Ubuntu Conference

Today was the first day of the Ubuntu conference in Sydney. It opened with Mark Shuttleworth reviewing the last release and looking forward to the next. I took some notes which are not proof read or spell checked in any way. Next Matt Zimmerman ran an Ubuntu brainstorm asking what would we like to make Ubuntu better. Somehow the hour filled up quickly. After that the day was 8 solid BoF sessions, brainstorming ideas which will shortly be made into a specification. In expanding universe ogra and dholbach talked about how MOTU have pulled in packages from apt-get.org and how they can get more universe (MOTU) developers. There is now a KDE team page on the wiki, my plan is for KDE to quietly take over MOTU. The next session was the Kubuntu Roadmap where me and amu plotted plans for the next Kubuntu. KDE 3.4 was perfectly timed to come out with the Ubuntu schedule, chances are we won't have such luck with KDE 3.5 so we'll have to see what happens. I went to the Rosetta BoF next where Daf and Carlos decided on their 1.0 release in a couple of months. The Ubuntu build daemons are modified to search for any .pot and .po files and import them into Rosetta for easy translation by whoever wishes to help (and unlike some distros the result is then open for anyone to take back). KDE packages don't work with Rosetta yet because Rosetta assumes one directory with the .pot and .po files not the structure of kde-i18n which has a templates/ directory with all the .pot files and a directory for the .po files of each language. Hopefully Rosetta can be modified to take in kde-i18n. In toolchain roadmap we discussed the scary prospect of converting to GCC 4. This is a big change for KDE because of the new C++ ABI. Also KDE seems to be generally untested with GCC 4 and is rumoured to break in unknown ways, so that'll be fun. USplash seems to have been stopped in favour of a simpler system just doing cat foo.jpg > /dev/fb0. The Graphical Installer BoF was talking about possibly making an installer based just on the live CD (which would significantly reduce the cost of shipit, and at over 1 million shipit CDs sent I can see why they don't have the budget to make Kubuntu shipit CDs). Finding Packages discussed a program which would be a cross between gnome-app-install and click-and-run, a program installer focused on applications not packages and with fun features like screenshots and user ratings, would be cool to have something like that in Kubuntu maybe based on Kapture, but the actual package manager needs to be taken care of first. Finally language selector discussed how users could install language packages easily since at the moment you only get the one installed that you chose when installing (k)ubuntu. Adding something to gnome-app-install or its replacement seems to be the way here.

So the first long day of many this week but the roof top pool really is nice.