Fabian Rodriguez

… if you’re new around or if you’re introducing someone else to Ubuntu for the first time, I think a critical read is the following link:

• Adding, Removing and Updating Applications

Painfully obvious ? Rightfully so.

Many new (and old) “converts” ask questions about how to compile applications, manually install .deb packages… those should be the last one needs to do when installing applications in Ubuntu (or any Linux for that matter), at least when you want to keep the system as close as possible to regular, supported security/feature updates and upgrades as possible.

I am still a bit surprised when I get a comment like “I’ve been trying to compile/install XYZ for a few days/hours” and there almost always is a solution using packages part of the regular repositories! For those special cases when there isn’t I have a million suggestions, but compiling is far from the top of my list.

Another friendly advice, also consider asking on the Launchpad “Answers” system or showing your new converts how to do that, many times you may find things in Ubuntu are done in a slightly different way - not always obvious, most of the time easier. Don’t take my word for it Asking where or how to get help is OK too.

Last but not least, http://www.ubuntu.com/support provides links to official docs, free community support and even commercial options. Chances are there is a Local Community Team in your area, know it, promote it, join it, use it!

There’s only one better thing than discovering Ubuntu, and that is knowing where its community is and how to tackle into it and even participate in it. I’ve found when new users are empowered to do this, they don’t have to depend on me at all for future support! Well, unless they want 24/7 immediate phone support, that is

If you’ve ever helped someone over the phone change any router configuration, you know it’s a bit of a challenge to guide anyone through the mazes of menus and options each different router has just to enable port forwarding for any given application.

Fear not, you can now become your local neighborhood router guru, just bookmarkhttp://www.portforward.com and have it handy when someone requests you mighty knowledge. If you feel like letting anyone else in to this carefully guarded secret, do so at your own risk

Thanks for the tip, David!

Canonical is hiring and the positions list is growing by the day. If you’d like to join a place where IRC is a requirement, colleagues are in almost every timezone, and hacking your home electronics is rather common, check the list and also how to apply.

Contact me if you have any questions.

July 2008 postings

• GNOME Developer, Online Services

Job Location: At home with broadband, in an American/European time zone. This job involves international travel three to four times a year, usually for one week.

• QA Engineer, Online Services

Job Location: Home based with broadband. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for one week.

• Engineering Manager, Linux Desktop Experience Team

Job Location: Millbank Tower, London; UK preferably

• Web Developer, Business Information Systems

Job Location: At home with broadband. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for periods of one or two weeks.

• Web Developer, Online Services

Job Location: Home based with broadband. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for one week

• ISV Relationship Manager

Job Location: The role will involve significant travel, most of which will be in the US and Europe. Boston, London or San Francisco are the preferred locations

• Security Engineer

Job Location: Your home, as long as you have broadband. Some international travel will be required.

• Engineering Manager

Job Location: Your home (given appropriate facilities including broadband Internet) in an American or European time zone.

June 2008 postings

• OEM Channel Manager (China)

Job Location: China

• Graphic Designer

Job Location: London, UK

• Launchpad Interface Design and Usability Engineer

Job Location: At home with broadband. This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for periods of one or two weeks.

May 2008 postings

• Ubuntu Mobile QA Engineer

Job Location: Lexington, MA; USA

• Field Application Engineer

Job Location: Taiwan x 5, India x 1 with regular travel engagements.

April 2008 postings

• Translations Software Engineer

Job Location: At home with broadband, in or near European or Asian timezones. The job
involves international travel several times a year, usually for periods of one or two weeks.

• Release Engineer – Mobile Solutions Group

Job Location: Lexington, MA; USA

• Systems Software Engineer – Mobile Solutions Group

Job Location: Lexington, MA; USA

March 2008 postings

• Ubuntu GNOME Maintainer

Job Location: Your home, given appropriate facilities including broadband Internet.

February 2008 postings

• ISV Channel Sales Manager (United States)

Job Location: Your home with broadband. Some international travel will be required.

• Product Manager

Job Location: London, UK

• Sales Engineer (North America)

Job Location: Your home with broadband (25% travel will be required).

• Field Application Engineer (North America)

Job Location: Lexington (MA), Austin (TX) or Houston (TX)

It seems more and more laptops come equipped with fingerprint readers lately. If you want to see support for such readers officially rolled into Ubuntu 8.10 by all means click on that mean Brainstorm logo! Update: it seems the Brainstorm voting has closed, however the discussion that entry has about security is worth checking.

I recently got an HP Pavillion xt1000 series with such hardware and while researching its fingerprint support I came across Fprint.

From the project site:

The fprint project aims to plug a gap in the Linux desktop: support for consumer fingerprint reader devices.

Previously, Linux support for such devices has been scattered amongst different projects (many incomplete) and inconsistent in that application developers would have to implement support for each type of fingerprint reader separately.

The provided packages are:

• libpam-fprint - PAM module allowing authentication (login, sudo, etc.) via fprint
• libfprint-dev - fingerprint library of fprint project, development headers
• libfprint0 - fingerprint library of fprint project, which allows using the fingerprint reader found of many of the more decent notebooks
• fprint-demo - fingerprint scan and verification graphic utility

The packages that enable fprint functionality in Ubuntu are provided by Pavel Rojtberg, I’d like to invite anyone with fingerprint readers to try them. If you find any bugs I think they can be sent to the project’s mailing list, I couldn’t find an obvious link to any open bug trackers. Oh, and don’t miss the FAQ!

There is a lenghty discussion and interesting information on Pavel’s site. I contacted him personally and he setup a Personal Package Archive (PPA) to build the Ubuntu packages very quickly! Thanks for you work, Pavel! All the development work the Fprint project has achieved is made available very easily to us Ubuntu users via the PPA service in Launchpad. This will not make it in any official Ubuntu repositories just yet, but it’s very promising so far. Above all it should not be considered a replacement for other standard authentication and security measures.
libpam-fprint + libfprint + fprint-demo packages for Ubuntu 7.10 are available as an archive at:
http://madman2k.net/files/fprint-packages.tar

Hardy Packages are available in this PPA:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/madman2k/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
(add that line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and update your repositories: sudo apt-get update from comand line or just use Synaptic.

For other distributions see: http://www.reactivated.net/fprint/wiki/Download

The fprint-demo package provides a graphical application to enroll fingerprints and set different options. After installing that package, fprint-demo can be invoked from command line only (no menu entry yet) by issuing this command (notice the underscore instead of hyphen):
sudo fprint_demo

In order to enable fprint authentication on Ubuntu install the libpam and libfprint packages and then edit your /etc/pam.d/common-auth so it contains

auth sufficient pam_fprint.so
auth required pam_unix.so nullok_secure

At your next login attempt or sudo command from terminal, this will first try to read your fingerprint before asking your password. For testing purposes, you can expire the sudo passowrd caching by issuing “sudo -k”. Do not try to disable password login completely; this is alpha software and you might lock out yourself.

Example of command-line fingerprint enrollment:
sudo pam_fprint_enroll --enroll-finger 7

For more information regarding the current (under consideration) integration of fingerprint readers support in Ubuntu, see:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/187130

…at least in the Eastern Standard Time zone
Now go and digg it!

A few days ago a friend asked me “How come Dell PCs with Ubuntu are only 50$ less than Windows ?”. I was actually suprised by his question and I thought I would share my answer.

If I apply the closed, non-free business models around proprietary software, I really think Ubuntu PCs should be much more expensive (like U$1000 more) than any Windows comparable machine. After explaining all you would need to add to a Windows install in order to make it comparable to Gnu/Linux, we actually agreed… I was then wondering what would happen if a tiny portion of Ubuntu users would contribute a portion of the U$1000 saved towards local development and advocacy efforts. Well, “finders, keepers” also works for me.

Think about it, I am sure you can come with more than this short list but… since being an Ubuntu user at home and at work,

1. I don’t need antivirus, firewall, cleanup, anti-spyware or other such ” security” software. This may require a bit more explanation, but what can I say. I my personal experience, I really don’t need any of this.
2. As a result of #1, I don’t actually need to waste a dual-core’s machine power so I can be “running a virus scan and management agent in the background“. I’d rather put that to good video transcoding use
3. As a result of #1, current sub U$500 cheap Celeron based laptops run just fine with only 512MB of RAM - they’re not ” useless” as I was told at the store
4. I can choose and download a healthy few thousands applications (including many servers like web, voip, etc.) from one central package/repository management application. Like, say, Windows update but for all applications. Multi-lingual, and including security updates, unlike Windows Marketplace. I do happen to work in spanish and french too.
5. I can have my systems (and all included applications) available in several languages at once.
6. I don’t worry about manual security updates, except for software I have decided to manually download and install from other sites (a rarity, but happens)
7. I don’t reinstall! Well, my work consists of advocacy and consulting / coaching / providing tech support so my main laptop does get reinstalled often. Home PC hasn’t had a reinstall for 3 years though.
8. I can keep using the oldest, crapiest hardware I love, like that PCMCIA reader or the “Windows 98-only” webcam, along the newer one
9. When I come across a missing feature / problem / documentation omission or translation problem I take the opportunity to contribute back and learn in the process
10. I can copy all this to any amount of people around me, without restrictions or underground illegal activities - the only limit being my bandwidth, and ability to give out CDs or other media. In fact I am often asked if the software I used is legal, as I seem to have a little or big app for most any use.

So how much is that worth to you ? I was thinking I would need to talk about the freedom, the formats, the licences, patent problems, etc., I guess that’s for another afternoon when I chat again with my friend.

This morning I was really excited to see the Launchpad 1.1.6 milestone announcement! Launchpad is a collection of services that assist in software development. Ubuntu uses it to manage its specifications, bugs, meetings, events and other assorted things. the Launchpad HowTo describes how this is done.

Among the many details of bugs and new development in this announcement, a few are of particular interest to any Ubuntu LoCo teams using Launchpad to manage their community and keep track of participation:

• Teams can now only join other teams with the approval of the first team’s administrator.
• Team members can now renew their own memberships, when their membership is close to expiry if the team is set-up with an on-demand policy.
• Answer contacts will now receive notification of new questions in their preferred languages only. - as a team administrator, visit any project’s page (like Ubuntu’s, then go to the Answers tab, and choose ” Set answers Contact” from the left menu. Previously you also received notices in English. If you don’t select a preferred language, it will automatically be set to your browser language preferences.

This last feature alone is very important for local teams that wish to have their members keep track of the help they provide to local communities in their native language. I also think it will be a good way to keep answers to common support question out of the mailing lists - sometimes a few technical questions can generate a *lot* of email traffic. An added bonus, you loco team members will get precious karma for every participation.

There were also two nice changes to improve privacy of participants in Answers and the bug trackers:

• Email addresses inside the Answer and Bug Trackers are now obfuscatedto anonymous (not logged in) users - e.g. Google.
• Quoted emails and standard signature lines are now stripped from emailed responses to Answer Tracker questions and also bug reports.

There are many more improvements and new features, the full announcement is in the Launchpad-users mailing list archives.

Additionally, there is now a Launchpad News blog now available at http://news.launchpad.net/ - it’s great to have another channel with regular updates and insight directly from the users and developers behind Launchpad.

Now, to make this a perfect “Launchpad fans” day, it would have been lovely to see an update about making Launchpad free and open source under the GPL or another licence…

Nicolas nous rappelle que jeudi prochain (21 juin) il y a une présentation organisée par FACIL au CRIM. Damien Seguy va nous sortir de notre petit nid douillet en nous parlant de La Sécurité des applications en ligne.

J’ai rencontré Damien à plusieurs reprises et je dois dire que je regrette beaucoup de ne pas pouvoir aller à sa présentation, alors ne manquez pas de lui dire bonjour de ma part si vous y allez suite à votre lecture de ce billet

I am putting together information that will be included in the official Ubuntu Certified Professional training material, and I thought it would be interesting to make my initial draft available here. Most of this information is already public, while some of it is derived from existing references, such as the Ubuntu releases lifecycles. I like to call this a crash course about support options available for Ubuntu, so if anyone reading this feels there are things that are badly missing, just comment and I’ll gladly revise it - or dig it.

Commercial Support

Canonical Global Support Services are deployed to enable 24×7 support infrastructure. Support requests are handled through telephone and the web. Canonical offers three types of production support: Desktop, Server and Thin Client/Cluster Support.

Canonical Ltd. provides various levels of commercial support for packages in the “main” component, including the Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu releases. Support can also be obtained from a growing network of companies and partners that are listed in the Canonical Marketplace at :
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/commercial/marketplace

Free community support

A range of free support options are also available from the Ubuntu Community, including forums, IRC channels and mailing lists. The Ubuntu Local Community Teams provide multi-language community support. For more details please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/support

Support lifecycles for Ubuntu releases

Ubuntu desktop and server releases are issued every six months, providing versions including feature and security updates of all applications. Each Ubuntu release is supported and includes free security updates for at least 18 months on the desktop and server.

With the Long Term Support (LTS) version the support lifecycle is extended to three years on the desktop, and five years on the server. Ubuntu versioning is based on year and month of a specific release, ie, 7.04 is for the April 2007 release.

Note: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is considered to be the same as Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS when updated.

Detailed release announcements are posted on the ubuntu-announce mailing list at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/

Updates policy and stable release updates

Once an Ubuntu release has been completed and published, updates for it are only released under certain circumstances, and must follow a special procedure. Most notably, security updates are backported and feature updates are not available until the next stable release.

Stable release updates (SRU) are automatically recommended to a very large number of users, and so it is critically important to treat them with great caution. Therefore, when updates are proposed, they must be accompanied by a strong rationale and present a low risk of regressions. This includes any community-proposed updates or bugs escalated from commercial support customers.

Free security updates are included for at least 18 months on the desktop and server. With the Long Term Support (LTS) version you get three years support on the desktop, and five years on the server. There is no extra fee for the LTS version, all Ubuntu editions are available on the same free terms. Upgrades to new versions of Ubuntu are also free of charge.

Ubuntu components

The Ubuntu software repository contains thousands of software packages organized into five components, on the basis of the level of support we can offer them, and whether or not they comply with our Free Software Philosophy. The components are called “main”, “restricted”, “universe”, “multiverse” and commercial.

The standard Ubuntu installation is a subset of software available from the main and restricted components. You can install additional software using installation software such as Synaptic Package Manager or Aptitude. Other components are added by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file. See “man sources.list” for more information on editing the sources.list file.

Supported packages

There are several CD and DVD versions of Ubuntu available. All versions are basically a selection of specific packages put together on the same media for convenience. Packages that are included are organized by groups called Seeds. There are seven primary seeds:

1. Minimal
2. Boot
3. Standard
4. Desktop
5. Ship
6. Live
7. and Supported

The minimal, boot, standard, desktop, and either ship or live seeds go onto our CDs and the “Supported” packages are available from the FTP site. “Supported” in this context means any needed packages that other packages depend on but can’t fit on the CD/DVD.. Seeding a package pulls all of its dependencies into the appropriate part of the archive and ensures everything needed to build that package is at least placed in “Supported”.

You can view the current seeds and the current full list of packages for them at:
http://www.ubuntu.com/support

Hier soir j’ai rejoint les rangs des deux autres “notaires” CaCert au Québec… Je suis un peu épuisé mais si ça vous dit quelque chose, voyez la FAQ sur l’”Assurance” (qu’on peut traduire à peu près par “certification”. Pour en savoir plus sur les “web of trust” dans la sécurité et le chiffrement de données, voyez ma page à ce sujet.

Le but de l’exercice est de certifier au moins trois membres de Koumbit et que nous puissions certifier n’importe qui lors de nos réunions hebdomadaires… dans le cadre de nouveaux services en sécurité qui seront annoncés sous peu .