[124001190010] |<title>The Heron takes flight</title>
[124001190020] |Hearty <strong>congratulations to the entire Ubuntu community</strong> on the successful launch of 8.04 LTS.
[124001190030] |This was our best release cycle ever, from the planning at UDS-Boston last year, at which we had many different teams and companies, to the beta process which attracted so much in the way of testing and patches.
[124001190040] |I think we can be justifiably proud of the quality of 8.04 LTS.
[124001190050] |From the code to the documentation, from translations to advocacy, this has been a team effort with the shared goal of delivering the very best free software experience to the very widest possible audience.
[124001190060] |May Hardy be both enduring and endearing.
[124001190070] |I’m very conscious of the fact that Ubuntu is the pointy edge of a very large wedge –we are the conduit, but we exist only because of the extraordinary dedication and effort of thousands of other communities and projects.
[124001190080] |We all <strong>owe a great deal to the team who make Debian’s “unstable” repository</strong> possible, and of course to the upstream projects from <strong>GNOME and KDE through to the Linux kernel</strong>.
[124001190090] |We hope you will be proud of the condition in which we have carried your excellent work through to the users of Ubuntu.
[124001190100] |So, well done everybody!
[124001190110] |I hope that friends, family, colleagues and others will have the opportunity to try it out and understand why we have all devoted so much to this project.
[124001190120] |Our work is deeply important –we are helping to bring free software to a new level of acceptance and adoption in the wider world.
[124001190130] |Ubuntu’s success adds to the success of free software.
[124001190140] |So as much as it is fun, challenging, the opportunity of a lifetime, a profession for some and a passion for others, it’s also changing the world.
[124001190150] |I don’t exactly want to shout “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” but to me you are all Heroes.
[124001190160] |Mark
[124001230010] |<title>Interview with Linux-Magazine Italia</title>
[124001230020] |<a>Vincenzo Ciaglia</a> from <a>Linux-Magazine Italia</a> sent me a few questions related to the release of 8.04 LTS.
[124001230030] |Since he was going to translate the conversation into Italian this week, he was happy for me to blog the English version here.
[124001230040] |<strong>1) Hi Mark, thank you for your availability.
[124001230050] |Some simple questions to introduce you to our readers to start.
[124001230060] |What’s your role at Ubuntu/Canonical and what do you do in your spare time?
[124001230070] |What are your hobbies?</strong>
[124001230080] |My favourite sport is snowboarding, and I enjoy travel to tropical spots.
[124001230090] |But ultimately I’m happiest when I’m being a geek, reading, playing games or relaxing with friends.
[124001230100] |<strong>2) You’re the founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.
[124001230110] |Why do you decided to invest a lot of dollars (10$ million) to start up the company?
[124001230120] |In which fields does it work to make its business?
[124001230130] |How do you make the company sustainable? </strong>
[124001230140] |The vision of Ubuntu and Canonical is a symbiotic one.
[124001230150] |We believe that Linux has grown to the point where it is possible to build the platform at a low enough cost to make it sustainable purely though services around it, rather than through licensing the platform.
[124001230160] |In other words, we think that support, training, online services, and professional engineering for people who want to adapt Ubuntu commercially will earn enough money to pay for Ubuntu itself.
[124001230170] |That means that we can fundamentally change the business model of the OS industry.
[124001230180] |Of course, it till take time to prove that we can achieve this, but we have a superb team and now that Ubuntu is well established we see increasing demand for services from Canonical, which is positive.
[124001230190] |<strong>3) Ok, let’s talk about the latest Ubuntu 8.04.
[124001230200] |<a>In an interview</a> you said that “Hardy Heron is your most significant release ever”.
[124001230210] |Well, can you talk about the main improvements of this release?</strong>
[124001230220] |First, this is an LTS (“Long Term Support”) release that was delivered on a very precise schedule.
[124001230230] |Six months ago we committed to shipping 8.04 LTS on April 24th, and we did exactly that.
[124001230240] |As far as I know, nobody has ever shipped an “enterprise class” OS release on a schedule that precise.
[124001230250] |And not only did we do that, but we have now committed to ship the next LTS in April 2010, it will be 10.04 LTS, and we’ll set the exact date six months in advance like we did with this one.
[124001230260] |It is thanks to Debian and the free software community that it is possible for us to do this.
[124001230270] |So 8.04 LTS has proven our ability to deliver not just 18-month-supported releases on time, but also LTS releases on time.
[124001230280] |We very much hope that other distributions will follow our lead on the LTS cycle with their enterprise releases, because that will make it easier for us all to collaborate, and make all the major Linux distributions better.
[124001230290] |Second, there are very significant new developments for Ubuntu itself.
[124001230300] |On the server, we worked with HP on their Proliant range, and with Dell on their PowerEdge range, to ensure that 8.04 LTS will be compatible with their popular x86 servers.
[124001230310] |We’re not yet certified, but we are sure that it will “Just Work”.
[124001230320] |Sun Microsystems has gone further, and has actually certified 8.04 LTS on a range of their x86 servers.
[124001230330] |This is a major step forward for Ubuntu on the server.
[124001230340] |We see an amazing amount of usage now for Ubuntu on the server – it’s the most popular server platform for several ISV’s.
[124001230350] |So it’s important that we work with server vendors, and server solution vendors.
[124001230360] |We’ve also put a lot of work into the use of KVM and VMWare virtualisation, because we see people building hundreds of virtual appliances on Ubuntu.
[124001230370] |On the desktop, we have focused on making it easier to install Ubuntu, especially on a machine which already has Windows, where you can now install Ubuntu into a file on the Windows partition instead of having to resize your Windows partition to make a new partition for Ubuntu.
[124001230380] |That makes it much easier for people to test out Ubuntu, and hence to get a taste of free software.
[124001230390] |We have also worked on many of the common things that people want to do with their PC, such as work with photos and music, and started to improve the user experience there.
[124001230400] |<strong>4) There are still some hardware issues (especially with some wireless devices) in Ubuntu.
[124001230410] |How do you think to solve these kind of problems and improve hardware support in the next releases? </strong>
[124001230420] |We are increasingly able to work directly with the hardware manufacturers, to try and convince them to develop free software drivers for their hardware.
[124001230430] |Our relationships with different PC companies mean that we can lobby strongly for people to embrace Linux, properly.
[124001230440] |We also work very hard to tie together all the ugly pieces of string that are needed to make the user experience of Linux on your hardware a pleasant one.
[124001230450] |Unfortunately, for example, there are multiple different wireless stacks, for example, with different capabilities.
[124001230460] |And Ubuntu spends a lot of time integrating and debugging them to try and create a harmonious, standardised experience for end-users.
[124001230470] |<strong>5) What kind of improvements Ubuntu 8.04 bring to server and virtualization solutions? </strong>
[124001230480] |Ubuntu Server Edition brings all the wonderful characteristics of Debian to the front – it’s modular, efficient, has a huge package selection, and is easy to install and manage.
[124001230490] |In addition, we’ve done a lot of work with server manufacturers to ensure compatibility with their popular hardware, and have started certifying with some of them.
[124001230500] |Our virtualisation offering is based around KVM and VMWare.
[124001230510] |Out of the box, Ubuntu should give you the best possible experience with both of them.
[124001230520] |It is optimised and rigorously tested, and Ubuntu is certified on VMWare’s ESX Server platform.
[124001230530] |KVM, the free software virtualisation option we prefer, is built in to our standard server kernel, so you can get started with virtualisation immediately.
[124001230540] |There is also a Xen kernel for folks who prefer Xen.
[124001230550] |We have done a lot of work around the integration of Ubuntu servers and Windows networks, particularly in the field of Active Directory and SMB file sharing servers.
[124001230560] |We worked with a company called Likewise to make sure that there is a smooth process to join an Active Directory network, and can even manage Linux machines through AD using Likewise’ professional tools.
[124001230570] |All the capabilities to do the basic stuff are free software and built in to Ubuntu.
[124001230580] |<strong>6) A dirty question from our readers: Ubuntu is really a giant now, are you trying to kill the Debian project? </strong>
[124001230590] |Absolutely not.
[124001230600] |I’m a Debian Developer myself, and very proud of what Debian has achieved, and also proud of everything that Ubuntu contributes to the broader Debian project.
[124001230610] |We consider Ubuntu to be a member of the Debian family, that’s just purely focused on the specific use cases and platforms that our customers want.
[124001230620] |Much of what we do in Ubuntu contributes directly to Debian.
[124001230630] |We lead the packaging of many important pieces of the desktop, and server, and toolchain, and contribute that work directly to Debian.
[124001230640] |As a result, Debian is updated much faster these days than it used to be without Ubuntu.
[124001230650] |We have lead many key transitions and always try to collaborate with the relevant people upstream AND in Debian to ensure that the work flows smoothly into those projects.
[124001230660] |Most DD’s are very happy to collaborate, but some view Ubuntu as a threat, and refuse to collaborate, or make unreasonable demands on Ubuntu because they think “you have money” when in fact most of Ubuntu is volunteer driven.
[124001230670] |My vision is that Debian and Ubuntu both grow stronger through good collaboration.
[124001230680] |I’m trying to have a keynote accepted at DebConf to help make that vision a reality, but so far have had no luck in getting approval.
[124001230690] |Hopefully, the leadership of Debian will start to come around tot he idea that Ubuntu’s success is very good for Debian.
[124001230700] |<strong>7) You’re working with embedded devices and electronics company.
[124001230710] |In which way?
[124001230720] |What is you work in the tight partnership with Intel? </strong>
[124001230730] |Linux is increasingly used by embedded solution providers, and many of them want to use Ubuntu.
[124001230740] |So we are working with Intel to make sure that Ubuntu fully supports their low-power hardware (cpu’s, chipsets, graphics and so on).
[124001230750] |<strong><img/>Ubuntu surely is the most used and appreciated GNU/Linux distribution in the world.
[124001230760] |But, do you think that Ubuntu Linux will reach – one day – the success of other operating systems like OS X and Windows?
[124001230770] |In which way do you think to accomplish a similar goal? </strong>
[124001230780] |I do believe that free software will come to be widely recognised, trusted and used by everyday computer users, as opposed to being limited to specialists as it is today.
[124001230790] |Hopefully Ubuntu will play a part in that, but I don’t think one platform will dominate that free software era like Windows dominated the proprietary software era.
[124001230800] |Ubuntu is focused on specific needs, and there are other versions of Linux or BSD that meet others.
[124001230810] |In order to break out from the pack, we need to deliver a desktop experience that is exciting, that is easy to use, and which people are confident will be compatible with their future needs and with those of their colleagues.
[124001230820] |<strong>9) Everybody talk about GNU/Linux but seems that not so many peoples trust Linux for now (some statistics talk about 0.xx% of the Linux world usage).
[124001230830] |What is the problem?
[124001230840] |Nevertheless Ubuntu is really a great operating system.
[124001230850] |Do you think it’s just a matter of marketing or because the lack of game packages? </strong>
[124001230860] |I think it takes time to change the habits of hundreds of millions of people!
[124001230870] |I also think we need to deliver an experience that is simply better than the alternatives.
[124001230880] |Projects like Firefox don’t define their goal as being “a good browser”, they say “we want to be the best browser on any platform, period”, and as a result they are very popular even on Windows.
[124001230890] |We need that winning attitude everywhere.
[124001230900] |<strong>10) Canonical was the first GNU/Linux company to make a deal with a computer vendor, Dell.
[124001230910] |How is going your business now?
[124001230920] |The curious thing is that on IdeaStorm a lot of users asked for Linux Computers but after some months seems that the sales aren’t so good, or at least not as expected.
[124001230930] |Why?
[124001230940] |Maybe GNU/Linux is not ready for the consumer market yet? </strong>
[124001230950] |I agree that the more people actually buy systems with Linux pre-installed, the faster things like hardware support will be addressed.
[124001230960] |Fortunately, we see millions of units being shipped with Linux already, just not at the high-end of the PC business.
[124001230970] |The low-end, especially in countries like Brazil and China, is very active.
[124001230980] |Slowly, Linux is becoming a volume player.
[124001230990] |<strong>11) Are you working with other computer vendor to sell other Ubuntu-based desktops and laptops?
[124001231000] |We’re Italians and the Ubuntu-Dell computers never arrived in our country.
[124001231010] |Why Dell, and other vendor, is so shy to sell GNU/Linux computers world wide? </strong>
[124001231020] |That’s a simple matter of demand and the cost to meet it.
[124001231030] |Any PC manufacturer will take a firm view of the economics of an opportunity, and it’s healthy that they do.
[124001231040] |Until folks in Italy are really willing to buy computers with Linux pre-installed, there will not be a real market for them.
[124001231050] |I’m sure there are local providers who build good computers who will pre-install Ubuntu for you.
[124001231060] |You need to help them become big enough that the Dell’s and HP’s and Lenovo’s of the world are confident there is an opportunity that is worthwhile for them.
[124001231070] |<strong>12) What is your point of view about the the Novell-Microsoft controversial deal? </strong>
[124001231080] |There are some good intentions, and there are some bad intentions, and unfortunately they are all mixed up in that deal.
[124001231090] |On the positive side, it’s good to see Microsoft acknowledge the need for both Linux and Windows, and the need for interoperability.
[124001231100] |On the negative side, the deal only works financially because Novell and Microsoft have the same business model – licensing software for a certain price per seat.
[124001231110] |Microsoft is in an awkward position.
[124001231120] |They very much want to stop the free use of Linux, and they would like to use patents to do so, which is why they structured the deal as a notional “IP license”.
[124001231130] |But they also know that free software engineers could probably avoid any patents they raise, so they have been unwilling to state which patents they think justify such a deal.
[124001231140] |<strong>13) In a interview (http://mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=6672) you declared that “you’d love to work with Microsoft”.
[124001231150] |Do you want to make another deal following the Novell one or what? </strong>
[124001231160] |I am very happy to work with Microsoft, or any other company, to improve the state of free software and the software industry as a whole.
[124001231170] |There are many things that we can collaborate on where we have shared interests – encouraging good telecommunications policy, for example.
[124001231180] |But I will not agree to a deal like the Novell one, because I don’t think there is any IP issue in fact, and until Microsoft actually states what patents it is concerned about there is no need for us to take any action.
[124001231190] |Unfortunately for Novell, I think they have done a deal which gives them a short-term boost, at a very high long term cost.
[124001231200] |Time will tell.
[124001231210] |<strong>14) And what do you think about the OOXML standard and the Microsoft Open Promise? </strong>
[124001231220] |I don’t believe that ISO’s declaration of OOXML as a standard will actually deliver any benefit to users of Microsoft Office.
[124001231230] |They will still be using a big, bloated piece of software with no competition, that is not-quite-standards-compliant.
[124001231240] |That’s a pity.
[124001231250] |Microsoft’s customers had an opportunity to ignite real innovation in the office document space, by encouraging Microsoft to support and existing, open, well-defined document standard in ODF.
[124001231260] |But they didn’t – Microsoft managed to push enough partners and resellers into the standards process that the ISO decision did not really reflect anything other than Microsoft’s commercial interests.
[124001231270] |<strong>15) We’re getting a GNU/Linux ultramobile-lowcost-laptop everyday.
[124001231280] |What do you think about Eee PC Linux revolution? </strong>
[124001231290] |I think they are great!
[124001231300] |<strong>16) Acer, HP, MSI, Asus and much more want to join the Linux-powered UMPC market.
[124001231310] |Are you making some deals to port Ubuntu on some of these laptop? </strong>
[124001231320] |Lots of people are installing Ubuntu onto their UMPC’s, so I think it’s reasonable that some manufacturers may choose to pre-install it.
[124001231330] |It’s their decision!
[124001231340] |If you think that would be popular, then it would probably be worth encouraging them to do so.
[124001231350] |<strong>17) A lot of analysts talks about a GNU/Linux conquer on mobile market in the next few years.
[124001231360] |From smartphone to UMPC: the future is Linux.
[124001231370] |Can you talk about Ubuntu Mobile, its concept, the present and the future? </strong>
[124001231380] |Yes!
[124001231390] |Intel is driving a project called Moblin, which aims to produce a mobile software platform for handheld devices, and we’re basing Ubuntu Mobile on that.
[124001231400] |The first versions are out already, and the roadmap looks very exciting.
[124001231410] |Traditionally, it was very expensive to produce software for consumer electronic devices, because they were all specialised hardware with specialised operating systems and application development environments.
[124001231420] |We are aiming to change that – to make it so that you can build a simple .deb on x86 which can be installed on any piece of consumer electronics that uses this platform.
[124001231430] |That should greatly increase the amount of innovation we see in the mobile space.
[124001231440] |<strong>18) What do you think about your competitors?
[124001231450] |Fedora/Red Hat, openSUSE and Mandriva are doing good work as well as Ubuntu.
[124001231460] |What GNU/Linux distribution do you prefer if you couldn’t use Ubuntu? </strong>
[124001231470] |Yes, all of the distributions make contributions to the art and industry of free software.
[124001231480] |I’m very glad that lots of companies continue to invest in Linux, it makes it a much healthier and more vibrant ecosystem than it would be if just one company dominated it.
[124001231490] |So I’m very happy with the competition.
[124001231500] |If Ubuntu didn’t exist, I would use Debian.
[124001231510] |<strong>19) And what is your feeling about the latest Sun acquisition (MySQL)?
[124001231520] |Are you working with Sun to port the OpenJDK on Ubuntu? </strong>
[124001231530] |MySQL is a great company and a very good fit for Sun.
[124001231540] |I hope they are happy together and that the company will continue to produce a superb free software database.
[124001231550] |Yes, OpenJDK is part of Ubuntu 8.04 (though it is not yet at the core, and not yet the default Java environment).
[124001231560] |We hope to have 8.04 LTS fully TCK-certified in due course.
[124001231570] |And most of all we are grateful to the Sun folks for letting us package OpenJDK as a proper Ubuntu package, neatly integrated with the rest of the OS.
[124001231580] |We are aiming for a result which feels “all Java, all Ubuntu”, and I would encourage your users to try it out!
[124001231590] |Make sure “universe” is enabled on your Ubuntu machine, then type “sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk”.
[124001231600] |<strong>20) What are the next Canonical plans?
[124001231610] |Are there any interesting initiatives in progress? </strong>
[124001231620] |Of course, but this is not the right place for a press release <img/>
[124001231630] |<strong>21) Finally, do you think that GNU/Linux is “really” ready for the desktop users?
[124001231640] |In which way could be improved? </strong>
[124001231650] |Yes, I believe it is ready for SOME desktop users.
[124001231660] |If you really want a desktop that is web-oriented, then Linux is an excellent choice, with either Gnome or KDE (I’m really impressed with the work going on as part of KDE4, by the way).
[124001231670] |We know that there are millions of people using Linux today.
[124001231680] |And we are focused on solving the problems that prevent more and more people from adopting it.
[124001231690] |Free software is intrinsically a better way to build software, I believe.
[124001231700] |But we should not plan to be judged on our morals, we should expect to be judged on our software.
[124001231710] |We have to deliver something that LOOKS and FEELS better, then we can expect people to embrace it fully.
[124001231720] |And once people realise they can have something that is better AND sustainable AND comes with many freedoms, the world will be a fundamentally different place.
[124001231730] |That is our goal.
[124001231740] |<strong>22) Our interview seems to be completed.
[124001231750] |Do you have something to add for our readers?
[124001231760] |Thank you for your time and keep up the excellent work!</strong>
[124001231770] |Please participate!
[124001231780] |There are lots of ways to get involved with upstream projects or with Ubuntu.
[124001231790] |Help spread the word, or fix a bug, or translate something from the desktop into Italian!
[124001240010] |<title>Nicely handled, Thawte!</title>
[124001240020] |I was delighted to see Thawte’s elegant handling of the recent OpenSSL random number generator flaw in Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives.
[124001240030] |They offered a free replacement for anyone who was affected.
[124001240040] |Years ago, when Thawte was setup, we put a lot of effort into doing things in a way which made sense for users of ApacheSSL and similar, open-source based secure servers.
[124001240050] |I’ve not kept up with the changes at the company since it became part of VeriSign in 2000, but it’s great to see that the brand has been preserved, and that more importantly some of it’s key values have, too.
[124001250010] |<title>Ubuntu’s role in bug management for the whole free software stack</title>
[124001250020] |A distribution occupies a very specific niche in the free software ecosystem.
[124001250030] |Among other things, we need to accept some responsibility for ALL the software defects (“bugs”) that users actually experience across the entire stack.
[124001250040] |Most users don’t install their apps from upstream source tarballs, they install them from the packages provided by their distribution.
[124001250050] |So when they experience a bug, they don’t know if it’s a bug introduced by that distribution, or a bug in the underlying upstream code.
[124001250060] |They don’t know, they don’t care, and they shouldn’t have to.
[124001250070] |More often than not they will report the issue to their distribution, and the way we respond to it is important, because it represents an opportunity to make the whole ecosystem more robust.
[124001250080] |I had a lecturer who was very opposed to the use of the term “bugs”.
[124001250090] |He said that the term “bug” was a cute-sification for “nasty biting insect”, and similarly, software defects have potentially serious consequences, so we shouldn’t treat them lightly.
[124001250100] |<strong>Bug work is serious work</strong>, and it’s one of the most important forms of contribution to the digital commons that Ubuntu can make, so I’d like to salute the extraordinary efforts of the Ubuntu Quality Assurance Team and Bug Squad.
[124001250110] |Initiatives like five-a-day are already making a huge difference to our users.
[124001250120] |As <a>Henrik Omma</a> says, effective bug reporting <a>requires a diligent and professional approach</a>, and I’ve noticed a real improvement in our community.
[124001250130] |Hopefully, we can bring the benefits of that competence to the broader free software ecosystem.
[124001250140] |Ubuntu gets as many bugs reported against it as OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gnome, and KDE combined.The vast majority of those bugs are issues that exist in upstream tarball releases, or in Debian.
[124001250150] |Our primary goals should be to ensure that fixes we produce, and information we generate in the QA process, make their way upstream where they will benefit the broadest cross-section of the community.
[124001250160] |Separately, we want to ensure that each Ubuntu release ships without major issues, regardless of where those issues originated.
[124001250170] |We are responsible for the user experience of every line of code, even though we don’t produce every line of code.
[124001250180] |In the month of April 2008, I found the following bug counts for large FLOSS projects:
[124001250190] |With hindsight, April was possibly a bad choice, because it was an Ubuntu release month so there’s usually a small spike in the number of bugs filed.
[124001250200] |It would be interesting to see the stats for other distributions, and projects, over a full year.
[124001250210] |But the general picture is clear –within our family of distributions, Ubuntu carries the brunt of the load w.r.t. bug tracking, triage and patch management –not only for our users, but for a broad cross-section of the open source stack.
[124001250220] |When I delved into the data to see how we do with pushing bugs upstream, I found a somewhat mixed picture.
[124001250230] |In many cases, we do very well indeed.
[124001250240] |We have a very good relationship with GNOME, for example, with a very high percentage of bugs appropriately forwarded to the relevant upstream bug tracker.
[124001250250] |In other projects, it’s harder to make a definitive statement.
[124001250260] |The percentage varies based on whether the Ubuntu team members have good relationships upstream, or whether there’s a person acting as an ambassador from Ubuntu to upstream (this is a great way to make a difference if you care about a specific application in Ubuntu!) or whether upstream themselves have taken an interest.
[124001250270] |We need to improve the tools that support these kinds of cross-project conversations.
[124001250280] |Launchpad does currently allow us to track the status of a bug in many different bug trackers, and there are quite a few distributions and upstreams that are now either using Launchpad directly or exchanging data efficiently.
[124001250290] |We’ll keep working to improve the quality of exchange across the whole ecosystem, including those projects that don’t use Launchpad themselves
[124001260010] |<title>Economic clustering and Free Software release coordination</title>
[124001260020] |I had the opportunity to present at the <a>Linux Symposium</a> on Friday, and talked further about my hope that we can improve the coordination and cadence of the entire free software stack.
[124001260030] |I tried to present both the obvious benefits and the controversies the idea has thrown up.
[124001260040] |Afterwards, a number of people came up to talk about it further, with generally positive feedback.
[124001260050] |Christopher Curtis, for example, emailed to say that the idea of economic clustering in the motor car industry goes far further than the location of car dealerships.
[124001260060] |He writes:
[124001260070] |Firstly, every car maker releases their new models at about the same time.
[124001260080] |Each car maker has similar products –economy, sedan, light truck.
[124001260090] |They copy each other prolifically.
[124001260100] |Eventually, they all adopt a certain baseline –seatbelts, bumpers, airbags, anti-lock brakes.
[124001260110] |Yet they compete fiercely (OnStar from GM; Microsoft Sync from Ford) and people remain brand loyal.
[124001260120] |This isn’t going to change in the Linux world.
[124001260130] |Even better, relations like Debian->Ubuntu match car maker relations like Toyota->Lexus.
[124001260140] |I agree with him wholeheartedly.
[124001260150] |Linux distributions and car manufacturers are very similar: we’re selling products that reach the same basic audience (there are niche specialists in real-time or embedded or regional markets) with a similar range (desktop, workstation, server, mobile), and we use many of the same components just as the motor industry uses common suppliers.
[124001260160] |That commonality and coordination benefits the motor industry, and yet individual brands and products retain their identity.
[124001260170] |Let’s do a small thought experiment.
[124001260180] |Can you name, for the last major enterprise release of your favourite distribution, the specific major versions of kernel, gcc, X, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org or Mozilla that were shipped?
[124001260190] |And can you say whether those major versions were the same or different to any of the enterprise releases of Ubuntu, SLES, Debian, or RHEL which shipped at roughly the same time?
[124001260200] |I’m willing to bet that any particular customer would say that they can’t remember either which versions were involved, or how those stacked up against the competition, and don’t care either.
[124001260210] |So looking backwards, differences in versions weren’t a customer-differentiating item.
[124001260220] |We can do the same thought experiment looking forwards.
[124001260230] |WHAT IF you knew that the next long-term supported releases of Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat and Novell Linux would all have the same major versions of kernel, GCC, X, GNOME, KDE, OO.o and Mozilla.
[124001260240] |Would that make a major difference for you?
[124001260250] |I’m willing to bet not –that from a customer view, folks who prefer X will still prefer X. A person who prefers Red Hat will stick with Red Hat.
[124001260260] |But from a developer view, would that make it easier to collaborate?
[124001260270] |Dramatically so.
[124001260280] |Another member of the audience came up to talk about the fashion industry.
[124001260290] |That’s also converged on a highly coordinated model –fabrics and technologies “release” first, then designers introduce their work simultaneously at fashion shows around the world.
[124001260300] |“Spring 2009″ sees new collections from all the major houses, many re-using similar ideas or components.
[124001260310] |That hasn’t hurt their industry, rather it helps to build awareness amongst the potential audience.
[124001260320] |The ultimate laboratory, nature, has also adopted release coordination.
[124001260330] |Anil Somayaji, who was in the audience for the keynote, subsequently emailed this:
[124001260340] |Basically, <a>trees of a given species will synchronize their seed releases</a> in time and in amount, potentially to overwhelm predators and to coordinate with environmental conditions.
[124001260350] |In effect, synchronized seed releases is a strategy for competitors to work together to ensure that they all have the best chance of succeeding.
[124001260360] |In a similar fashion, if free software were to “release its seeds” in a synchronized fashion (with similar types of software or distributions having coordinated schedules, but software in different niches having different schedules), it might maximize the chances of all of their survival and prosperity.
[124001260370] |There’s no doubt in my mind that the stronger the “pulse” we are able to create, by coordinating the freezes and releases of major pieces of the free software stack, the stronger our impact on the global software market will be, and the better for all companies –from MySQL to Alfresco, from Zimbra to OBM, from Red Hat to Ubuntu.
[124001280010] |<title>It’s a solvency problem, not a liquidity problem</title>
[124001280020] |The term “credit crunch” is very misleading for the current crisis.
[124001280030] |It suggests that the problem is merely one of confidence, that calm will return if liquidity is introduced to the system.
[124001280040] |My view, though, is that the real issue is one of solvency.
[124001280050] |This is the systemic bankruptcy of 2008.
[124001280060] |<strong>Mortgages are just the beginning.</strong>
[124001280070] |At real rates of interest, with real expectations of a reasonable rate of return, many of the deals which have been done since 2003 just do not make economic sense.
[124001280080] |Thus far, the spotlight has been on one piece of that problem –bad mortgage loans –but I think we’ll see the problem areas expanding rapidly to include a lot of the private equity deals which were done on the basis of free money between 2003-2007.
[124001280090] |I remember a fatuous statement by some private equity genius that “everybody’s rushing to do the first $100bn deal”.
[124001280100] |Well, the chickens are coming home to roost.
[124001280110] |Expect a steady flood of announcements of setbacks, restructurings and bankruptcies as companies that were bought with borrowed money turn out to be unable to service their debt.
[124001280120] |<strong>Lower interest rates will ease the symptoms only. </strong>
[124001280130] |Dramatic easing of interest rates will help to slow down the pace at which we have to deal with the bankruptcies, but they won’t change the cold reality of the situation, and they run the very real risk of making things worse by encouraging another round of speculation based on free money.
[124001280140] |We are once again in a situation where the US discount rate is effectively a negative real rate of interest, as a gift to the banks, but staying there for any length of time puts us back into a state of addiction.
[124001280150] |<strong>Interventions must target bank equity and leverage, not liquidity. </strong>
[124001280160] |The latest move from the UK to buy equity stakes is the best response yet, I think.
[124001280170] |It dramatically improves the capitalisation of those institutions, it keeps the upside of that move in taxpayers hands (they are taking the pain and funding the bailout, it seems right to preserve the upside for them) and it dilutes the existing shareholders who allowed their institutions to become insolvent.
[124001280180] |Personally, I’d be inclined to do more than dilute those shareholders.
[124001280190] |I don’t see the current $700bn deal making a real difference to US banks.
[124001280200] |I would expect the US to announce a deal similar to the UK deal soon, but the numbers would have to be larger.
[124001280210] |Scarily large.
[124001280220] |Much better for the US to make that move, than to wait for Asian and Middle-eastern sovereign wealth funds to step into the breach.
[124001280230] |<strong>Depositors in regulated banks should be protected by the governments that run the regulators.
[124001280240] |Shareholders not so much.
[124001280250] |Bondholders… maybe. </strong>
[124001280260] |I think the Irish and other countries who have guaranteed the deposits of individual users have done the right thing.
[124001280270] |Governments setup regulatory authorities, and banks advertise that they are regulated.
[124001280280] |The people who appoint those regulators need to stand by the approach they take –they should offer a guarantee that they will stand by their product, and when it fails, they will stand by the people who trusted in them.
[124001280290] |Depositors at banks in the UK really should not have to worry that the bank might fail –such a failure should at most affect the interest rate they receive, not the safety of their capital.
[124001280300] |Shareholders in those banks, however, should be very worried indeed.
[124001280310] |There’s an interesting question about bondholders and institutional depositors.
[124001280320] |By one argument they are sophisticated investors and should be responsible for their bonds.
[124001280330] |By another argument, they are the very people who can cause massive shifts in funds from bank paper to T-bills, and hence worth keeping pacified.
[124001280340] |I would lump them in with individual depositors too.
[124001280350] |<strong>Executive compensation should be structured not fixed. </strong>
[124001280360] |There has been a lot of discussion about limiting executive compensation.
[124001280370] |That’s just an invitation for armies of consultants and lawyers and accountants to work around whatever compensation limits are put in place.
[124001280380] |And frankly, I’m hard-pressed to understand how politicians, who constantly vote themselves bigger salaries and expense accounts, are qualified to set bank executive salaries.
[124001280390] |They effectively WERE in charge of Fannie and Freddie executive compensation, and that wasn’t a stellar success.
[124001280400] |What I would say, however, is that financial institution earnings should only be recognised over a seven year period, and bonuses based on those earnings should be held in escrow until that seven year period is up.
[124001280410] |Imagine if we could now tap into the bonuses of investment bank employees over the past seven years in order to shore up the balance sheets of those banks.
[124001280420] |That would include the bonuses paid to Mr Fuld, Mr Greenberg, and Mr Greenspan.
[124001280430] |Anybody care to run the numbers?
[124001280440] |I think it would be material.
[124001280450] |<strong>I’m nervous. </strong>
[124001280460] |The big question I’m asking is <strong>which sidelines don’t have landmines?</strong>
[124001280470] |My team and I are fortunate to have stepped out of many markets before the current flood of fear.
[124001280480] |We stepped right into a few problems, but in large part dodged the cannonballs.
[124001280490] |So far so good.
[124001280500] |But what does it mean to have cash in the bank, when banks themselves are failing?
[124001280510] |What does it mean to hold dollars, when the dollar is being debased in a way that would feel familiar to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe?
[124001280520] |These are very dangerous times, and nobody should think otherwise.
[124001290010] |<title>GNOME usability hackfest</title>
[124001290020] |The GNOME user experience hackfest in Boston was a great way to spend the worst week in Wall St history!
[124001290030] |Though there wasn’t a lot of hacking, there was a LOT of discussion, and we covered a lot of ground.
[124001290040] |There were at least 7 Canonical folks there, so it was a bit of a mini-sprint and a nice opportunity to meet the team at the same time.
[124001290050] |We had great participation from a number of organisations and free spirits, there’s a widespread desire to see GNOME stay on the forefront of usability.
[124001290060] |Neil Patel of Canonical <a>did a few mockups</a> to try and capture the spirit of what was discussed, but I think the most interesting piece wasn’t really possible to capture in a screenshot because it’s abstract and conceptual –<a>file and content management</a>.
[124001290070] |There’s a revolution coming as we throw out the old “files and folders” metaphor and leap to something new, and it would be phenomenal if free software were leading the way.
[124001290080] |I was struck by the number of different ways this meme cropped up.
[124001290090] |We had superb presentations of “real life support problems” from a large-scale user of desktop Linux, and a persistent theme was “where the hell did that file just go?”
[124001290100] |People save an attachment they receive in email, and an hour later have no idea where to find it.
[124001290110] |They import a picture into F-spot and then have no idea how to attach it to an email.
[124001290120] |They download a PDF from the web, then want to read it offline and can’t remember where they put it.
[124001290130] |Someone else pointed out that most people find it easier to find something on the Internet –through Google –than they do on their hard drives.
[124001290140] |The <a>Codethink</a> guys also showed off some prototype experience work with <a>Wizbit</a>, which is a single-file version control system that draws on both Git and Bazaar for ideas about how you do efficient, transparent versioning of a file for online and offline editing.
[124001290150] |We need to rearchitect the experience of “working with your content”, and we need to do it in a way that will work with the web and shared content as easily as it does locally.
[124001290160] |My biggest concern on this front is that it be done in a way that every desktop environment can embrace.
[124001290170] |We need a consistent experience across GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice and Firefox so that content can flow from app to app in a seamless fashion and the user’s expectations can be met no matter which app or environment they happen to use.
[124001290180] |If someone sends a file to me over Empathy, and I want to open it in Amarok, then I shouldn’t have to work with two completely different mental models of content storage.
[124001290190] |Similarly, if I’ve downloaded something from the web with Firefox, and want to edit it in OpenOffice, I shouldn’t have to be super-aware or super-smart to be able to connect the apps to the content.
[124001290200] |So, IMO this is work that should be championed in a forum like FreeDesktop.org, where it can rise above some of the existing rivalries of desktop linux.
[124001290210] |There’s a good tradition of practical collaboration in that forum, and this is a great candidate for similar treatment.
[124001290220] |At the end of the day, bling is less transformational than a fundamental shift in content management.
[124001290230] |Kudos to the folks who are driving this!
[124001290240] |<strong>Update:</strong> thanks mjg59 for pointing out my thinko.
[124001290250] |The Collabora guys do great stuff, but Codethink does Wizbit.
[124001300010] |<title>Ibex design: user switching, presence and session termination</title>
[124001300020] |With Intrepid on track to hit the wires today I thought I’d blog a little on the process we followed in designing the new user switcher, presence manager and session management experience, and lessons learned along the way.
[124001300030] |Ted has been blogging about the work he did, and it’s been mentioned in a couple of different forums (briefly earning the memorable title “the new hotness”), but since it’s one of the first pieces of work to go through the user experience design process within Canonical I thought it would be interesting to write it up.
[124001300040] |Here is a screenshot of the work itself in action:
[124001300050] |New FUSA applet allows you to mange your presence setting, as well as switch to a guest or other user, and logout
[124001300060] |In one of the first user experience sessions, we looked in more detail at the way people “stop working”.
[124001300070] |We thought it interesting to try and group those actions together in a way which would feel natural to users.
[124001300080] |We have already done some work in Ubuntu around this –for a long time we have had a button in the top-right corner of the panel which brought up a system modal dialog that gave you the usual “end your session” options of logout, restart, shutdown, hibernate, suspend and switch user.
[124001300090] |That patch was always a bit controversial and had not been accepted upstream, so we looked at ways to solve the problem differently.
[124001300100] |We decided to use the top-right location, because it’s one of the key places in the screen that’s quick and easy to get to (you can throw your mouse into a corner of the screen very easily and accurately) and because there was a strong precedent in the old Ubuntu logout button.
[124001300110] |One key insight was that we wanted to make “switching user” less an exercise in guesswork and more direct –we wanted to let people switch directly to the specific user they were interested in rather than have an intermediate step where they login as that other user.
[124001300120] |So we started with the Fast User Switcher applet, or FUSA, as a base fr the design.
[124001300130] |Another key idea that emerged was that we wanted to integrate the “presence setting” into the same menu, because “going offline” or “I’m busy” are similar state-of-mind-and-work decisions to “log me off the system” or “shut down”.
[124001300140] |<strong>Menu order</strong> We discussed at length the right order for the menu items.
[124001300150] |On the one hand, putting the “other users” at the top of the menu would mean that all the user names –yours and the ones you can switch to –would appear “in the same place” at the top of the menu.
[124001300160] |On the other, we strongly felt that things that would be used more casually and more easily should be at the top.
[124001300170] |In the end we settled on putting the presence management options at the top (Available, Away, Busy, Offline). Right next to those (in the same set) we put the “Lock screen” option, because it feels like a presence setting more than a session management setting –you are saying “Away” more than anything else.
[124001300180] |Ted did a lot of work to make the presence menu elements work with both Pidgin and Empathy because there was some uncertainty as to which would be used by default in the release.
[124001300190] |Since it all uses dbus, it should be straightforward to make it work with KDE IM clients too.
[124001300200] |We then put the user switching options –including the Guest Session which is a cool new feature in Intrepid that as been widely <a>blogged</a> (check out the <a>YouTube demo</a>) and which uses AppArmor to enforce security.
[124001300210] |And finally, the session termination options –log out, suspend, hibernate, restart and shutdown are at the bottom of the menu, because you’re only ever likely to use them once in a session, by definition!
[124001300220] |<strong>Styling </strong>The design of the menu is deliberately clean.
[124001300230] |We use very simple colours and shapes for the presence indicators, and replicate those colours and shapes in the actual GNOME panel so that you can see at a glance what your current presence setting is. Ted had to jump through some hoops, I think, to get the presence icons in the menu to line up with the current-presence-status indicator in the panel applet, but it worked out quite nicely.
[124001300240] |There’s some additional work to tighten up the layout which didn’t make it in time for the release but which might come in as a stable release update (SRU) or in Jaunty.
[124001300250] |We decided not to put icons into the menu for each of the different statuses.
[124001300260] |Our design ethic is to aim for cleaner, less cluttered layouts with fewer icons and better choice of text.
[124001300270] |A couple of people have said that the menu looks “sparse” or “bare” but I think it sets the right direction and we’ll be continuing with this approach as we touch other parts of the system.
[124001300280] |<strong>Upstream </strong>This work was discussed at UDS in Prague with a number of members of the GNOME community.
[124001300290] |I was also very glad to see that there’s a lot of support for a tighter, simpler panel at the GNOME hackfest, an idea that we’ve championed.
[124001300300] |The FUSA applet itself is going through a bit of a transformation upstream as it’s been merged into the new GDM codebase and the old code –on which our work is based –is more or less EOL’d.
[124001300310] |But we’ll figure out how to update this work for Jaunty and hopefully it will be easier to get it upstreamed at that point.
[124001300320] |In Jaunty, we’ll likely do some more work on the GNOME panel, building on the GNOME user experience discussions.
[124001300330] |There was a lot of discussion about locking down the panel more tightly, which we may pursue.
[124001300340] |<strong>Integration into Ubuntu</strong> We realised rather late in the Ubuntu cycle that we hadn’t thought much about packaging.
[124001300350] |The Ubuntu team had kindly offered to help package and integrate the applet but we definitely learned the value of getting the packaging done earlier rather than later.
[124001300360] |We had the applet in a PPA for testing between developers fairly early, but we underestimated the difference between that and actual integration into the release.
[124001300370] |The Ubuntu team rallied to the cause and helped to smooth the upgrade process for new users, so that we can try to get everyone onto the same footing when they start out with Intrepid whether as a new install or an upgrade.
[124001300380] |There are some challenges there, because the panel is so customisable, and we had to think hard about how we could ensure there was a consistent experience for something as important as logging out or shutting down while at the same time trying not to stomp on the preferences of folks who have customised their panels.
[124001300390] |Similarly, we were concerned that people who run different versions of Ubuntu, or different distributions entirely, with the same home directory, would have problems if those other OS’s didn’t have the same version of FUSA –we weren’t really able to address that satisfactorily.
[124001300400] |We also realised (DOH!) that we hadn’t thought all the way through the process of integration, because we hadn’t figured out what to do with the old System menu options.
[124001300410] |It turned out that those were in a state of flux, with the Ubuntu folks having to choose between the current GNOME default which everyone said would change, the patches for the likely NEXT GNOME approach, and the old Ubuntu approach.
[124001300420] |Ted whipped up some patches to make the GNOME panel more dynamic with its menus, so that we could remove the System menu logout options when people have the same menu in the FUSA applet, but that landed too late for inclusion into Intrepid final.
[124001300430] |All in all, I think it’s a neat piece of work and hope other distro’s find it useful too.
[124001300440] |It’s just a teaser of the work we plan to do around the desktop experience.
[124001300450] |I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at <a>UDS Jaunty in Mountain View</a> in December, when we can talk about the next round!
[124001300460] |Thanks and well done to Ted, Martin, Scott, Sebastien and everyone else who helped to make this a reality.
[124001300470] |<strong>Well done to Team Ubuntu (thousands of people across Ubuntu, Debian and upstreams) who make the magic in 8.10 possible.</strong>
[124001300480] |Happy Release Day everyone!
[124001310010] |<title>This is not the end of capitalism</title>
[124001310020] |Some of the comments on my last post on the economic unwinding of 2008 suggested that people think we are witnessing the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new socialist era.
[124001310030] |I certainly hope not.
[124001310040] |I think a world without regulated capitalism would be a bleak one indeed.
[124001310050] |I had the great privilege to spend a year living in Russia in 2001/2002, and the visible evidence of the destruction wrought by central planning was still very much present.
[124001310060] |We are all ultimately human, with human failings, whether we work for a state planning agency or a private company, and those failings have consequences either way.
[124001310070] |To think that moving all private enterprise into state hands will somehow create a panacea of efficiency and sustainability is to ignore the stark lessons of the 20th century.
[124001310080] |The leaders and decision makers in a centrally-planned economy are just as fallible as those in a capitalist one –they would probably be the same people!
[124001310090] |But state enterprises lack the forces of evolution that apply in a capitalist economy –state enterprises are rarely if ever allowed to fail.
[124001310100] |And hence bad ideas are perpetuated indefinitely, and an economy becomes dysfunctional to the point of systemic collapse.
[124001310110] |It is the fact that private enterprises fail which keeps industries vibrant.
[124001310120] |The tension between the imperative to innovate and the consequences of failure drives capitalist economies to evolve quickly.
[124001310130] |Despite all of the nasty consequences that we have seen, and those we have yet to see, of capitalism gone wrong, I am still firmly of the view that society must tap into its capitalist strengths if it wants to move forward.
[124001310140] |But I chose my words carefully when I said “regulated capitalism”.
[124001310150] |I used to be a fan of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and great admirer of Ayn Rand’s vision.
[124001310160] |Now, I feel differently.
[124001310170] |Left to it’s own devices, the market will tend to reinforce the position of those who were successful in the past, at the exclusion of those who might create future successes.
[124001310180] |We see evidence of this all the time.
[124001310190] |The heavyweights that define an industry tend to do everything in their power to <strong>prevent</strong> innovation from changing the rules that enrich them.
[124001310200] |A classic example of that is the RIAA’s behaviour –in the name of “saving the music industry” they have spent the past ten years desperately trying to keep it in the analog era to save their members, with DRM and morally unjustifiable special-interest lobbying around copyright rules that affect the whole of society.
[124001310210] |Similarly, patent rules tend to evolve to suit the companies that hold many patents, rather than the people who might generate the NEXT set of innovative ideas.
[124001310220] |Of course, the lobbying is dressed up in language that describes it as being “in the interests of innovation”, but at heart it is really aimed at preserving the privileged position of the incumbent.
[124001310230] |In South Africa, the incumbent monopoly telco, which was a state enterprise until it was partially privatized in 1996, has systematically delayed, interfered, challenged and obstructed the natural process of deregulation and the creation of a healthy competitive sector.
[124001310240] |Private interests act in their own interest, by definition, so powerful private interests tend to drive the system in ways that make THEM healthier rather than ways that make society healthier.
[124001310250] |Left to their own devices, private companies will tend to gobble one another up, and create monopolies.
[124001310260] |Those monopolies will then undermine every potential new entrant, using whatever tactics they can dream up, from FUD to lobbying to thuggery.
[124001310270] |So, I’m a fan of regulated capitalism.
[124001310280] |We need regulation to ensure that society’s broader needs, like environmental sustainability, are met while private companies pursue their profits.
[124001310290] |We also need regulation to ensure that those who manage national and international infrastructure, whether it’s railways or power stations or financial systems, don’t cook the books in a way that lets them declare fat profits and fatter bonuses while driving those systems into crisis.
[124001310300] |But effective regulation is not the same as state management and supervision.
[124001310310] |I would much rather have private companies managing power stations competitively, than state agencies doing so as part of a complacent government monopoly.
[124001310320] |Good regulation is very hard.
[124001310330] |Over the years I’ve interacted with a few different regulatory authorities, and I sympathise with the problems they encounter.
[124001310340] |First, to be an effective regulator, you need superb talent.
[124001310350] |And for that you need to pay –talent follows the money and the lights, whether we like it or not, so to design a system on other assumptions is to design it for failure.
[124001310360] |My ideal regulator is an insightful genius working for the common good, but since I’m never likely to meet that person, a practical goal is to encourage regulators to be small but very well funded, with key salaries and performance measures that are just behind the industries they are supposed to regulate.
[124001310370] |Regulators must be able to be fired –no sense in offering someone a private sector salary and public sector accountability.
[124001310380] |Unfortunately, most regulators end up going the other way, hiring more and more people of average competence, that they become both expensive and ineffective.
[124001310390] |Second, a great regulator needs to be independent.
[124001310400] |You’re the guy who tells people to stop doing what will hurt society; it’s very hard to do that to your friends.
[124001310410] |A regulatory job is a lonely job, which is why you hear so many stories of regulators being wined and dined by the industries they regulate only to make sure they don’t look too hard in the back room.
[124001310420] |A great regulator needs to know a lot about an industry, but be independent of that industry.
[124001310430] |Again, my ideal is someone who has made a good living in a sector, knows it backwards, can justify their high price, but wants to make a contribution to society.
[124001310440] |Third, a great regulator needs to have teeth and muscle.
[124001310450] |It has been very frustrating for me to watch the South African telecomms regulator get tied up in court by Telkom, and stymied by government department inadequacy.
[124001310460] |Regulators need to be able to drive things forward, they need to be able to change the way companies behave, and they cannot rely on moral suasion to do so.
[124001310470] |And fourth, a regulator has to make very tough decisions about innovation, which amount to venture capital decisions –to make them well, you have to be able to tell the future.
[124001310480] |For example, when an industry changes, as all industries change, how should the rules evolve?
[124001310490] |When a new need for society is identified, like the need to address climate change early and systemically, how should the rules evolve?
[124001310500] |Regulators need to move forward as fast as the industries they regulate, and they need to make decisions about things we don’t yet understand.
[124001310510] |And even when you regulate, you may not be able to stop an impending crisis.
[124001310520] |It’s very easy to criticize Greenspan for his light touch regulation on hedge funds and derivatives today, but it’s not at all clear to me that regulation would have made a difference, I think it would simply have moved the shadow global financial system offshore.
[124001310530] |So regulation is extremely difficult, but also very much worth investing in if you are trying to run a healthy, vibrant, capitalist society.
[124001310540] |Coming back to the original suggestion that sparked this blog –I’m sure we will see a lot of failed capitalists in the future.
[124001310550] |Hell, I might join their ranks, I wouldn’t be the first <img/>.
[124001310560] |But that doesn’t spell the end of capitalism, only the opportunity to start again –smarter.
[124001330010] |<title>Notifications, indicators and alerts</title>
[124001330020] |Let’s talk about notifications!
[124001330030] |As <a>Ryan Lortie mentioned</a>, there was a lot of discussion across the Ubuntu, Kubuntu, GNOME, KDE and Mozilla communities represented at UDS about the proposals Canonical’s user experience design and desktop experience engineering teams have made for Ubuntu 9.04.
[124001330040] |<a>See the mockup as a Flash movie.</a>
[124001330050] |There are some fairly bold (read: controversial) ideas that we’d like to explore with, so the opportunity to discuss them with a broader cross-section of the community was fantastic.
[124001330060] |There were several rough edges and traps that I think we’ll avoid in the first round as a result, thanks to everyone who participated.
[124001330070] |Some of the things we work on in these teams are done directly with partners for their devices, so they don’t see this level of discussion before they ship, but it’s wonderful when we do get the opportunity to do so.
[124001330080] |Some of these ideas are unproven, they boil down to matters of opinion, but since our commitment to them is based on a desire to learn more I think of them as constructive experiments.
[124001330090] |Experiments are just that –experiments.
[124001330100] |They may succeed and they may fail.
[124001330110] |We should judge them carefully, after we have data.
[124001330120] |We are putting new ideas into the free desktop without ego.
[124001330130] |We know those ideas could be better or worse than similar work being done in other communities, and we want to gather real user feedback to help find the best mix for everyone.
[124001330140] |The best ideas, and the best code, will ultimately form part of the digital free software commons and be shared by GNOME, KDE and every distribution.
[124001330150] |So, for those folks who were upset that we might ship something other than a GNOME or KDE default, I would ask for your patience and support –we want to contribute new ideas and new code, and that means having some delta which can be used as a basis for discussions about the future direction of upstream.
[124001330160] |In the past, we’ve had a few such delta’s in Ubuntu.
[124001330170] |Some, like the current panel layout, were widely embraced.
[124001330180] |Others, like the infamous “Ubuntu spacial mode”, were not.
[124001330190] |C’est la vie, and we all benefit from the evolution.
[124001330200] |Experiments are also not something we should do lightly.
[124001330210] |The Ubuntu desktop is something I take very personally; I feel personally responsible for the productivity and happiness of every Ubuntu user, so when we bring new ideas and code to the desktop I believe we should do everything we can to make sure of success first time round.
[124001330220] |We should not inflict bad ideas on our users just because we’re curious or arrogant or stubborn or proud.
[124001330230] |Despite being occasionally curious, arrogant, stubborn and proud <img/>
[124001330240] |So, what are we proposing?
[124001330250] |First, we are focusing some attention on desktop notifications in this cycle, as part of a broader interest in the “space between applications”.
[124001330260] |I think Canonical and Ubuntu can best help the cause of free software by focusing on the cracks between the major components of the desktop.
[124001330270] |In other words, while there are already great upstreams for individual applications in the free software desktop (Novell for Evolution, Sun for OpenOffice, Mozilla for Firefox, Red Hat for NetworkManager), we think there is a lot of productive and useful work to be done in the gaps between them.
[124001330280] |Notifications are things that many apps do, and if we can contribute new ideas there then we are helping improve the user experience of all of those applications.
[124001330290] |That’s a nice force multiplier –we’re hopefully doing work that makes the work of every other community even more valuable.
[124001330300] |Nevertheless, expect bumps ahead.
[124001330310] |Ideas we are exploring may / will / do conflict with assumptions that are present today in various applications.
[124001330320] |We can address the relevant code in packages in main, but I’m more focused on addressing the potential social disruption that conflict can create, and that’s more a matter of conversation than code.
[124001330330] |Notifications are interesting, subtle and complex.
[124001330340] |There are lots of different approaches on lots of different platforms.
[124001330350] |There are lots of different use cases.
[124001330360] |We’re trying to simplify and eliminate complexity, while still making it possible to meet the use cases we know about.
[124001330370] |There has been good work in the freedesktop.org community on notifications, and even a spec that is *almost* at 1.0 in that community, with existing open source implementations.
[124001330380] |Our proposal is based on that specification, but it deprecates several capabilities and features in it.
[124001330390] |We will likely be compatible with the current API’s for sending notifications, but likely will not display all the notifications that might be sent, if they require features that we deprecate.
[124001330400] |If this experiment goes well, we would hope to help move that FD.o specification to 1.0, with or without our amendments.
[124001330410] |The key proposals we are making are that:
[124001330420] |<li>There should be <strong>no actions on notifications</strong>.</li>
[124001330430] |<li>Notifications should not be displayed synchronously, but <strong>may be queued</strong>.
[124001330440] |Our implementation of the notification display daemon will display only one notification at a time, others may do it differently.</li> 
[124001330450] |That’s pretty much it.
[124001330460] |There are some subtleties and variations, but these are the key changes we are proposing, and which we will explore in a netbook device with a partner, as well as in the general Ubuntu 9.04 release, schedule gods being willing.
[124001330470] |This work will show up as a new notification display agent, not as a fork or patch to the existing GNOME notification daemon.
[124001330480] |We don’t think the client API –libnotify –needs to be changed for this experiment, though we may not display notifications sent through that API that use capabilities we are suggesting be deprecated.
[124001330490] |We will try to ensure that packages in main are appropriately tuned, and hope MOTU will identify and update key packages in universe accordingly.
[124001330500] |Why a completely new notification display agent?
[124001330510] |We are designing it to be built with Qt on KDE, and Gtk on GNOME.
[124001330520] |The idea is to have as much code in common as we can, but still take advantage of the appropriate text display framework on Ubuntu and Kubuntu.
[124001330530] |We hope to deliver both simultaneously, and have discussed this with both Ubuntu and Kubuntu community members.
[124001330540] |At the moment, there is some disagreement about the status of the FD.o specification between GNOME and KDE, and we hope our efforts will help build a bridge there.
[124001330550] |In Ubuntu 9.04, we would likely continue to package and publish the existing notification daemon in addition, to offer both options for users that have a particular preference.
[124001330560] |In general, where we invest in experimental new work, we plan to continue to offer a standard GNOME or KDE component / package set in the archive so that people can enjoy that experience too.
[124001330570] |The most controversial part of the proposal is the idea that notifications should not have actions associated with them.
[124001330580] |In other words, <strong>no buttons, sliders, links, or even a dismissal [x]</strong>.
[124001330590] |When a notification pops up, you won’t be able to click on it, you won’t be able to make it go away, you won’t be able to follow it to another window, or to a web page.
[124001330600] |Are you loving this freedom?
[124001330610] |Hmmm?
[124001330620] |Madness, on the face of it, but there is method in this madness.
[124001330630] |Our hypothesis is that the existence of ANY action creates a weighty obligation to act, or to THINK ABOUT ACTING.
[124001330640] |That make notifications turn from play into work.
[124001330650] |That makes them heavy responsibilities.
[124001330660] |That makes them an interruption, not a notification.
[124001330670] |And interruptions are a bag of hurt when you have things to do.
[124001330680] |So, we have a three-prong line of attack.
[124001330690] |<li><strong>We want to make notifications truly ephemeral.</strong>
[124001330700] |They are there, and then they are gone, and that’s life.
[124001330710] |If you are at your desktop when a notification comes by, <strong>you will sense it</strong>, and if you want you can LOOK at it, and it will be beautiful and clear and easy to parse.
[124001330720] |If you want to ignore it, you can safely do that and it will <strong>always go away without you having to dismiss it</strong>.
[124001330730] |If you miss it, that’s OK.
[124001330740] |Notifications are only for things which you can safely ignore or miss out on.
[124001330750] |If you went out for coffee and a notification flew by, you are no worse off.
[124001330760] |They don’t pile up like email, <strong>there is no journal of the ones you missed</strong>, you can’t scroll back and see them again, and therefor you are under no obligation to do so –they can’t become work while you are already busy with something else.
[124001330770] |They are <strong>gone like a mystery girl on the bus you didn’t get on</strong>, and they enrich your life in exactly the same way!</li>
[124001330780] |<li>We think there should be <strong>persistent panel indicators for things which you really need to know about, even if you missed the notification</strong> because you urgently wanted that coffee.
[124001330790] |So we are making a list of those things, and plan to implement them.</li>
[124001330800] |<li><strong>Everything else should be dealt with by having a window call for attention</strong>, while staying in the background, unless it’s critical in which case that window could come to the foreground.</li> 
[124001330810] |Since this is clearly the work of several releases, we may have glitches and inconsistencies along the way at interim checkpoints.
[124001330820] |I hope not, but it’s not unlikely, especially in the first iteration.
[124001330830] |Also, these ideas may turn out to be poor, and we should be ready to adjust our course based on feedback once we have an implementation in the wild.
[124001330840] |We had a superb UXD and DEE (user experience design team, and desktop experience engineering team) sprint in San Francisco the week before UDS.
[124001330850] |Thanks to everyone who took part, especially those who came in from other teams.
[124001330860] |This notifications work may just be the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a very cool tip <img/>
[124001330870] |One or more of our early-access OEM partners (companies that we work with on new desktop features) will likely ship this feature as part of a netbook product during the 9.04 cycle.
[124001330880] |At that point, we would also drop the code into a PPA for testing with a wider set of applications.
[124001330890] |There are active discussions about updating the freedesktop.org specification based on this work.
[124001330900] |I think we should be cautious, and gather real user testing feedback and hard data, but if it goes well then we would propose simplifying the spec accordingly, and submit our notification display agent to FreeDesktop.org. Long term collaboration around the code would take place on Launchpad.
[124001340010] |<title>Commercial access to space on hold</title>
[124001340020] |As <a>widely</a> <a>reported</a>, Russia has closed commercial public access to Soyuz seats for flights after the US shuttle is retired.
[124001340030] |Now that the ISS has the capacity for a larger full-time crew, the seats are more likely to be devoted to long-duration ISS crew rotation than short-term ISS visits, whether visits by professional EU / US astronauts or folks flying privately.
[124001340040] |I’ve no doubt that there are economics attached to the Russian seats that are similar for both cases –the EU and US have to pay for the lift just like us ordinary folks.
[124001340050] |There are a couple of interesting twists to the story.
[124001340060] |One is that, when the Shuttle is retired, the Russians will have the only manned access to orbital flight in the ISS partnership.
[124001340070] |Russia and China will be the only nations with manned orbital capabilities, and the US huffishly refuses to welcome China into the ISS club.
[124001340080] |Expect the price of a seat to rise substantially while that’s the case.
[124001340090] |Another is the EU’s plan to evolve their autonomous cargo vessel (ATV) into a manned capability, something that’s perfectly feasible and quite sensible IMO.
[124001340100] |And the third twist is that the Russians have long been open to commercial offers for a long-duration flight (six month ISS crew rotation).
[124001340110] |That woudl require substantially more training (12-18 months minimum depending on who you ask) but would certainly include the Soyuz lift to get there and back.
[124001370010] |<title>My new focus at Canonical</title>
[124001370020] |From March next year, I’ll focus my Canonical energy on product design, partnerships and customers.
[124001370030] |Those are the areas that I enjoy most and also the areas where I can best shape the impact we have on open source and the technology market.
[124001370040] |I’m able to do this because Jane Silber, who has been COO at Canonical virtually from the beginning, <a>will take on the job of CEO</a>.
[124001370050] |Since Jane joined the company, she and I have shared the load of coordinating between the leaders of all the key teams that make up Canonical.
[124001370060] |We’ve been through various permutations as new initiatives needed different kinds of attention; Jane currently leads the Ubuntu One effort, for example.
[124001370070] |I’ve become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products.
[124001370080] |I can’t think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldn’t think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane.
[124001370090] |We’ve worked together long enough, and closely enough, that I can be confident of continuity in the pieces I most care about and also excited about the ways in which I think Jane will raise the bar for the senior team.
[124001370100] |As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organisational leadership, which I see as essential for Canonical over the next five years.
[124001370110] |We are being welcomed as a partner and supplier to ever-larger businesses, and I want to make sure we are a robust answer to their needs.
[124001370120] |Many folks in the community will know Jane from Ubuntu Developer Summits, and of course she’s well established as a leader at Canonical.
[124001370130] |In order to focus on the new role, we’ll be hiring for a COO and a new lead for Ubuntu One (both positions will be advertised publicly as well as within Canonical).
[124001370140] |There’s no rush, so we plan to coordinate things carefully and I expect I’ll be focused on my new role by March.
[124001380010] |<title>Light: the new look of Ubuntu</title>
[124001380020] |<a>Jono Bacon</a>, <a>Alan Pope</a>, and many others have written, yesterday we published <a>a new visual story and style for Ubuntu</a>.
[124001380030] |The core design work was lead by Marcus Haslam, Otto Greenslade and Dominic Edmunds, who are the three visual artists leading our efforts in the Canonical Design team.
[124001380040] |Once we had the base ideas in place we invited some anchor members of the Ubuntu Art community to a design sprint, to test that the concept had the legs to work with the full range of forums, websites, derivatives and other pieces of this huge and wonderful project.
[124001380050] |And apparently, it does!
[124001380060] |Here are some additional thoughts.
[124001380070] |<strong>Embracing both Ubuntu and Canonical</strong>
[124001380080] |One of the real challenges for us has been to find a branding and design strategy which spans the spectrum of audiences, forums and dialogues that we cover.
[124001380090] |With Ubuntu, it’s my specific dream to find a constructive blend of commercial and community interests, not only for Canonical but for other companies.
[124001380100] |That has made our design and branding work difficult –the distinctive look of Ubuntu lent itself well to pure community messaging, but it was hard to do a brochure for Canonical data center services for Ubuntu on servers.
[124001380110] |We have not only Ubuntu, but also Kubuntu and an important range of derivatives that all have a role in our ecosystem.
[124001380120] |So we spent a lot of time trying to distill the requirements down into a set of three dimensions:
[124001380130] |We found a set of ideas which each represent those spectrums, and which work together.
[124001380140] |For example, we identified a palette which includes both a fresh, lively Orange, and a rich, mature Aubergine, which work together.
[124001380150] |The use of Aubergine indicates Commercial involvement of one form or another, while Orange is a signal of community engagement.
[124001380160] |The Forums will use the Orange elements more strongly, and a formal product brochure, with descriptions of supporting services, would use more of the Aubergine.
[124001380170] |On the consumer/enterprise spectrum, we took inspiration from the aerospace industry, and identified a texture of closely spaced dots.
[124001380180] |When you see more of that, it means we’re signalling that the story is more about the enterprise, less of that, and it’s more about the consumer.
[124001380190] |Of course, there are cross-overs, for example when we are talking about the corporate desktop, where we’ll use that closely space dot texture as a boundary area, or separator.
[124001380200] |We also identified shades of Aubergine that are more consumer, or more enterprise –the darker shades mapping to a stronger emphasis on enterprise work.
[124001380210] |And on the end-user / engineer spectrum, we took inspiration from graph paper and engineering blue prints.
[124001380220] |When you see widely spaced patterns of dots, or outline images and figures, that’s signalling that the content is more engineering-oriented than end-user oriented.
[124001380230] |And finally, we found a number of themes which enhanced and echoed those ideas.
[124001380240] |We use a warm gray supporting colour to give shape to pages and documents, and we built on the dots and circles to create a whole style for figures, illustrations and pictograms.
[124001380250] |The beauty of this is that we can now publish content that spans the full range, and we generally know when we start the design process what sorts of visual cues we want to be signalling.
[124001380260] |Instead of having these different mental domains fight with one another, we can now convey quite subtle collaboration between community and corporate, or work which is aimed at engineers and developers from enterprises as opposed to developers working with consumers.
[124001380270] |Time will tell how it shapes up, but for now I’m celebrating the milestone and the efforts of the team that pulled it together.
[124001380280] |There’s something there for everyone who wants to participate in the great hubbub of Ubuntuness that is our shared experience of free software.
[124001380290] |So, for example, here’s a conference banner.
[124001380300] |The strong use of Aubergine suggests that it’s more corporate messaging (Canonical is heavily involved).
[124001380310] |Orange is used here more as a highlight.
[124001380320] |The Aubergine is darker, and there’s quite a lot of the fine dot pattern.
[124001380330] |Below the image is a set of scales showing where on those spectra this work is pitched.
[124001380340] |As another example, here’s a brochure with an emphasis on end-users who are thinking about adopting Ubuntu’s cloud infrastructure.
[124001380350] |Again, the fine dot patterns suggests a more enterprise focus, as does the use of the dark aubergine.
[124001380360] |You can see the circle metaphor used in the quote callout.
[124001380370] |And here’s a similar brochure, but with a more developer or engineering oriented focus: note the use of the graph-paper theme with wide spaced dots, and outline shapes.
[124001380380] |Finally, here’s an example of a brochure and CD cover for Ubuntu:
[124001380390] |As you can see the idea is to signal a mix of both community and Canonical involvement in the message, addressing consumer audiences with a mix of developers and end-users.
[124001380400] |<strong>A new Ubuntu font</strong>
[124001380410] |We have commissioned a new font to be developed both for the logo’s of Ubuntu and Canonical, and for use in the interface.
[124001380420] |The font will be called Ubuntu, and will be a modern humanist font that is optimised for screen legibility.
[124001380430] |It will be published under an open font license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but leave it free for use across the web and in printed documents.
[124001380440] |It will take a few months for the font to be finalised, initial elements will be final in the next week which will be sufficient for the logo and other bits and pieces, but I expect to see that font widely used in 10.10.
[124001380450] |The work has been commissioned from world-renowned fontographers <a>Dalton Maag</a>, who have expressed excitement at the opportunity to publish an open font and also a font that they know will be used daily by millions of people.
[124001380460] |Initial coverage will be Western, Arabic, Hebrew and Cyrillic character sets, but over time we may be able to extend that to being a full Unicode font, with great kerning and hinting for print and screen usage globally.
[124001380470] |We are considering an internship program, to support aspiring fontographers from all corners of the world to visit London and work with Dalton Maag to extend the font to their own regional glyph set.
[124001380480] |The critical test of the font is screen efficiency and legibility, and its character and personality are secondary to its fitness for that purpose.
[124001380490] |Nevertheless, our hope is that the font has a look that is elegant and expresses the full set of values for both Canonical and Ubuntu: adroitness, accountability, precision, reliability, freedom and collaboration.
[124001380500] |We’ll publish more as soon as we have it.
[124001380510] |<strong>A good start</strong>
[124001380520] |It’s been an exciting process, but I have the sense that we are just getting started.
[124001380530] |The language will get richer, we will find new things that we want to communicate, and new treatments and visual themes that resonate well with these starting points.
[124001380540] |We’ll find new ways to integrate this on the web, and on the desktop (look out for the two new themes, Radiance and Ambiance).
[124001380550] |I hope we’ll see the language being used to good effect across everything we do, both commercial and community oriented.
[124001380560] |There’s a range of expression here that should be useful to artists across the spectrum.
[124001380570] |Let me know how it works for you.
[124001410010] |<title>Shooting for the Perfect 10.10 with Maverick Meerkat</title>
[124001410020] |It’s time to put our heads together to envision “the perfect 10″.
[124001410030] |This is a time of great innovation and change in the Linux world, with major new initiatives from powerful groups bringing lots of new ideas, new energy and new code.
[124001410040] |Thanks to the combined efforts of Google, Intel, IBM, Canonical, Red Hat, Oracle, Cisco, ARM, many other companies, Debian and other projects, a hundred startups and tens of thousands of professional and inspired contributors, the open source ecosystem continues to accelerate.
[124001410050] |We need to bring the best of all of that work into focus and into the archive.
[124001410060] |For millions of users, Ubuntu represents what Free Software can do out of the box for them.
[124001410070] |We owe it to everybody who works on Free Software to make that a great experience.
[124001410080] |At the <a>Ubuntu Developer Summit</a>, in May in Belgium, we’ll have a new design track, and a “cloud and server” track, reflecting some major focal points in 2010.
[124001410090] |They will complement our ongoing work on community, desktop, kernel, quality assurance, foundations and mobile.
[124001410100] |Our new theme is “Light”, and the next cycle will embrace that at many levels.
[124001410110] |We have a continued interest in netbooks, and we’ll revamp the Ubuntu Netbook Edition user interface.
[124001410120] |As computers become lighter they become more mobile, and we’ll work to keep people connected, all day, everywhere.
[124001410130] |We’ll embrace the web, aiming for the lightest, fastest web experience on any platform.
[124001410140] |The fastest boot, the fastest network connect, the fastest browser.
[124001410150] |Our goal is to ensure that UNE is far and away the best desktop OS for a netbook, both for consumers and power users.
[124001410160] |On the other end of the spectrum, we’ll be lightening the burden of enterprise deployment with our emphasis on hybrid cloud computing.
[124001410170] |Ubuntu Server is already very popular on public clouds like EC2 and Rackspace, and now that Dell supports the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud for private cloud infrastructure, it’s possible to build workloads that run equally well in your data center or on the cloud.
[124001410180] |We’ll focus on making it even easier to build those workloads and keep them up to date, and managing the configurations of tens, or tens of thousands, of Ubuntu machines running in the cloud.
[124001410190] |It’s not all about work.
[124001410200] |We don’t just want to be connected to the internet, we want to be connected to each other.
[124001410210] |Social from the Start is our initiative to make the desktop a collaborative, social place.
[124001410220] |For the past five years, we’ve all been shifting more and more data into the web, to a series of accounts and networks elsewhere.
[124001410230] |Now it’s time to start to bring those social networks back into our everyday computing environment.
[124001410240] |Our addressbooks and contact lists need to be synchronized and shared, so that we have the latest information everywhere –from mobile phones to web accounts.
[124001410250] |So there’s a lot to do.
[124001410260] |I hope you’ll join us in shaping that work.
[124001410270] |<h3>Introducing the Maverick Meerkat</h3>
[124001410280] |Our mascot for 10.10 is the Maverick Meerkat.
[124001410290] |This is a time of change, and we’re not afraid to surprise people with a bold move if the opportunity for dramatic improvement presents itself.
[124001410300] |We want to put Ubuntu and free software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move.
[124001410310] |We will deliver on time, but we have huge scope for innovation in what we deliver this cycle.
[124001410320] |Once we have released the LTS we have plenty of room to shake things up a little.
[124001410330] |Let’s hear the best ideas, gather the best talent, and be a little radical in how we approach the next two year major cycle.
[124001410340] |Meerkats are, of course, light, fast and social –everything we want in a Perfect 10.
[124001410350] |We’re booting really fast these days, but the final push remains.
[124001410360] |Changes in the toolchain may make us even faster for every application.
[124001410370] |We’re Social from the Start, but we could get even more tightly connected, and we could bring social features into even more applications.
[124001410380] |Meerkats are family-oriented, and we aspire to having Ubuntu being the safe and efficient solution for all the family netbooks.
[124001410390] |They are also clever –meerkats teach one another new skills.
[124001410400] |And that’s what makes this such a great community.
[124001410410] |<h3>Here’s looking at the Lynx</h3>
[124001410420] |Lucid is shaping up beautifully, but there’s still a lot to be done to make it the LTS we all want.
[124001410430] |Thanks to everyone who is bringing their time, energy and expertise to bear on making it outstanding.
[124001410440] |And I’m looking forward to the release parties, the brainstorming at UDS, and further steps on our mission to bring free software to the world, on free terms.
[124001420010] |<title>Ubuntu’s Indicator Menus –Ayatana bearing fruit</title>
[124001420020] |When we set up Project Ayatana to improve the usability of the whole desktop, we called it Ayatana because we were focused on the “sphere of consciousness”, one’s awareness of what’s going on <strong>outside</strong> of the current application.
[124001420030] |There are two key aspects to the work:
[124001420040] |<li><strong>Notifications</strong> are “awareness distilled” in the sense that you cannot interact with them at all.
[124001420050] |We designed them as ephemeral “click-transparent” messages, implemented in Notify-OSD.
[124001420060] |Their sole purpose is to notify you of transient events.</li>
[124001420070] |<li><strong>Indicator Menus</strong> combine persistent awareness of a state with a set of options for modifying that state.</li> 
[124001420080] |In this blog I’ll outline the arc of our work on indicator menus to date, and the trajectory we expect it to follow.
[124001420090] |We’re about a year into the effort, all told, and I think it will take another 18 months before we can consider it baked.
[124001420100] |It should be done by 12.04 LTS.
[124001420110] |This is an iterative process, and things are in flux right now.
[124001420120] |I hope, when we are happy that we can commit to ABI stability, that Gnome and KDE will adopt the work too.
[124001420130] |For the moment, the rapid pace of evolution has meant that we’re depending on fantastic upstreams to keep up with us as things move.
[124001420140] |<h2>Goals of the Ayatana Indicators</h2>
[124001420150] |The indicators are designed to create a <strong>persistent awareness of state, or an awareness of a persistent state</strong>.
[124001420160] |They complement notifications: they are persistent, when notifications are ephemeral.
[124001420170] |You might miss a notification, but you should always be able to check your indicators.
[124001420180] |You can interact with indicators, using their menus, in contrast with the un-clickable notifications.
[124001420190] |We value:
[124001420200] |<li><strong>Support for both GNOME and KDE</strong>.
[124001420210] |Both desktop environments are important in Ubuntu.
[124001420220] |We encourage the teams to reflect a pure vision of each, but it’s also the case that users will want to run a GNOME application on Kubuntu occasionally, or vice versa.
[124001420230] |So we have to make sure the work is considered from the perspectives of developers on either side, and we have to provide APIs and libraries that work in both environments.</li>
[124001420240] |<li><strong>Accessibility</strong>.
[124001420250] |Indicators are critical elements of awareness.
[124001420260] |Whether you are connected, what the time is, whether you are online, whether your battery will last long enough for you to finish your work, whether you have messages… these are all vital to a complete computing experience.
[124001420270] |We have to make sure that visual and other disabilities can be addressed.</li>
[124001420280] |<li><strong>Familiarity and Innovation</strong>.
[124001420290] |As always, these are in tension with one another.
[124001420300] |Innovation helps us put free software at the front of the curve, but it creates the risk of breaking people’s habits and expectations.</li>
[124001420310] |<li><strong>Consistency and Usability</strong>.
[124001420320] |We want the end result to be more usable in the whole, and we are willing to lose individual nuggets if that helps make the whole more valuable.</li>
[124001420330] |<li><strong>Streamlining</strong>.
[124001420340] |There are too many indicators, that aren’t clear enough about their intent.
[124001420350] |There are also many indicators from different applications which do roughly the same thing, but in slightly different ways.
[124001420360] |The value of all the indicators is enhanced if there are fewer of them, and they are more obvious to discover and use.</li> 
[124001420370] |<h2>Some firm decisions</h2>
[124001420380] |Those values lead us to some anchor decisions:
[124001420390] |<li><strong>D-Bus for communications</strong>.
[124001420400] |A messaging approach makes it straightforward to adopt consistent patterns across different desktop environments.
[124001420410] |We will provide wrapper libraries for both Gtk and Qt applications to access the indicator capabilities.
[124001420420] |A Qt application running on Ubuntu should “feel native” when it’s using indicators correctly.
[124001420430] |And vice-versa.
[124001420440] |The messaging approach also lets us handle accessibility in a better way: we don’t have to accommodate every possible disability visually, because we can have agents that interpret the indicator messages and handle it in ways that are appropriate for a particular disability.</li>
[124001420450] |<li><strong>Opinionated placement</strong>.
[124001420460] |We will place all indicators at the top right of the screen on GNOME.
[124001420470] |We’ll place them in a particular order, too, with the “most fundamental” indicator, which controls the overall session, in the top right.
[124001420480] |The order will not be random, but predictable between sessions and screen sizes.
[124001420490] |There will be no GUI support for users to reorder the indicators.</li>
[124001420500] |<li><strong>Constrained behaviour</strong>.
[124001420510] |All the indicators will take the form of an indicator (icon or text), and a menu.
[124001420520] |Clicking on an indicator will open its menu.
[124001420530] |Keyboard navigation will always work, and left and right arrows will translate either into submenu navigation or flipping from indicator to indicator.
[124001420540] |The whole set of indicators on the panel will be navigable as a single menu, in essence.
[124001420550] |We won’t support “right click” on indicators differently from “left click”, and there’ll be no ability for arbitrary applications to define arbitrary behaviours to arbitrary events on indicators.</li>
[124001420560] |<li><strong>Symbolic visuals</strong>.
[124001420570] |We want to pare back the visual representation of status presented by the icons.
[124001420580] |We don’t believe that visual accessibility for the disabled need drive the design of the standard icon set, as there will be both alternative icons, renderings, and entirely different options such as speech or custom devices to handle those.
[124001420590] |Colors on the indicators should have semantic purpose and be used mainly for alerts and awareness, while the shape of the icon should define its purpose.</li> 
[124001420600] |The first part of our work was pure housekeeping.
[124001420610] |The panel in Ubuntu is very generic, it lets you put all sorts of different gadgets in all sorts of different places, and those gadgets can behave in all sorts of different ways.
[124001420620] |The result has been to stimulate innovation, but it has also made the panel very inconsistent and ultimately less useful.
[124001420630] |We reviewed the way Ubuntu-specific applications were using the panel, and set out to clean them up.
[124001420640] |Update-manager lost its persistent notification in favour of the more direct popup window.
[124001420650] |Others will follow.
[124001420660] |We decided to introduce a new gadget on the panel which would be a container for all the indicators which follow our new Ubuntu Ayatana pattern.
[124001420670] |And we started work on a set of indicators that would fit inside that container.
[124001420680] |Thus far, we’ve done the session, “me”, and sound indicators.
[124001420690] |We also created a framework for applications which want to display their own indicator.
[124001420700] |That’s the AppIndicators work, which has been fantastically lead in 10.04 LTS by Jorge Castro, coordinating with many upstreams to ensure that their applications feel tightly integrated into the panel.
[124001420710] |The icon visual design turned into a conversation about “-symbolic” icons at UDS in Dallas, and is now being realised in the ubuntu-mono icon theme in 10.04 LTS.
[124001420720] |There is work under way to make symbolic icons a more formal and rigorous construct that can be themed, and we’ll participate in that effort or offer an alternative implementation.
[124001420730] |<h2>9 parts perspiration, 1 part innovation</h2>
[124001420740] |The detailed design of a large set of systemic indicators, together with the work to make them all look, feel and behave in a consistent fashion, has been substantial effort involving MPT, Ted Gould, Cody Russell and many others.
[124001420750] |There’s still a lot of work to do.
[124001420760] |Conor Curran and Kalle Valo joined the team in this latest cycle.
[124001420770] |There is a great deal that remains to be done.
[124001420780] |We also aspire to introduce some new and innovative concepts.
[124001420790] |<h3>Category Indicators</h3>
[124001420800] |In order to reduce the number of indicators and improve the persistence and usefulness of the indicators that remain, we’ve introduced the idea of “category indicators”.
[124001420810] |These are indicators into which multiple, similar applications can embed themselves.
[124001420820] |Instead of having a different indicator each application, we have one indicator for the whole category.
[124001420830] |The messaging indicator, which aggregates awareness about many different types of messages from real people, is an example.
[124001420840] |Instead of having three different icons for email, IM and Identi.ca or Twitter, Ubuntu has just one messaging indicator, which can make you aware of important messages in any of those applications.
[124001420850] |The three default applications for those lines of communication all share the same indicator.
[124001420860] |They are part of the same category.
[124001420870] |There are custom API’s for messaging applications which let them:
[124001420880] |<li>Insert entries in the messaging menu which are displayed even when the application is not running.
[124001420890] |Useful for helping people go straight to the activity.
[124001420900] |Instead of having to check if the email client is running, then switching to it or launching it, then going to the message composition window, I should *always* be able to compose a new message with just two clicks, regardless of whether or not the mail client is running initially.</li>
[124001420910] |<li>Add custom menu entries to the messaging menu that are relevant to them.
[124001420920] |Each applications gets a “section” in the category indicator menu, and they can add custom menu entries to their section.</li>
[124001420930] |<li>Register themselves as applications that should be shown in the messaging menu, or remove themselves from that menu.
[124001420940] |The default applications will show up there unless they are uninstalled or expressly configured not to use the messaging menu.
[124001420950] |Other applications will put themselves there by default when they are run by that user, who can also configure them not to display there.</li>
[124001420960] |<li>Show whether they are running, a state which is indicated with a small “play” style triangle next to the application icon in the menu.</li> 
[124001420970] |There are also some behaviours which are collective across all the applications in the category.
[124001420980] |For example, any of the applications can set the messaging indicator to an alert state, signalling that it’s worth clicking on.
[124001420990] |Each category indicator supports a unique API that’s relevant for that category.
[124001421000] |There are some common features, for example the ability of applications to register and de-register for the indicators and the ability to add menu entries, but the details might vary substantially from one category to another.
[124001421010] |The underlying goal is to make it clearer to users “what all of those icons are about”.
[124001421020] |There are fewer of them, and the ones that are there are more persistent –they are always there, and they always do the same sort of thing.
[124001421030] |“You’ve got a message” is useful no matter which channel the message came through.
[124001421040] |The net result is that the whole set of indicators feels tighter and better defined.
[124001421050] |The session indicator, which displays the shutdown / restart menu, has a similar capability that replaced the “restart required” panel icon in 10.04 LTS.
[124001421060] |Since the session menu already contains the “restart” menu option, the session menu will now be set into an alert state when you need to restart.
[124001421070] |The “Restart…” menu option is changed to “Restart Required…” (though I would now prefer something like “Restart, completing updates…”).
[124001421080] |The battery indicator shows the status of all of your batteries, from laptop to UPS to mouse and wireless keyboard.
[124001421090] |Other applications and devices which have battery information should be able to insert themselves there appropriately.
[124001421100] |Similarly, all the calendar and alarm applications might fit into the Clock Indicator.
[124001421110] |And perhaps all the applications which have downloads might use a single category for that –there’s some discussion along those lines on the Ayatana list at the moment.
[124001421120] |<h2>Timelines and iterations</h2>
[124001421130] |The basic “add an indicator with a menu” capability is there now, and was used for Application Indicators in 10.04 LTS.
[124001421140] |What complicates the picture from a delivery perspective is our evolving understanding of how best to organise the category indicators.
[124001421150] |For example, at the moment we are aggregating received messages in the messaging indicator, but the send or broadcast elements of those same communications channels are accessed through the Me menu, where we track presence.
[124001421160] |That has been controversial –sensible folks think we should perhaps restructure that to bring the elements together.
[124001421170] |Each arrangement of category indicators involves shaping the API’s in new ways, because the categories are fundamentally different from one another, and we want to design custom indicators for each category.
[124001421180] |Not only are the individual category indicator designs changing, but the arrangement of categories themselves is subject to active debate and experimentation, which is important to getting a crisp final result.
[124001421190] |We can’t be certain that the current configuration is the best one, and want the flexibility to continue to evolve and reshape the APIs accordingly.
[124001421200] |We expect it will take at least three iterations of Ubuntu to be certain, and that we can commit to ABI stability for 12.04 LTS onwards.
[124001430010] |<title>A global menu for Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition</title>
[124001430020] |In the <b>netbook edition</b> for 10.10, we’re going to have a single menu bar for all applications, in the panel.
[124001430030] |Our focus on netbooks has driven much of the desktop design work at Canonical.
[124001430040] |There are a number of constraints and challenges that are particular to netbooks, and often constraints can be a source of insight and inspiration.
[124001430050] |In this case, wanting to make the most of vertical space has driven the decision to embrace the single menu approach.
[124001430060] |<h2>It’s all about vertical pixels</h2>
[124001430070] |Netbooks are conventionally small-and-wide-screen devices.
[124001430080] |A common screen format is 1024×600.
[124001430090] |There’s plenty of horizontal space, but not a lot of vertical space.
[124001430100] |So we’ve been lead to explore options that really make the most of the vertical space.
[124001430110] |This is important because the main thing people do with a netbook is surf the web.
[124001430120] |And most pages will fit horizontally in a netbook screen, but they require quite a lot of vertical scrolling.
[124001430130] |The more we can optimise the use of vertical space, the more enjoyable it will be to spend time on the web, with your netbook.
[124001430140] |In the first few iterations of Ubuntu’s netbook-oriented UI, we concentrated on collapsing the window title into the top panel.
[124001430150] |In 10.10, we’re going to put the menu there.
[124001430160] |<h2>Only on the Netbook Edition UI</h2>
[124001430170] |We’re going to put the menu in the panel on the netbook edition of Ubuntu, and not on the desktop edition, because that’s where the screen real-estate is most precious.
[124001430180] |There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart.
[124001430190] |Those questions are greatly diminished in the netbook environment, by definition.
[124001430200] |Also, the netbook edition has a reduced application load.
[124001430210] |That will reduce the number of applications we need to get this working on.
[124001430220] |However, it will be straightforward to use this on your desktop too, if you want, and we’d encourage people to try with that configuration.
[124001430230] |The more testing we have early on, the better we’ll understand how it works with different applications.
[124001430240] |It will be easy to add to the standard desktop panel for people who want to try it out, or prefer to work that way.
[124001430250] |<h2>Innovation: combining title and menu in a single panel</h2>
[124001430260] |It’s not confirmed yet, but we will aim to go beyond what Apple and others have done with panel menus, to consolidate both the window title (and window controls) into the panel along with the menu.
[124001430270] |By default, we’d display the contents of the title bar.
[124001430280] |When you mouse up to the panel, or when you press the Alt key, the contents would switch to the menu.
[124001430290] |That way, you’re looking at the document title most of the time, unless you move towards it to click on the menu.
[124001430300] |In mockups and prototype testing, the result was a leaner, cleaner feeling netbook interface.
[124001430310] |Less clutter, less wasted space, and improved clarity of purpose.
[124001430320] |We’ll have to get running code in front of users to evaluate the usability of it and tweak transitions and presentation.
[124001430330] |Generally, people use netbooks with a small set of applications running, all maximised.
[124001430340] |In that case, putting the menu in the panel will save 24 pixels, about 4% of the vertical space.
[124001430350] |Combined with other work on the netbook interface, we’re confident there is no better OS for surfing the net on your ultra-mobile netbook.
[124001430360] |<h2>Under the hood: d-bus menu transport</h2>
[124001430370] |The technical approach we are taking in this work is to build on the d-bus menu work that Cody Russel and Ted Gould have pioneered for our work on indicators.
[124001430380] |Essentially, this lets us map a menu into d-bus space, where a different application can take responsibility for rendering it.
[124001430390] |The technology works across both Gtk and Qt applications, so we are confident that it will work for the common cases of GNOME and KDE apps running on the Ubuntu netbook edition.
[124001430400] |Of course, there is a lot of work to be done to support applications that use different toolkits, notably the Mozilla suite of Firefox and Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.
[124001430410] |And there will be many applications which need some thought as to how best to map the experience from the current world of “one menu per window” to a single, panel-displayed menu.
[124001430420] |We’ve started working on this with the existing Global Menu project.
[124001430430] |While there are differences in the technical approach we want to take, that team has already identified many of the common issues, and there are great opportunities for us to collaborate.
[124001430440] |I’m looking forward to seeing the result in action in 10.10!
[124001450010] |<title>Window indicators</title>
[124001450020] |The Ayatana Indicators work has given us a crisp, clean basis for indicators in the panel.
[124001450030] |We’ve said they will all look a particular way, and behave a particular way.
[124001450040] |And we’ve said they will be placed on the right of the panel.
[124001450050] |But why limit indicators to the panel?
[124001450060] |Let’s make it possible for applications to use indicators themselves, for all the things that indicators are good at:
[124001450070] |<li>Conveying a particular state, such as whether or not the application is connected,</li>
[124001450080] |<li>Providing a handle for the indicator menu, to modify that state</li> 
[124001450090] |We’ll start with “window indicators”, or “windicators” for fun.
[124001450100] |<strong>Windicators are indicators displayed in the window title bar that behave just like the indicators in the panel: they have an icon which shows state, and clicking on the icon brings up a menu.</strong>
[124001450110] |Applications can create, update and remove window indicators using an API more or less like the AppIndicator framework first put to use in 10.04 LTS.
[124001450120] |Window indicators, or "windicators", shown in a sample application window.
[124001450130] |We’ve carefully placed all the panel indicators on the right, and we’ve carefully put the window controls and window title on the left.
[124001450140] |So now we have all this space on the right.
[124001450150] |As a pattern, it would fit to put the window indicators there.
[124001450160] |Cody Russell is leading some work in Canonical around the technology which actually draws the window title bar and borders.
[124001450170] |It’s called “client side window decorations”.
[124001450180] |We are moving the rendering of the window decorations into the app itself, so that you don’t have the window manager and application drawing those pieces separately.
[124001450190] |That simplifies certain things (of course it also makes some things harder).
[124001450200] |One of the most interesting consequences of the client-side decorations work is that it means that the application could more easily draw into the titlebar (because the application is drawing the title bar).
[124001450210] |And that makes it even more natural for the application to control the right side of the window title bar as well.
[124001450220] |<b>Update:</b> Several commenters correctly pointed out that window indicators could just as easily be rendered by window managers in cases where the theme is not CSD-based.
[124001450230] |CSD provided the inspiration for giving that space to the application, it’s not essential to the implementation.
[124001450240] |It would be fantastic for window indicators to be available on
[124001450250] |<h3>Less chrome, more content: banish the status bar</h3>
[124001450260] |I’m on a “less is more” kick with our design efforts, and one of the things I want to banish is wasted vertical space.
[124001450270] |For netbooks, that’s particularly important.
[124001450280] |And a lot of applications have status bars at the bottom, for no good reason other than it was that way in Windows 3.1.
[124001450290] |Typically the application status bar has:
[124001450300] |<li>Some status icons (“online”)</li>
[124001450310] |<li>Some tools (“Yslow”)</li>
[124001450320] |<li>A transient status message (“Saving draft…”)</li> 
[124001450330] |We can replace these with a combination of windicators and temporary, overlay status bars.
[124001450340] |I really liked the Chrome browser’s use of overlay status messages, so kudos and thanks to them for the inspiration.
[124001450350] |The net result of those two steps, in apps where we can, is to save about 5% of the vertical space for your stuff –real content.
[124001450360] |<h3>Prioritising examples for implementation</h3>
[124001450370] |If you’re interested in this idea, please join the Ayatana mailing list and participate in the design discussions there.
[124001450380] |We’d like to develop some patterns that are generic, so that we can use a common icon and possibly also common indicator menu entries for addressing the same issue in diverse applications.
[124001450390] |Of course, applications will be free to use the mechanism for things that are unique to them.
[124001450400] |<h3>Candidates for 10.10</h3>
[124001450410] |It would be fantastic to implement a few of these window indicators for 10.10.
[124001450420] |Please help us choose the most useful cases!
[124001450430] |Currently on the list are:
[124001450440] |<li><strong>Online / offline</strong> status indicator and toggle options for the mail client, chat program or Gwibber, the broadcast messages application.</li>
[124001450450] |<li>An “<strong>unsaved</strong>” indicator, that tells people that the contents of the file they are working on have changed and potentially lets them save it or set autosave properties.</li>
[124001450460] |<li><strong>Progress indicators</strong>, which show that an action is in progress, and possibly also indicate the extent of the progress.
[124001450470] |The associated menu would enable one to pause or cancel the operation, and perhaps define the behaviour on completion of the action.</li>
[124001450480] |<li>A “<strong>basket</strong>” indicator, which shows if any items have been selected for purchase,</li>
[124001450490] |<li><strong>Sharing</strong> indicators, which would show if a document is shared with multiple people, and enable one to setup such a share.</li>
[124001450500] |<li><strong>Volume</strong> indicators, which would show the loudness of application audio streams, and enable one to set the volume for that specific application.</li> 
[124001450510] |The key thing is that these indicators are entirely application-specific, and ideally only relevant to the window that you are actually looking at.
[124001450520] |<h3>Just like Panel Indicators…</h3>
[124001450530] |From a visual design point of view, again the goal would be to ensure that indicators are symbolic.
[124001450540] |They would follow the same styling as Ayatana indicators:
[124001450550] |<li>Monochrome by default, with shape indicating the function of the indicator</li>
[124001450560] |<li>Semantically colored: with red for critical problems, orange for alerts, green for positive status changes and blue for informative states that are not the default or usual state.</li> 
[124001450570] |<h3>Integrated with the Netbook Edition Smart Panel</h3>
[124001450580] |Last week I blogged about our decision to adopt a single, global menu for all applications, in the panel.
[124001450590] |And I also said we would explore putting the window title *and* menu into the panel, when the window is maximised.
[124001450600] |Of course, that means that we need to accommodate the window indicators in the panel as well.
[124001450610] |So: when the window is maximised, and we are using a smart which can include both indicators and window titles, the window indicators will be inserted into the panel as well.
[124001450620] |They will appear on the right of the panel, and be the leftmost indicators.
[124001450630] |For example, here is the application, maximised (note the dodgy Ubuntu logo in the top left –that’s the panel, not the window title bar you’re looking at):
[124001450640] |In this configuration, the system achieves “singular purpose”: the entire screen is devoted to a single application, yet the Ayatana elements continue to serve their purpose, either systemic (the battery indicator) or application specific. 
[124001460010] |<title>Unity, and Ubuntu Light</title>
[124001460020] |A few months ago we took on the challenge of building a version of Ubuntu for the dual-boot, instant-on market.
[124001460030] |We wanted to be surfing the web in under 10 seconds, and give people a fantastic web experience.
[124001460040] |We also wanted it to be possible to upgrade from that limited usage model to a full desktop.
[124001460050] |The fruit of that R D is both <strong>a new desktop experience codebase, called Unity</strong>, and a range of <strong><a>Light versions of Ubuntu</a>, both netbook and desktop</strong>, that are optimised for dual-boot scenarios.
[124001460060] |The dual-boot, web-focused use case is sufficiently different from general-purpose desktop usage to warrant a fresh look at the way the desktop is configured.
[124001460070] |We spent quite a bit of time analyzing screenshots of a couple of hundred different desktop configurations from the current Ubuntu and Kubuntu user base, to see what people used most.
[124001460080] |We also identified the things that are NOT needed in lightweight dual-boot instant-on offerings.
[124001460090] |That provided us both with a list of things to focus on and make rich, and a list of things we could leave out.
[124001460100] |Instant-on products are generally used in a stateless fashion.
[124001460110] |These are “get me to the web asap” environments, with no need of heavy local file management.
[124001460120] |If there is content there, it would be best to think of it as “cloud like” and synchronize it with the local Windows environment, with cloud services and other devices.
[124001460130] |They are also not environments where people would naturally expect to use a wide range of applications: the web is the key, and there may be a few complementary capabilities like media playback, messaging, games, and the ability to connect to local devices like printers and cameras and pluggable media.
[124001460140] |We also learned something interesting from users.
[124001460150] |It’s not about how fast you appear to boot.
[124001460160] |<strong>It’s about how fast you actually deliver a working web browser and Internet connection.</strong>
[124001460170] |It’s about how fast you have a running system that is responsive to the needs of the user.
[124001460180] |<h3>Unity: a lightweight netbook interface</h3>
[124001460190] |There are several driving forces behind the result.
[124001460200] |The desktop screenshots we studied showed that people typically have between 3 and 10 launchers on their panels, for rapid access to key applications.
[124001460210] |We want to preserve that sense of having a few favorite applications that are instantly accessible.
[124001460220] |Rather than making it equally easy to access any installed application, we assume that almost everybody will run one of a few apps, and they need to switch between those apps and any others which might be running, very easily.
[124001460230] |We focused on maximising screen real estate for content.
[124001460240] |In particular, we focused on maximising the available vertical pixels for web browsing.
[124001460250] |Netbooks have screens which are wide, but shallow.
[124001460260] |Notebooks in general are moving to wide screen formats.
[124001460270] |So vertical space is more precious than horizontal space.
[124001460280] |We also want to embrace touch as a first class input.
[124001460290] |We want people to be able to launch and switch between applications using touch, so the launcher must be finger friendly.
[124001460300] |Those constraints and values lead us to a new shape for the desktop, which we will adopt in Ubuntu’s Netbook Edition for 10.10 and beyond.
[124001460310] |First, we want to move the bottom panel to the left of the screen, and devote that to launching and switching between applications.
[124001460320] |That frees up vertical space for web content, at the cost of horizontal space, which is cheaper in a widescreen world.
[124001460330] |In Ubuntu today the bottom panel also presents the Trash and Show Desktop options, neither of which is relevant in a stateless instant-on environment.
[124001460340] |Second, we’ll expand that left-hand launcher panel so that it is touch-friendly.
[124001460350] |With relatively few applications required for instant-on environments, we can afford to be more generous with the icon size there.
[124001460360] |The Unity launcher will show what’s running, and support fast switching and drag-and-drop between applications.
[124001460370] |Third, we will make the top panel smarter.
[124001460380] |We’ve already talked about adopting a single global menu, which would be rendered by the panel in this case.
[124001460390] |If we can also manage to fit the window title and controls into that panel, we will have achieved very significant space saving for the case where someone is focused on a single application at a time, and especially for a web browser.
[124001460400] |We end up with a configuration like this:
[124001460410] |Mockup of Unity Launcher and Panel with maximised application
[124001460420] |The launcher and panel that we developed in response to this challenge are components of Unity.
[124001460430] |They are now in a state where they can be tested widely, and where we can use that testing to shape their evolution going forward.
[124001460440] |A development milestone of <a>Unity is available today in a PPA</a>, with development branches on Launchpad, and I’d very much like to get feedback from people trying it out on a netbook, or even a laptop with a wide screen.
[124001460450] |Unity is aimed at full screen applications and, as I described above, doesn’t really support traditional file management.
[124001460460] |But it’s worth a spin, and it’s very easy to try out if you have Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installed already.
[124001460470] |<h3>Ubuntu Light</h3>
[124001460480] |Instant-on, dual boot installations are a new frontier for us.
[124001460490] |Over the past two years we have made great leaps forward as a first class option for PC OEM’s, who today ship millions of PC’s around the world with Ubuntu pre-installed.
[124001460500] |But traditionally, it’s been an “either/or” proposition –either Windows in markets that prefer it, or Ubuntu in markets that don’t.
[124001460510] |The dual-boot opportunity gives us the chance to put a free software foot forward even in markets where people use Windows as a matter of course.
[124001460520] |And it looks beautiful:
[124001460530] |Ubuntu Light, showing the Unity launcher and panel
[124001460540] |In those cases, Ubuntu Netbook Light, or Ubuntu Desktop Light, will give OEM’s the ability to differentiate themselves with fast-booting Linux offerings that are familiar to Ubuntu users and easy to use for new users, safe for web browsing in unprotected environments like airports and hotels, focused on doing that job very well, but upgradeable with a huge list of applications, on demand.
[124001460550] |The Light versions will also benefit from the huge amount of work done on every Ubuntu release to keep it maintained –instant-on environments need just as much protection as everyday desktops, and Ubuntu has a deep commitment to getting that right.
[124001460560] |The Ubuntu Light range is available to OEM’s today.
[124001460570] |Each image will be hand-crafted to boot fastest on that specific hardware, the application load reduced to the minimum, <strong>and it comes with tools for Windows which assist in the management of the dual-boot experience</strong>.
[124001460580] |Initially, the focus is on the Netbook Light version based on Unity, but in future we expect to do a Light version of the desktop, too.
[124001460590] |Given the requirement to customise the Light versions for specific hardware, there won’t be a general-purpose downloadable image of Ubuntu Light on ubuntu.com.
[124001460600] |<h3>Evolving Unity for Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10</h3>
[124001460610] |Unity exists today, and is great for the minimalist, stateless configurations that suit a dual-boot environment.
[124001460620] |But in order embrace it for our Netbook UI, we’ll need to design some new capabilities, and implement them during this cycle.
[124001460630] |Those design conversations are taking place this week at UDS, just outside Brussels in Belgium.
[124001460640] |If you can’t be there in person, and are interested in the design challenges Unity presents for the netbook form factor, check out the conference schedule and participate in the discussion virtually.
[124001460650] |The two primary pieces we need to put in place are:
[124001460660] |<li>Support for <strong>many more applications</strong>, and adding / removing applications.
[124001460670] |Instant-on environments are locked down, while netbook environments should support anybody’s applications, not just those favored in the Launcher.</li>
[124001460680] |<li>Support for <strong>file management</strong>, necessary for an environment that will be the primary working space for the user rather than an occasional web-focused stopover.</li> 
[124001460690] |We have an initial starting point for the design, called the Dash, which presents files and applications as an overlay.
[124001460700] |The inspiration for the Dash comes from consoles and devices, which use full-screen, media-rich presentation.
[124001460710] |We want the Dash to feel device-like, and use the capabilities of modern hardware.
[124001460720] |The Unity Dash, showing the Applications Place
[124001460730] |The instant-on requirements and constraints proved very useful in shaping our thinking, but the canvas is still blank for the more general, netbook use case.
[124001460740] |Unity gives us the chance to do something profoundly new and more useful, taking advantage of ideas that have emerged in computing from the console to the handheld.
[124001460750] |<h3>Relationship to Gnome Shell</h3>
[124001460760] |Unity and Gnome Shell are complementary for the Gnome Project.
[124001460770] |While Gnome Shell presents an expansive view of how people work in complex environments with multiple simultaneous activities, Unity is designed to address the other end of the spectrum, where people are focused on doing one thing at any given time.
[124001460780] |Unity does embrace the key technologies of Gnome 3: Mutter, for window management, and Zeitgeist will be an anchor component of our file management approach.
[124001460790] |The interface itself is built in Clutter.
[124001460800] |The design seed of Unity was in place before Gnome Shell, and we decided to build on that for the instant-on work rather than adopt Gnome Shell because most of the devices we expect to ship Ubuntu Light on are netbooks.
[124001460810] |In any event, Unity represents the next step for the Ubuntu Netbook UI, optimised for small screens.
[124001460820] |The Ubuntu Netbook interface is popular with Gnome users and we’re fortunate to be working inside an open ecosystem that encourages that level of diversity.
[124001460830] |As a result, Gnome has offerings for mobile, netbook and desktop form factors.
[124001460840] |Gnome is in the lucky position of having multiple vendors participating and solving different challenges independently.
[124001460850] |That makes Gnome stronger.
[124001460860] |<h3>Relationship to FreeDesktop and KDE</h3>
[124001460870] |Unity complies with freedesktop.org standards, and is helping to shape them, too.
[124001460880] |We would like KDE applications to feel welcome on a Unity-based netbook.
[124001460890] |We’re using the Ayatana indicators in the panel, so KDE applications which use AppIndicators will Just Work.
[124001460900] |And to the extent that those applications take advantage of the Messaging Menu, Sound Indicator and Me Menu, they will be fully integrated into the Unity environment.
[124001460910] |We often get asked by OEM’s how they can integrate KDE applications into their custom builds of Ubuntu, and the common frameworks of freedesktop.org greatly facilitate doing so in a smooth fashion.
[124001460920] |<h3>Looking forward to the Maverick Meerkat</h3>
[124001460930] |It will be an intense cycle, if we want to get all of these pieces in line.
[124001460940] |But we think it’s achievable: the new launcher, the new panel, the new implementation of the global menu and an array of indicators.
[124001460950] |Things have accelerated greatly during Lucid so if we continue at this pace, it should all come together.
[124001460960] |Here’s to a great summer of code.