The Dell Mini 10v ships with BCM4312 wireless. As a result it needs restricted drivers for wifi to work. On the Kubuntu Netbook Remix ISO we included everything needed to get the Broadcom STA driver installed and working. Unfortunately, Jockey doesn't know where to find the driver when the install is from USB.

After install you need to make a few adjustments. Leave the USB device you installed from in after the first reboot.

First add the device to /etc/apt/sources.list. The line to be added will look somewhat like:

deb file:///media/disk/ lucid main restricted

where media/disk is the path to your device

Then fire up jockey (Hardware Drivers under system). It should show you two options for driver install. You want to install the STA driver.

Once jockey is finished, you should have wifi.

So that solves the "you must have internet to get internet" Catch-22.

It's fortunate I was at UDS when this happened, I was able to talk to several different people and lay out a plan to fix this for Maverick.

http://lurker.clamav.net/message/20100507.110656.573e90d7.en.html

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The choice of venue was personally interesting to me in a way that (like my last UDS in Prague) I had not anticipated. As many of you will know already, a long time ago (in what seems almost like a different life) I was in the US Navy. I spent Christmas 1991 and New Years Day 1992 in Barcelona.

For those of you to young to remember, January 1, 1992 was a day that marked a significant change in the world. It was the first day in roughly 75 years in which there was no Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). We had heard the news that this was happening, but many of us wondered how much of this was real change and how much of this was cosmetic.

At the pier across from us there was a merchant ship of the former USSR. I still remember coming topside and being surprised to see there were already sailors up on the ship's stack with a cutting torch cutting the hammer and sickle of the USSR down off their ship. That was the moment when it really hit me that the world had changed in a way that really couldn't be reversed.

There is a connection to Ubuntu here too, beyond the physical location of UDS. Whatever your opinion of my country (I'll tell you in advance I don't intend to have a debate about it's goodness/badness and will not publish comments either way), I felt I was there making a sacrifice in the service of freedom. In that time and place it was the best way I knew how to do it. Today I do stuff like take an unpaid week off of work and go to UDS to help make Ubuntu better. This is also done in the service of freedom.

There are a lot of people all over the world who don't want others to be free. Keep in mind that what we do in Ubuntu is part of a larger struggle to make sure these people do not succeed when considering if it's worth it to do one more bug triage, patch fix, or whatever it is you do to make Ubuntu better.

Fundamentally it looks like I'll be able to get rid of all the systray stuff i don't care to see just using that. So that's pretty cool. I just wish I'd remembered before I put the time into writing that last night. Ugh.

In preparation for UDS Karmic I decided to take a look at my Kubuntu 9.04 systray (as well as a few systray like items that in KDE 4.2 aren't or can't be in the actual systray). It looks like this:

I also experimented with removing some of these items to see how I experienced it.

Moving from left to right:

USB stick/SD card (Device notifier) - I don't see any need for this to be on the panel/systray by default at all. Make a appearance when you've got a device to notify about.

Sound (Kmix) - I rarely need this. I've got multimedia keys on my laptop (and they work - including the notifications about volume setting). This could easily be somewhere else, less readily available. It certainly doesn't need to be visible in the systray at all times for everyone.

Display (X Resize and Rotate) - I think I've only ever used this when setting up my laptop to work with a projector. I have a vague recollection of this only being started by default as a workaround for a bug, but don't quote me on that. I definitely don't need to see it.

Passwords (Kwallet) - I am sometimes vaguely interested in if the wallet is open or not, but I virtually never click on it. Generally if something needs access to the wallet the application asks for it. No need for this on the systray.

IRC (Quassel) - I click on this on all the time. Sometimes it's just to get to IRC to see what's up, sometimes I right click on the icon to connect to Quassel's core component), and when I want to get to a channel where I was highlighted, if I don't click on the notification action, I can click on the Quassel icon to get to the correct channel quickly and easily. I would not want this to be harder to get to.

RSS (aKrogator) - I click on this pretty regularly to read feeds when I'm taking a break from working on something. This is useful. It's not just for getting to read feeds, but also for triggering manual checks for updates. I could live with this being two clicks away, but like it in the systray.

Clipboard (Klipper) - I use this all the time. It's a great thing to have and the systray is a lovely place for it.

Email (Kmail) - I use this very regularly to get to Kmail. I have a lot of windows open and finding the one that's Kmail is hard. If I can click on the systray icon and get to it, it's very handy. I do not use notifications for mail, I don't even pay much attention to the number on the icon, I mostly just need a quick way to get to kmail. If the icon weren't reliably in the systray, that would a step back for me.

Network (Plasma Widget Network Management) - I really don't care about this much beyond am I connected. I could live without seeing this if I got notified on disconnect (currenlty I just get connection notifications).

Battery (Plasma Widget Battery Monitor) - I moved the battery from the panel onto the desktop where I don't see it unless I minimize everything (i.e. almost never unless I explicitly look). I found that the battery low/battery warning notifications were generally sufficient. Until after the battery warning notification I almost never looked. Afterwards I tended to peak at it fairly regularly. Based on this, I don't see a need for direct access, just an easy way to get to it once the battery was low. For bonus points it might appear in the systray after the battery hit warning level.

So once I got through looking at what systray and systray like items I was interested in, I was left with wanting something that contained an easy way to get to the things that had been removed and this:

Jordan Mantha's message on the Ayatana mailing list is what got me thinking about this. Having looked at my own needs, despite using a different desktop environment, they appear similar. "system-to-user" indications are a fruitful place to find opportunity to reduce the footprint of systray/notification area. I'd be interested to see Ayatana take this on.

Clamav 0.95 appeared late in the Jaunty development cycle, but with help from the other members of the Clamav Update Team and the Debian Clamav Packaging Project we got not only Clamav 0.95.1 into Jaunty, but all the reverse dependencies updated and tested.

There were a few glitches in the clamav-milter packaging and some additions to the apparmor profile that have been fixed in post-release updates. I think we have a solid clamav package in Jaunty now.

At the same time we were working to test and integrate clamav 0.95.x in Jaunty, we were also working to finish testing 0.94.2 for Dapper and Hardy. We also got that done, so the version that Intrepid released with is available for Dapper/Hardy/Intrepid (and has been patched to deal with all known post-release security issues).

Finally, we've prepared packages to test backporting clamav 0.95.1 to all supported releases. They are in the ubuntu-clamav PPA. Once we get these tested we'll get them into the official backports repository. If you test these packages, please mark your results on the team wiki.

If you're interested in helping out, do some testing and apply to join the team.

I'm very happy with it and report that I feel a lot more relaxed about responding to notifications from Quassel. If I want to respond to an notification after it's already disappeared, I just click on Quassel's systray icon and I get right there.

Anyone who wants to try it out can upgrade from my PPA. This update includes the patch for that and another dealing with correctly setting notification timeouts. Some users who use Quassel outside of a KDE environment have mentioned that notifications didn't go away and had to be manually dismissed. I'm interested to hear if this patch makes a difference.

This patches and a number of other bug fixes will be out shortly in Quassel 0.4.2. Once it's released and I get it pacakged for Karmic, I'll also get it into jaunty-backports for people who want to try it without upgrading their entire system.

Back in January, what I showed you was not a KDE notification. It was generated by Qt and provided by (I think) the standard libnotify (Canonical's notify-osd did not exist yet). It wasn't at all pretty in a KDE environment, but it worked. I got a notification and, if I wanted, I clicked on it and Quassel appeared. If I didn't, it went away. Things were functional, if not pretty.

I week later we activated the then experimental KDE integration for Quassel and things went initally downhill. I was still running Intrepid with KDE 4.1 and the KDE Plasma notifications in KDE 4.1 were ugly and they were persistent (plus the action to click on them stopped working). Having to manually dismiss all the notifications was a real annoyance. This is one aspect of notifications upon which I completely agree with Mark Shuttleworth.

Once I upgraded to KDE 4.2, things got good again. Not only did notifications start going away on their own, but the Quassel developers figured out the problem with integrating actions via KNotification. The result, I think is extremely usable and visually appealing:

The part that makes this notification just killer for me though is not just the action, but that when I click on View, not only does it take me to Quassel, it takes me to the channel that triggered the notification. I've used IRC with no notifications (just a flashing icon in the systray), with non-interactive notificaitons, with notifications that just took me to the right application, and now with notifications that take me to the right channel. This is far and away the best I've had so far.

To give credit where it is due, now that I have an application with a really useful notification action, I start to see, a little bit, Mark Shuttleworth's point about actions on notifications creating a "weighty obligation to act". The trick being that I have to get to it before it goes away to be useful. I don't at all agree that taking the action away is a good thing. While this could be better, I'm very glad to have it.

I've already followed up with the Quassel developers and they've added a solution to this problem to their feature plan for their next release. Their responsiveness to feedback that I blogged about in January continues. The solution is in their systray icon. Currently (like most applications) it just raises and lowers the application window when you click on it. For the next release, if Quassel is not on top, it will remember where your last notification came from and take you there. Once that's in place, the rush is gone.

KNotification is working effectively throughout KDE 4.2. The progress dialogue when you copy files is a notification. When you click on a link that opens a new window, it's a notification:

All in all, KDE made a huge step forward in notifications in KDE 4.2 and I'm very happy to see it. One of the interesting aspects of the design is that while transient notifications can exist for varying lengths of time (for example until the file copy is complete), they only stay maximized for a short period. If they still exist, but aren't maximized they get their own systray icon (A nice stylized i - for information, I guess):

I'm quite pleased with the progress made in KDE 4.2. I'm interested to see how the new systray protocol in KDE 4.3 evolves and is integrated with the notification system for the Karmic Koala.