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!

The training will focus on free software and its origins / advantages, using LibreOffice, the GNU/Linux desktop and installing Debian, Ubuntu and Trisquel. Oh, and making CAT5e cables The goal is to have two full training days next week, Monday and Tuesday. Training is free and open to the public, but you need to contact me or add yourself to the wiki (see next paragraph).

I am also seeking help to work on the Ubuntu Haiti wiki. If you know any organizations using Ubuntu in Haiti, this would be a good time to add them there. I am susbcribed to it so I’ll get any updates as they happen.

Although my current Internet access is spotty, I can be reached by email, check my contact page.

The Internet, January 25, 2011 – The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project.Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

1. the developer community has been able to build their own and independent process, and get up and running in a very short time (with respect to the size of the code base and the project’s strong ambitions);
2. thanks to the high number of new contributors having been attracted into the project, the source code is quickly undergoing a major clean-up to provide a better foundation for future development of LibreOffice;
3. the Windows installer, which is going to impact the largest and most diverse user base, has been integrated into a single build containing all language versions, thus reducing the size for download sites from 75 to 11GB, making it easier for us to deploy new versions more rapidly and lowering the carbon footprint of the entire infrastructure.

The full announcement is available here.

There are important release notes regarding this version of LibreOffice.

A complete list of new features and fixes included in LibreOffice (with screenshots) is also available.

Getting involved in LibreOffice

Most importantly, the LibreOffice project needs all the help it can get. If you want to join a vibrant, active community around a very visible and dynamic project, there are plenty of ways to do so.

If you or someone you know has some time and resources to dedicate to this important part of Ubuntu and of every libre desktop, come by sometime to the #libreoffice IRC channel and we’ll take care of you

Getting help for LibreOffice

I joined the LibreOffice project a few weeks ago and I must say this is a very exciting day ! I am mostly involved in marketing and documentation, but I’m also proposing the following two resources to become official support and self-help channels:

• http://libreoffice.shapado.com – a questions & answers community driven by reputation and voting
• http://www.libreofficeforum.org – forums dedicated to language specific versions of LibreOffice (I monitor the French & Spanish forums there)

The LibreOffice project has a dedicated page listing all available online help resources.

I believe having additional self-help and support communities that complement the exiting OpenOffice.org existing ones is important, as the LibreOffice code-base will inevitably diverge more and more, and as we have more version-specific issues and bugs that can’t be treated equally. Furthermore, having language-specific communities and tools that can be used in your own language is also an important way to advocate LibreOffice in any part of the world – without depending on English-only tools.

Installing LibreOffice in Ubuntu

If you haven’t tried LibreOffice in Ubuntu yet, this would be a good time

If you are using Ubuntu do not download the .deb files for manual installation, there is a PPA repository that has been available for a few weeks now. Follow these instructions to install LibreOffice from the PPA so you get automatic updates. If you are running Ubuntu 11.04 LIbreOffice is already part of the standard packages, just search for libreoffice in your favorite package manager. Keep in mind the PPA shows version 3.3 rc4 as of this writing (which is bit-for-bit identical to the released 3.3), however a 3.3-numbered release should be available shortly.

The following is needed and works for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Ubuntu 10.10. Keep in mind a PPA is always considered a third-party application and unfit for production purposes (as far as official commercial support goes), however LibreOffice is becoming part of Ubuntu officially in the next release, due in April 2011, so the PPA will get a lot of attention and care. Make sure you test this and perhaps wait a few weeks if you intend to use this in 10.04 LTS or 10.10 in any significant way.

Here are the steps, then to install LibreOffice in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Ubuntu 10.10:
Start a terminal window and issue these commands (you’ll be asked for your password):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libreoffice

To complete the integration to Ubuntu (Gnome) or Kubuntu (KDE), you will also need to either

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gnome

or

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-kde

… accordingly.

Filing a bug for LIbreOffice in Ubuntu is easy, I have documented the process here.

Additional language modules, help files and extensions are also available if you search for libreoffice in your package manager.

It just took a few minutes. Considering the massive amount of time Wikipedia saves me every day explaining technical terms and providing historical references to many projects and products I work with, it’s time and money well spent. You can only resist Jimmy Wales for so long

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.

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.

But I hate my cellphone provider, Rogers Canada. I hope that’s clear. Rogers CANADA.

Being a community, people-oriented person, free software activist and open source enthusiast, and on top of that a full time technical trainer and support analyst, last summer when I heard that Rogers Canada would be the first company to sell & support the mighty HTC Dream (known as G1 to T-Mobile customers), I decided I would trust them. In fact I got my HTC Dream the day it came out, on June 2nd. If Google trusted Rogers with their first Android deployment in Canada, I would be OK. Big mistake!

I’ve posted before that Rogers Canada sucks. I’ve thought about documenting my own problems, but it’s getting easier to just gather other similar experiences Android customers have at Rogers:

• Rogers Mandatory Update Debacle
• How Rogers Ruined My HTC Dream
• Rogers and the Squashing of Personal Freedom
• I want my one point six – a blog dedicated to the HTC problems
• …

That’s right, there is a whole blog dedicated to document and share all the mistakes Rogers Canada has made and all the problems they have caused.

When I saw that I started my own Identi.ca group: RogersSucks (or !rs)

As I write this I am waiting for a replacement HTC Magic which was promised once, order “lost”, promotion postponed, then secretly available again, then finally ordered on Sunday. I know, it’s Wednesday and we’re only a province away, but the phone hasn’t even shipped. Nevermind it’s only a slightly less outdated phone, I am waiting again to get the Rogers Canada Android Revolution.

Rogers Canada thinks it’s good business practice to suspend data service in order to force customers into upgrading to a firmware that basically locks down my phone. Why is it important it’s unlocked and rootable ? Because otherwise it’s very much useless, or should I say even less useful than a regular cell phone. At least regular cell phones behave well with BT headsets, don’t crash or reboot spontaneously, and don’t lag for >30 seconds when going from one application to the other. Among other things. It used to be possible to use Cyanogen Mod and other custom firmwares to make these phones somewhat usable. Not anymore.

How did Google let this happen ? I have no clue.

A lot of similar mistakes can be made by any company selling devices based on free, open-source software (and yes I know Android devices don’t come with 100% free software). I secretly hope some anonymous person inside such companies learns something from Rogers Canada mistakes. This is truly an example on how NOT to launch and service such a product.

Meanwhile I am gathering details on my own problems and getting all my services with Rogers cancelled without penalty for breach of contract. If that doesn’t happen, small claims court in Quebec should help, and I’ll document this in true free, open fashion so I can help as many people as I can do the same: vote with their money. I am angry such a great platform got such a bad start in Canada.

I guess the Revolution is not going to be available in Canada for some time.

Télévision de Radio-Canada is a Canadian French language television network. It is owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, known in French as Société Radio-Canada, or just “Radio-Canada”, for the rest of us. – from Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago they launched a new web site, tou.tv, making “available” all their TV shows (or most of them)… in Flash

Never mind it’s 2010 and HTML5, Ogg Theora and in general open standards and formats are the talk of the day on most web development sites… Flash 10 is a bad enough choice as it is, but apparently tou.tv’s team just forgot that Linux existed.

Within hours of the launch Ubuntu Québec team members started complaining on the mailing list and on tou.tv’s Facebook group. We wrote to their admins, provided details, wrote to the ombudsman, got canned replies for all communications. We then put together a Facebook group, and started inviting people to join and we shared our findings (now all on a public wiki). 451 people joined the group which is an amazing number for Quebec province, given the context. I never ever thought I’d use Facebook for open formats and Linux support advocacy in such a way!

Only one programmer from the tou.tv’s team first acknowledged the problem, then asked for testers. That’s it, total silence from the tax-payers-funded TV network and website.

Within hours of the initial launch people on the mailing list had analyzed the streaming protocol, the Javascript code, etc. and ruled out problems there. To our amazement, a single commented line was preventing any shows to be displayed. Someone put together a GreaseMonkey script, someone else tested it… we went online on IRC to coordinate testing + blogging. Bottom line is we came up with a workaround. A week later tou.tv finally applied minimal fixes to unblock the Flash display on Linux systems.

The site is not perfect and now other minor issues subsist, and yes, I wish open formats were an option. For now I just wanted to thank Ubuntu for providing not only an incredible operating system but also an amazing community that made all this possible I also wanted to thank the Free Software Foundation as we used several resources from them such as the Defective by Design web site to explain the problems associated to using DRM-like implementations of web TV sites, and the problems of not using open formats, such as Flash.

I also wanted to send a big FAIL to Radio-Canada and tou.tv’s team. To this day they don’t even mention Linux on their FAQ.

You can also find more details about this little victory of ours in my original blog post in French.

Your taxes at work!

I knew there was a Gobby server in Ubuntu but didn’t know it was this easy to setup. I quickly found out about Gobby-Infinote (Gobby using the new Infinote protocol) and Infinoted (server). It was really nice to be able to go to the #infinote channel on Freenode and ask questions one-on-one to the actual developpers and validate my tests! Thank you!

From Gobby’s website:

Gobby is a free collaborative editor supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-like platforms.

I performed my tests on an Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit desktop.

1. On all client systems, install the gobby-infinote package
2. Then on the server system, install the infinoted package
3. Once the server is installed, either:

• If you trust your local network and don’t want any security, launch the server using:

  infinoted --security-policy=no-tls

  or

• If you’d rather have encryption, TLS is available. Use:

  infinoted --create-key --create-certificate -k key.pem  -c cert.pem

The keys creation is automatic, and you can launch the server just using:

infinoted -k key.pem  -c cert.pem

You can also specify such options in ~/.config/infinoted.conf as noted on Infinoted’s wiki (which I plan to update with some of my notes). I am not sure yet what’s best to start the server automatically at system’s startup, I am told upstart should handle this. I’ll probably file a bug or investigate that further later.

Of course your server system can be a desktop, and you can run Gobby from that same system. Once installed clients should go to Accessories > Internet > Gobby Collaborative Editor (0.5).

You will also need to install avahi-daemon so the Infinote Gobby server availability is advertised through your local network and it’s shown among possible choices in your Gobby clients.

If you have setup TLS and you double click one of the available servers that use it, you will be presented a warning as you have a self-signed certificate:

The “other” Gobby in Ubuntu is a previous, stable version (package: gobby). Its server companion, sobby, is not the focus of current development efforts.

The main differences I found are:

• Optional TLS encryption
• Undo ability (which required rewriting the sync protocol)
• Interface improvements
• Ability to delete files
• Folder hierarchy creation now possible
• Graceful recovery & offer to save when the server “disappears” or when someone deletes a file
• Zeroconf support – so the server “advertises” itself on a LAN, no more IP/port info needed

The current client version in Karmic is 0.4.92 but 0.4.93 is already in Lucid and 0.4.94 is looing up.

Find out more here:

• Infinoted
• Gobby 0.4.93 announcement last December
• The Infinote protocol