ScottK might have something to say ...

Once the release finally happens today, Ubuntu will have some new siblings. One of them will be Kubuntu Netbook Edition.

Why Kubuntu Netbook Edition?

1. Kubuntu because it's built on Kubuntu and KDE.
2. Netbook because that's the target system.
3. Edition because it is all built from FOSS packages available in the official archives.

First there was a nugget of an idea from upstream. KDE should have a different approach for netbooks. About the same time we had the developer summit to plan the Karmic release. Fortunately we had good representation from both the Kubuntu community and KDE developers and we organized around the idea of an early look at the KDE netbook vision (it will be released "for real" with KDE 4.4 in January 2010).

We came up with a basic plan and got it approved.

Then as we got to work, interesting things started to happen. We created a new subset of the Kubuntu seeds to define the packages for a standard netbook install. We created a set of default settings designed for the smaller screens on netbooks. Then we started to make an ISO image for Kubuntu Netbook. One thing I noticed throughout this process was that every time we needed a little bit of help or direction from someone at Canonical (trust me, I did not navigate the internals of debian-cd to add another image type without help) they were there to help us keep moving along.

By the Alpha 3 milestone, Kubuntu Netbook existed. At this point, Kubuntu Netbook was nothing more than a miniature Kubuntu. Thanks to the inherent scalability of KDE4, this was pretty easy to do.

Fortunately for us, the KDE developers had done their before they started and already had a good idea where they wanted to http://morpheuz.cc/netbook.pdf and made rapid progress.

By Alpha 5 we had a svn snapshot of the new plasma netbook packaged and working. From that point on, we had a solid foundation for development and got to a pretty good result.

I'm very pleased with the way that Ubuntu developers (many, but not all of which work for Canonical) have jumped in and helped out when we needed it. This is a supportedt release just like Kubuntu or Ubuntu. It's a first effort, but I think a pretty good one that would not have been possible without all the help.

We've got three netbooks running Kubuntu Netbook Edition here at our house and we're all pretty happy. I hope everyone else enjoys it too.

Of course we can't get too satisfied with what we have. While we were off integrating and testing the early version of Plasma Netbook, upstream has been busy working on the final version we'll see in Lucid Lynx.

Posted by Scott Kitterman at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Chicago with my wife and three kids for the wedding of one of my wife's cousins. As we were about to board the return flight, my middle daughter (15) noticed that her suitcase was missing. We didn't have time to do anything except a quick look around and then get on the plane to go home.

Once we were home, after a lot of calling around by my wife and the daughter in question, they located the bag. It was found at the TSA security checkpoint. This was better than we had hoped for.

TSA told us all we had to do was have the airline come pick it up and with our authorization, they would turn the bag over to United for them to send it back to us. All seemed well.

Unfortunately, United's position was that since it wasn't a checked bag, it wasn't their problem. United's motto used to be "Fly the friendly skies." I checked and I see that's no longer the case. At least they aren't still pretending.

As soon as I heard this, I said to my wife, "Wait, I know people in Chicago." I know Ubuntu developers who live there and I know there is an active Chicago loco team.

I visited #ubuntu-chicago (IRC on freenode) and almost immediately had multiple offers of help. Thanks to
Tony Narlock (skiquel), the suitcase is on it's way home and my daughter is out of having to do a lot of shopping for clothes with money she doesn't have. Thanks again Tony.

Being in the Ubuntu community is kind of like having family everywhere.

Posted by Scott Kitterman at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Not much more to say. Have a look:

Posted by Scott Kitterman at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Oh dear. Is any comment actually necessary:

I won't even go into the pain of trying to actually speak to someone to complain about it. At least the web tech support understood it was a dumb idea. Progress for our side, I guess.

Posted by Scott Kitterman at 01:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last half year, you've almost certainly heard of Canonical's Ayatana Project. At UDS Karmic in Barcelona we spent quite some time working out the best was for Kubuntu, KDE, and Ayatana to work together. We came up with a plan.

This plan gives Ayatana room to innovate and explore new concepts, preserves Kubuntu's position as a very upstream KDE focused distribution, and makes it easy for Ayatana's good work to benefit upstream.

We didn't agree on everything, but we did agree on the idea that a user's notifications should be consistent. From a Kubuntu perspective this meant that if a user was using a non-KDE application in a KDE session, then notifications should look and feel KDE like.

I gather it took quite some discussion on the XDG list to get agreement on how to achieve this, but Aurélien Gâteau has now landed patches in KDE svn (for KDE 4.4) and in the Ubuntu archive for Karmic (KDE 4.3) to enable this [1] [2] [3] [4].

I think this is a great first step for Ayatana, Kubuntu, and KDE. I look forward to more.

[1] href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/kde4libs/4:4.2.96-0ubuntu5
[2] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/kdebase/4:4.2.96-0ubuntu2
[3] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/kdebase-runtime/4:4.2.96-0ubuntu2
[4] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/kdebase-workspace/4:4.2.96-0ubuntu4

Posted by Scott Kitterman at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

One of our goals for Kubuntu in this development cycle is to introduce a new sub-flavor of Kubuntu for netbooks (thus Kubuntu Netbook Edition).

We took a significant step forward on Friday when we got our first images:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-netbook/daily-live/current/

They are not optimized for netbooks yet, but KDE is natively pretty flexible about scale so it works reasonably well.

Now we need testers. I'm particularly interested in testing with a variety of netbook hardware. If you have a system that needs proprietary, undistributable modules like poulsbo (e.g. Dell mini 10), then this won't work. I did already discover that the Broadcom drivers my mini 10v needs were not on the ISO and that's fixed.

We have two goals for this release:

1. We want to offer a traditional KDE computing experience scaled to the smaller form factor. We should have a first cut at this done soon and be ready for some real testing to see what was missed.

2. Offer a really exciting and new netbook experience using the plasma-netbook shell. The pieces we need for this are still under heavy development (it looks like Kubuntu will be the first distro to release with it) and so it will arrive somewhat late and may have to be deferred to Karmic +1.

For now, please install from our new image and see if all your hardware works. I'll let you know when we're ready for more.

For now you'll need to use the GTK usb-creator, but we are also close to having both KDE and Windows USB creator variants.

Posted by Scott Kitterman at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

When I was growing up, this was the advertising slogan of the "Yellow pages". This was (is) the business telephone directory put out by the local telephone company throughout the US (I have no idea how localized the term Yellow Pages is, so I explain, just in case).

Recently I had an immediate need for a horse riding helmet for one of our daughters. The need was immediate because she was leaving for camp the next day.

This is not the kind of thing I normally purchase and I've only lived in this area for a few years, so I had no idea where to go. Without giving it a lot of thought, I fired up Google Local and found a great specialty shop close to our house. I had no idea it was there because it was on the back side of a small shopping center that I didn't know had a back side.

While we were there, I had a nice chat with the owner and mentioned I'd found the store via Google and his web site. He mentioned that he gets a lot of new customers that way. He's recently decided to cancel all his "Yellow Pages" advertising. He said he views it as a waste of money. His web site is a lot less expensive and works much better. His comment about "Yellow Pages" was something like "No one uses it anymore".

This got me thinking. I have a current copy. The telephone company delivers it every year. I can't remember the last time I actually used it instead of going online.

This seems like another small industry that is just going to go away. I hadn't thought of this one before.

Posted by Scott Kitterman at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)