Bye all - time to stop
Il 11/10/2009 11:52, Vincenzo Ciancia ha scritto: Il 10/10/2009 21:16, Peteris Krisjanis ha scritto: Sorry, I can't agree more either. You don't even offer your reasoning why there is no strong reasons. For me, integrity, visual style, etc. makes it much better and welcome in Ubuntu desktop than Pidgin. And it has been a class example why we do evaluate apps and why they are given second chance if they improve as Empathy did. I am pointing out that empathy at the moment is widely broken, and none of the feature it promises are there. I don't think you can install ubuntu on a fresh computer and be sure voice calls with empathy will work at all. I don't think you can really use empathy for IRC. I don't think empathy will imports accounts from pidgin in a reliable way. How do I know these things, is because I tried it. When it'll be ready, it will be a pleasure to use it. I am not saying distributors should resist to change. V. But in any case, even more important, I have to unsubscribe from this list. Even the above criticism could become a contribution to ubuntu. It may e.g. prod developers into looking at those bugs again. And I have decided that my contributions to ubuntu should stop. CC Mark Shuttleworth, because it is clear that no developers want to speak about this problem, so the boss is the only one entitled. This is because one thing are design issues that can be discussed, and eventually I would understand the reasons for those uncomfortable changes, and start convincing MY users that these changes are good; bugs can be reported, cooperation can be done in my free time, one other thing is to 1) notice that we^H^H^H you are still tricking your users into thinking that they google for something, whereas they really ubuntu+google for something http://start.ubuntu.com/9.10/ 2) Notice that the solution to the problem would just be to add a link in that page to a relevant explanation, and that developers have SILENTLY refused to do that. 3) notice that all the persons involved (and it's extremely difficult to find someone who will say yes I am responsible for that page) PROMISED that the issues would have been solved 4) notice that Mark Shuttleworth in person said that these issues would have been discussed 5) notice that all the above can be safely skipped, since in the end nothing changed. I quitted some time ago, now I make it official; I was not the most useful contributor anyways. bye Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Pulse audio
Il 10/10/2009 21:16, Peteris Krisjanis ha scritto: Sorry, I can't agree more either. You don't even offer your reasoning why there is no strong reasons. For me, integrity, visual style, etc. makes it much better and welcome in Ubuntu desktop than Pidgin. And it has been a class example why we do evaluate apps and why they are given second chance if they improve as Empathy did. I am pointing out that empathy at the moment is widely broken, and none of the feature it promises are there. I don't think you can install ubuntu on a fresh computer and be sure voice calls with empathy will work at all. I don't think you can really use empathy for IRC. I don't think empathy will imports accounts from pidgin in a reliable way. How do I know these things, is because I tried it. When it'll be ready, it will be a pleasure to use it. I am not saying distributors should resist to change. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Pulse audio
On Thu, 2009-10-08 at 08:40 -0400, Daniel Chen wrote: On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Vincenzo Ciancia cian...@di.unipi.it wrote: The real problem that nobody seemed ever to be getting is that when you introduce huge regressions, then you probably should 1) either not distribute the software yet 2) or put more energy into bug fixing for the particular software, or at least have strong, or 3) have convincing reasons for forcing people to enjoy the regressions while they could as well live happily with the previously used one, or 4) make it easy for people to try the new solution, and if it fails, revert to the old All valid points, but: (1) is a catch-22: software does not get fixed if no one uses it. You need real, difficult bugs to be reported, i.e., real testing. Testers use the software, I have been a tester, we all probably are or have been. But ubuntu should perhaps be more inclined to abandon software even after testing, that is, the software stays there for the alphas, but if it's still broken it goes away in the beta. Otherwise it's like saying that end-users really are testers, it must not be the case. video calls. I never succeded in having it work for voice/video. And it is so badly broken in other areas I really wonder how you all can be so blind. You seem to use you all as if you can't effect change within the source development. Do you mean that I have a possibly remote possibility of convincing the ubuntu developers to ship pidgin instead of empathy? Do I need to write a scientific paper on that, or is it possible that someone actually does an unbiased comparison by themselves? No need for experimental; just look at all the bug reports filed affecting flashplugin-nonfree, nspluginwrapper, firefox-3.0, alsa-lib, and pulseaudio. The sad thing is that we could have shipped a two-line change to /etc/pulse/default.pa that would have alleviated nearly all of the (users') showstoppers. The change remains in my pulseaudio/hardy bzr branch. Skype fundamentally misused the alsa-lib API. PulseAudio broke Skype is a horrible non-example. Skype is an horrible example of software by itself, but it is a software that changed the life of people. It was very bad that in hardy pulseaudio was enabled by default even if it was very clear that it fought with skype. Because that meant that dual-boot still felt the need to reboot. No, no, I can't agree. I like new software but there must be a measure. Pulseaudio in the end could be easily disabled in hardy, but e.g. empathy can not make sense, there are no strong reasons to use it, except that it is a gnome thing but also pidgin is. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Pulse audio
On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 23:32 -0400, Daniel Chen wrote: Granted, fixing things upstream is generally smiled upon more so than focusing on a particular distribution. In the case of stellar Ubuntu audio bugs, perhaps contributing more than just testing is way forward? The real problem that nobody seemed ever to be getting is that when you introduce huge regressions, then you probably should 1) either not distribute the software yet 2) or put more energy into bug fixing for the particular software, or at least have strong, or 3) have convincing reasons for forcing people to enjoy the regressions while they could as well live happily with the previously used one, or 4) make it easy for people to try the new solution, and if it fails, revert to the old one. Ubuntu did not show particular interest in any of the above policies. Typically, the new software replaces the old one, period. See e.g. the shiny new IM software that will replace the old one, and karmic users will love. The only advantage that it should offer is voice and video calls. I never succeded in having it work for voice/video. And it is so badly broken in other areas I really wonder how you all can be so blind. Asking users to start contributing proves that there is no sufficient manpower to fix bugs. But perhaps people could live without the new software and related regressions? Now in the case of pulseaudio, for me, the benefits are greater than the regressions. I personally can use skype while watching a flash movie, and that's an innovation in linux. But are there experimetnal measurements of the impact the introduction of pulseaudio had in hardy on users? Empirically, I saw that it broke skype for everybody I knew. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
Il 27/07/2009 10:52, Alan Pope ha scritto: ..or read his blog post about it:) http://www.asoftsite.org/s9y/archives/162-What-is-this-Multisearch-thing-in-my-Firefox-about.html (which I can see Vincenzo already has, and has indeed commented on it [assuming that's Vincenzo]). When someone can start reading my e-mail... I already explained very well that the object of the question is not the multi-search but the default search page which *has been there since hardy* and I also am perceiving this big confusion between multisearch, which is a testing feature, and the default page, which has been there since hardy, as a way to take time and not reply. Do you know anything about the custom search? If so, tell us, if not, you are confirming my theory, not the opposite. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
Il 27/07/2009 10:46, Sebastien Bacher ha scritto: On sam., 2009-07-25 at 16:45 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: 1) on this list, nobody knows the answer. I think this is likely. Then, the custom search should be removed from firefox. Nobody knows why it is there. You seem to jump to a weird conclusion, because busy maintainers don't read your emails on a noisy discuss list you advice to drop changes? Wouldn't it make sense to rather try contacting the maintainer or the ubuntu mozilla team about the issue or to open a bug on launchpad so you can get a reply from the people doing the changes? Sebastien Bacher Sebastian: did you notice another message that has been there for one year? I already told in previous messages that time is not an excuse for that reason, but let me link it: http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com/msg04111.html An important topic may also deserve a timely clarification, even if that other message had not been there for more than one year. We all are busy. Me too. I do real work, but sometimes I prioritize important things. Maybe this issue is just not important for ubuntu, we shall see. For me it is urgent: I need to know if it's worth keeping contributing to ubuntu or not, because if principles did not come before technical merits for me, 12 years ago, when gnome and kde did not exist, I would have stayed with windows, or perhaps I'd have gotten a mac. I contacted the ubuntu mozilla team, as you suggest, and did not get any reply. A bug does not make sense here because mine is a question, not a bug report. Do you know anything about the search page? If so, tell us, if not, you are confirming my theory, not the opposite. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
Il 27/07/2009 12:26, Sebastien Bacher ha scritto: (could you stop private copying me and reply on the list?) On lun., 2009-07-27 at 12:16 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: Sebastian: did you notice another message that has been there for one year? How does that change the fact that the people you want to reach might not be reading the list you are posting to now? Sebastien Bacher That's the most universal place that I know where users and developers may meet. Certainly ubuntu-devel is not the right place (maybe it's even moderated?). How can you be sure ubuntu-mozilla developers and maybe M.S. are not reading this list? Is it possible that nobody here consider the issue important enough to eventually forward it to somebody who can know the answer? Are you a community or what? Sebastian: if you are not involved you don't need to reply at all, this message is not for you. If nobody in this list knows either an answer or cares to forward the issue, maybe the problem is hidden/buried enough to justify my concerns. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
Are you not part of this community? No, I am not a developer. I am part of the broader community of ubuntu users (I do lots of bug reporting). If I write to ubuntu-devel-discuss maybe there is some developer on it, and maybe they can even communicate between each other. But let us stop questioning this since I am not as stupid as I may look like, therefore I also contacted the list you suggest, as I _already_ replied to Sebastien. That was only two days ago, so you can still scream that this problem is all my fault and that there is nothing bad, that I have to be patient and wait for a reply. I am NOT going to second this: lots of important people, including Mark Shuttleworth, read this list, and if nobody has been concerned with replying about that issue for more than one year, then ubuntu is not respecting the principles that lead _me_ to use and campaign for free software. Time may be still an excuse, so I am going to wait for a week more for an ubuntu-mozilla-team reply. If the issue is not important they may reply in six months or so, but for me it has become an urgent matter. It already was urgent one year ago, but I decided I could live with that. When I saw the custom page being pushed also in the firefox search box, which has the google symbol on it, and no ubuntu specific decoration, I realised I had not been doing my duties as a free software advocate and user, and decided that this time I will either get a satisfactory reply or quit. I publicly committed to the free software philosophy many times, also during my career, so for me it is vital to know if what I am working for is what I expect. I do think nobody here knows the answer. It's something specific to one package (albeit an important one). It's probably best to get in touch with the Mozilla team directly: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam#Communication Remco Let us not joke about this. Surely much more people than that team knows about this, I do NOT believe that it's a decision of their own, that was not discussed in a broader council. That is why I expected somebody on THIS list to know about that. The fact that I am alone in asking and, also, no developer is worried about that page, is really strange. I can't believe, for example, that ex-debian-developers may pass this under silence. That's another reason why I thought this list would have been ok. Probably philosophy does not drive free software anymore. Eventually, I will grow up and understand that free software is only about licenses, and that money drives all of us. That's a problem of my own. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
I understand that you're annoyed because you feel an issue that's important to you has been ignored for a long time, but venting your feelings to the list is never productive. You are more likely to get useful responses if you focus on constructive areas of debate, and ignore irrelevant sub-threads wherever possible. Doing so will make your thread look more attractive to potential posters. - Andrew This is why I asked very politely and concisely, both one year ago, and three days ago. I even posted a second message to clarify that I was not referring to the multi-search. So if you know something about the google custom search you can reply to the first message and I will not injury anyone. Being direct and being polite may live together. I know that it is easier to not reply when it can likely cause a mess. But not replying is going to cause a mess anyways because it is evident from the sole startup page that the user is not informed. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
The google custom search
[Please notice the cross-post and use the reply button accordingly] As there were many bugs related to the subject in launchpad, I did not consider the possibility that a separate bug on the phylosophical issue could be filed. I was convinced to do that on IRC. Communication is good. Here I did that. Without accusing anyone, I also ask you all if, according to your experience in web technology (I am not an expert) the launchpad cookie could be associated with the forms submitted to ubuntu.com, and there is one more question: why the page is not local but on the ubuntu servers. Everything is summarized in the bug report below. https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu-website/+bug/405350 Thanks Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search
Il 27/07/2009 17:42, Vincenzo Ciancia ha scritto: the forms submitted to ubuntu.com The forms are not submitted to ubuntu.com so that is a non-issue. Changed the bug accordingly. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
[1]: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-deal-with-google-for-3-years/ Oli, thanks for this link. So next time I'll see some crappy microsoft search engine by default in internet explorer I will not laugh at their users anymore. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
Il 26/07/2009 03:34, Jan Claeys ha scritto: The custom search is quite annoying and intrusive. I've resorted to using the binary download. Eh, you know that you can add/remove whatever search engine you want, don't you? Jan, did you read my e-mails? It is clear to everybody that 1) we can customize firefox and 2) this is an effect of it being open source. My concerns are of a completely different nature. It seems to me that they are pushing a custom search making it look like a standard search page (even if it has an ubuntu logo). My mother (if I had not changed the start page for her) would certainly have been tricked into the thing. And wonder why on linux there are no maps or conversions. And I think that this is not acceptable in a free software distribution. At least, these are not the principles that led me to push ubuntu among people of all sort, and to help with bug reporting in my free time. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - and the invasion of the multisearch
The worst thing of it all is that whenever ubuntu touches firefox (e.g. I installed today the italian localization because when I installed karmic it was not available) it OVERWRITES MY SETTINGS WITH YOURS. I call this hammering and normally would ban the user, except that I can't yet ban ubuntu from my pc. So I wasted time to fix my own installation editing about:config, now I have to redo that. Ubuntu went way too far. Hope this will be honestly considered a bug and fixed. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
The fact that there is nobody willing to reply (I posted a similar message one year ago, so this is certainly not a matter of time) can mean only two things: 1) on this list, nobody knows the answer. I think this is likely. Then, the custom search should be removed from firefox. Nobody knows why it is there. 2) someone knows, but they are ashamed to tell the truth. This is likely too. If you just want to adopt a marketing strategy, damnit, just admit it. The majority of users including myself will continue to use ubuntu. But why silence? This is really worrying. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search
Il 25/07/2009 17:55, Mario Vukelic ha scritto: Not sure if this is what you are writing about, but you will probably want to read it: http://www.asoftsite.org/s9y/archives/162-What-is-this-Multisearch-thing-in-my-Firefox-about.html Dear Mario, unfortunately this is not what I am talking about. The multisearch is an experimental feature. But the google custom search has been there since hardy. There is a lot of confusion about the two things. I would like to learn about the google custom search in the default page, and ideally would like to see a short text and a link in that page, that informs users they are not searching with google but with a custom search. I am really asking for a very small effort from the ubuntu mozilla team. I now emailed them directly. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - perhaps it went there by itself?
Il 25/07/2009 17:36, dan ha scritto: The custom search is quite annoying and intrusive. I've resorted to using the binary download. Me too, but my concern is: is it worth to continue pushing ubuntu among my friends and colleagues, if they pass over such an issue without commenting? I do not want to look like I appreciate this situation which does not recall free software at all. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The google custom search - clarification
I see that there are open bugs in launchpad about the google custom search, mostly related to the multisearch add-on. This is said to be in testing. But my e-mail is about the default firefox home page, and the necessity to push a google custom search anyways. The default page was the custom search at least in jaunty, so my e-mail has NOTHING to do with testing. This will save the list from a lot of noise I hope. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: a safer system
Il 23/07/2009 04:43, Anthony G Weitekamp ha scritto: In short, the install of any one new application should never effect the operation of the entire system. What do I need? Separate Linux installations for each group of tasks that I may be working on? Really? This is completely out of topic but you are asking the installation of new packages to be without side effects, I would say this is similar to functional programming, and in fact there is a software development model, and a linux distribution, called nixos, that are centered on purely functional package *deployment*. I did not have the time to understand it very well, but it's on my TODO list. http://nixos.org/nixos/ Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reporting usability problems, and an example that I'd like you ALL to read
Il 23/07/2009 12:05, Andrew Sayers ha scritto: Hi Vincenzo, You might have more luck if you describe your changes as feature requests. Whether or not you personally think they're bugs, calling them new features should avoid the always been that way reaction from developers. Hi Andrew, if I call them features, when they are bug, the reply will be that they need to be blueprinted :) And in any case the priority is doomed to be low, and so the interest of the developers. Sometimes it's just a matter of changing a wrong string, and maybe the problem is to find which package is the responsible. Now, this can be argued, but let me reply to the second part of your e-mail and then I will give an example of the issues I am talking about. The example is clearly not a feature request, but as Sebastien said it was difficult to fix and with no interested developers. But read it for more. You might also want to try helping out with the improved me too blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/malone/+spec/improved-me-too - useful me too data would let you argue that behaviour is non-obvious. - Andrew I wanted to know about such a blueprint so thank you. However in my experience this is not going to help with usability problems. Most of the users don't care about usability once they got around the issues. Very often I am alone in requesting a change. This in turn triggers the response that I am the only one reporting the bug, then it's not affecting all users, hence it's low priority or even not a bug. I think some of you reading will remember such a circumstance recently :) (Perhaps not so) clearly this is wrong. Usability bugs typically affect ALL users, but all of us need to go on and learn how to circumvent those. Often, this results in users starting to fear to do obvious things such as touching their mouse, when a certain window is opened. This is a totally istinctive kind of reaction. We are learning machines and being punished because we e.g. touch the mouse and a certain program may do something annoying results in us learning not to touch the mouse in that case. This is typical in windows, and this is probably what they call the mac user experience, that is, not having to fear touching our computer, or e.g. clicking on a menu, because it works in the expected way. Gnome is very advanced in this respect, but there still are problems, obviously. EXAMPLE: When I click on the gnome panel menus, I am constantly in a be careful mode, because I know that if I start a drag by mistake, I can't press ESC to cancel. In the past, I have been punished because I started dragging. E.g. it happened that I started copying some huge remote directory inside the desktop without noticing it, eventually running out of disk space. Now it seems that the bug is fixed in karmic by disallowing dragging. I don't know if this is a wanted behaviour or just the sum of two opposite bugs. But it seems the latter, unfortunately, since I actually see the drag start and be immediately cancelled, which is also very irritating when you actually want to drag something. That's a bug nobody cared about for years. I reported that in 2006, Sebastien (who is my best triager :)) told me it was already known upstream. Recently I found out a clue on why this happens (it was an open question since several years). The problem is that the panel does not have the keyboard focus when one is dragging, so pressing ESC is captured by the currently focused window. You can observe this by opening a modal dialog closeable with ESC in a program and then starting to drag, and press ESC. The dialog disappears. I reported it, BOTH in the ubuntu bug and upstream. Guess what? Nobody cared to reply. I don't know if my comment triggered any attention but clearly this issue is not considered interesting enough to post a reply, even if it's present in ALL the ubuntu installation. That's 100% of the users. If the priority was higher, perhaps somebody would have at least replied to my comment? I don,t know, but it's a fact that the priority can't be higher, because it's a stupid problem, not a crasher or a release blocker. This is a vicious circle that is not leading to anywhere. We need to handle usability in a separate way perhaps, but this is something that canonical and ubuntu have to consider, not me. Here is the bug: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gnome-panel/+bug/69012 You can see it's old, it's low priority, and it has been rejected as a papercut. You can also follow the upstream link and see my comment stay there unreplied. That's frustrating. Consider that I kept the problem for 3 years in a corner of my mind, and when I saw a clue about the solution, I hurried to you to tell you that. This is manpower for free, or for a better ubuntu, which I am happy to have as a salary :) Nothing personal, you know that. And 2 weeks is a short time for a reply, I know also this. But I
Re: Reporting usability problems, and an example that I'd like you ALL to read
Il 23/07/2009 15:28, Sebastien Bacher ha scritto: On jeu., 2009-07-23 at 13:40 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: I agree with the issues you raise. Let me see if I can even be propositive. Things are often not as clear as you think, read the list of all the bugs users suggested as hundredpapercut for some example. The way you use your computer is often different from the one the next user will use and you will have conflicting opinions (some users think that switching workspace by scrolling mouse over the applet is efficient some other that the behavior is confusing, some will want confirmation to actions some other don't get why the computer should ask confirmation rather than just respect the user action, etc) Fact 1: need for an authority, and maybe a democratic one = From the above, I'd say that we need an authority to decide that we will not scroll on the destko^H ahem, to put an end to endless discussion. What I would like to see is turning endless discussion into creative and constructive force. I would consider the ubuntu usability team(s) but in my dreams of democracy I would also love some sort of a popular jury that can influence in some way the authority. Also because I am not going to become an ubuntu developer for lack of time :) But most important, because democracy will mean less dictatorship feeling hence less endless discussions. What importance to give to the democratic part (from 0 to 100% of the decision power) and how to select people (perhaps from the team of proposal 1 below) does not belong to me. But there is an obvious problem: how can one be sure that decisions will be accepted? Example: I myself endlessly discussed the pop-up of update notifier. I still hate the idea but in the end I had to accept the authority princple like everyone else. Here comes a proposal Proposal 1: a new code of conduct for develpers and bug reporters, and a new team == Let us design all together a new code of conduct, and create a new team. The team will have a set of bugs (assigned? separate bug tracker? just a tag? too early to say this) on which they discuss and work. The team will not have decision powers by itself (that's the authority which is a separate concern) and the condition to enter the team will be only to sign the code of conduct. The code of conduct shall be oriented to principles such as - no endless discussions, but try to accept a reached agreement even if you are not pleased by that (I am one of the biggest culprits here :)). - no underestimation of the person reporting the bug or discussing. Members of the team are supposed to know what usability is, so if at a first glance it seems they are saying something stupid, perhaps a second look is needed. Acting like the person is a newbie who needs technical explanations about why the behaviour is that way will only create endless discussions. - trying to identify common guidelines, as if all bugs reported were also in the whole ubuntu. E.g. it *should* not make sense to decide, in the same team, that rhythmbox will quit when one window is closed and banshee will not (sorry if the example is related to bad memories g), even if the argument we will not go against upstream developers may in the end be adopted in corner cases. Consistency of the desktop will be a good argument to avoid endless discussions. - whatever you like There is several issues there: - the people working on packages and softwares are often good to do technical work but not so good when it comes to take decisions on usability or design Therefore the decisions may be taken by somebody else as I suppose it is already happening in ubuntu - the usability issues reported often turn to long arguments between users not agreeing on the change and those issues are in the middle of clear technical bugs, it's difficult for usability people to list the usability concern and reciprocally a high number of usability suggestion makes the list of technical bugs harder to work with since you have to find a way to filter those you have no interest in Therefore it is worth to create a separate place for discussion among those interested in usability, as you note below - the distribution maintainers are not written most of the software distributed and don't always feel entitled to take design decision on the software without having it discussed with the upstream authors, they also don't always want to take the suggestion upstream because they have no strong opinion on the topic and don't feel they will argue for the change in a convincing way there That is out of scope IMHO; I don't have a clear vision on who should talk to upstream and on when it's just better to leave things as they are. That said we should perhaps have a different location where those suggestions can be discussed and moved to the bug tracker once a clear design change
Re: Reporting usability problems, and an example that I'd like you ALL to read
Il 23/07/2009 18:17, Vincenzo Ciancia ha scritto: - no underestimation of the person reporting the bug or discussing. Members of the team are supposed to know what usability is, so if at a first glance it seems they are saying something stupid, perhaps a second look is needed. Acting like the person is a newbie who needs technical explanations about why the behaviour is that way will only create endless discussions. And here I forgot to mention that the code of conduct will also clearly state that there will be no offence to developers for their decision, no sentences such that I hope that someone will be fired for this or you want all hackers to run away from ubuntu and so on. For the same reason: no underestimation of the person developing the code or discussing. But indeed there should be a written, clear set of guidelines to which to make appeal for a clearer discussion. I think we already have those. Vinecnzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
The google custom search
Dear all, today I noticed that the consistency problem between the default ubuntu start page, which is a custom google search, and the search box at the top-right of firefox, has finally been solved. Now also the search box is a custom search. I already tried to raise the problem that average users are not so expert to know what a custom search is, but they will certainly notice that googe in linux does not work as in windows since google will not show maps, images, and do conversions on the fly in the custom search. There is also the problem that localization is currently broken in ALL ubuntu installations except english speaking, since localised results are not returned, hence ubuntu will return english results first to my italian-only speaking mother (well she speaks some spanish, and latin too, but this does not change the problem). In the past, silence was the main answer. What I would prefer is 1) clarificaition on why this is needed, since it seems mostly a trick, and 2) some effort in localization, and in using all the google goodies by default, maps, images, conversions. Images and videos may even be questionable, even if I would rather not use google if e.g. finding inappropriate content is a concern, but maps and conversions are useful tools and people uses those every day. But if 1) and 2) can't be achieved, at least an explanation on why there are no links in the default search page (and maybe in the results) explaining what a custom search is, would be appreciated. Given that users certainly may not know what a custom search is (e.g. even if I am a computer scientist, and worked in the IT, I did not care about custom searches until ubuntu started giving me strange results), educating them by putting in-place documentation, in the form of a short sentence and a link, would be appropriate. I can understand that a custom search may bring money to canonical (correct me if I am wrong, as I said I did not care about custom searches until very recently). I think the majority of users would be happy to be able to help ubuntu by just searching the web. However, they should be made aware of the choice, instead of silently tricked into the system. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant when you triage bugs!
Dear all, sorry for crossposting, please notice it before replying to all. I tend to report all usability bugs I find, in the hope that ubuntu will become better. The hudred-papercut effort shows that I am not wrong in reporting those as bugs. However, it is very easy that a developer does not recognise an usability-related bug report, and confuses it with a more or less strange support request, and I often have to discuss to have it accepted as a bug. It is typical that on usability bugs I get trapped into endless discussions (e.g. it's always been like that, it can't be fixed, it's an obvious behaviour and so on). In the future, I will try to remember to add a sentence like this is an usability related bug report, please handle it as such, I am reporting it to ease the user experience of the whole ubuntu community and maybe link this e-mail, but in the meantime, could developers try to be a bit more careful in rejecting bugs? I am NOT going to link specific bugs here, because that would get personal, but this is becoming tiresome. Today I went to IRC and convinced a developer that a bug is a usability problem indeed. This costed me a quarter of hour, in addition to the time spent to identify and report the bug. He had just closed the bug, without at least reassigning to ubuntu, because it's not specific to the package I reported it in. But in that case one reassings it to ubuntu perhaps! The apparent problem is that he took me for a newbie not understanding an obvious fact. Which I understood perfectly, but is not correct. In the end I convinced him, but it was a waste of time and it happened a lot in the past. Discussing all the time makes bug reporting an unpleasant experience, and discourages especially usability reports, as some people tend to assume a technician attitude in thinking these are stupid requests from unexperienced users. Being constantly confused with a newbie is also a bit irritating :) especially because I think reporting usability bugs is something people do not do usually, so we all really need this kind of things. Thanks for listening and the work all of you do everyday on my ubuntu, and thanks to the developer involved in today's discussion because he did not discuss too much, and as soon as he recognised it as a bug, he kindly offered cooperation. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant when you triage bugs!
Il 22/07/2009 18:47, Vincenzo Ciancia ha scritto: Dear all, sorry for crossposting, please notice it before replying to all. I am possibly a bit of an idiot for what I did, but luckily the other list which has nothing to do with my target has a moderator. I generate too much noise. My apologises. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant when you triage bugs!
Il 22/07/2009 19:04, Henrique Almeida ha scritto: Agreed. Ubuntu developers either don't understand my usability reports or tag them as low priority bugs, which gets triaged for many releases. This is because these are not crashers and typically just affect a small portion of the application and of the codebase. My conclusions are that priorities are absolutely bad for dealing with usability. Alternative solutions include the use of special tags, special packages (e.g. the papercut approach) or whatever. But this can only happen if developers are interested in assigning a separate kind of priority to usability bugs. E.g. one may say that a bug is high priority as an usability bug but certainly it's not going to be prioritised over kernel crashes! The hundred papercut approach is absolutely perfect, so perhaps a papercut-potential tag, if accepted by developer, would be nice. The idea being that such tagged bug may have a different meaning for priorities. Your mileage may vary. I certailny can't decide :) Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Reporting usability problems: please be more tolerant when you triage bugs!
Il 22/07/2009 22:53, Mikus Grinbergs ha scritto: Let me suggest that Ubuntu appoint an usability triager/ombudsman, to determine (from the Ubuntu users' perspective, not from an Ubuntu developers' perspective) how much attention ought to be paid to each and every usability-related bug report. Do we really have so few usability related report that a single man could do that? I hope not! An usability tag, which alerts the developers, so that they don't default to istinctive reactions such as it's always been like that or perhaps even getting to newbie-handling techniques, would be sufficient but is there one already? V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The haskell platform in ubuntu?
Il giorno sab, 18/07/2009 alle 00.32 +0200, Jan Claeys ha scritto: Debian unstable experimental are updated all the time, so as long as the Debian maintainer keeps the package up-to-date, there will be a new version every 6 months in Ubuntu too? Hmm yes this is likely obvious but: is it true that packages in sid are updated frequently? I mean: it is a waste of manpower to keep a package up-to-date, e.g. if stable has version 1, and unstable passes trough version 2,3,4,5, then the stable is released again, what is the motivation in putting versions 2,3,4 in debian (apart from ubuntu :). I am not _questioning_ this, I am wondering if maintainers in debian are actually worried to constantly update packages in unstable. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
The haskell platform in ubuntu?
Dear all, there exists an haskell platform¹, which is supposed to be a single set of libraries and tools across many operating systems. Notably, the platform includes the cabal tool. More often than not, people give up on using the ubuntu haskell packages because they want to use cabal. Can we talk a little bit about steps for its possible inclusion in ubuntu? It seems that there is some interest in debian: http://orangesquash.org.uk/2009/07/04/debian-haskell-packaging-team-getting-underway/ Shall I just bother^H^H^H^H^H^H join them? Let me argue a bit why not. The platform is released every six months, so it makes a very good candidate for synchronised releases in ubuntu. This is why perhaps ubuntu might have lots more success by adding the platform by itself rather than just synchronising to debian (I expect them to include the platform at a given version, and then update it in the next release, so ubuntu would actually have outdated versions of the platform in its six-months cycle, defeating the sole purpose of the platform itself). Vincenzo [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/ -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
I beg your attention on a regression
Dear all, my internal intel wireless card is never going to work well with my home router (*ANY* other card *AND* the same card under windows work fine, intel has not been able to truly solve the problem across years). I bought an external card some time ago. It's now broken in karmic. This is a potential regression. https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/396417 I ***BEG*** your attention on this bug. Please try not to let it slip in the release without attention. My laptop is getting close to end-of-life perhaps, but since dapper I am still dreaming of a release where it works correctly. thanks in any case Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think
On gio, 2009-07-02 at 21:03 -0400, Evan wrote: Coincidentally, Bryce recently posted a couple of blog posts dealing with Me too storms on launchpad [1]+[2] which are related. They want their problem fixed, they can do nothing, they feel frustrated, plus, they are used to small groups or blogs where me too likes the sun is ok to be posted. They are newbies. They don't even know why it is wrong at all. So why not starting by putting a sentence above the text comment that says please don't post me too statements: if the most important thing in your post is a me too kind of statement, please don't post it; use the this bug affects me too link at the bottom of the page to add yourself to the counter. With a link to a short page of good bug-reporting tips. Post-it education. Before worrying about the noise, I would worry about why, when the this bug affects me too link was invented, people didn't care. Why people writes me too instead of clicking on there. Indeed it's too few visible and publicised. OTOH, perhaps it can be made more useful e.g. by giving some value to these counters; don't know. When the gnome BTS asks me for the 1,2,3 steps it pre-fills your bug reporting form with, I think it twice before deleting them, when I really want to. They put a post-it in my reporting form and I tend to obey to it. Wikipedia is edited and touched dayly by everybody, but it's full of post-its like the one I speak about, and they work very good. I am a young researcher, but I must recognise that I learned how to recognise a sentence that requires citation because of the reminder from wikipedia embedded into articles. So much people could learn such a difficult concept, and so well, that many articles of wikipedia are marked for citations where missing, something that you wouldn't even dare thinking, without such an educated community. They do this education by putting post-its everywhere :) Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Standing in the street trying to hear yourself think - ii
On ven, 2009-07-03 at 10:10 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: On gio, 2009-07-02 at 21:03 -0400, Evan wrote: Coincidentally, Bryce recently posted a couple of blog posts dealing with Me too storms on launchpad [1]+[2] which are related. They want their problem fixed, they can do nothing, they feel frustrated, plus, they are used to small groups or blogs where me too likes the sun is ok to be posted. They are newbies. They don't even know why it is wrong at all. So why not starting by putting a sentence above the text comment that says please don't post me too statements: if the most important thing in your post is a me too kind of statement, please don't post it; use the this bug affects me too link at the bottom of the page to add yourself to the counter. With a link to a short page of good bug-reporting tips. Post-it education. I just saw that Bryce noticed this too: in http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080/drupal/me-too-storms-solutions he said in the form of the This bug doesn't affect me (change) text and link on every bug. [...] Another issue is that the link just isn't that noticeable. I'll leave it to usability experts to work out how best to improve it, but it definitely needs a re-think so it's a bit more obvious, especially for casual launchpad visitors. And here is an ineresting comment: Launchpad should have a mee-too counter first. Currently even if I use the This bug affects me too link, I don't have any feedback about the amount of people affected in total. So it's quite useless now. Seeing the me-too counter increase will certainly appeal to many mee-tooers :) Can the bugs be sorted by me too? Searched for with a treshold? This is getting offtopic here. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re:
On gio, 2009-06-25 at 19:33 +1000, chris jackson wrote: Hi -I am trying to install an adobe flash plugin to my ubuntu program but a window keeps coming up saying that I need a password to grant administrative rights.How do I get this password??? Chris Jackson Hi Chris this is the wrong mailing list, the support mailing list is ubuntu-users, not ubuntu-devel-discuss. However the solution to your problem is simple: you need to use *your own* password; this will work if your user is an administrator of the machine, which surely happens for the user you create during installation. If you did not install ubuntu just ask who installed it. You can also install flash only for your user if the administrator can't be contacted, just go to the adobe web site and follow instructions for linux instead of using the automated system for firefox, which tries to install flash for all users. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Pidgin and Yahoo! login
Il giorno gio, 25/06/2009 alle 13.11 +0200, Martin Soto ha scritto: Indeed, you can currently work around the problem by connecting to a server that still supports the older protocol. Yahoo! could deactivate this alternative server at any time, though. Martin, please could you advice a server or link some web page with a list of server? Thanks Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Provide a GUI option in the installer to enable popcon
Il giorno gio, 25/06/2009 alle 13.40 +0200, Martin Soto ha scritto: I'm convinced that expert users are, by far, the hardest to migrate. Efforts like AppCenter will definitely help in this area, but we should think of making available a Quick Migration Guide for Veteran Windows Users as well. This also applies to old-time unixers like e.g. the physicists community. I've seen this many times. They install whatever distribution and then start installing everything they need from sources :) Perhaps an advice in the default firefox starting page would be good, something like Looking for packages on the web? Look in the repositories first! with a short explanation and a link to proper documentation. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Fallback plan if Empathy isn't ready for Karmic?
Il giorno mer, 24/06/2009 alle 08.23 +0200, Martin Pitt ha scritto: We don't propose to retroactively default to it in Jaunty. :-) Of course we will revert to Pidgin if Empathy doesn't get stable/useful enough by Karmic beta. Thank you for noting this. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Empathy is not in line with the much discussed guidelines
On mer, 2009-06-24 at 14:36 +0200, andreas-...@warperbbs.de wrote: Nicolò Chieffo wrote: http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/Git FYI: I made a ppa with daily build of empathy and telepathy-glib, available here: https://edge.launchpad.net/~amoog/+archive/empathy-daily This should aid in testing bug fixes. Thank you, I subscribed to that ppa. BTW, it still flashes the notification area, does not popup new messages, and does not handle irc authentication properly so, Nicolò, it's still -3. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Provide a GUI option in the installer to enable popcon
Il giorno mer, 24/06/2009 alle 20.52 +0100, Andrew Sayers ha scritto: Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: Andrew Sayers wrote on 23/06/09 17:55: We're constantly trying to make the Ubuntu installation process simpler. And explaining the Popularity Contest in an understandable way, in the installer which is completely out of context, would be quite difficult. As part of the AppCenter design work, I hope to make the popcon option more prominent in context. That's a good point, and AppCenter looks very interesting indeed. I look forward to playing with it! - Andrew From the appcenter wiki page: If Linux has an Achilles heel, from the point of view of a Windows user, it's installing new software. Be prepared to enter a new world in which Windows Update is a model of simplicity by comparison, and in which you may feel as if you need a Ph.D. in physics merely to install new applications or updates. — Preston Gralla, “Living free with Linux: 2 weeks without Windows”, Computerworld I am surprised: all the people I ever heard talking of ubuntu, including non-geeks, appreciate the simplicity of adding and removing applications. Perhaps that comment is a bit outdated even if, since the beginning of times, comparing synaptic with windows tools is a laughable joke, to say the least. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Fallback plan if Empathy isn't ready for Karmic?
Il giorno lun, 22/06/2009 alle 19.04 +0100, Andrew Sayers ha scritto: The plan is to make sure that these bugs are all fixed in time for Karmic, but what's the backup plan if there are still showstoppers when the release starts to get closer? More precisely, when, where and how should people speak up if Empathy still has showstopping bugs? The usual backup plan in ubuntu is: ignore the problem early, because we have time, and ignore the problem later, because we are late :) Please take this with a bit of irony, but isn't this happening again? For how much I personally hate anything starting with MS including the cigarettes :P the MSN protocol is a must work thing. If it does not work, pidgin should remain the default. One thing is to push usage of the new one, to receive more feedback and be encouraged to work on it, one other thing is to release broken things, which causes laughters in undecided users who could even switch back to windows. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
Il giorno dom, 21/06/2009 alle 19.17 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto: Yeah uh...it isn't real LaTeX. Take the source you can view in LyX, save it, and run it through the latex command and watch it fail utterly. Could you provide an example file? I usually cut and paste tables from lyx instead of doing them by hand. Where usually means for the 5-6 tables I have done in my whole life :) Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Empathy is not in line with the much discussed guidelines
[CC-ing ayatana, if this is wrong just tell me] Today I tried empathy on my karmic testing system. Here are the scores. The last part IS VERY IMPORTANT please read it too. Don't thake my comments as angry, I'm just in a hurry. +1 The first time I launch it, it offers me to import accounts from pidgin. Very good -1 It crashes immediately later 0 I restart it and it does not crash, so that I can't report it -1 It does not allow me to open any kind of chat, it says something related to EMPATHY_IS_CONTACT(contact) failed +1 I close it, reopen, and it starts working. This should be 0, as it is already supposed to work, but I want to be nice on it. -1 I receive a notification that the IRC bot has recognised me. Please find a way to avoid this! Pidgin has a couple of plugins to handle the rough corners of IRC and at least identification MUST be done properly (it should not need any plugin in principle). THE IMPORTANT PART -1 It flashes the notification area. THIS IS FORBIDDEN. Update notifier can not do that. Why should empathy do that? This must be fixed. -1 It does NOT OPEN A POPUP on new messages. When the infamous update-notifier popup was decided, it was argued that pidgin already did that. I am a pop-up hater and the IM client is the only exception. In fact, for IM a pop-up may be desired. This is because if I start the IM client chances are I *want* to be disturbed and if a contact calls me I *want* to interact immediately. So ehm, I know it should not come from me but can we have the popup back? The last 2 behaviours SHOULD BE opt-in for those who love them, of course. TOTAL SCORE: -3 it can do better with very little effort :) Now testing it properly and will report bugs. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Empathy is not in line with the much discussed guidelines
On mar, 2009-06-23 at 18:04 +0200, Nicolò Chieffo wrote: Sayersandrew-ubuntu-de...@pileofstuff.org wrote: who don't feel like compiling their IM client from source every day. you are definitely right, anyway now empathy is actively developed, and the only way to test it is git Nah. I already wast enough resources to test karmic. If you want me to test empathy you have at least to provide a ppa whose code is guaranteed to land in ubuntu soon or later. Not to be polemic at all, I just want to pose a limit on how much energy I donate to ubuntu :) Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Empathy is not in line with the much discussed guidelines
On mar, 2009-06-23 at 16:58 +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote: Could you give us some idea of when a testable version will land in Karmic? We've got two months left until the final decision on whether this becomes as significant a part of Ubuntu as Firefox or OpenOffice, so it would be nice to have more than a few weeks of testing by people who don't feel like compiling their IM client from source every day. You are being utopistic. The decision has already been taken. I would not bet a cent on the possiblity that empathy does not become default even if as broken as it is right now. This is why I ran to testing as early as possible. I would love if programs that we test during alphas could be declared not ready but I NEVER saw ubuntu going back. The only decision I saw going back was the re-introduction of kdvi in jaunty, which was then removed at a very late time before release without leaving time to test the feature addition to okular that *supposedly* would have let it replace kdvi. From that date, I learned not to hope in such an obvious thing as let's try it, as we are testers, and then decide. If you try it, you buy it. If someone wants to prove me wrong, a good way would be to fix a set of target features and bugs for empathy and guarantee to us all that if such a minimum quality standard is not met then empathy will be dropped for karmic. Please don't pollute the list by posting angry replies to this. You are free to do so, but first, read: I love ubuntu and am doing as much as I can for it. Above I am a bit polemic but I think I am telling the truth. If I am wrong, glad to be corrected and to note the eventual information sources that I do not know right now. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: [Ayatana] Empathy is not in line with the much discussed guidelines
On mar, 2009-06-23 at 19:00 +0200, Sense Hofstede wrote: Hello, There is an PPA at https://launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa. Unfortunately it gives you 2.27.2, instead of the latest 2.27.3. It is a start, though, and I expect 2.27.3 to be uploaded soon. Very kind of you. Will test that one, but is it the code that will land in ubuntu more or less? Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Empathy is not in line with the much discussed guidelines
On mar, 2009-06-23 at 19:13 +0200, Nicolò Chieffo wrote: as I was saying 2.27.3 is already old. You need to be synchronized to a current git version of empathy, weather it is self compiled or from an external PPA. ah, ok so I will not test the PPA :) Didn't check the version number. Anyway most problems are not in empathy, but somewhere in telepathy protocol managers (for instance the current ubuntu version of telepathy-butterfly does not work) Also for this reason a ppa would be very comfortable. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
Il giorno sab, 20/06/2009 alle 12.16 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto: Seeing as that's optional, yes you did. I find the copying useful since well...if it didn't copy them, it'd be like GThumb, pretending to organize my camera (not actually changing the filesystem by the way, just pretending) and not getting the images onto the computer. You'd have to manually copy all the images from the camera to the hard drive, then run GThumb/F-Spot. In that case, why are they set to start when a camera is plugged in or an SD card inserted? They'd be rather useless for the getting stuff of the camera usecase (the usecase implied by their autolaunching). That's quite the point: a simple picture viewer such as gthumb shows you a directory at a time. It's good to see my vacation pictures. F-Spot is a photo collection manager, and I do not really know which of the two is most frequently used. Regarding taking notes with tomboy in class, I think most of your classmates also use latex (I do too, eh) but it's not in the default distribution. Everyone needing latex or tomboy can install it, but our average user probably does not use both. I may be proven wrong, we do not have any data to prove facts like these. We need a way perhaps. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: AMD/ATI vs NVIDIA vs Intel
Il giorno dom, 21/06/2009 alle 03.26 -0400, Danny Piccirillo ha scritto: NVIDIA has linux drivers, but none of them are open (there is a project for that but nvidia doesn't offer open drivers themselves). Intel has open drivers, but we all hate Intel for one reason or another. Or just because they take profit of the fact that they are advertised as _the_ free video card for linux, but they do not really work for fixing their drivers timely. I have nvidia, ati and intel cards. The most problematic and buggy are the intel drivers, and the most hateful thing is that on windows, their drivers work. Do not make me link bugs here again. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
On 19/06/2009 Alan Pope wrote: 2009/6/19 Danny Piccirillo danny.picciri...@ubuntu.com: And sadly, Banshee (mono) may soon be replacing Rhythmbox in Ubuntu Lets not go down that road huh? I have nothing against mono myself but in my opinion rhythmbox and gthumb cover the basic needs one may have. I sometimes wanted to use f-spot but the fact that it copies all the pics in its own folder gives an alien and feeling to it, in the sense that it seems to me the program is doing something I didn't ask for (pictures take lot of space). Regarding tomboy, I want to point out this: many times in the past, I have been told that my requests of reverting certain upgrades (e.g. the intel driver, which is currently badly broken in jaunty, even if there are hopes for karmic) are not well motivated because you got to know how frequent is the use case. That's a good excuse for everything, then: how frequent is the tomboy use case? I NEVER saw anybody using it at all. Please do not reply I use it. I know there are users, indeed. The point is, having it by default makes few sense if less than 10% uses it. So if we really wished, we could make mono optional. Even if it will surely not happen. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replace Tomboy with Gnote?
Il giorno ven, 19/06/2009 alle 09.32 +0100, Scott James Remnant ha scritto: Don't forget the question wasn't whether to add Gnote, the question was whether to replace Tomboy with Gnote. What does Gnote have/do that Tomboy doesn't? It does not use mono; I think the only two applications that use mono in the default installation are tomboy and f-spot, and some people do not like having mono in the default install for various reasons. YMMV. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: about empathy as the default IM application
Il giorno mer, 17/06/2009 alle 14.40 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto: Daniel would know better, but based on what he's explained: I'd guess Empathy would deal better with audio than Skype would simply because Empathy doesn't try to abuse the ALSA API or do silly things to /proc like Skype does...and I *think* it's PulseAudio-aware, unlike Skype. Skype is pulse-aware, it's just that it's broken. A bit like jaunty with intel cards :) But they are not working to improve it. OTOH, the audio quality of an alsa-abusing skype call is very good. Last time I *managed* to make a call with ekiga, it was not even remotely the same. But I hope telepathy is going to be better. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: about empathy as the default IM application
On 16/06/2009 Ken VanDine wrote: If you really need OTR, you can install pidgin. All the users I've shown OTR to agreed it's an extremely good thing to have. You can not know if your boss is watching you. Cryptography tools available for the masses in an easy way is another way to distinguish a free software distribution from . Ops, win is just tree letters isn't it :) -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Better clipboard management?
Il giorno mer, 17/06/2009 alle 02.15 +0100, (``-_-´´) -- BUGabundo ha scritto: been using parcelite since Jaunty, and it seem to be in good state on karmic. +1 from me I recall clipboard managers were problematic, e.g. openoffice was continuously updating the selection. Don't remember right now, but in all honesty, all you who use these, are there also usability problems related to their usage? Also, the problem of keeping an history of cut and paste is privacy, like in all cases. A centralised action using which all the histories (file browsing, shell, firefox, cut and paste) could be brainstormed about in this occasion. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: about empathy as the default IM application
Il giorno mer, 17/06/2009 alle 08.29 -0700, George Farris ha scritto: I agree and use OTR all the time, however, if more people start using Empathy then hopefully an OTR plugin will be ported sooner rather than later. Yes I agree. Another option would be for Canonical or Gnome to find funds for the port (how difficult can it be?). A summer of code project? A bounty? V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: about empathy as the default IM application
Il giorno mer, 17/06/2009 alle 13.16 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto: Nevermind the fact that Empathy replacing Pidgin eventually was discussed at UDS *Jaunty* 6 months ago with a let's aim for Jaunty+1 outcome and then re- discussed at UDS Karmic. There's been 6 months to get input. Testing requests must be more advertised perhaps. However we still have 3+ months to give further input. I just hope that serious regressions will be fixed if any. E.g. OTR comes to mind. A ubuntu live cd can be used for secure communication. If you just plan to drop the thing there and wait, then people will complain. I personally would prefer empathy over pidgin as it supports audio (does it work well? As good as skype, which is bad in everything else?). V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: shameful censoring of mono opposition
Il giorno mar, 09/06/2009 alle 19.43 -0400, Mark Fink ha scritto: to MONO boosters, MONO is a religion: http://nocturn.vsbnet.be/node/142 To UBUNTU boosters, UBUNTU is a religion. I am not surprised by this. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: shameful censoring of mono opposition
Il giorno mar, 09/06/2009 alle 20.02 -0400, Mark Fink ha scritto: Maybe you should go start an I HATE MONO!!! mailing list, Mark, where you can dispense your bile without fear of having anyone point out that you're doing nothing to add light here, only heat. no wonder you got reported to your boss, david. you are not very resptful of your users and customers. You all are going completely crazy. Reporting to bosses?? Do you think it is RIGHT to risk to ruin a career and a life because of a discussion on the web? If so either please commit suicide or seek for medical assistance, or just rethink. Not only you, everyone who thinks it's ok to send an e-mail to the boss of somebody else to inform him/her about... a flamewar involving an employee. You can spread the voice against mono as much as you want but switching to persecution of other persons life is sick and should be treated. I *know* that I am at risk of being reported to my bosses now. But as they are very good scientists I have no doubt that they will be able to tell what's going on here. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: shameful censoring of mono opposition
Il giorno lun, 08/06/2009 alle 20.50 -0300, Derek Broughton ha scritto: That's not an argument, it's a complete misdirection. Are you really just fink using different nym? Professional trolling here at work. Do the communist have to do with the plan? Just to know on what side I want to be :) V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: shameful censoring of mono opposition
Il giorno mar, 09/06/2009 alle 09.48 -0400, Mark Fink ha scritto: that's a LOT of bloat also programs like Gnote are GPL3 so you are protected from patents Come on this is the only fair criticism that I have seen until now; I think we still don't ship timidity fonts and have broken midi because of space on the cd, now I don't know how many standard ubuntu users really need tomboy and f-spot in the default install but certainly half of the ubuntuers I know don't use those. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: shameful censoring of mono opposition
Il giorno mar, 09/06/2009 alle 12.14 -0400, Christopher Olah ha scritto: It appears to me that the most important point has been forgotten: the accusations of censorship. This, if true, is very alarming... We can bicker over Mono all we like, but if people are being censored, like the OP suggests, something is _very_ wrong. Ubuntu is a centralised entity. No external person can control e.g. why we have a custom search in the home page of firefox by default. People who can't tell the difference will keep using a different google, but there is not even way to get some discussion around this (I tried in the past). So if us really feel that this is risky (like it's risky for all centralised organisations, including e.g. google and it's services) then the only alternative is to develop a decentralised linux distribution. If it was easy I'd already have done that :) Otherwise we have to stick with the anyways good level of trust that we have on the ubuntu entity. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Properly identifying applications
Il giorno mar, 09/06/2009 alle 16.55 +0200, David MENTRE ha scritto: I agree. Displaying a Document Viewer (evince) or Document Viewer / evince would be a big plus. Yes also because this is needed when talking to ordinary non-technical users e.g. my mother on the phone I could not see the pictures - what program did you use? the picture viewer of course, do you think I am stupid? :) V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: On apturls and repositories
Il giorno sab, 06/06/2009 alle 23.55 -0400, Martin Owens ha scritto: Is it? I didn't think is was the port that defined the protocol but the nature of the messages sent over the connection. The port is a default but not a requirement, like ssh or ftp. I think the point here is that the keyserver should handle requests on port 80, even though the OP incorrectly called them HTTP requests. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: On apturls and repositories
Il giorno mar, 02/06/2009 alle 12.03 +0200, Alexander Sack ha scritto: I agree. Instead of talking about allowing PPAs to be enabled through apturl, we should improve the way PPAs can be enabled in software-sources and app-center which was also one of the results of the UDS discussions we had. Excuse me but isn't this pushing the PPAs over external sources? If so, considering that canonical or ubuntu surely does not guarantee for the PPA, this is going both to create a false sense of security and discourage the use of external repositories. Of course they can all migrate to launchpad but I don't know if it's a good idea. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: On apturls and repositories
Il giorno mar, 02/06/2009 alle 11.37 -0300, Derek Broughton ha scritto: I beg to differ. A user who is going to install software of dubious origins will install it whether it's click-through or not. You're merely annoying people who want to install known, reliable, software (virtualbox comes to mind - every time they issue a new release, I get a download link when I start it [and yes, I know I can actually add the URL to my sources.list - it's just an example]). I think that making the process two-steps only affects usability: I can do the same things, with the same authorizations, but I need to minimise the firefox window, go to the desktop, find the downloaded file and open it. In any case, the apturl window *is* dangerous and users must know. It does not matter how I do it, via javascript or providing a link, if you click on a deb you get prompted for your root password. You're actually providing a bridge for extraneous persons into your system. Nothing will prevent that by making the process a bit harder. A better idea would perhaps be to allow installing packages from apturls or debs *only* if the key is already present in the system, that is, you don't even add the source permanently if not. Then, a smart user-friendly way to get the keys is clearly the way to go. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Configuration of OPAL
Il giorno mar, 26/05/2009 alle 14.45 +0200, Antonio ha scritto: I installed libopal3.6.1-dev and libpt2.6.1-dev in order to compile samples of OPAL like ivrOPAL. But if I run make pathes like $OPALDIR and $PTLIBDIR are not set. How do I configure this things afterwards? You put the variables into .bashrc as export OPALDIR=path In the future, the appropriate list for this kind of requests is ubuntu-users, not ubuntu-devel-discuss. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Cron jobs too heavy for ordinary systems (system completely unusable for a while)
Hi all, I am running jaunty. Sometimes, randomly, the disk starts spinning (I hear the noise and see the light) and the system becomes unusable. Often, to gain control of a shell (even in console) is a matter of waiting minutes and eventually, when I finally can do some top iotop or ps to understand what's happening, the storms is already calmed and I can't see anything. I am not running trackerd on this machine (and with last year of development, it's rarely the culprit). This time I did that in time, while thinking be it the kernel itself, I apt-get remove it. I found that cron jobs where running. I am seriously tempted to apt-get remove anacron :) But it seems to me that the apt automatic update is the problem. I will try disabling it. At the end of the storm, I can see this: vince...@frattaglia:~$ free total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 1017884 987568 30316 0 16544 651836 -/+ buffers/cache: 319188 698696 Swap: 18875961884040 3556 So yes, an hurricane has passed in my poor 1gb of memory, leaving almost 2gb of trash in my swap partition. This problem makes ubuntu reach the bottom of its user experience. From an end-user point of view, you are working, and your system trashes. It takes several seconds to even get the focus to an existing terminal if any. There's nothing else to say, this must not happen. Cron jobs should not be able to take over a system. How could this be solved? Would a smart use of the nice command be enough? Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Cron jobs too heavy for ordinary systems (system completely unusable for a while)
Il giorno sab, 23/05/2009 alle 13.10 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia ha scritto: Hi all, I am running jaunty. Sometimes, randomly, the disk starts spinning (I hear the noise and see the light) and the system becomes unusable. Often, to gain control of a shell (even in console) is a matter of waiting minutes and eventually, when I finally can do some top iotop or ps to understand what's happening, the storms is already calmed and I can't see anything. I am not running trackerd on this machine (and with last year of development, it's rarely the culprit). It seems that I spoke too early: I restarted firefox that I had killed, and everything started swapping again. I was visiting three online newspapers and top reported a RES memory for ALL typical heavy processes (xorg, firefox, evolution, pidgin, skype) which was an order of magnitude bigger than ordinary (e.g. xorg around 500 mb, firefox more than 100mb and so on). The system had been suspended to ram and resumed some times and not rebooted for two days. I rebooted, reopened all the same applications, letting firefox restore its settings. Everything is normal now, the most memory hungry process is update-manager (I opened that too) at 55mb RES memory Perhaps this is a bug in the kernel related to suspend. I will investigate again the problem in the following days. thanks for your patience Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Cron jobs too heavy for ordinary systems (system completely unusable for a while)
Il giorno sab, 23/05/2009 alle 09.55 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto: Sounds fairly normal to me...heck, only 100MB for Firefox? I'm surprised to see that Firefox is currently using only 462MB for me. It's usually at least 700MB, sometimes over 1GB just for that process. Wellxorg sounds kind of high, but if you're using Compiz... After reboot xorgs with compiz stays below 50mb. The server was likely the problem! Think I must wait and see, then just in case, how does one find out more about a memory leak in Xorg? V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: What's wrong with Ubuntu's policy?
Il giorno gio, 21/05/2009 alle 14.16 +0200, Markus Hitter ha scritto: Well, xorg is based on (or part of) X, which is about 20 years old. X was considered to be mature for some time, and severly behind a few years later. Do you really think there is something like a maturity which can be reached? If not after 20 years, how long does it take? 30 years, 50 years? Similar facts apply for the other packages you mentioned. My strong feeling is, reaching maturity is almost like stopping development, which shouldn't happen. It looks like the key to success is to reach a good user experience in constant development, without ever reaching task done. My view of maturity is related to reliability: I should be able to start (the latest stable release of) a new software and trust that it is going to work today, as it worked yesterday. Emacs in ubuntu is a mature program. Until now, it never had surprises for me. Xorg may be even older than emacs (I admit I dont know) but Xorg in ubuntu is far from being reliable from a release to another. Each time, surprises may come. This gives an impression of a young system and in fact it is, because it is often updated to introduce new features. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
Il giorno ven, 15/05/2009 alle 12.56 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto: It became incompatible with the router? I didn't think that was possiblethough it is true that iwl3945 had some growing pains. I found that a Broadcom-based laptop I had had about double the range the iwl3945 did in Hardy. Meanwhile, ipw3945 had a very good range (and worked well for hacking tools, unlike iwl3945 at the time). I think it's in pretty good shape now though... There is a known (for years, also upstream, who never *cared* to reply) about extremely slow transfer rate and disconnections on 802.11b networks (like the cheap router I bought at home years ago). It may be cheap, but it is serving me perfectly with other laptops and also with the external card. It also works with the windows xp that came preinstalled with my laptop. It used to work very well with the older driver. Yes, the situation is that nobody cared about that even if I signalled it several times. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
A bug in openoffice that affects disabled persons, needs attention
Hi all, this bug has been perhaps brought up on this list other times. On the ubuntu philosophy it is loudly stated that ubuntu should work equally well for disabled persons and the rest of the world so perhaps some more manpower (if there is anybody able to work with the ooo source code indeed) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/69247 thanks for reading Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
Il giorno gio, 14/05/2009 alle 02.47 +0100, Dmitrijs Ledkovs ha scritto: User-defined commands - Tick; RefTex - bibliography completion - Tick preview-latex - Why do I need it when I have auto-refresh of Xdvi But ok =D Please let us stop this. I know emacs. 10 years ago I was a university student having fun in coding in lisp. Point here is that unless you're willing to learn the specifics of it, you are lost in emacs. Now please let's not start a discussion about how useful is to learn. Learning is my profession, plus, I know how to dissect my ubuntu and my computer until the bare hardware. I am talking of a different thing: the concept of usability introduced by both graphic improvements such as completion pop-ups, and by automation, (e.g. no need to discover what reftex is, because the system just completes citations) *does* matter. We can't just say hey emacs will be better because this won't equate the offer on the market. I can install emacs under windows if I really want. NOT that I ever used windows since when I was a slave of a microsoft slave. That's not the point. V. -- It is also important to note that hedgehogs do not actually hurt each other when they get close to one another. Actually, when living in groups, hedgehogs often sleep close to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog%27s_dilemma -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
Il giorno gio, 14/05/2009 alle 21.26 +0900, Emmet Hikory ha scritto: Vincenzo Ciancia wrote: (and sometimes different priorities for the same package: seeking new features until personal use cases are addressed, and then wanting the package to be stable from that point forward). Very good observation. That probably includes most ubuntu users :) However, in some cases, it may be worth to maintain the old thing while the new one is already available. This is done in many existing packages. Kile, kdvi, amarok, and the intel driver should be in that list given the balance of bugs w.r.t. new features. And selecting the right packages can even be done in some cases by whitelisting/blacklisting. We can't expect the users to chose the right version of each package by hand. That's one of the main purposes of a distribution. I do know that the only way we can make sure that Ubuntu works for our use cases is to be involved. I became involved with development because my joystick didn't work with a game, and would encourage anyone else who finds a problem to do the same. I became involved with the developement and then gave up, when I recognised that ubuntu needed manpower. So I understand what you say. However we can't expect all users to be developers. And in any case, also testing is necessary and the effort of tester shouldn't be wasted. we need to be involved in the testing of that release, and we need to make sure that we are involved in discussions of the solution. I was! Especially for the kdvi issue. But that does not count. When kdvi was removed again some day before release, the opinion of NO tester was seeked. I think this will upset somebody (at least if the person is not killfiling me already as promised) but it is just true. If I take the time to come here personally and get involved, and then am cut off in the near future, why should I bother to come back again. And no, it's not better for all of you if I go away. The problem is not that I write an e-mail every three or four months, that sounds injurious to somebody. Getting rid of this kind of e-mails will not get you rid of the problem, which is, you released jaunty badly broken for a lot of persons. And you don't even know how many. In any case I won't stop writing this kind of e-mails because honestly I think that something must be changed. I can't bear this fact that in every release good code is thrown away without too much questioning, and then even if testing reports regressions, the decision CANNOT be reverted. This WRONG. It may take two years to get a decent texing environment (xdvi is in Xaw, and I don't think I need to say anything else); God knows how long it will take to get the intel driver in good shape. And Hell knows when my vga out will get BACK to work as it USED TO in feisty (or was it edgy). As usual, I am tired of this. I want to do my part and see a side effect on that. That's all. The best way to make sure that someone looks at your bug is to help make all the other bugs go away (help mark duplicates or non-bugs, help make sure the bugs have the right information, help provide workarounds or patches to fix the bugs, etc.). For those that have the time, doing a lot of this will result in being a developer, but that's almost a side effect in the goal of making sure that one's own bugs are solved. (note that this is but one of many reasons people become Ubuntu developers). I may decide to get back to contributing patches at least in the near future. But e.g. if I provide a forward port of the intel driver, be honest, do you think that anybody in ubuntu will care? I expect to waste my time. If I could at least have a warranty that the need for a forward port is appreciated, I might do my best to do that. But if I have to waste my time and then wait for a decision if my work is needed or not, frankly, I have better things to do. NOTE THAT I AM NOT SAYING that if I ever do the port, it HAS to be accepted as is, or that I won't do just an unacceptable mess. It's different: I am saying that even if I do a good job, it does not seem to me that ubuntu is really willing to keep a forward port of the driver; it seems to me that doing such a thing would be so easy for an xorg ubuntu developer that they'd already done that if they wanted it. And this is exactly the problem. If someone can prove me wrong please DO; I'll be happier. It's also very useful to track the development releases. Yes, this *will* cause your system to have issues as large things change, but by doing so, one can verify that one's critical use cases are all supported in each release. It's the only way to do it, really. Emmet: do you know that I DID that? That I wrote here to point out the already known bugs? That I was responded in one case we have time in the other case ok we for-port kdvi and in the first case, time did not suffice, in the second case, the forward port was removed last minute? This is what
Re: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
Il giorno gio, 14/05/2009 alle 09.54 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto: I became involved with the developement and then gave up, when I recognised that ubuntu needed manpower. More volunteers are needed, so I'll stop volunteering...what? Just a badly constructed sentence: I volunteered when I realised that it was both needed and worth to contribute. I stopped trying to provide patches when I realised that I had not enough time, especially due to my ignorance on ubuntu-specific issues. Putting (and then gave up) in parenthesis translates the sentences. There is a forward port of it in a PPA.. Great news. I found it. So it really is as I say, that ubuntu does _not_ want the old driver in the release and that's all even if testing clearly indicated that it was too early to get rid of it. V. -- It is also important to note that hedgehogs do not actually hurt each other when they get close to one another. Actually, when living in groups, hedgehogs often sleep close to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog%27s_dilemma -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
Il giorno gio, 14/05/2009 alle 00.11 +0100, Dmitrijs Ledkovs ha scritto: Lack of Decent Latex Support? I've switched to ubuntu because of it. I was sick of realising that I'm missing this or that latex package. in ubuntu I did default average (a little bit of extra math fonts) and everytime I'm offline I manage to compile anything my collegues give me. About editors have you tried AucTeX with Speedbar and code folding? It rocks better than anything else. I know the power of emacs and use it for many things (btw you should also mention preview-latex when advocating it ;) and where did x-symbol end?) but when I compile documents it seems a pain to go to the next error and similar. I _know_ that I can learn it because I use it for coding, but it's not your tipical user interface. Kile is very good in covering the needs of ex-texnic-center users and has very comfortable facilities (e.g. the completion for user-defined commands and for bibliography). Xdvi true is the current way for dvi workflow. just wait for a SyncTex and everyone will be off to Pdf. Synctex changes the pagination of the document AFAIK, and apart from that, my post is about... what to do while we wait! I have NO doubts that both okular and evince will one day be perfect for texing. Evince is for pdfs right now. Just it still can't reliably print a pdf (since years). The patch is in gnome so it will hopefully be in karmic BTW. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools
Il giorno mer, 13/05/2009 alle 17.47 -0400, Daniel T Chen ha scritto: Ubuntu is a community-driven distribution. Help make it as good as it can be. There is no I cannot, only I will not. I tried for a while (can brag about a couple of xournal and lyx uploads) but for me the consumed time was too much especially because not doing those things every day means to forget them. At least I can provide feedback on testing for now. In the future things may change. For now, I I can't even take care of the few free software I wrote myself. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The awesome software sources adding feature
Il giorno gio, 07/05/2009 alle 09.14 -0700, Dylan McCall ha scritto: So, in getting that rolling, I copied over sources.list from my desktop to my netbook. Noticed I could open that file with Software Sources! The program promptly appeared, offering to add all those repositories to my list automatically and then refresh. That was awesome. Why haven't I seen the functionality used before? Install directions with repositories involved look completely hostile right now, but this resolves the issue perfectly. The functionality of saving the apt sources and of saving the full package selection from synaptic should be merged: it takes a very small effort to clone an ubuntu system that way. Are there hurdles that I don't see? V. -- It is also important to note that hedgehogs do not actually hurt each other when they get close to one another. Actually, when living in groups, hedgehogs often sleep close to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog%27s_dilemma -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Spoke too early
Il giorno sab, 25/04/2009 alle 20.44 +0200, Andreas Wenning ha scritto: Until now I've only heard talk about the reverse search, and that was the reason for bringing kdvi back in Intrepid. You might be right that forward search doesn't work in Okular; then that is indeed a valid request, that we need to take upstream if it is not already there. It is not possible to re-add kdvi at this point. But I've just tested, and installing the kdvi package from intrepid works fine in jaunty; so that is a possible solution for now. Yes, in the end tex users may be more keen to do things by hand, but it should have been added to the release notes (can they be modified now?). Sorry for coming up about this too late. However: kdvi was in the jaunty archive until very recently, so I could not have reported it before. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: No inverse searches for dvi files in ubuntu - please read!
Il giorno ven, 24/04/2009 alle 20.14 -0400, Scott Kitterman ha scritto: Precisely. I packaged kdvi from KDE 3 kdegrapics as a stopgap to provide this capability in Intrepid since no KDE4 package provided it in KDE 4.1. It's time has now passed. Indeed, okular is doing reverse searches. Thank you for the effort in intrepid. To the benefit of other users stepping by here, to have reverse searches in okular one must configure an editor in okular settings (e.g. kile) and then shift+doubleclick will trigger reverse search. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Spoke too early
Il giorno sab, 25/04/2009 alle 18.29 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia ha scritto: Il giorno ven, 24/04/2009 alle 20.14 -0400, Scott Kitterman ha scritto: Precisely. I packaged kdvi from KDE 3 kdegrapics as a stopgap to provide this capability in Intrepid since no KDE4 package provided it in KDE 4.1. It's time has now passed. Indeed, okular is doing reverse searches. Thank you for the effort in intrepid. To the benefit of other users stepping by here, to have reverse searches in okular one must configure an editor in okular settings (e.g. kile) and then shift+doubleclick will trigger reverse search. Vincenzo I spoke too early: okular does reverse search but not forward searches: it only supports a -p switch. When working with multi-file latex documents it is very comfortable to have the viewer switch to the edit point. Please do not get me wrong: I like okular and hope it will be able to replace kdvi. I understand the desire to get rid of kde3 applications in a kde4 installation; probably patching okular to accept forward searches (and kile to use the same syntax) is very simple and will come soon, but in the meantime could kdvi be re-uploaded? I think it was in jaunty at least until the beta am I wrong? Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Ubuntu Gaming Team
Il giorno ven, 24/04/2009 alle 14.48 +0300, Dotan Cohen ha scritto: Yes, but look what happens when game devs try to port their work to Linux: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/09/mini-rant.html No wonder they stay far away. I looked at the blog post you pointed out. You should stay away of such a stupid thing as a blog for hating something. Indeed the blog post is biased. If you follow the link, you'll find a set of normal questions from a non-linux game developer, and the first answers that they got are entirely reasonable. There's not so much to say: SDL is dated but it's working well. OpenGL is the state-of-the-art 3d graphics library. That's what i can read in the replies. And the conclusion is that linux for now may have worse tools, but you'll surely get the job done. V. -- It is also important to note that hedgehogs do not actually hurt each other when they get close to one another. Actually, when living in groups, hedgehogs often sleep close to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog%27s_dilemma -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: No inverse searches for dvi files in ubuntu - please read!
Il giorno gio, 16/10/2008 alle 22.27 -0400, Scott Kitterman ha scritto: The story has a happy ending. Today kdvi got back into the archive after I bent the old kdegraphics package from KDE3 into building it in a way that's compatible with the kdegraphics package from KDE4. Scott K I upgraded to jaunty final and with my great disappointment I lost kdvi. I don't see it in the repositories, why? V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: dynamic executables ?
Il giorno gio, 23/04/2009 alle 10.15 +0100, richard ha scritto: I'm stuck in the position that I'm using Eagle on the MDV partition, as its not functioning at all in ubuntuamd64. Your eagle copy is a 32 bit executable, while your machine is running at 64bit. Probably you have installed MDV (mandriva?) in 32 bit. The proper fix would be to find a 64 bit version of eagle that can take full advantage of your machine and operating system (which is not responsible, on the countrary, you'd be happy to have a 64bit OS). Another fix is to install the 32bit version of ubuntu, but I think there are ways to run 32bit applications natively while running a 64 bit OS; I am sure you'll find this out or other persons will reply to you. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: dynamic executables ?
Il giorno mer, 22/04/2009 alle 15.19 +0100, richard ha scritto: richar...@richard-g8jvm:~/eagle-5.5.0/bin$ ldd ./eagle not a dynamic executable The output from file eagle? V. -- It is also important to note that hedgehogs do not actually hurt each other when they get close to one another. Actually, when living in groups, hedgehogs often sleep close to each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog%27s_dilemma -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1
Il giorno dom, 05/04/2009 alle 22.45 +0200, Remco ha scritto: Are there any problems with enabling automatic updates by default? Most users don't care about updates to the point that they never install them. I think that one of the aspects is the following: as an update may *always* create a problem, it is necessary to let the user aware of a possible change, so that when he tries (or asks others to try) to solve the problem he has a possible cause-effect relationship. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Please don't automatic upgrade
Il giorno lun, 06/04/2009 alle 08.00 -0400, Andrew Barbaccia ha scritto: Now that the Updates Available window opens by itself, it may help for it to contain a checkbox for installing future updates by default. +1. I would say keep the current update workflow but add a line about click here to automatically update in the future. Unless you can _guarantee_ that every upgrade will NOT harm the system and e.g. make it impossible to login, or break Xorg, it is much wiser if upgrades are done only by the hand of persons who know how to solve a glitch. This happens to me every now and then, but until now I was always able to recover the system. In the current situation, and with my more than 10 years experience in _using_ debian and then ubuntu, I will call a liar any of you claiming that upgrades are safe :) If you can guarantee this, contact me, I will signal your name for a Turing award. Notice that you first have to solve the problem of the dpkg database breaking, which actually happens and breaks the upgrade system, and of the system running out of space in /var and /tmp. Which you BET will happen soon, or later. My best suggestion if you want e.g. your parents to use ubuntu without risk when you are miles away from home, is to give them an USER account, not an ADMINISTRATOR one, so they will not be bothered with upgrades they don't understand. The USER accounts have been designed with your parents in mind. The ADMINISTRATOR accounts, they are for You! OTOH, thanks to the power of the command line that only us unix freaks understand :) you can install ssh and eventually do upgrades remotely. But when your mom calls and says hey the computer is broken you know what you did the night before. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Please don't automatic upgrade
Il giorno lun, 06/04/2009 alle 16.32 +0300, Lars Wirzenius ha scritto: As you point out, it is not possible to guarantee that. However, it is probably best to point out that not upgrading can also harm things, when it is about security updates. Thus, it would perhaps be best to enable automatic updates by default for -security only. Security updates tend to be pretty minimal. As far as testing them happens, I'm sure that can be improved, perhaps a lot. Especially for some critical parts of the system, it might be possible to have automatic testing to verify that things still work after an upgrade. For example, testing that Firefox can be launched and can access web pages. Perhaps the best solution would be to be able to do rollbacks of updates, as frequently requested. This should be a very simple text-mode application integrated in the startup system and should use the latest kernel known to work. It should just offer you the option of restoring the system exactly as it was before upgrading. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Please don't automatic upgrade
By the way, when was the last time an update (in a stable release) broke X? September 2006 is the last (and only!) one I remember. Ever since then, there's this horrible fear...come on, the lesson was learned, and kernels aren't being released until their accompanying modules are done building now. Shouldn't Jaunty's DKMS prevent issues with people who aren't using repository-sourced graphics drivers anyway? It happens from time to time, e.g. the post-installs of nvidia drivers (ok I have an nvidia, but notice that they are auto-configured and maintained by ubuntu itself) sometimes screw up. The very famous cases are not the only one. Notice that you first have to solve the problem of the dpkg database breaking, which actually happens and breaks the upgrade system, How common is that? And isn't it something that only happens if you manually kill -9 an apt process or if your hard drive is failing (which is expected to cause everything to break anyway)? Do your parents know about kill -9? Dpkg database breaking is common, don't know why but had various friends fall into that. Exhausting disk space is also common, and currently apt or synaptic DO NOT recover gracefully as they should. Exactly because that is going to break everything, we should avoid the risk of this happening automatically. This is made worse because upgrades are runned as root hence they do not leave the 5% reserve of disk space that user applications are constrained to - by the default format options. and of the system running out of space in /var and /tmp. Which you BET will happen soon, or later. Not if you use that wonderful little setting in Software Sources so that it doesn't hold onto old packages until the end of time (and then some). As long as you let it auto-delete old debs, / shouldn't be filling up. The / will fill-up as soon as you install new applications, and also either that wonderful setting is not enabled by default or it doesn't work, because I ran out of disk space during an upgrade yesterday :) Also, if you use the default Ubuntu install mode, /var, /tmp, and / will not be separate partitions. You'd need to fill the entire drive, at which point I wonder how you're getting anything done at all. There is also /var/lib, and that partition may definitely fill in in a number of curious ways. A power loss may happen, but much simpler: a deadlock in a post-install may happen too, constraining the user to either kill or reboot. Not that I expect this for security upgrades. I think all of us, (and I bet you included), experienced at least one case in which the system consistency was lost during an upgrade. This may not look like, but robustness to big failures is a serious problem of the dpkg/apt combination. If the system is made transactional in this kind of maintenance operations I will have no further objections :) It seems to me that you have never experienced a failure in a machine which is miles away from you, and that your parents need absolutely to work today. It's a huge problem then, because your ordinary PC technician will either laugh in your face, or promise you to re-install linux and not do it. My mother had both the experiences and both times agreed with the technician that I was crazy in insisting parents should use linux. What a shame parents believe to technicians (perhaps with moustaches?) more than their childrens :) What I advocate is that machines that can't be repaired by someone should not be touched unless you are sure that your users are able to rollback, and this is not our case. My best suggestion if you want e.g. your parents to use ubuntu without risk when you are miles away from home, is to give them an USER account, not an ADMINISTRATOR one, so they will not be bothered with upgrades they don't understand. The USER accounts have been designed with your parents in mind. The ADMINISTRATOR accounts, they are for You! So um...when do the security updates get installed? When you visit for Christmas? Of course! Not joking. My mother uses an user account, and let me insist, I don't see why I should call my mother an administrator. She is an ex-teacher of humanities, and she is 70. The last thing on earth I want to see is her fiddling with system upgrades. If you would like, we can design a survey and try to gather historical information on how many times our ordinary home users have faced security problems due to missing upgrades, and how many times a system upgrade broke an user's system. The only time I remember in my life to have heard of a machine infected because of not having been properly updated... it was a server of the _debian_ project. You should remember the circumstances :) If worms will appear for ubuntu, serious consideration for on-time security upgrades may be taken, but until now I don't think the risk is worth the benefit. OTOH, thanks to the power of the command line that only us unix
The new logout design can cause unwanted reboots
Hi all, I recall that ctrl+alt+backspace was disabled because it can be hit accidentally. A similar thing happened to me; I experienced an unwanted reboot and it's not so pleasant, even if I didn't loose any work. I hit ctrl+alt+canc by mistake that is, trying to do something else; I likely had some full screen window, hence the popup must have finished below other windows. I have a decent monitor now (19'') and I didn't actually see the flashing down in the bar (it's really too few contrasted for LCD monitors, I am looking at it now). Then after the timeout it turned off my system. With the extremely high focus on usability that ubuntu has, it is impossible that we don't have a better solution: I see the need for a confirmation pop-up, I see the need to have it unfocused to avoid hitting it by mistake, I don't quite see the need for a timeout (I hate it) but I assume that it had some planning and there are reasons for that, but I also see the need to be more clear when... the system is going to be turned off in a minute! What if my boss enters the room, starts talking to me and I forget about the dialog? I suppose there was a discussion on that, but could we see if there is some easy improvement? Perhaps at least a notification should be issued, but even better, the window should get on top of other windows, and unclickable, for a few seconds, then maybe go to bottom, or just become clickable. Also, the good old dimmed screen was really helpful to understand that something serious was going to happen. I see, changes happened and We Shall no go Back. However, this does not work (at least for me) as it currently is. Finally, what about a slightly longer timeout? Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Strange kind of spam related to this list
I am receiving more and more blub messages from www-d...@enforcer.homedns.org, in response to messages that I posted on this list. I attach an example, if someone has information about it just let me know. Thanks Vincenzo ---BeginMessage--- blub ---End Message--- -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The new logout design can cause unwanted reboots
Il giorno mer, 01/04/2009 alle 11.30 +0100, Mat Tomaszewski ha scritto: This is a very valid point. We are currently investigating possible alternative solutions and we're hoping to introduce a much better experience as soon as possible (sorry no commitments as yet!) Thanks for raising this. Thank you for your prompt reply! In the meantime, is there a way (e.g. via gconf) to disable the timeout or extend it? Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: The new logout design can cause unwanted reboots
Il giorno mer, 01/04/2009 alle 16.05 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas ha scritto: ... I hit ctrl+alt+canc by mistake that is, trying to do something else; I likely had some full screen window, hence the popup must have finished below other windows. I have a decent monitor now (19'') and I didn't actually see the flashing down in the bar (it's really too few contrasted for LCD monitors, I am looking at it now). Then after the timeout it turned off my system. ... The logout alert box is supposed to float on top of other windows. If it doesn't, please report a bug. Are you sure? On #ubuntu+1 they even told me that it's on purpose to avoid accidentally hitting the wrong option. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Notifications as instant messages?
Mark Shuttleworth ha scritto: And I see your point! We've been focused on the idea that the action itself should be immediately accessible to the user (rather than a notification followed by a clickable panel icon followed by the action :-)). But the windows itself could be minimised. Let's explore that. I think it may be too late for Jaunty but I'll see what we can do. From the beginning, this issue made me think of IM programs such as pidgin. There, you have exactly the same problem: there are messages pending for you, and you have to choose how to be notified. Notice that the various modalities (blinking or non-blinking notification icon, pop-up window, pop-under window, pop-up minimised window) are _already_ (!) a choice in most IM clients. Because they had to solve this problem before. Here I'd like to argue that the two problems are the same problem and their solution should be the same, as the system is actually an entity talking to you. Of course your mileage may vary, but I would be happy to start a blueprint if there is consensus, with the idea of using a _local_ IM protocol (such as bonjour) and an IM client (either pidgin or a lightweight ad hoc receiver) to notify the user. Motivations are as follows: - IM clients already have to solve the problem of notifying the user. - it is evident to most users that they can configure how to get notified of new messages (pop-ups, minimised pop-ups, blinking icons etc.) - Pidgin already uses the new notification machinery, hence pretty notifications would be automatically obtained - messages can contain URLs. One can use a clickable URI to run a program - e.g. update-notifier. Indeed, these URIs must be made clickable in the client _only if_ coming from the system account. And for more security enabled applications could be whitelisted as one can do with sudo. - If ALL the applications notify via this system, there can be a system buddy that notifies you of ALL system messages, instead of a SEPARATE window for every application. Enabling the chat log in the IM client will save all the messages that the system sent to you, so that you can choose when to take a look at all the pending messages (e.g. before going home from office). - Having a chat window is perceived as much less annoying than a perhaps non-standard pop-up dialog, and would enable for the future smart applications, such as enhanced intelligent interactions and dialogues with the system, as it happens with IRC bots. - many more reasons but I first would like some impression on these. - the only problem I see is: how to make a notification persistent across different sessions? That's a problem also in pidgin: if I close the session without reading a pending message, will I be notified next time? I don't think so. But perhaps this is easy to solve, and indeed would be part of the blueprint. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Notifications as instant messages?
Il giorno lun, 30/03/2009 alle 06.38 -0600, Charlie Kravetz ha scritto: While I think this might have great merit, I have to question what happens to those who do not run any type of IM? I have, I think, started pidgin one time on my system, to test it. However, I do run any instant messengers. Please do not draw up a plan requiring another application be learned and run full time. My old computers have enough running already. My idea is that a lightweight client for the sole purpose of displaying notification should be created. That would ideally act as the log of all notifications received (not only updates). You would see by default the notification balloon (or whatever it is called), and then, depending on the default choice, a pop-under or minimised window, or a coloured icon in the panel. Differently from pidgin you wouldn't have a contact list, OTR and other plugins etc. Differently from the current system, all the notifications would be in one place, and with clickable links in them. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: [Fwd: Re: [Bug 332945] Re: [Jaunty] Update Notifier icon would provide useful status information]
On 28/03/2009 Scott Kitterman wrote: I agree. The feedback on this particular change has been so overwhelimingly negative already that if any amount of discussion would result in change it would have happened already. It seems that an incredibly negative feedback will not stimulate any positive discussion; I can't refrain from pointing out that it's wrong. Now don't take me negatively, I'm just surprised to see this statement. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Jaunty is wonderful
Since I always complain of stuff, I want to send a post to say that I am using jaunty on my office machine and I am in love with it :) Also the new notifications are fantastic, evoution is fast and responsive, openoffice 3 is great and so on. Sorry for maing the S/N ratio worse! Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Auto-launching of applications
Il giorno dom, 22/02/2009 alle 21.47 +, (``-_-´´) -- BUGabundo ha scritto: Olá Matthew e a todos. FYI a bug was opened after a bit of chat on #ubuntu+1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/332945 [Jaunty] Removal of Update Notifier is WRONG A second call for attention is needed here. This bug is causing a lot of disagreement. Why not be more constructive and e.g. let the community vote on it? People basically do not like the pop-up or pop-under, and do not like to be informed of updates with a delay. It is the enthusiasm of these people that made the success of ubuntu until now; their consensus is important and it's not very obvious to everyone that the new solution will actually improve the understanding of users. Users typically close windows that they don't want to be bored by. In my very humble opinion the change should be rolled-back and postponed to the k release; OEMs can still re-enable it via gconf. In the meantime a broader discussion to find a better solution should be done. Moreover, the new notification mechanism had very few testing, and already some important bug, so it does not seem a good idea to me to include it in a stable release given that bugs in it may affect the security of the system. V. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replacing network-offline (old version 2xmonitor) with NM wlan 0% signal strength icon
Yep. We're very pleased that there are OEMs selling computers with Ubuntu pre-installed, so that millions more people are using Free Software. And we're happy to accept feedback from those OEMs on problems their customers have with Ubuntu, even if some of that feedback is private. We're not going to make unrealistic demands that they do all their product development in public. We couldn't do that even if we wanted to, precisely because Ubuntu is Free Software. In my opinion we should rather point to build a distributed usability study. Some of us teach ubuntu to ordinary persons; when there are doubts about usability, such as the new behaviour of update-notifier, a set of fixed-answer questions should be prepared (perhaps starting from a discussion on this list). All of us will be able to try this on our... patients :) and report how they react, together with some data on their age, profession, computer science exposure and so on. Then we will not have to choose between observations such as my grandma would never understand the new behaviour of the apache restart mechanism - not that she uses linux - or even the PC, though AND closed-source studies. What I expect for example is that for the new update notifier behaviour we would get a lot of users just getting used to close the window that pops up in the middle of their work and ignore the upgrades. But I might be proven wrong, so that would be a good question to ask. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Replacing network-offline (old version 2xmonitor) with NM wlan 0% signal strength icon
On 20/03/2009 Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: That's a reasonable complaint, but not an easy one to address. OEMs don't want to give their hardware competitors any ideas prematurely Come on! That's the opposite of the spirite of free software - or at least of open source. Closed-source companies too, do not want to give their competitors any ideas, be it prematurely or not, that's how they laugh in your face when you propose them open strategies. If they publish their results, chances are that some expert will be able to referee their work and eventually publish a critic comment; and maybe that would outline some mistake in the studies and then convince everybody that a certain design is not such a good idea as it seemed from the OEM study. That's quite in the spirit of open-* and we should try to stick to this attitude rather than justifying what will be wrong for the entire community. This is not meant to accuse you or canonical in any way; perhaps I just want to point out the obvious: how it looks like on our free-software-enthusiasts side. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Remove app via apt-get from menu
On 19/03/2009 Jonh Wendell wrote: Why can't the user go to add/remove programs to uninstall them if [s]he went there to install in the first place? An argument can go as follows: when you look for something that you don't have in the menus, you'll naturally select the voice that says add/remove, as the application is not yet in the menu. It is similar to creating a new file in a folder. But when you already have a file in a folder, you will want to act on the file to delete it. In the same spirit, when you see an application that you don't use and clutters your menu, you will want to click on it and delete it. And it's shorter anyway because you don't have to search (in the remove dialog) for something that you already have in front of you. Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
Re: Remove app via apt-get from menu
On 19/03/2009 Andrew Barbaccia wrote: I agree. Two places to accomplish the same thing seems confusing. Then we should either remove the trashcan or the corresponding right-click menu entry :) Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
