Shipit and the LTS
Anyone know if there will be DVD (or USB?) distribution to LoCo teams for the 14.04 LTS? Alan. -- I work at http://libertus.co.uk -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Rrrrolling Rrreleases
Hi all, as you have probably seen there has been discussion opened up about having a rolling release between the LTS releases. My guess is that this means the approved LoCo teams would get a CD pack to distribute every two years rather than every 6 months. Anyone know if this is a good guess, and does anyone have an opinion on this? Personally I am fine with that, it would be good to have a slightly bigger shipment of desktop DVDs every two years (I have no idea why we ever press the Server CDs) distributing them every 6 months is kind of inefficient, this way the LTS will have more long term relevance as a pressed DVD. Alan. -- I work at http://libertus.co.uk -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Assistance needed
there is also a Malayam translation and localisation team https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-l10n-ml https://launchpad.net/%7Eubuntu-l10n-ml It would be great to have an active and approved LoCo for India as a whole, I get more requests from students in India for CDs than I get from the UK (and I can't send them) the instructions are pretty clear here http://ubuntu-uk.org/free-cds/ that it is a UK offer, but still I get a steady stream of emails asking for CDs from people at various universities in India. Alan. On 05/11/12 17:41, José Antonio Rey wrote: Prince, There is already a LoCo in India https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-in. You can create a translations team, by following the steps here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/KnowledgeBase/StartingTeam. Let us know if you need any help. On 11/05/2012 12:30 PM, Prince Mathew wrote: Hi, My name is Prince Mathew and I would like to start a LoCo in Kerala, India for supporting Ubuntu in Malayalam language. I have read http://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeamHowto page and still I am not clear on how to start a LoCo. For example, where should I register the name of my new LoCo? How can I get approved as LoCoTeamContact? Who gives the administratorship? Where should I exactly begin? Regards, Prince. -- The Open Learning Centre is rebranding, find out about our new name and look at http://libertus.co.uk -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Kerala team? Re: Assistance needed
On 06/11/12 08:45, Lucas Betschart wrote AFAIK (according to Jono) that's not allowed. At least it wasn't for us (Switzerland) when I asked. We've got the same problem (3 languages), just in a smaller size. But the LoCo's you've listed aren't Approved LoCo's, that's maybe the reason why. It is certainly discouraged, but people promoting Ubuntu in different ways and in different places is always a good thing. Part of the point of the LoCo structure is to be geographically grouped by country so that various free goodies can be sent out like the CDs. There is no reason why an India LoCo couldn't have pretty much independent groups within it for various regions and languages. You just need to show that you are organised and active as a team to get approved status. Yes, the USA is a bit of an exception with various states running as independent LoCos, however if you want an India LoCo that is approved and gets the free CDs then working as one team is the way forward. If you don't care about that, then carry on! Alan. -- The Open Learning Centre is rebranding, find out about our new name and look at http://libertus.co.uk -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Ubuntu Developer Summit Videos and Live Streams
they are just there when live, they then get pulled down as recordings and put up on the ubuntudevelopers channel http://www.youtube.com/ubuntudevelopers as videos with more description. When live the room number is the best description because it matches the schedule here http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-r/2012-11-01/ Alan. On 01/11/12 12:30, Dan Trevino wrote: This is great! Any chance we could get something more descriptive than B3-M1 on the titles? Or at least some sort of translation guide for what that means? Dan -- The Open Learning Centre is rebranding, find out about our new name and look at http://libertus.co.uk -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Media Request from PC retailer
I would say give them lots of CDs. They are very well placed to get them in the hands of lots of people who are interested. If they sell them for a small fee then fine, they are charging for the service of keeping them on expensive shelves. Alan. On 26/06/12 14:53, Marcus Moeller wrote: Hi all. In general we hand out Media to everyone who is requesting them. In the past these where only non-commercial requests for events and so. Lately we got a request form a PC retailer in our region. I am not sure if we really want to support commercial interests, so I would like to ask if one of you has been in a similar situation and if so, how you handle these kind of requests. Greets Marcus -- The Open Learning Centre is rebranding, find out about our new name and look at http://libertus.co.uk -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: [RFC] LEP#1, Standardize the LoCo Team Display Names
On 30/06/11 17:48, Paul Tagliamonte wrote: OK, So, let's clarify and get back on track: good idea Who's got more to add to this? -Paul me! ok, so that is some objections and some solutions, what I was missing was the problem. After making a complete and utter idiot of myself whilst trying to find out what the problem was I now think I do understand it better. It *isn't* just about un-uglifying http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ because even if that was perfectly sorted it would still look like an ugly huge page of links to read. It *isn't* about an obsessive compulsive need to rename everything in line with ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 country code elements (although I would totally sympathize if it was, hence me being rather pedantic about UK vs GB) It *is* about helping people new to Ubuntu to find their local team. I didn't get this until I read the UDS session notes here: http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/community-o-loco-directory/ and listened to the audio of the two sessions here: http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-09-09-55-community-o-loco-directory.ogg http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-10-09-55-community-o-loco-portal.ogg As an aside, there are a few different use-cases for loco.ubuntu.com that I didn't know about before listening. I originally thought it was just supposed to be a series of microsites for the LoCo teams, and I didn't think it did this particularly well because I kept ending up on global lists of events and meetings, I was always accidentally escaping from the team I was on. However some people really do want to browse it and see events and stuff going on everywhere in the world, this is totally cool, I just never realised that was the point. The new my teams page http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/me goes a long way to improve my microsite use-case for the system. So the point of this exercise is to allow better navigation to your LoCo team from a starting point of *not* knowing what it is called and there are exceptions and complications all over the place which make that harder than it sounds. I don't know who organised the planet into countries, but they didn't do a very good job of it. I think the map on the home page of loco.ubuntu.com is a great start, it allows you to visually select where you are in the world, but then it falls down as it just links to an anchor on the big /teams page and doesn't really filter out any of the stuff I don't want to see, furthermore it basically dumps me at a list of 46 teams in Europe to trawl through, what I want it to do is give me a map of my continent, then I click my country and it tells me what is going on there. Having the 46 teams in a slightly more logical order (ISO codes are not massively intuitive) really won't make a heap of difference, I still want a map. Making 5 clickable maps that shows 152 teams in the right countries and maintaining it could be quite a bit of work, but in the words of Bob the Builder and Barak Obama We can do it! I have been messing about with a prototype here http://libertus.co.uk:8000/europe/ (running on my laptop at the wrong end of an ADSL line so it will seem slow - and might be turned off) It uses an SVG map from wikimedia commons which has all the country objects with the id matching the ISO code (except it uses uk when it should use gb technically . . .) I hacked together some code that displays a popup window with some HTML for the country listing the relevant teams, which might include nearby teams or language specialist teams as appropriate to the local situation. The thing is a bit hard coded and experimental at the moment (view source or grab lp:~alanbell/loco-directory/maps to see how it works) I need to add a field for the ISO country code to the country object in the loco directory to get this generating the per-country information directly from the database. The thing would need a full list of the teams below the map for accessibility reasons and those using browsers that don't do SVG (I have no idea if it works in Internet Explorer). I think there are probably maps on wikimedia commons appropriate to the other continents, (please go find them) I am going to focus on getting Europe near-perfect, if other people want to join in, especially to fix the rest of the world then lets collaborate on it in the #ubuntu-website channel on freenode. Even if we can make this work it doesn't mean that tidying up the LoCo names is a bad idea in itself, there is a lot of inconsistency there and consistency is good. I just think this is a more useful way of solving the underlying problem that has been identified. Alan. -- The Open Learning Centre is rebranding, find out about our new name and look at http://libertus.co.uk -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: [RFC] LEP#1, Standardize the LoCo Team Display Names
interesting example to pick. The ISO country code for the United Kingdom is GB. We have an exceptional reservation on UK which means no new country can claim it, but the code is GB. On Freenode #ubuntu-gb redirects to #ubuntu-uk as I think xchat automatically joins #ubuntu-$countrycode I am really not at all keen on the idea of rebranding Ubuntu-UK to Ubuntu-GB to tidy up one page on the web. http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams isn't ideal for a number of reasons. My expectation on clicking the map on the front page of loco.ubuntu.com is that when I click europe it should take me to a larger map of Europe, then I click my country and it takes me there. I never want to see the huge list of other teams in places I don't live. Failing that, as I know creating such a clickable map would be a bit of work (not *that* much work, would keep someone amused for a few hours but we could do it) create loco.ubuntu.com/europe which just shows me teams in my continent, it would load faster than the global list. With the current state clicking the map does not add a lot of value as it still loads all of the same page, just scrolls to roughly the right bit of the page. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Please share with your LoCos
On 25/05/11 10:16, Rafael Carreras wrote: I got some complaints about using google docs for that survey from Catalan LoCo Team. I assume it was the quickest way to do that, but not always the quickest is the better, right? it doesn't impose any non-free dependencies on the users, it is using software as a service as a communications tool (which is OK according to RMS and the FSF as long as you are not depending on it to perform your computational activities) it means that the results could end up being shared using an open file format, and it is quick and good enough. I am sure launchpad or the loco directory teams would welcome contributions from the Catalan team to add survey functionality. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
limesurvey
I can throw up a limesurvey instance on a virtual machine I reserve for Ubuntu stuff (on one of my servers hosted in a proper datacentre). I really don't see the point in messing about with an already started survey, but for future survey needs I would be happy to do that for teams. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: limesurvey
well here it is http://mumble.libertus.co.uk/limesurvey/ email me off list to get a username and password and lets have a play with this thing and see what it does. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
LoCo Contact for Ubuntu-UK
Hi all, I have now been appointed as the point of contact/team leader for the UK loco, taking over from Dave Walker. I would like to thank Dave for all he has done, and now lets get on with making Ubuntu rock that bit harder in the UK Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: [ubuntu-web] Ubuntu Wiki
On 11/11/10 22:52, John Baer wrote: What version of MoinMoin are we running? John https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemInfo moin version 1.6.3 The issue with the wiki is that the Xapian search engine is turned off. That is the beginning and the end of all the performance issues, the timeouts that cause 500 errors and all the complaints about how much the wiki sucks and why we should switch to wikimedia. It is *the* issue with the wiki. Without Xapian turned on every search is a brute force full text search across the entire corpus of text that is wiki.ubuntu.com. OK, so you may thing, what is the big deal, searches take ages, so what? Well there are a lot of pages that include search results, 651 to be precise, here is a list of them: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AlanBell/fullsearchpages (some are OK and are just displaying a search box, some do a search on open of the page) if you see something that looks like: FullSearch(searchterm) then that page will take 30 seconds or so to open as it hammers the heck out of the server for 30 seconds reading through the entire wiki. FullSearch() by itself is ok, that just displays a search input box and FullSearchCached(searchterm) is OK as the search is cached (just doesn't update until someone deletes the cache for that page then it takes 30 seconds to reload) OK, so these broken pages are slow, and also anti-social as they place a massive load on the server slowing it down generally for other people. In theory someone could go through these pages and change them to use cached queries, or we could just live with these being slow. Now we come on to the *big* problem. Page subscriptions are not stored on the pages themselves, they are stored on the user profiles, you can go to your user profile and see the pages you are subscribed to, which can include wildcards picking up even new pages in a part of the wiki namespace. So when you save a page on the wiki it has to send a notification email to anyone who has subscribed to the page. Can you guess how it finds the people to send mails to? hint: it takes about 30 seconds. Turning on Xapian is simple. Really simple. Here is how to do it http://moinmo.in/HelpOnXapian So why have we endured multiple years of pain and frustration? Well we are on sucky old 1.6.3, if you have a look at the release notes you will see that a number of Xapian related crashes have since been fixed http://moinmo.in/MoinMoinRelease1.8. The current release of moin is 1.9.3 and we have this in maverick. 1.9.2 in Lucid LTS would be fine too. python-moinmoin (source: moin): Python clone of WikiWiki - library. In component main, is optional. Version 1.9.3-1ubuntu1 (maverick), package size 14659 kB, installed size 25140 kB python-moinmoin (source: moin): Python clone of WikiWiki - library. In component main, is optional. Version 1.9.2-2ubuntu3.1 (lucid), package size 14469 kB, installed size 25612 kB So why has nobody gone and upgraded our paleolithic moin instance? Well there is a little bit of non-standard tinkering that went on to implement Launchpad integration. I don't believe it is much, and I am fairly sure it would not be a big job to port that to a modern version, if indeed any change was required. Moin has not had any major architectural change that I can see and themes I have been developing on 1.9.2 seem to run just fine on 1.6.3. Having discussed this with the web team it was suggested that I should push for an upgrade to be discussed at the next UDS as nothing is likely to be done before then, so this is me, starting to push for it, right now. If you are a wiki user, particularly if you have been doing less stuff on the wiki because it is just such an unproductive place to work then do join in the conversation and lets get this thing fixed. The problem is not unknown, moin does not inherently suck, transitioning to mediawiki would be disruptive and much much more work than just upgrading to the supported and packaged version in Ubuntu and turning on the Xapian option. Alan. -- Alan Bell The Open Learning Centre Web: http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com Mob: +44 (0)7738 789190 Tel: +44 (0)844 3576000 The Open Learning Centre is a trading name of Bell Lord Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales #05868943. VAT Registration #GB 901 4715 55 -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Logging of Ubuntu LoCo Teams core channels
personally I see this only as a good thing. We have an open and transparent community, with open mailing list archives and a culture of blogging, tweeting, denting stuff that we do that is interesting. I see IRC as an extension of the mailing lists, just more realtime interactive short messages and conversations than asynchronous long messages. I frequently refer to the logs of our loco channel (For example I once had a kernel issue and traced it to a package I had installed, then checked back in the logs for that timestamp and discovered what I was trying to do at the time.) and logs of the meeting channels and other Ubuntu channels. Having loco channels logged as a general rule seems like a beneficial thing to me. I can understand concerns about having the logs indexed on search engines and I have previously verified that it would be possible to have a robots.txt file with wildcards in it so you could put entries such as http://logs.ubuntu-eu.org/freenode/*/*/*/%23ubuntu-myloco.html to block spiders from the logs for all days for that particular channel if there was one that didn't want to be indexed. This format is respected by Google at least and probably other search engines, but robots.txt can be ignored and isn't a security mechanism as such. Alan. -- Alan Bell The Open Learning Centre Web: http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com Mob: +44 (0)7738 789195 Tel: +44 (0)844 3576000 The Open Learning Centre is a trading name of Bell Lord Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales #05868943. VAT Registration #GB 901 4715 55 -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Moin Themes
On 16/08/10 08:53, Serge Matveenko wrote: On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:50, Ddorda ddo...@ubuntu.com wrote: Speaking about the wiki, I think MoinMoin is old and slow and it's time to change to something that works better (Like MediaWiki?). Both are bad. Its time to write good one in Python. http://moinmo.in/Python wiki.ubuntu.com is slow, and having asked in #moin part of the problem is that we are running an old version that is no longer supported. I have been trying to offer to help to fix it, but I have been unable to find who is responsible for it. wiki.ubuntu.com is a little on the sluggish side, so I have been looking at ways I could help to make it a bit faster There are quite a few pages that use the FullSearch(foo) embedded search rather than FullSearchCached(foo) which is way quicker but that does need a cron job to run moin maint cleancache to get it to update every so often that lead me on to the general user searches, at the moment we don't have Xapian search engine installed, if we did then that would be indexed searches and much faster and lower processor load also because I think that runs in a separate process it would probably scale over multiple processors better according to the folk in #moin the version we are using (1.6.3) is out of maintenance for the last 23 months and an upgrade to 1.9.3 or the packaged in lucid 1.9.2-2ubuntu3 would be a good thing too. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: We need your help!
On 15/08/10 18:48, Chuck Frain wrote: This does not answer the question that was asked of you. You're blaming your tool for its handling of emails. Completely irrelevant to what was asked of you. The question to you was are you suggesting that the digest subscribers and non-subscribers are not allowed to participate on this mailing list? I'm reiterating this as I'm curious for the answer as well. of course they can participate. Not being a digest subscriber to any lists I am curious about how one would normally reply to a digest mail. Surely a list would quickly grind to a halt if everyone replied to digests including the full digest as the next days digest would be full of digests from the day before and would be quite um, indigestable. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Monthly Reports
On 27/07/10 15:30, Martin Owens wrote: Dear LoCo Council, snip We fail at making things easy and instead insist upon the manual and monotonous. A re-instance of monthly reports do not make them more appealing, they make running a LoCo a chore rather than good fun. snip Regards, Martin Owens I believe the missing information in this conversation is what happens to all these team reports? do the wiki pages just sit there waiting for random readers to go hunting for them? Well actually no, there is a point to the terse format of them and the particular URLs they sit at. As a reward for contributing in your little report you get to read the big consolidated report with stuff from everyone in it. The June report is here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/June2010 It does the consolidation by a bit of moin wiki magic, which you can see in the raw text of the page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/June2010?action=rawrev=4 so it has lots of sections that look like this: === Ubuntu United Kingdom LoCo Team === Include(UKTeam/TeamReports/10/June) which goes and retrieves the relevant team report for the month and includes it in the big report, which is why the report has to be placed at a predictable URL on the wiki. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
Re: Approval Workflow
On 23/07/10 13:52, Philipp Stiegler wrote: Hello Ubuntufolks, I am a member of the Austrian Loco Team. I have a few things to say about the approval work which is done by the council. First of all I want to say, that Ubuntu was a great distribution and still is my favorite one out there. mine too What I think about this approval process is, that a lot of work, from people who really are committed to Ubuntu, is getting bashed. I don´t think that this is the right way and I know that in former times there was nearly no bureaucracy in the Ubuntu community. Everyone worked for the community, not for reapproval, only because they were convinced of Ubuntu and wanted to share this expirience with their friends and in general other people. it isn't about bashing anything it is about making sure everything is going well and sharing ideas and best practices. Approved teams are doing great stuff and can have resources chucked at them from time to time and can be expected to be organised enough to cope with it. Non approved teams can be provided with help in organising themselves. I know some guys, who have their work, make their studies AND care about the ubuntu project. They do that for free without asking for payment or asking for anything else. Thats why I think that its not fair that a council judge that people. great! Their wonderful work should be shown off to the council and, more importantly, the other locos so we can see their awesomeness, and copy what they are doing. Alan. -- loco-contacts mailing list loco-contacts@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
