Don’t miss this opportunity !!!

Ok, this is not as exciting as getting your fingerprint reader to work or customizing window close/maximize buttons positions…

If you consider using Ubuntu 10.10 when it releases (or already do), upgrading to it, or suggesting anyone around you doing so, this would be a good time to read the Maverick Technical Overview Making new (or existing, upgrading) Ubuntu users happier also means knowing about its issues before hand, and deciding if you stick to 10.04 LTS, wait a bit longer before upgrading, or else. How else can you help improve such knowledge ?

As many may know, most of Canonical workforce is distributed, but we often get together in sprints where we attack a specific subject. During this week at the Montreal Canonical office we’re having a special event around the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 release. We’re literally sprinting until Friday, on a very busy week during which we’ll wrap-up all the information we have from weeks of testing, bug reporting/triaging, support issues reported by customers, escalated issues, knowledgebase solutions, and more.

Lots of fun! Specially when Boris is around

For our sprint this week in the Montreal support office, my team is focusing on desktop issues within the following areas, among others:

* Networking (wifi, drivers, sharing, printing..)
* Boot / install / post-install issues (upstart, GRUB*, casper..)
* Video (multi-head, setup, legacy drivers..)

Other teams are focusing on server, cloud, and more. It’s interesting Desktop and “other” areas intersect in what most would generally call “corporate” use of Ubuntu – mass deployments, OEM issues, etc. So we’ve also learned to never underestimate even the tiniest Desktop papercuts

You can see some of the issues and bugs we consider worth knowing before hand in this Delicious bookmarks feed. If you’re interested in contributing to this list, consider using Delicious and tagging with “maverick” and “bug”. We’ve also chosen some more tags representing tasks around them, for example “relnotes” for those issues already in the release notes and “norelnotes” for those without an entry, but which we consider would benefit from being there. Most importantly, please consider filing a bug against the Ubuntu Release Notes project if you feel something should be there to help evaluating going to Ubuntu 10.10.

You will instantly become a better person, I promise.

Back to what we’re doing this week, this is a bit different than most sprints in that we’re not specifically targeting finding a solution for most issues, but rather workarounds or maybe just even making a small note land in the Maverick Technical Overview (which will later become the Release Notes). Given our workflow, we’re also reporting bugs as we go, but I view that mostly as a labor of documenting existing problems, not necessarily advancing their resolution directly – at least not during this week.

So if you have a particular pet peeve that is not in our release notes or Delicious feed, please let me know, I am always interested and curious to share such information.

As a disclaimer I should mention that I work at Canonical as a senior support analyst for Ubuntu support (both desktop and server) and I also train other people to provide Ubuntu support. I am also the admin and creator of the Ubuntu group in Shapado (10 months ago). So I constantly switch my community and professional hats

I use the Answers system in Launchpad extensively (including its FAQ facility) but it lacks two big features:

• Non-English language support – also known as “l10n” or “localization“. That would be Bug #81419.
• A reputation / trust system

As you can see that bug report is in an odd deadlock. My interpretation of it is Answers and Launchpad itself were not planned from the beginning to be multilingual. It’s so big now that this can’t be done quickly or easily.

The reputation system or “making Launchpad more social” is a huge feature request too, perhaps traditionally out of scope for such technically-oriented online resources (at least in the traditional Free / Open Source communities). It’s also something I am missing from my daily interactions with customers when providing commercial support.

So when I learned about Shapado I found a nice tool that could complement my advocacy needs, and some more. How is it different than Launchpad’s Answers ? To me, it’s primarily the language support, but many other features are a bonus.

Regarding the recent proposal to have an Ubuntu community in Stack Exchange, see How does Shapado compare to StackExchange ?. I honestly don’t want to join yet another English-only site that runs on non-Free software that I can’t fix or translate myself. I can’t ask anyone around me to do that either. That proposal was forwarded to the LoCo Teams contacts mailing list, asking team contacts to forward it. I am sorry but as an Ubuntu Member and Ubuntu QC contact I won’t do that. I am sticking with my principles for now, and using any free, open source alternative I can get.

So if you’re interested in using Shapado for Q&As in English but also French, Portuguese and Spanish (for now), see http://shapado.com/pages/faq and http://ubuntu.shapado.com.

If you’re interested in setting up your own local, localized Shapado Q&A server, see the installation instructions, the question asking about Ubuntu/Debian packages, and the Shapado “needs-packaging” bug report.

Here is more information on Shapado:

• Shapado, the free Q&A Software from South America
• Microblog: http://identi.ca/shapado and http://twitter.com/shapado
• Blog: http://blog.ricodigo.com/shapado
• Live chat: http://shapado.com/chat (or #shapado on Freenode)

In true dogfood fashion, one can report bugs or make suggestions at http://shapado.com directly, just by using the “bug” or “feature-request” tags There is also a more traditional bug tracker.

"Surfin'" by Coda2, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike

See you there!

If you’ve wondered how to upgrade from from 8.04 LTS or from Ubuntu 9.10 to Lucid Lynx (soon-to-be 10.04 LTS), you may find the above link useful.

It’s a little experiment in documentation built in “Choose-your-own-Adventure” fashion. I don’t mean to replace any official docs but I’d like to have comments if anyone thinks it’s useful or how to improve it.

Upgrade Wizard wiki guide

Please note this is NOT an applications – it is only a wiki guide meant to be followed by clicking on corresponding links!

I am using this as part of a set of internal tools for support (as Canonical staff are encouraged to upgrade to beta versions during development cycles) but also as a community tool to help follow best practices.I’ve also integrated links to IRC and the Answers section of Launchpad – I believe integrating live chat and the question/answer facility may help too.

The target here is beginners but also experienced Ubuntu users that seek an easy way to help someone upgrade.

Let me know what you think.

BTW I’ve focused on 8.04LTS and 9.10 but if anyone is willing to document upgrading from the other versions using the same conventions just let me know.

Lunch & Ubuntu

Well, this is only a friendly reminder and invitation to come and join us at Café Suprême, (4190 Boulevard St-Laurent, Montreal – Plateau Mont-Royal) tomorrow Thursday at noon. We’ll have lunch and who knows, perhaps meet some new people. Or just have lunch.

“Support” includes of course going through help requests we get over the phone or via Landscape, escalating bugs and working with developers to deliver fixes for our customers (and to Ubuntu public updates), but also helping other colleagues within Canonical (a benefit for all staff), review and write technical documentation, help with training, playing with some awesome hardware I can’t quite blog about and more… including coming to UDS and raise our issues while catching up with what’s going on in the Ubuntu galaxy.

We’re extremely lucky we are at freedom to chose how and where we participate in UDS. I personally consider it to be 50% social, 50% technical. There are some obvious places where it’s easy to jump in (such as Tools for better X.org bug triaging and diagnosis), because they are closely related to our troubleshooting process and how we approach problems. Others are not as easy to spot. Going together to a shooting range sure beats many bonding exercises I’ve attended before. You learn a thing or two about the great community folks and about your colleagues in-between shots As a side note, I have to say although I don’t particularly understand the reason fire arms exist, this is one of those things I wanted to try.

Another interesting, unique experience is meeting our actual customers at support! You know who you are! It’s a bit crazy and it feels like it’s the Academy Awards – an expression Jono used this morning much to our enjoyment – and we’ve won a prize consisting of meeting face-to-face. I also see quite a bit of Québécois here which I am very proud of, as I am a Colombian living in Québec for 20 years now. And of course sabdfl is still very much part of UDS, not only for the obvious reasons but because you’ll actually see him busy at his keyboard and getting into many sessions giving his opinion and participating in lively discussions.

My first day at UDS started with the plenary, where Jono presented the seven tracks UDS follows, giving the opportunity to all ~300 participants to know the differents team leads and what their people do. Mark Shuttleworth also spoke about Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and how those three letters make it special in its very own way. We all have a lot of work ahead. I liked it a lot when Jono said this event consisted of one-hour chunks and we needed to make the most of every single one of those chunks. And stealing everyones’ hearts or something to that effect!

Then started the actual meat of this event. Here are the sessions and activities I was part of today:

• Ubuntu Foundations team roundtable, where I learned a bit more about services and their management
• Meeting with a few customers and gathering their goals and objectives for the week
• Catching up on all the free, open source community fun & positive gossip
• Sharing mneptok‘s hilarious and irreverent jokes
• How to Run a Good Session, Software Center Roadmap and Opportunistic Programmer plenaries
• Server usability papercuts
• Requirements for Update and Upgrade Experiences
• Landscape for Lucid

Back to back, it’s lots of talking, listening, agreeing and disagreeing, documenting, chatting, introductions, translating and catching up to do. It’s also useful to keep up with regular email. All incredibly useful & productive, if a bit intense. I tried to leave a trail of it on my micro-blogging backyard like others at http://identi.ca/tag/uds.

The day ended at the firing range as I mentioned before, followed by some relaxing time at the lobby and watching some TV while preparing this post. I hear we’ll have interesting visitors tomorrow, can’t wait! Until then, I can’t repeat enough – Thank You Canonical !

Yesterday my pre-UDS day kicked off at the Festival del Tamal that was happening right across our hotel. From Wikipedia,

“The terms Chicano and Chicana (also spelled Xicana) were originally used by, and in reference to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. The term began to be widely used during the Chicano Movement mainly amongst Mexican Americans, especially in the movement’s peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The self-identify term Chicano is still of popular usage today. [1]“

I initially thought “mhh Latinos… there must be food”. I knew tamales where a key component of Latin American food but I’ve never ever seen so many people lined up to get their piece of it! There must have been a few thousand people and I truly felt I was in Mejico, not in the U.S. as I typically imagine them and see them in the news. But as we cruised the venue I also noticed a lot of stands and kiosks offering help & services for landing immigrants, and NGOs of all types and origins. We felt the strange contrast of a huge happy family reunion and people struggling to just make it- while keeping a huge smile.

Going into my third year at Canonical in a few days, I still feel the same excitement and anticipation about spending a whole week (and then a bit more) having 100% one-to-one bandwidth with many of the essential individuals that are the driving force behind our favorite operating system – and freedom culture evangelization tool. After a few tamales and being immersed in this huge latino crowd I couldn’t help but see some parallels between the Chicano social liberation struggle and the Free Software movement.

I even got a TShirt from this nice gentleman who kindly explained to me why there was a Chicano Activist Convention a few months ago right here in Tejaztlán. They have these student groups called Mechas who meet regularly and discuss and further issues they face daily (and have for a few decades now). “Wow,” I thought to myself..”this is kinda like our LoCo teams and Bug#1!”. Except on a very different social (and technical) scale, of course. Here, meet the Mecha of Tejaztlán group.

Aztlán, by the way, “is the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples, one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica. “Aztec” is the Nahuatl word for “people from Aztlan.”[2].  So you can see a bit of where the Tejaztlán word came from.

He looked at me with a “where the hell have you been” face, but was nice anyways, as my Latino looks couldn’t get him through the notion I was completely ignorant of the Chicano movement to the extent I still thought yesterday it meant “any Mexican in the US” when in fact it means a lot more. I remembered how patient and welcoming we must be to every person that is new to Ubuntu and I felt welcome to further my knowledge and fix their Bug #1.

Going back to the hotel I thought I’d wear the Tshirt on my first day at UDS, if only to honor this land that welcomes us, and in a way, knows what we are up to this week. I am hoping to meet members of the Ubuntu Texas Team and perhaps they’ll help me better understand their very own ecosystem, and if I was wrong in any of my first impressions at my pre-UDS kickoff day, it wouldn’t be my first time. I love being in that position, and having the ensuing discussions, specially when they revolve about Freedom.

Oh, and if you have any Apple hardware, please know I will be nice to you anyways, I don’t hate Apple or you – buy me a beer and we can have that discussion too

Putting a full working Ubuntu install on a USB key and linking to an existing home directory may be the closest to an actual full-upgrade: it doesn’t touch your hard disk (so no need to reverse any changes). Well, mostly. For example if you use Firefox, a new version will upgrade extensions, etc.

One of my colleagues, Shang Wu, has put together a little script to automate this setup, and a basic document on how to install Ubuntu on a stick to test Karmic as I described, see: Testing Ubuntu Beta Releases off a USB stick. Please do read the code before executing it in one of your systems

If anyone has comments or suggestions for this script or if you have better recipes to let existing Ubuntu users test/try future releases, I’d like to hear about it.

Open this post on my blog to see image captions.

Imagine a few hundred people gathered in a big conference were presentations go from Android on Ubuntu to Making Ubuntu family-friendly to Ubuntu One development to Mastering Unicode to project updates … well you get the point. Oh, and everyone of them is a colleague. The challenge here was to go beyond shaking as many hands as possible and trying to find out what we all had in common to best push Ubuntu forward, while looking at our best shots without losing sight on things to improve and innovate on.

Pfew! If that sounded like an intense few days, it was. I am glad I planned on sleeping very little.

I hope this gives a small insight into how great this big Canonical-family meeting was.

Now UDS follows, although I won’t be attending I trust my many mates will drive this one home too.

Cheers to all and see you soon, somewhere

• Support Technical Analyst- Corporate Services

I am sorry this is painfully obvious but if you don’t speak excellent English don’t even think about it.

Let me know if you want to apply to any of those, it’s always best when someone has been referred.

And before anyone asks, yes, there is a referral bonus for such referrals – I guess that covers the million questions we get when we help someone apply.

Also don’t miss all the recent job postings:

• Service Delivery Manager – posted: December 2008

Posting Date: December 2008
Job Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Job Summary: Working with key OEM and ODM customers in Taiwan, you will be responsible for the release into manufacturing of Ubuntu and Ubuntu based customized software. You will have experience in the PC industry of launching products for major brands and will be familiar with the engineering life cycles at a …

more details

• Integration Engineer – posted: December 2008

Posting Date: December 2008
Job Location: Millbank, London
Job Summary: The BIS team is responsible for building and supporting the internal IT systems that Canonical uses. This role on the BIS team involves deployment, support and administration of a variety of 3rd party systems, integration of those systems with other Canonical systems and migration of legacy systems.

more details

• Ubuntu Senior Certification Engineer – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Your home (given appropriate facilities including broadband Internet) in an American or European time zone.
Job Summary: Hold responsibility for the delivery of manual and automated testing for certification and hardware enablement. Quality Assurance Team Manager

more details

• Web Developer BIS – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Home based. Some international travel may be required
Job Summary: The BIS team is responsible for building and supporting the internal IT systems that Canonical uses. This role on the BIS team is to develop web applications and components to integrate Canonical websites and applications with other key internal and external systems.

more details

• Product Manager, Online Services – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Home based with broadband, in an American/European time zone. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for one week.
Job Summary: Is your head in the clouds? We have a unique opportunity for a dynamic, technically astute product manager who can demonstrate an understanding of the way web-based services change the desktop experience. We’re looking for someone thinking about the cloud, but with feet firmly planted on a product schedule. The …

more details

• Ubuntu Mobile Developer – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Your home, as long as you have broadband. North American & European time zones preferred. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: Our goal is to make the best open source Linux Distribution, your job is to assist in solving issues around creating it. You need to be a jack-of-all-trades, able to quickly determine what the actual issue is and how to solve it, whatever “it” might be. Work on a broad …

more details

• Ubuntu Mobile/MID QA Tester – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Your home (given appropriate facilities including broadband Internet) in an American or European time zone.
Job Summary: Execute testing cases and tools for the Ubuntu mobile platform.

more details

• Systems Software Engineer – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Lexington, MA; USA preferred but applicants welcome for home workers
Job Summary: Integration of new hardware devices and technologies on mobile internet devices and subnotebooks. This engineer will have a broad scope of responsibilities to customize Ubuntu to work on mobile internet devices, netbooks and other unique hardware designs

more details

• Project Administrator – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Home based with broadband, in an American or European time zone. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for one week.
Job Summary: The Project Administrator role is a key role in our software development teams. As a part of the technical team, the Project Administrator defines and monitors process and progress metrics. Strong communication and a steadfast commitment to not dropping the ball are required skills for this role, as the successful …

more details

• Web Designer – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Millbank, London; UK
Job Summary: The Web Designer will be responsible for the experience our prospective customers and our developer community have via our Canonical, Ubuntu and other web portals. These portals are critical to the success of our business and our products and our Web Designer will be expected to own this experience from …

more details

• Lead Concept Designer – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Millbank, London; UK
Job Summary: This is a key role in the Design and Customer Experience team and across the business. Our Lead Concept Designer will be responsible for creating unique, innovative and simply amazing concepts, from customer facing products and the finite detail within, to internal facing projects to ensure the business ‘gets’, buys …

more details

• Ubuntu GNOME Desktop Engineer – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Your home, as long as you have broadband. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: To maintain the GNOME packages that form the basis of the Ubuntu desktop experience.

more details

• Partner Marketing Manager – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: London, UK
Job Summary: Provide marketing expertise to support and develop business with our growing list of high-profile business partners, particularly major PC suppliers and OEM/ODMs.

more details

• Telco Channel Manager – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Europe or USA
Job Summary: Channel Manager will be responsible for building commercial relationships with top level Telcos and related industry partners

more details

• Ubuntu Program Manager – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Preferable London, UK however other candidates home based in American or European time zones may also be considered.
Job Summary: The PM will be managing the implementation project life cycle: requirement gathering, implementation and testing within time, quality and cost standards. Also managing project risk, as well as planning and delivering complex software integration projects; reporting of project progress and status internally, to customers and stakeholders; managing escalations, changing controls …

more details

• QA Engineer – posted: November 2008

Posting Date: November 2008
Job Location: Taipei, Taiwan
Job Summary: Perform automated and manual testing of custom versions of Ubuntu Desktop. Support local Field Engineering staff with SQA process development/implementation.

more details

• Gnome Developer – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: At home with broadband, in an American/European time zone.
Job Summary: As a member of the Desktop Experience Team, this role will be to design and develop new innovative elements of the Gnome platform. The candidate must have strong coding and debugging skills in C, coupled with in-depth knowledge of X11, OpenGL and GTK+ programming. This role will work closely with …

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• KDE Developer – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: At home with broadband, in an American/European time zone
Job Summary: We’re hiring talented engineers to develop a new, innovative desktop experience, in Ubuntu Linux. You will design and implement key elements of the KDE platform, in coordination with your peers in the community . As a member of the Desktop Experience Team, this role will be to design and develop …

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• Open GL Developer – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: At home with broadband, in an American/European time zone
Job Summary: As a member of the Desktop Experience Team, the Software Engineer’s role will be to design and develop new innovative elements of the Ubuntu Desktop. The candidate must have strong coding and debugging skills in C/C++, coupled with in-depth knowledge of OpenGL and experience with Linux graphical toolkits. This role …

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• OEM Channel Manager (Europe) – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: Europe

Job Summary: Based in Europe the OEM Channel Manager will be responsible for building relationships with top level OEM/ODM and local MNC accounts in focus region. As part of the Business Development Department, the OEM programme counts 6 Channel Managers who seek to create a network of partners across the globe with …

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• Launchpad Bugs Application Engineer – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: Home-based but prefer time zones from Europe to east coast USA
Job Summary: We are looking for a software engineer that is passionate about bug tracking in open source projects. The position requires experience in both web and server-side programming. The ideal candidate has strong experience with other bug tracking systems and a desire to tackle the problem of bug management across a …

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• Field Engineer (China) – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: China – with regular travel engagements
Job Summary: The application Field Engineer will support deploying Ubuntu and assist in sales opportunities. The continuous improvement and refinement of engineering and technical sales processes is a key aspect in this position. This involves building working relationships within Canonical to enhance the efficiency of collaboration between different teams.

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• Field Engineer (Taiwan) – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: Home based position in Taiwan, with regular travel engagements
Job Summary: Field Engineer

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• Ubuntu Mobile/MID QA Engineer – posted: October 2008

Posting Date: October 2008
Job Location: Your home (given appropriate facilities including broadband Internet) in an American or European time zone
Job Summary: Develop automated testing tools for the Ubuntu mobile platform.

more details

• Kernel Field Engineer – posted: September 2008

Posting Date: September 2008
Job Location: Taiwan
Job Summary: The Kernel Field Engineer will support the kernel team with hardware enablement in Ubuntu. This is achieved by working with our partners, system builders, ODMs (Original Device Manufacturers) and development teams within Canonical to assess and implement device drivers and other hardware bring up as necessary. This is a highly …

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• System Administrator in Taiwan – posted: August 2008

Posting Date: August 2008
Job Location: Taiwan
Job Summary: Part of the systems administration team for Canonical Ltd, with specific responsibility for all on-site systems administration related tasks in Canonical’s Taiwan office.

more details

• Ubuntu Translations Coordinator – posted: August 2008

Posting Date: August 2008
Job Location: Your home, as long as you have broadband. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: The role of the Ubuntu Translations Coordinator is to oversee, represent, guide and optimise the processes and workflow of the Ubuntu translations community as well as coordinating the LoCo Teams project. Applicants should have experience of working in a translations community and with computing user groups, be knowledgeable of the …

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• Salesforce Integration Engineer, BIS Team – posted: July 2008

Posting Date: July 2008
Job Location: At home with broadband. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for periods of one or two weeks
Job Summary: The BIS team is responsible for building and supporting the internal IT systems that Canonical uses. This role on the BIS team involves design and implementation of custom Salesforce integrations and add-ons.

more details