Unity Technologies announced Monday that the next version of Unity will support publishing to Ubuntu. This is fantastic news because it will enable developers to deliver their new and existing games to Ubuntu users very easily.

The Unity 4 game engine delivers new features like the Mecanim animation technology and a boost in game fidelity to everyone from the independent developer to a major studio. For game developers the gaming engine provides the majority of the technologies required to deliver a game – including things like sound, graphics and physics. Game studios standardise on using an engine so they can spend their time on the aspects of their game that will be unique. For Ubuntu to be supported by game developers the gaming engines are a critical dependency – without them developers cannot port or target new games.

Unity Technologies made their name with independent developers who often target alternative platforms where they can stand out from the crowd of games created by the major studios. Unity Technologies is well known for their deep technology ability and for targeting alternative platforms such as Android. We have been in discussions with Unity Technologies since last summer as there is a lot of developer demand for a market ripe for awesome games. We are delighted to see Unity commit to publishing to Ubuntu – a significant commitment for a team handling so many platforms.

Following on from EA publishing games to the Software Center in May and the Humble Indie Bundle supporting Ubuntu in June – the past several months have been fantastic for gaming on Ubuntu, and Unity 4 support of Ubuntu promises to make next year even better.

If you would like to get involved developing or porting games to Ubuntu with Unity during the beta you can pre-order Unity 4 Pro. In the meantime there are lots of resources available on The Ubuntu Developer site. This month we are running the Ubuntu App Showdown contest with fantastic prizes for the best apps developed.

Jelmer writes:

bzr-builddeb 2.8.1 has just landed on Debian Sid and Ubuntu Precise. This version contains some of my improvements from late last year for the handling of quilt patches in packaging branches. Most of these improvements depend on bzr 2.5 beta 5, which is also in Sid/Precise.

The most relevant changes (enabled by default) are:

• ‘bzr merge-package’ is now integrated into ‘bzr merge’ (it’s just a hook that fires on merges involving packages)
• patches are automatically unapplied in relevant trees before merges
• before a commit, bzr will warn if you have some applied and some unapplied quilt patches

Furthermore, you can now specify whether you would like bzr to automatically apply all patches for stored data and whether you would like to automatically have them applied in your working tree by setting ‘quilt-tree-policy‘ and ‘quilt-commit-policy‘ to either ‘applied‘ or ‘unapplied‘. This means that you can have the patches unapplied in the repository, but automatically have them applied upon checkout or update. Setting these configuration options to an empty string causes bzr to not touch your patches during commits, checkout or update.

We’ve done some testing of it, as well as running through a package merge involving patches with Barry, but none of us do package merges regularly. If you do run into issues or if you think there are ways we can improve the quilt handling further, please comment here or file a bug report against the UDD project.

Caveats:

• If there are patches to unapply for the OTHER tree, bzr will currently create a separate checkout and unapply the patches there. This may have performance consequences for big packages. The best way to prevent this is to set ‘quilt-commit-policy = unapplied‘.
• ‘bzr merge‘ will now fail if you are merging in a packaging tree that is lacking pristine tar metadata; I’m submitting a fix for this, but it’s not in 2.8.1.
• if you set ‘quilt-commit-policy‘ and ‘quilt-tree-policy‘ but have them set to a different value, bzr will consider the tree to have changes.

To disable the automatic unapplying of patches and fall back to the previous behaviour, set the following in your builddeb configuration:

quilt-smart-merge = False

I have been writing weekly Ubuntu development updates for about one cycle now. As many seem to like these updates, it’s time to raise the bar a bit. As I can’t do this just on my own, I need your help.

After some discussion with the Ubuntu News team, we agreed that development news can now be submitted to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by simply sending a mail there with “[dev]” in the subject. To get a better idea of which kind of news we are looking for, check out the development news wiki page.

This is a very important service, as it will help us all to stay informed in our huge development community, it will make our efforts more transparent and inspire others to help out or get involved in similar efforts, so if you have just a few news bits, send them there. If you want to thank somebody for their work, tell us about it.

Also if you have ideas for additional topics we should write about, either send a mail or add a comment below.

Also am I looking for contributors, who would like to get involved in writing and collecting information about Ubuntu development. It’s not a huge amount of work, but should be pretty fun. If you are interested, please leave a comment below or drop me an email.

At the moment we are working on providing support for proxy on Ubuntu One. In order to test this correctly I have been setting up a LAN in my office so that I can test as many scenarion as possible. On of those scenarios is the one in which the auth if the proxy uses Active Directory.

Because I use bind9 to set one of my boxed for the DNS I had to dig out how to configure it to work with AD. In order to do that I did the following:

1. Edited named.conf.local to add a subdomain for the AD machine:

   zone "ad.example.com" {
           type master;
           file "/etc/bind/db.ad.example.com";
           allow-update { 192.168.1.103; };
   };
   

2. Configured the subzone to work with AD.

   ; BIND data file for local loopback interface
   ;
   $TTL    604800
   @       IN      SOA     ad.example.com. root.ad.example.com. (
                                 2         ; Serial
                            604800         ; Refresh
                             86400         ; Retry
                           2419200         ; Expire
                            604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
   ;
   @       IN      NS      ad.marvel.
   @       IN      A       127.0.0.1
   @       IN      AAAA    ::1
   ;
   ; AD horrible domains
   ;
   dc1.ad.example.com.    A       192.168.1.103
   _ldap._tcp.ad.example.com.     SRV     0 0 389  dc1.ad.example.com.
   _kerberos._tcp.ad.example.com.    SRV     0 0 88   dc1.ad.example.com.
   _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.ad.example.com.   SRV     0 0 389  dc1.ad.example.com.
   _kerberos._tcp.dc._msdcs.ad.example.com.    SRV     0 0 88   dc1.ad.example.com.
   gc._msdcs.ad.example.com.      SRV     0 0 3268 dc1.ad.example.com.
   

   Note:Is important to remember that the computer name of the server that has the AD role is dc1, if we used a diff name we have to change the configuration accordingly.

3. Restart the bind9 service:

   sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart
   

4. Install the AD server and specify that you DO NOT want to set that server as a DNS server too.
5. Set the AD server to use your Ubuntu with your bind9 as the DNS server.

There are lots of things missing if you wanted to use this a set up for a corporate network, but it does the trick in my LAN since I do not have AD duplication or other fancy things. Maybe is useful for you home, who knows..

Last week was the Bazaar sprint, which was fantastic and tiring. Somehow even the people who’d been at UDS just before made it through five packed days of fixing bugs, preparing releases, and debugging package imports. We were most hospitably hosted at the Canonical offices a long way up Millbank tower. But even those who couldn’t be there in person to enjoy the view were part of the experience. At home in the Ukraine Alexander wore his Bazaar shirt in support during the first day. On IRC larstiq and santagada ran the test suite on pypy and investigated incompatibilities. And all week we had a small robot John sitting in the middle of the table on the line from the Netherlands, working on performance bugs and offering helpful advice.

There were two new faces introduced. Max has been a stalwart maintaining the ~bzr PPAs and getting daily builds working. Jonathan is joining the Bazaar team on rotation from Kubuntu, which is very exciting for fans of qbzr. He started getting to know bzrlib by taking on some bugs tagged ‘easy’ and pair programming on harder ones. It was a bit tough to keep track of everything going on, but good progress was made on the Ubuntu Distributed Development front, the translation framework branches Naoki put together were landed, and lots of pet bugs were fixed. Download bzr 2.4b3 now to see the rest of the results for yourself.

After these long days in front of screens a nice meal out was a welcome treat. Over dinner we even managed to get on to topics other than code on occasion. On Thursday evening everyone went to As You Like It at the Globe as groundlings. Even with the language barrier to overcome for some of the sprinters, the comedy lived up to the categorisation. Trying to use the cycle hire scheme to travel there and back proved more of an obstacle. The bikes themselves were fine, provided you could get past the terrible computer interface and persuade the system to let you rent them. Now, if only they took patches for that…

Some of you might know that I’m a rugby nutter. I love watching it, playing it, training… this has had the following consequence:

Unfortunately this will slow me down the following 4 weeks which will affect those people that wanted to see the new code coming to Ubuntu One on Windows. Sorry for that, I hope you can understand

As most of you know, the Windows files system does not support a number of special characters. To be precise does characters are

:”/\\|?*. As you can imaging this is a problem when syncing between far superior Unix system and Windows. Knowing this, can you please let me know what is wrong/right in this image:

Got it? Lets look closer:

Well, the genius behind this was not me but it was Chipaca, I can tell you, I’m far less imaginative. But this little trick will allow you to sync between Windows and Ubuntu in a far better user friendly way that other sync services do

As some of you may know I am the person that is currently working on the port of Ubuntu One to Windows. Recently a colleague asked me how to install Ubuntu One in its current alpha state on Windows, and I though that posting the instructions for the adventurous would be a nice thing to do (I might get someone interested to help me too ).

Setting the build environment

Because the .msi that we generate does not have the digital signature of Canonical we do not distribute it yet. But you shall not worry since all the code is open source are you are more than able to compile, test and create the installer by yourself. To do that you have to set up your environment (I should create an msi or script for this….). In order to set everything, follow this steps:

1. Install python 2.6 for windows and extensions (installer)
2. Install py2exe
3. Patch py2exe with this
4. Add the following implementation of XDG for windows.

5. Install this python packages:

   • twisted
   • oauth
   • ubuntuone-storage-protocol

   It is important that if you use easy_install to install the packages you need to use the -Z option so that the dependecies are not isntalled as eggs. Py2exe cannot work with eggs and by using the -Z option the egss will be automatically extracted for you.

Creating the .msi

As usual everything in the build process has been automated. To automate the process we have used Nant which will build, test and create the .msi to be used.

A list of the commands can be found in the ubuntu wiki, nevertheless here they are:

bootstrapper

Creates a bootstrapper that will allow to install in the users machine the Ubuntu One solution plus a number of useful applications (Tomboy + GtkSharp)

build

Compiles the different projects that are part of the solution.

clean

Removes the different results from the last compilation/task .

installer

Compiles the application using the build task, runs the unit tests usint the tests task and creates a msi installer that can be used to install Ubuntu One in the users machine (do not confuse with the bootstrapper, it only installes Ubuntu One)

tests

Compiles the solution using the build task and runs the different unit tests. The output of the tests can be found in the test-results dir.

In order to build the msi you will have to execute the following from the root of the directory:

tools\Nant\bin\nant.exe installer

Once you have done that you will be able to find the msi in the install directory that you will be able to use to install the app in your machine.

Installing

Well it is an .msi, so double click

Using

As I mentioned, this is an alpha, an very very early alpha and it means that there is some work to get it running. Currently the most blocking issue is the fact that we do not have an implementation of Ubuntu SSO on windows an therefore we cannot retrieve the OAuth tokens required by Ubuntu One. Here are the instructions to get them:

1. Get credentials from Linux

The first step is to get your credentials from a machine that you already have paired. To do so, launch seahorse (the image might help)

Once you have opened seahorse you should be able to find an UbuntuOne token (if not, you will need to pair your machine to Ubuntu One). Right click on it and selected the properties options which should open a dialog like the following:

At this point simple click on the + sign and select “Show password” so that you can copy paste the Oauth tokens.

2. Set you OAuth in Windows

Currently the OAuth in Windows are read from an env variable. To be able to start syncing in your Windows machine you will have to set the env variable with the tokens you just retrieved from your Linux box. This example will be using Windows XP but it should be the same in other Windows versions.

To access to the env vars in Windows XP right click in “My Computer” and select “Properties”:

This will launch the system properties dialog. Select the “Advance” tab where you will find the option of “Enviroment Variables”:

Once the “Enviroment Variables” dialog is launched you will have to create a new env variable in the “User Variables” section:

The data to be used in the following:

Variable Name

UbuntuOne

Variable value

Your OAuth token from Linux.

Sync

If you did not restart your machine after the installer, do it. In the next boot time you will have the following:

Not all the actions of the menu are yet there, but for sure you can use the “Synchronize Now” option.

How can I help

Well the easiest way to help is to file bugs, secondly join #ubuntuone on freenode and look for mandel (me ) and I will happily explain the C# code as well as the python code and the work we have to do. This is not an easy project so do not get scared by the amount of code done so far or were to start, I’m here for that

Happy syncing!

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