Elizabeth Krumbach: Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Gema Gomez-Solano: I love good software and computers. When I was at high school, and I watched the film Sneakers, I decided to become a Computer Engineer. I admired those computer wizards who could do almost anything with a keyboard. I really wanted to be part of a group that could do cool things with technology, no matter how complicated.

I studied Computer Engineering in Barcelona, Spain; a Master equivalent degree at the Catalonia Polytechnic University. After finishing university, I was hired by a security company in Barcelona to do security audits and assessments.

In 2004, given my security background, I was offered a role in London as a Test Engineer at Symbian within the security team. This was my first time working at an English company, and in an international environment. We had teams in the UK and India, and later in China. Testing an operating system was one of the most complex and enlightening experiences of my career. I grew as a tester and as a QA engineer during the first years there. The security team moved to Cambridge and I decided to stay in London doing integration testing within the kernel team.

Then, in 2007, Symbian decided they wanted to build a strong System Test team, and offered me the Technology Architect position for that team. We built a technically strong test team who changed the quality of the OS visibly and for good. It felt great to see that project develop after all the battles that we had to fight to make it happen.

Then Nokia took over Symbian, and announced it was going to become open-source. After spending 9 months helping the team to integrate in the new organisation, I decided to take some time off to rethink my career to find the next challenge. I had seen the team grow and establish itself as a smoothly running testing team, so my job there felt done and I was eager to find a new project that I could help develop and build.

As my next challenge I took up an opportunity to join VMware in London. I did API testing for almost a year with them but it didn’t really feel like the challenge I had been seeking. So I kept trying to find what I was looking for, and that’s how I came across Canonical and the Ubuntu project. It was an operating system; it was in need of testing if it was to become the predominant OS. And, most importantly, it was a chance to collaborate with a great community from around the globe. This opportunity got my attention instantly, and, when I was offered the QA Engineer position, I didn’t hesitate.

Five months and one UDS down the line, it still feels good and lots of things are starting to happen within the Canonical Platform QA team and within the community in terms of QA. I enjoy seeing how my work has a direct impact on a system used by millions worldwide. I would like to see Ubuntu become the operating system everyone uses and that comes with every computer that is sold. Most importantly, I personally would like to see the QA work that we are doing for Ubuntu become a de facto standard in terms of quality assurance and good testing practices.

EK: How and when did you first get involved with open-source?

GG: The first time I thought about open-source as a way of making software was when I was told Symbian was becoming opensource. We had to think about how to make our code available to everyone, as well as keeping the continuous integration and testing of the code going. That was the first time I really thought about the concept of open-source, and realised how powerful the idea is.

My partner has been a developer of an open-source project, Dragonfly BSD, for some time now. I have seen him work on that project, and interact with its community, for years. He tried to convince me to do testing for them – but I was so busy with my day-to-day work that I never had enough quality time to dedicate to that.

So my first real taste of opensource, and being part of a community, has been with Canonical and the Ubuntu Project. I am learning to work with the community and to bounce ideas back and forth until they become work items and get implemented. Initially, the QA list felt somewhat lifeless, and the community was a bit stuck on what it was doing. Not much collaboration was going on so we split some of the tasks our team was doing this cycle, and made them available to the community. We’ve raised the awareness of testing, and plenty of community members have started to collaborate with us, and a lot of discussions are going on at the moment regarding the future of QA in Ubuntu. All geared towards taking the quality of Ubuntu to the next level.

I have also started talking to the Mozilla QA team regarding a test case management tool (Case Conductor) they are creating that we would like to use for Ubuntu as well. They are keen on collaborating, and would like to gather requirements from us so that the tool is fit for purpose for Ubuntu, too. We will soon be involved in beta-testing and other collaboration with the Mozilla team on this tool. So inter-community collaboration is something I am exploring at the moment.

EK: What is your role within the Ubuntu Project?

GG: I started working for the Platform QA team at Canonical back in August, and I have been watching the project during the final stages of Oneiric Ocelot as well as learning more about Linux and the community.

I wrote a high level strategy of what I think needs to happen in the coming 2 years for our quality levels to rise significantly. The plan was well received at the management team, and we got a green light to start implementing it. I have since moved to be the technical lead of the Platform QA team. We are currently working on putting the right tools in place so that developers can act on the important defects as soon as they are found. The Daily ISO testing is already following this principle, and its quality is improving noticeably as we speak. We are keeping track of the defects we find as part of our testing efforts, and of the defects we didn’t find but are found later in the development cycle, so that we can improve the testing of future releases. Our overall aim is to build a solid automated testing suite as soon as we have the basics in place.

We changed the format of the meeting to make it more QA focussed, splitting it from the Bug Control meeting. Now both groups have different times to meet and discuss their issues and progress, and we have a set of tasks that community members are contributing to, with the aim of improving the quality of Ubuntu. I am driving and coordinating this effort at the moment, but this is not going to be my focus going forward since there will be a QA Community Coordinator with whom my team will collaborate closely and I will be just one more community contributor. The QA Platform team will be helping shape the testing effort and trying to make every little effort a worthwhile contribution to the whole. Historically, there has been little leadership in the QA front, and we are trying to bring good practices from the industry to the open-source community to improve the situation.

EK: Do you have any suggestions for others who are looking to get involved with Ubuntu and opensource in general?

GG: I think open-source is an unstoppable force that is driven by a huge worldwide community. I’d say the first step is to figure out what you want to do with your free time, then choose a project that you’d like to contribute to and see if they are in need of any of your skills; odds are they are. If you are a developer but do not want to write code in your free time, you might enjoy reviewing code or betatesting a product to find problems, or triaging some bugs. Maybe you are good at languages and want to contribute by translating the software.

Or if you enjoy breaking software, and would like to do quality assurance and testing of a particular product, and you are prepared to join a very dynamic and challenging environment, I’d like to see an email from you on our ubuntu-qa@lists.ubuntu.com list (it’s open to anyone: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-qa ). We are in the process of gathering as much help as we can get. The tasks that are being worked on at the moment at the community level for Precise are available on the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/TasksPrecise

The QA Team for Ubuntu has a weekly gathering. Feel free to attend our weekly meeting and ask questions so that you get to know the team and what each one of us is doing. It takes place every Wednesday at 17:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on freenode. We are thrilled to see new people show up and contribute. The agenda for the meetings, and details and logs of past meetings, are available here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Meetings

Originally posted by Elizabeth Krumbach in Full Circle Magazine Issue #57 on January 27, 2012

Unity is a key piece of Ubuntu, and the Unity experience in Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up to be fantastic across Desktop, TV, and Android.

Yesterday Mike blogged asking for contributors to improve our Quicklist support in the most popular apps in Ubuntu. Within the same day he had a number of awesome contributions made as a response.

I just wanted to offer thanks to our new rock-stars Nekhelesh Ramananthan, Trenton Fox, Prateek Karandikar, and David Baucum who were the first folks to make contributions. Thanks for making the Ubuntu experience even smoother and more integrated.

Mike has since blogged sharing the other most popular apps that need Quicklists; be sure to help if you can…you don’t need to be a coder to contribute. Find out how to contribute here. You can get help for how to participate in #ubuntu-unity on Freenode IRC, and feel free to ask questions in the comments here and Mike and I will help.

You folks will be hearing more and more from Mike over the coming weeks and months about ways in which everyone can help to make Ubuntu that little bit more streamlined, integrated, and enjoyable. Our community is our backbone, and thanks again to Nekhelesh, Trenton, Prateek, and David for being such great examples of this.

Howdy!

I’d like to officially state (for the record) that it is my intent to apply to become a Debian Developer within the next $TIMEFRAME.

Currently soliciting advice and opinions before nm.d.o comes back online

It’s a big step, but it’s a natural one.

Gametime?

Hey so I totally messed this up because I thought it was a good geeky meme but I failed you all. In the past people mixed up Jonathan Lange with Jono Bacon. This is because they both went by “jono”. How we dealt with this as a project was that Jono Bacon was just “jono”, and then Jono Lange was “evil jono”. But then Jono Lange lost all this weight and became unrecognizable. And he wasn’t really evil, he’s actually pretty great. And Bacon listened to metal, so you could make the argument that he was the evil one. So we tried other iterations like “metal jono” vs. “new zealand jono who really lives in London but whatever”. None of those really stuck.

Since we know Lange is a huge Game of Thrones fan, I started calling him “The Greatjon” at the last sprint. People thought this was cute at the sprint, but unfortunately I forgot to tell people outside of the room, my fault for not being transparent. Here’s the real character, and while I feel Evil Jono really doesn’t fit the personality of this character I think it would be awesome to have a random title like this for someone in the project, it would certainly make meetings more interesting, especially when you do IRC meetings in the context of the books.

Think about it, what if meetings went from this:

Hey Jono, when do you think this feature will land in the Software Center?

to this:

Hey Jono, whom they call the Greatjon, when do you think this feature will land in the Software Center?

I know right, I suspect the Langaseks are going to have fun with this. I realize that we could just refer to them by normal social factors like last name or whatever, but what’s the fun in that? Also, this will be awesome, I was just looking for an excuse to talk about Season 2.

I work with a team, the Ubuntu Foundations team, that has an interest in a lot of source packages and naturally bugs reported about those packages. To track all these packages we have setup a team in Launchpad, the foundations-bugs team, and subscribed them to the packages we care for and setup a mailing list to receive bug mail. Launchpad also provides us with a report that shows us some bug numbers, but this just shows information about where the bug tasks are as a whole. I wanted to find out which packages are receiving bug tasks right now and if that bug volume is abnormal for the package. (Some packages will always be receiving lots of bug reports.)

To this end I’ve created created a chart, using the packages the foundations-bugs team are subscribed to, that displays the quantity of bug tasks opened in the past 7 days and the past 14 days. Additionally, the bug tasks for a package are classified by their reporting method. (When a bug is reported by apport it is tagged differently depending on the type e.g. if it is a crash the bug is tagged apport-crash.) This information allows us to tell if a particular package is receiving a lot of crashes or package installation failures, which is more important than a lot of tasks tagged ubuntu-bug.

Looking at the above screenshot we can see that casper is having a spike in bug reporting activity as the bar length for the 7 day and the 14 day period are equal. This likely has something to do with the 10.04.4 testing that was going on but is worth investigating. grub2 also seems to have a large number of apport-package bugs which also should be investigated. The chart makes this really easy as each section of the bar takes you to a Launchpad search for all bug tasks about that package with the relevant tag. Additionally, the package name is also a link for all the bugs about the package.

I’ve made the same chart for the desktop, server and ubuntu-x-swat teams. If you have a team that is subscribed to Ubuntu packages I’m happy to make one for you too. Additionally, there are also charts for every package set in Precise so one of those might have a list of packages in which you are interested.

I would like to open up Ubuntu Accomplishments to a little wider testing. Please note a few caveats:

• You need to be running Ubuntu 12.04 to test this.
• This is still a work in progress; there will be bugs.

Please follow the instructions at here for how to install. If you have questions feel free to ping me on IRC (I am jono and I am around in #ubuntu-community-team most of the time).

If you find a bug (and you probably will!), the bug will either be in software itself or one of the accomplishments. Please file bugs using the following links:

• Bugs in the daemon and app – file bugs here
• Bugs in the Ubuntu Accomplishments set – file bugs here

If you are unsure, just file bugs here.

There is a lot of work going on each day on this, so please be sure to update your branches each day (until we start releasing packages). You can do this with:

cd ubuntu-accomplishments-system
bzr pull

cd ubuntu-community-accomplishments
bzr pull

Thanks!

Writing Accomplishments – Volunteers Needed!

There are only a few accomplishments available in the system right now. The goal here is that accomplishments should be about new experiences. I would like to avoid things such as “50 posts to a bug report” or “500 posts to a forum“; those could be achieved by repeating meaningless content to get the numbers up. I would rather focus on new experiences such as “I have become an Ubuntu Member“, or “I got my first uploaded accepted“.

Writing accomplishments just requires a little knowledge of launchpadlib and Python for Ubuntu Accomplishments, or you can write accomplishments for other projects where you can query a web service.

If you are interested in writing some accomplishments to plug into the system, please see this page and the video tutorial at here.

Thanks!

Since almost all of recommended packages in my original post have been tackled already thanks to Nekhelesh Ramananthan and David Baucum, here’s a new list for those of you who are still itching to knock a few out.

This list contains some of the most popular downloads from the Ubuntu Software Center that don’t have a Quicklist in Precise.  Not all of them will have useful command line options to make shortcuts for, so if you run across one of those just mention it in the comments and I’ll take it off the list.

Available

• audacity
• filezilla
• compizconfig-settings-manager
• cheese
• adobe-flashplugin
• libreoffice-writer
• emesene
• smplayer
• k3b
• audacious
• wesnoth-1.8
• blender
• stellarium
• supertuxkart
• calibre
• virtualbox-ose
• eclipse

Done

• firefox done!
• rhythmbox done!
• pidgin done!
• remmina done!
• ubuntuone-control-panel done!

Not Available

• vlc doesn’t support command line options
• skype does not support command line options
• gparted only supports 1 commandline option which is useless
• gtk-recordmydesktop does not support command line options
• openshot only supports 1 commandline option which is useless

Jorge Castro has also linked to an AskUbuntu page that lists many pre-made Quicklists for various apps that just need to be made in a bzr branch and turned into a merge proposal, which is another great and simple way to contribute to Ubuntu.

Just a quick note to say we’re coming back with a brand new season of the Ubuntu UK Podcast Live on 28th February 2012, with the download available the following day!

Check the calendar for all this season’s episode dates.

Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Leave us some segment ideas on the Etherpad
Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode
Leave a voicemail via phone: +44 (0) 203 298 1600, sip: podcast@sip.ubuntu-uk.org and skype: ubuntuukpodcast
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Follow us on Google Plus

Just a quick note to say we’re coming back with a brand new season of the Ubuntu UK Podcast Live on 28th February 2012, with the download available the following day!

Check the calendar for all this season’s episode dates.
Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode
Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Leave us some segment ideas on the Etherpad
Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode
Leave a voicemail via phone: +44 (0) 203 298 1600, sip: podcast@sip.ubuntu-uk.org and skype: ubuntuukpodcast
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Follow us on Google Plus

March 3rd, the Ubuntu Catalan community celebrates Ubuntu Global Jam in Barcelona.

We plan to carry on with these activities:

• Translation Marathon with Catalan Translation Team members.
• Bug triage: we’ll assess bugs to determine whether or not they have enough information to be worked on and assign a priority to them as soon as possible. You’ll need some English skills so you can communicate with the user reporting the bug.

We’ll be on #ubuntu-cat for those not avaliable to travel and I will be on #ubuntu-locoteams for some chat.

You can do that too

Never run a Jam in your town? Why not try to start one, even if few people can attend? You can find support in a variety of places, including irc sessions. Most of them have already been done, but you can read the whole sessions online.

After the first Ubuntu Global Jam organized by our local community six months ago, it’s time to announce the second one. This time the media team has prepared a nice video sequence* to announce this event. See you on 2, 3 and 4 March at the National School of Engineers of Gabes.
(*) The video is in Tunisian dialect: from Arabic mixed with French.

Après le premier Ubuntu Global Jam organisé par notre communauté locale il y a 6 mois, il est temps d’annoncer le second. Cette fois l’équipe média a préparée une belle séquence vidéo* pour annoncer cet événement. Rendez-vous donc le 2, 3 et 4 Mars à l’École Nationale des Ingénieurs de Gabes.
(*) La vidéo est en dialecte Tunisien : de l’arabe mixé avec le français.

Last night I posted about how non-developers can directly contribute to the Unity desktop experience, and this morning I was greated by not one, but two contributions already made by Nekhelesh Ramananthan.

First he added player controls to Totem, then he added shortcuts for Update Manager and PPA management to the Software Center launcher. That is some awesome work.

Thanks Nekhelesh!

First for those who do not know it yet: since start of February I am happily working for the free software (open source) project ownCloud. My main tasks are to integrate ownCloud into other products, for example into the Univention Corporate Server (short UCS).

As the ownCloud project will stay under the AGPL, there will be no secret code behind. The basic integration consists of creating a UCS package which nicely installs into the server and does auto-configuration and joining the environment. The goal: after installing ownCloud via package management it is instantly available for the users. That means, the setup procedure runs automatically and the LDAP module will be configured, so that users may login directly after installation.

Utilizing LDAP and Management Console

To take advantage of the capabilities of UCS with their LDAP backbone and registry, it will be possible to manage attributes via LDAP. In order to do so we registered our own PEN at the IANA. Thus we are able to define our own scheme and configure e.g. ownCloud specific user settings using this backend. With the capsulation into our own scheme the utilization of LDAP is not bound to UCS.

In the next steps, we are going to make reasonable parts of ownCloud being configurable from the Univention Management Console, the web administration interface of UCS. Basically, we aim to enable you to administer ownCloud from the web interface, without logging into it as „local“ admin.

Since the development is being done in the public, the package code is available in our „integration“-repository on Gitorious. To build the package, you need to copy the recent ownCloud source files into the package folder. A simple „dpkg-buildpackage“ should do the trick, given you have sufficient UCS packaging tools installed.

Demo at CeBIT

I hope that we can see already a very good amount of it at the CeBIT, 6th to 10th March in Hannover, Germany. If you are there, come by at our booth at Univenation in Hall 2, booth D48!

“Ubuntu Awareness at ICT Day 2012″

From Ubuntu Malaysia LoCo Team @ KMPP, posted by Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman on 2/21/2012 (27 items)

Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher

Yes, we really want an Ubuntu computer (Maybe on the shop?)

Ubuntu MINI computer mockup

By Lucas Romero Di Benedetto.

Ubuntu Hour is a chance to meet up for an hour and chat with other Ubuntu users. The meeting is open to anyone interested whether they use Ubuntu or not, and everyone’s welcome with no commitments or RSVPs. It’s definitely a good opportunity to bring along friends who are curious about Ubuntu.

Not only is it fun to meet local Ubuntu fans, but we can also be a valuable introduction to Ubuntu for others. Wear that cool Ubuntu or Linux shirt or bring your laptop with the Ubuntu stickers, if you have them. We’ll also follow the Ubuntu Code of Conduct while we’re there. Easily summarized as “be excellent to each other,” it means that we’ll be good examples of the wonderful Ubuntu community.

The latest information, including locations and times, is always available at http://www.nhaines.com/ubuntu/hour/

Upcoming dates

• Thursday, February 23, 2012, 6pm – 7pm
• Thursday, March 8, 2012, 6pm – 7pm

Location

Panera Bread (Yelp) (Google Maps)

23592 Rockfield Blvd.
Lake Forest, CA 92618</a>

Panera Bread is a casual restaurant that has fresh bread, soups, and sandwiches and free wi-fi access. We’re the group with a laptop or two and some Ubuntu logos, so please feel free to come up and say hi.

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20120221 Meeting Agenda