I’d like to share a few projects and organizations that I’d love to see reaching their goals this time of the year.

I want to stress how important it is to understand that donating even U$25 or U$5 or whatever you can is important. It’s also an easy decision for many people (I am not saying it is the case for everyone), to donate and make a difference, instead of spending that same money having lunch at the restaurant or taking a cab. You can also ask your employer to chip in – just ask! Your employer could donate to these projects, become a corporate member of the associations I mention, or pay your membership as part of mutual benefits (non-profit tax receipt + happy employee) Just ask. The worse that can happen is you get a “no, sorry”.

“OpenStreetMap‘s Operations Working Group, who have the important role of keeping core OSM services running smoothly, have planned to invest in a new server which will provide [them] with a database back-up. This improvement is at the very core of the OpenStreetMap infrastructure, giving services greater resilience. It means [they]’ll bounce back quicker and easier in the event of a hardware failure. In time the new server will also bring about some performance improvements.” – you can read more details about the fund drive and donate here. I am donating 50€ to this project.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook was first written in French (and is a best-seller already) by two Debian developers who are translating it to English and possibly publishing it under a free license. The latter will only happen if the liberation fund reaches 25 K€. A physical book is a big helper when doing advocacy for free software. Imagine if instead of just showing the book to anyone interested, you could also show them how to search it electornically, cite it, use it, modify it, circulate it, share it at will ? I donated 100€ to this project.

Become a member of the Free Software Foundation and/or The Linux Foundation. I don’t always agree with everything that is said and done by the FSF, although I consider myself an active member and advocate – I certainly couldn’t do any of my advocacy work without all I’ve learned from the FSF and other fellow members. My membership at The Linux Foundation is a way to contribute to finance important projects (such as paying Linus Torvals’ salary). If you have a local free software advocacy group (such as FACIL or APELL in Quebec), consider joining as a full member or even making a donation – meeting space, flyers, CDs and food/drinks go a long way when networking locally. Becoming a member also increases the organization’s footprint, if nothing else. Numbers speak! This coming year I am sponsoring a student associate membership at the FSF.

• Linux Foundation membership benefits – Become a member
• Free Software Foundation membership benefits – Become a member (referred by me, member #3877)
• Free Software Foundation Europe fellowship form (including benefits)

Do you have any other ideas on where to donate cold, hard cash to further free, open technologies and software ? I’d love to hear them.

Update: I am helping putting together an accordingly “freedom geek” buying guide here, if anyone wants to peek or get inspiration for it.

I'd like to share a few projects and organizations that I'd love to see reaching their goals this time of the year. I want to stress how important it is to understand that donating even U$25 or U$5 or whatever you can is important. It's also an easy decision for many people (I am not ...

Don’t miss it! À ne pas manquer!

This year I was able to bring two simultaneaous events together, in different locations.

Cette année j’ai pu programmer 2 événements différents, ça se passe demain, à deux endroits différents .

Les détails à / All details at: http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2011/Canada/Montreal

See you there! À demain!

Don't miss it! À ne pas manquer! This year I was able to bring two simultaneaous events together, in different locations. Cette année j'ai pu programmer 2 événements différents, ça se passe demain, à deux endroits différents :). Les détails à / All details at: http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2011/Canada/Montreal See you there! À demain!

When you upgrade to Ubuntu after release, or when one of your friends, family or colleagues installs it for the first time, I trust they will like many of the new features or just appreciate finding everything they need in their new Ubuntu installation. I also trust in some cases they will encounter some of the known issues which at this point (1 week before release) may not be fixed and may not make it but we need to know about. Imagine when someone mentions an issue and you can say “Yeah, I know about it.” and “I reported that bug” / “It’s in the release notes” / “We’re working on it” … “This morning’s updates fixes it” !!!

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.

When you upgrade to Ubuntu after release, or when one of your friends, family or colleagues installs it for the first time, I trust they will like many of the new features or just appreciate finding everything they need in their new Ubuntu installation. I also trust in some cases they will encounter some ...

This is an invitation to anyone interested in joining a multi-lingual, freely-licensed Ubuntu Q&A site to check http://ubuntu.shapado.com.

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.

This is an invitation to anyone interested in joining a multi-lingual, freely-licensed Ubuntu Q&A site to check http://ubuntu.shapado.com. 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 ...

Sorry for the French post. Montreal folks will know what this is about and go straight to the QR code Remember this is very beta and not officially approved by ISF.

Ce matin Claude Chasse nous apprends sur le groupe LinkedIn d’Android Montréal qu’une nouvelle application pour localiser les points d’accès d’Île Sans Fil est disponible pour tester.

Direct link: ilesansfil.apk

Attention cette application est encore en développement – le but est de reccueillir des commentaires.

Je suggère fortement d’envoyer vos commentaires sur le Google Group d’Android Montreal.

Voici quelques captures d’écran pour vous mettre l’eau à la bouche

Mes premiers commentaires:

• L’intégration Google Maps serait complète si on pouvait aller directement à “Directions” pour un point d’accès, appeler l’endroit, visiter son site web
• Une section “Favoris” serait intéressante
• On voit les point d’accès “down” ! Excellent pour éviter un déplacement
• L’ajout de l’option “my location” dans les paramètres manque
• Bonne intégration du blog d’ISF

Sorry for the French post. Montreal folks will know what this is about and go straight to the QR code :) Remember this is very beta and not officially approved by ISF. Ce matin Claude Chasse nous apprends sur le groupe LinkedIn d'Android Montréal qu'une nouvelle application pour localiser les points d'accès d'Île Sans Fil ...