Ubuntu (Berlin) Global Jam at c-base

To make it short: Between bug triaging and patching Daniel showed the startup procedure two or three times on his X61s (with an solid state disk, one has to add) and as promised it started up in five seconds after Grub. Actually this isn’t more than a fast booting notebook, but it shows the results of focussed efforts from the last one and a half year. Remember the initial “10s” posting and the bunch of changes it took.

So I am happy looking forward to improvements for Maverick on my netbook. And yes: I am happy with 10 seconds, too.

[update]

Daniel noted, that it’s a X61s, not a T61. Changed.

Read the press release: Desktop Summit 2011 Announced

As Ubuntu member and head member of c-base e.V. I am part of the Berlin team, together with Claudia Rauch from KDE e.V. and Mirko Boehm of KDE. Let me quote Mirko:

“We are honored and proud that our proposal was selected. What we look forward to the most is the inspiration our communities will draw from having the Desktop Summit together again, but also from visiting our bustling, welcoming city. We would like to thank all the supporters of the proposal, and will work hard to make the conference a big success.”

I am sure this event will become a success. And it’s a great opportunity to meet and greet across the letters before the “U” in “Ubuntu”.

1) Ubuntu Community booth

The “ubuntu Deutschland e.V.”, Ubuntu and Kubuntu community presented their work at a community hosted booth. A bunch of Ubuntu Berlin members supported the booth, answered hundreds of questions and helped with the proceedings.

2) Talks

Saturday Featured a lot of Ubuntu focussed talks. For the first time “Ubuntu Berlin” and its members hosted a remarkable amount of them, e.g.:

• Anselm Helbig – Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (tmux)
• Benjamin Drung – Ubuntu in 50 minutes, Packaging for Debian and Ubuntu
• Caspar Clemens Mierau – Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (Vimperator), Gnome-Do, Ubuntu in 50 minutes
• Daniel Holbach – Fixing Bugs in Ubuntu (see slides), Ubuntu in 50 minutes, Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (liblaunchpad)
• Marcel Eichner – Ubuntu Berlin Lightning Talks (Franklin)
• Torsten Franz – Supporting Ubuntu

minutes before the “Ubuntu in 50 minutes” talk

3) Interviews for Radio Tux

Several members of Ubuntu Berlin gave interviews to the well known German Podcast “Radio Tux“. Daniel’s talk on bugjamming has been released already. Be sure to check the archive for other releases within the next days.

4) LinuxTag BBQ

Last but not least: The  ”End of LinuxTag BBQ” at c-base, sponsored by Canonical, has been a great success again. Three barbacues and about ten “Grillmeister” (you cannot translate this) provided more than hundred visitors with tasty food. Members of various types of open source communities had interesting chats while relaxing at the banks of the Spree.

As Ubuntu Berlin’s support for the LinuxTag continuously increased within the last years, I am sure next year will even better. We’ll see.

The BBQ opens around 6pm. If you don’t know how to get to c-base from the LinuxTag area, a friendly team will guide you – just have a look at the official announcement. The last two your showed, the LinuxTag BBQ is a perfect ending as a large crowd of open source developers and community members of all free project types take the possibility to chat and relax directly at the riverside of the Spree. Don’t miss that See you there.

At Ubucon 2008 in Göttingen, a German Ubuntu User Conference, I noticed that a lot people hanging around discussed how nicely their parents and especially moms are using Ubuntu. No hazzle, no further explanations needed – it just worked. And often they don’t even know or notice that they are using Ubuntu, as they just standard software like Firefox and Thunderbird. As this user group doesn’t belong to the tweeting, facebooking, social web society, I decided to found a launchpad group named “My Mum Runs Ubuntu“, that has no further meaning than joining it means your mother runs Ubuntu – a simple way of giving this “silent” user group at least a number and a marker on a map.

I was surprised how fast the member list grew and happy to see that it’s members came and come from all over the world as you can see below:

"My Mom Runs Ubuntu" global map (map by Google)

So this is not about a single heroine in technology – it is about a general movement:  I am convinced, especially Ubuntu with it’s focus on an intuitive interface seems to keep the entry level very low and therefore attracts user groups that might be a suprprise for a lot of people. I know dozens of techie people stating that free operating systems are way too complicated to use for them. When telling about “My Mom Runs Ubuntu” they run out of reasons. At least there is nothing more convincing on using free software than people that are just using it on a daily basis without the need of telling everybody as they just take it as normal. I am sure, this user group continues to grow and am

So, if you already have a Launchpad account and your mum runs Ubuntu, too, give her a voice by just joining the group.

And if you think, this post misses real techie heroines, check the “Ubuntu Women” project, featuring some of the most active members of the Ubuntu community.

Ada Lovelace Day Logo

Ada Lovelace

The “Ada Lovelace Day” celebrates the achievements of women in technology and science and pledges for blog posts about this topic. As the Ubuntu community tries to emphasize the involvement of women in the contribution to the project (e.g. see Ubuntu Women), there might interesting stories about an Ubuntu specific focus on this day’s topic.

I am looking forward the 24nd, there are over 1000 blog post pledges so far. In case you use twitter, have a look at the hash marks #AdaLovelace and #ald10.

A detailed German description of the workshop can be found in Anselm’s blog. The workshop is free of charge.

After several investigations I started examining the MySQL binlog from the master – a file containing all queries that will be transferred to the slave (and executed there if they don’t match any ignore-db-pattern). I grepped for ids of rows that have not been deleted on the slave as I’s interested if the DELETE statement was in the binlog. In order to read a binlog file just use “mysqlbinlog” and parse the output with grep, less or similar. To my surprise I found the following entries:

$ mysqlbinlog mysql-complete-bin.000335 | grep 1006974
DELETE FROM `tickets` WHERE `id` = 1006974
SET INSERT_ID=1006974/*!*/;

As “SET INSERT_ID” is a result of an INSERT statement it was clear, that MySQL wrote the INSERT => DELETE statements in the wrong order. As INSERT/DELETE sometimes occur quite fast after each other and several MySQL  threads are open in the same MySQL server, you might run into a rare INSERT/DELETE race condition as the master successfully executes them, while the slave receives them in the wrong order.

As a comparision this is a normal order of INSERT and DELETE (please note that the actual INSERT is not displayed here):

$ mysqlbinlog mysql-complete-bin.000336 | grep 1007729<br />SET INSERT_ID=1007729/*!*/;<br />DELETE FROM `tickets` WHERE `id` = 1007729<br />

Actually this all so far. Lesson learned for me: A mysql binlog might get you into serious trouble when firing a MySQL server with INSERT and DELETE on the same rows as the linear binlog file can fail the correct statement order, which might be a result of different MySQL threads and an unclean log behavior. I have not yet found a generic solution for the problem but I am looking forward to it.

Karmic is to be released any minute now, so just as a reminder:

Over the last weeks I started writing “human” release notes that concentrate on the most important changes that impact the users work. They are available on the Ubuntu Wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KarmicKoala/HumanReleaseNotes

If you like, you can add a screenshot of Empathy (and Pidgin?) video chat in action or send them to me, so I’ll upload them.

Please note, that Ernst Sjöstrand just dropped me a line, that he had the same idea of writing “human” release notes, but focussed on main packages and there forked the work on

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KarmicKoala/HumanReleaseNotesv2

In my eyes the human release note project is yet at an early stage but I got a lot of positive feedback and think the work can be continued with the next Ubuntu Lucid Lynx release in an advanved way with more contributors.

Best,

ccm.

If you cannot see the embedded spot, click on this link.

It’s really nice to have this great audience-appealing support once again, as it presents Ubuntu in a totally non-techie medium, reaching an audience that is hard to reach and that has time to consume  input – as the screens inside the metro trains are quite appealing.

I’ll see if I can post some real life pictures of the spot soon.