML
parsers. Currently has sample data for Nokia 6230, Motorola KRZR K1,
and Sony K800i, Z530i and Z710i phones.
These fixes should improve the user experience for owners of some Sony
Ericsson phones by letting them copy files to the phone, rather than
Nautilus just telling them that there is no free space. Unfortunately,
if there isn't enough free space you'll get an error part way through
the copy. This is the best that can be done with the information
provided by the phone.
I've had a number of requests for USB support in gnome-vfs-obexftp. At
first I didn't have much luck talking to my phone via USB. Running the
obex_test utility from OpenOBEX gave the following results:
$ obex_test -u
Using USB transport, querying available interfaces
Interface 0: (null)
Interface 1: (null)
Interface 2: (null)
Use 'obex_test -u interface_number' to run interactive OBEX test client
Trying to talk via any of these interface numbers failed. After reading
up a bit, it turned out that I needed to add a udev rule to give
permissions on my phone. After doing so, I got a better result:
Sync osso-gwobex and osso-gnome-vfs-extras changes from Maemo
Subversion.
Instead of asking hcid to set up the RFCOMM device for
communication, use an RFCOMM socket directly. This is both faster
and doesn't require enabling experimental hcid interfaces. Based on
work from Bastien Nocera.
Improve free space calculation for Nokia phones with multiple memory
types (e.g. phone memory and a memory card). Now the free space for
the correct memory type for a given directory should be returned.
This fixes various free-space dependent operations in Nautilus such
as copying files.
Previously, I posted about the FM radio
plugin I was working on. I just posted the code to bug
168735. A few notes about the implementation:
The code only supports Video4Linux
2 radio
tuners (since that’s the interface my device supports, and the V4L1
compatibility layer doesn’t work for it). It should be possible to
port it support both protocols if someone is interested.
It does not pass the audio through the GStreamer pipeline. Instead,
you need to configure your mixer settings to pass the audio through
(e.g. unmute the Line-in source and set the volume appropriately).
It plugs in a GStreamer source that generates silence to work with
the rest of the Rhythmbox infrastructure. This does mean that the
volume control and visualisations won’t work
No properties dialog yet. If you want to set titles on the stations,
you’ll need to edit rhythmdb.xml directly at the moment.
The code assumes that the radio device is /dev/radio0.
Other than that, it all works quite well (I've been using it for the
last few weeks).
I've been working on some FM radio support in Rhythmbox in my spare
time. Below is screenshot
At the moment, the basic tuning and mute/unmute works fine with my
DSB-R100. I don't have any UI for adding/removing stations at the
moment though, so it is necessary to edit
~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to add them.
Comments:
Joel -
This feature would truly be a welcome addition!
I'm especially pleased it's being developed by a fellow Australian!
(If the radio stations are any indication)
I upgraded to Feisty about a month or so ago, and it has been a nice
improvement so far. One regression I noticed though was that my USB FM
radio tuner had stopped working (or at least,
Gnomeradio could no
longer tune it).
It turns out that some time between the kernel release found in Edgy and
the one found in Feisty, the dsbr100 driver had been upgraded from the
Video4Linux 1
API to
Video4Linux
2. Now the
driver nominally supports the V4L1 ioctls through the v4l1_compat, but
it doesn't seem to implement enough V4L2 ioctls to make it usable (the
VIDIOCGAUDIO ioctl fails).
Today we unveiled the Launchpad 1.0 User
Interface, which has
been in private beta for the last few months. As well as the improved
visual appearance, there are a number of new features such as the
ability to add your own branding to Launchpad pages associated with
your project (for example, Ubuntu's
pages).
As mentioned in the press release, we've got two new high profile
projects using us for bug tracking: The Zope 3
Project and The Silva Content Management
System. As part of their
migration, we imported all their old bug reports (for Zope
3, and for
Silva). This was done using the same
import process that we used for the SchoolTool import. Getting this
process documented so that other projects can more easily switch to
Launchpad is still on my todo list.
Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer
for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on
21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated
tzdata packages were released on 27th
November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an
updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug
72125).
One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications
used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database. So other
places that might need updating include:
I arrived in San Francisco today for the
Canonical company conference. Seems like a
nice place, and not too cold :). So far I've just gone for a walk
along Fisherman's Wharf for a few hours. There look
On the plane trip, I had a chance to see Last Train to
Freo, which I didn't get round
to seeing in the cinemas. Definitely worth watching.
Like a few other states, Western Australia does not do daylight saving.
Recently the state parliament has been discussing a Daylight saving
bill.
The bill is now before the Legislative Council (the upper house). If the
bill gets passed, there will be a 3 year trial followed by a referendum
to see if we want to continue.
I hadn't been paying too much attention to it, and had assumed they
would be talking about starting the trial next year. But it seems
they're actually talking about starting it on 3rd December. So assuming
the bill gets passed, there will be less than a month til it starts.
In my previous entry about using the
Maemo obex-module on the desktop, Johan Hedberg mentioned that
bluez-utils 3.7 included equivalent interfaces to the
osso-gwconnect daemon used by the method. Since then, the copy of
bluez-utils in Edgy has been updated to 3.7, and the necessary
interfaces are enabled in hcid by default.
Before trying to modify the VFS code, I thought I'd experiment a bit
with the D-BUS interfaces via the D-BUS python bindings. Most of the
interesting method calls exist on the org.bluez.Adapter interface. We
can easily get the default adapter with the following code:
When I got my new laptop, one of the features it had that my previous
one didn't was Bluetooth support. There are a few Bluetooth related
utilities for Gnome that let you send and receive SMS messages and a few
other things, but a big missing feature is the ability to transfer files
to and from the phone easily.
Ideally, I'd be able to browse the phone's file system using Nautilus.
Luckily, the Maemo guys have already done the
hard work of writing a gnome-vfs module that speaks the OBEX FTP
protocol. I had a go at compiling it on my laptop (running Ubuntu Edgy),
and you can see the result below:
People often refer to other bugs in comments, which both Bugzilla and
Launchpad conveniently turn into links. The changed bug numbers meant
that the bug references in the comments ended up pointing to the wrong
bugs. The bug import was done one bug at a time, so if bug A referred to
bug B but bug B hadn't been imported by the time we were importing bug
A, then we wouldn't know what bug number it should be referring to.
I've been testing out Ekiga recently, and so
far the experience has been a bit hit and miss.
Firewall traversal has been unreliable. Some numbers (like the
SIPPhone echo test) work great.
In some cases, no traffic has gotten through (where both parties
were behind Linux firewalls). In other cases, voice gets through in
one direction but not the other. Robert
Collins has some instructions on
setting up
siproxd
which might solve all this though, so I'll have to try that.
The default display for the main window is a URI entry box and a
dial pad. It would make much more sense to display the user's list
of contacts here instead (which are currently in a separate window).
I rarely enter phone numbers on my mobile phone, instead using the
address book. I expect that most VoIP users would be the same,
provided that using the address book is convenient.
Related to the previous point: the Ekiga.net registration
service seems to know who is online and who
is not. It would be nice if this information could be displayed next
to the contacts.
Ekiga supports multiple sound cards. It was a simple matter of
selecting "Logitech USB Headset" as the input and output device on
the audio devices page of the preferences to get it to use my
headset. Now I hear the ring on my desktop's speakers, but can use
the headset for calls.
It is cool that Ekiga supports video calls, but I have no video
camera on my computer. Even though I disabled video support in the
preferences, there is still a lot of knobs and whistles in the UI
related to video.
Even though there are still a few warts, Ekiga shows a lot of promise.
As more organisations provide SIP gateways become available (such as the
UWA gateway), this software will become more
important as a way of avoiding expensive phone charges as well as a way
of talking to friends/colleagues.
Thought I'd post a followup on my previous post since it generated a
bit of interest. First a quick summary:
It is not an Ubuntu Dapper specific bug. With the appropriate
combination of fonts and pango versions, it will exhibit itself on
other Pango-enabled Firefox builds (it was verified on the Fedora
build too).
It is not a DejaVu bug, although
it is one of the few fonts to exhibit the problem. The simple fact
is that not many fonts provide ligature glyphs and include the
required OpenType tables for them to be
used.
It isn't a Pango bug. The ligatures are
handled correctly in normal GTK applications on Dapper. The bug only
occurs with Pango >= 1.12, but that is because older versions did
not make use of the OpenType tables in the "basic" shaper (used
for latin scripts like english).
The bug only occurs in the Pango backend, but then the non-Pango
renderer doesn't even support ligatures. Furthermore, there are a
number of languages that can't be displayed correctly with the
non-Pango renderer so it is not very appealing.
The firefox bug is only triggered in the slow, manual glyph positioning
code path of the text renderer. This only gets invoked if you have
non-default letter or word spacing (such as justified text). In this
mode, the width of the normal glyph of the first character in the
ligature seems to be used for positioning which results in the
overlapping text.
At this point, I am not sure if it is an Ubuntu specific bug. The
current conditions I know of to trigger the bug are:
Firefox 1.5 (I am using the 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-1ubuntu10 package).
Pango rendering enabled (the default for Ubuntu).
The web page must use a font that contains ligatures and use those
ligatures. Since the "DejaVu Sans" includes ligatures and is the
default "sans serif" font in Dapper, this is true for a lot of
websites.
The text must be justified (e.g. use the "text-align: justify"
CSS rule).
If you view a site where these conditions are met with an affected
Firefox build, you will see the bug: ligature glyphs will be used to
render character sequences like "ffi", but only the advance of the
first character's normal glyph is used before drawing the next glyph.
This results in overlapping glyphs:
I've been in London for a bit over a week now at the
Launchpad sprint. We've been staying in a
hotel near the Excel exhibition centre in Docklands, which has a nice
view of the docs and you can see the planes landing at the airport out
the windows of the conference rooms.
I met up with James Bromberger (one of the two
main organisers of linux.conf.au 2003)
on Thursday, which is the first time I've seen him since he left for
the UK after the conference.
The Bugzilla migration on Friday went quite well, so we've now got all
the old Ubuntu bug reports in Launchpad.
Before the migration, we were up to bug #6760. Now that the migration
is complete, there are more than 28000 bugs in the system. Here are some
quick points to help with the transition:
All bugzilla.ubuntu.com accounts were migrated to Launchpad
accounts with a few caveats:
If you already had a Launchpad account with your bugzilla email
address associated with it, then the existing Launchpad account
was used.
No passwords were migrated from Bugzilla, due to differences in
the method of storing them. You can set the password on the
account at https://launchpad.net/+forgottenpassword.
If you had a Launchpad account but used a different email to the
one on your Bugzilla account, then you now have two Launchpad
accounts. You can merge the two accounts at
https://launchpad.net/people/+requestmerge.
If you have a bugzilla.ubuntu.com bug number, you can find the
corresponding Launchpad bug number with the following URL:
If all goes well, Ubuntu will be using a single bug tracker again on
Friday (as opposed to the current system where bugs in main go in
Bugzilla and bugs in universe go in Malone).
Comments:
Keshav -
Hiiii,
I am Keshav and i am 22. I am working as software dev.engineer in
Software Company . I am currently working on Bugzilla. I think i can get
some help in understanding how i can migrate bugzilla . Can you provide
me the tips and list the actions so that i can come close in making a
effective migration functionality
Joao: you can
configure XScreenSaver to show a "Switch User" button in it's
password dialog (which calls gdmflexiserver when run). This lets you
start a new X session after the screen has locked. This feature is
turned on in Ubuntu if you want to try it out.
Of course, this is not a full solution, since it doesn't help you
switch to an existing session (you'd need to guess the correct
Ctrl+Alt+Fn combo). There is code in gnome-screensaver to support this
though, giving you a list of sessions you can switch to.
One of the things that was discussed at
UBZ was moving Ubuntu's bug
tracking over to Launchpad. The current
situation sees bugs in main being filed in
bugzilla while bugs in universe go in
Launchpad. Putting all the bugs in Launchpad is an improvement, since
users only need to go to one system to file bugs.
I wrote the majority of the conversion script before the conference, but
made a few important improvements at the conference after discussions
with some of the developers. Since the bug tracking system is probably
of interest to people who weren't at the conf, I'll outline some of
the details of the conversion below:
So after I posted some instructions for setting up Avahi on Breezy, a
fair number of people at UBZ
did so. For most people this worked fine, but it seems that a few
people's systems started spewing a lot of network traffic.
It turns out that the problem was actually caused by the
zeroconf package
(which I did not suggest installing) rather than Avahi. The zeroconf
package is not needed for service discovery or .local name lookup, so
if you are at UBZ you should remove the package or suffer the wrath of
Elmo.
During conferences, it is often useful to be able to connect to connect
to other people's machines (e.g. for collaborative editing sessions
with Gobby). This is a place where mDNS
hostname resolution can come in handy, so you don't need to remember IP
addresses.
This is quite easy to set up on Breezy:
Install the avahi-daemon, avahi-utils and libnss-mdns packages
from universe.
Restart dbus in order for the new system bus security policies to
take effect with "sudo invoke-rc.d dbus restart".
Start avahi-daemon with "sudo invoke-rc.d avahi-daemon start".
Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf, and add "mdns" to the end of the
"hosts:" line.
Now your hostname should be advertised to the local network, and you can
connect to other hosts by name (of the form hostname.local). You can
also get a list of the currently advertised hosts and services with the
avahi-discover program.
As well as being my first time in Canada, it was my first time in
transit through the USA. Unlike in most countries, I needed to pass
through customs and get a visa waiver even though I was in transit. The
visa waiver
form
had some pretty weird questions, such as whether I was involved in
persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies.
Picked up a
DSB-R100 USB
Radio tuner off EBay recently. I did this partly because I have better
speakers on my computer than on the radio in that room, and partly
because I wanted to play around with timed recordings.
Setting it up was trivial -- the dsbr100 driver got loaded
automatically, and a program to tune the radio
(gnomeradio) was
available in the Ubuntu universe repository. I did need to change the
radio device from /dev/radio to /dev/radio0 though.
