[NTLUG:Discuss] Ubuntu Developer Summit for version 10.04

[Ralph Green]

On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 23:11 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 15:54 -0500, Ralph Green wrote:
> >  Have you been to one of these summits before?  
> 
> Yes, a few.
> 
> > I want to learn about a
> > couple of specific things about Ubuntu.  I also generally want to learn
> > more and see if there is a good place for me to participate.  How useful
> > are these summits, if you don't do as an active developer on some
> > existing project?
> >  Specifically, I want to learn more about how to customize and
> > distribute versions of Ubuntu.
> 
> Generally going to learn isn't useful.  If you want to go to mold and
> adapt those are good reasons to go.  Most of the discussions aren't at a
> level where someone who isn't familiar would get much use out of them.
> If you have made a couple of custom respins of Ubuntu, and have had
> issues with doing so that you'd like to see fixed, UDS is a good place
> to bring those issues forward and try to advance solutions.
> 
  I have made respins of Knoppix, Fedora, and Puppy, but I have not
found a good guide to doing this for Ubuntu.  Do you know of one?  I
would like to be able to deploy machines with the packages added that
are needed for my customers.  Tonight, I found information on how to
setup the packages I want.  I have not tried it yet, but I will soon.
The part I have not found in how to have add-ons installed for users in
Firefox.  At a minimum, I need NoScript, and User Agent Switcher.  A
couple others would be nice.  With the Greasemonkey add-on and a few
other packages(gnash, totem, and totem-mozilla), I can enable youtube,
which people always ask about.  Jeff Rush has given me one lead on
auto-installing add-ons, but I don't have the details worked out yet.

> Also to note, the various track leads are soliciting topics for sessions
> now.  If you'd like to propose a session, now is a good time.
> 
  I'll think about this.  One thing I want to learn more about is
virtualization.  I have used the vm-builder in Ubuntu.  It is a good
start, and I can see other things being built that make it more useful.
I don't have enough hardware that supports virtualization in KVM to make
my own cloud yet.  I will soon, and that is what I want to learn about.
I know you said these are not general purpose learning sessions.  I
think I have used the underlying tools enough that I would gain from
these sessions and maybe be able to contribute.

> > I also want to talk to someone about the
> > crazy way update-notifier works now and find out what is planned.
> 
> I'd be happy to answer your questions on that. :)
> 
  I'll assume you will answer on the list here.  If you would rather
talk about that off-list, just let me know.
  The way update notification works in 9.04 is really annoying.  I know
what they were trying to accomplish, but the solution is worse than the
cure.  The single worst part is having Update Manager open up on the
screen when it find updates.  This happens in the middle of
presentations, or other things you are trying to use the computer for.
I don't tend to work on the newest computers and Update Manager is not
only distracting, but noticeably slows down the desktop until it
finishes loading.
 Now, you can turn off the auto launch of Update Manager, but that still
leaves notifications that are too strong.  That big red arrow comes up.
It makes it look like your system is in danger, even if the updates is
something like the recent time zone updates.  I am about to start
putting a cron job in to "pkill update-notifier" once an hour or more
often.  One of the things I do is setting up machines for people who
have very little computer experience.  I have kept the deployed machines
at Ubuntu 8.10 so far.  I don't want to stay with an older version, but
the way 9.04 works for notifying about updates is just not acceptable.
Is it going to get better?  I have been running alpha, beta and now rc
versions of Karmic, but I don't have a sense of how update-notification
works there.  Updates come so frequently there that this machine does
not stay up for more than a day or two between reboots.  I don't fault
the dev process for this.  It just means it is an active development.