Time does fly, and we’re alread on the last day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Lots of content covered and still lots of interesting discussions to be had. We’re thrilled to bring you the summary on what’s on today on the App Development track.

Here’s the list of app development sessions for today at UDS:

• At 14:00 UTC: App Development Roundtable
• At 14:00 UTC: SDK UI Toolkit Responsive Layouting
• At 15:05 UTC: Core Apps plans for 13.10
• At 15:05 UTC: Contact Service for Ubuntu Touch
• At 16:05 UTC: LoCo Team Coding Challenge
• At 16:05 UTC: Refocus the Ubuntu App Developer site to go mobile
• At 18:05 UTC: Building a set tutorials for App Developers
• At 19:00 UTC: Closing Plenary and Track Summaries

Hope to see you there!

After a very productive kick off, we’re back with the second day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit on the App Development track and the summary of sessions for today. Thank you everyone who participated in the sessions yesterday, either in hangouts or in IRC.

Here’s the list of app development sessions for today:

• At 14:00 UTC: App Development Roundtable
• At 15:05 UTC: SDK Tools and Qt Creator
• At 16:05 UTC: The Next Ubuntu App Showdown
• At 18:05 UTC: New API Documentation Website
• At 18:05 UTC: QML Friends API and UI Components
• At 19:05 UTC: Core Apps in Ubuntu Touch Preview Images
• At 19:05 UTC: Calendar Application and Backend for Ubuntu Touch

See you there!

UDS, the Ubuntu Developer Summit, is here again, starting in just a few hours. A week packed with content that will define the plans for the new Ubuntu development cycle, and as usual, a with a full track dedicated to application development.

So for all of you interested in helping and being part of the effort of making Ubuntu a platform of choice for application developers, here’s a quick list with an overview of the sessions we’ve got in store for today.

The links in the list below will take you to the each session, ready to participate on the live hangout or on IRC. You can also check out the full UDS schedule.

So, without further ado, here’s the list of app development sessions for today:

• At 15:05 UTC: App Development Roundtable
• At 16:05 UTC SDK UI Toolkit Theming
• At 16:05 UTC SDK Feedback from App Developers
• At 18:05 UTC SDK Roadmap
• At 19:05 UTC Growing the Ubuntu SDK Apps Collection

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Last cycle we saw quite a number of changes to the way that planning works for Ubuntu. Some of these changes are causing issues that the current implementation of the Ubuntu Status Tracker is not easily able to handle. The main issue that I have noticed from helping people setup their work items and blueprints for tracking is that tracking needs to not be so closely dependent on the Ubuntu release cycles. This is causing issues in two ways. The first that I have seen is that a feature is planned to be released in stages essentially X number of cycles. It currently isn’t possible to track a single blueprint across different cycles, let alone multiple cycles. If you try to do this anyway by changing the cycle every 6 months, then the Status Tracker sends out what are essentially validation errors because as far as it is aware, any milestone that isn’t in the cycle that it is looking at is in valid (ubuntu-13.04 is a raring milestone and isn’t valid on a saucy blueprint).

In order to discuss these issues and hopefully come up with a solution, I have created a meeting for the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit which starts tomorrow.

Next Tuesday, May 14 starts the second Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. Based on feedback, this vUDS will be three days long. Don’t forget to register for the event. A list of currently approved blueprints is available on Launchpad. If you find that one is missing, you can create your own. Keep an eye out this week for scheduling to start.

Tracks…

• App Development: Alan Pope, David Planella & Michael Hall
• Community: Daniel Holbach, Nick Skaggs & Jono Bacon
• Client: Jason Warner & Sebastien Bacher
• Server & Cloud: Dave Walker & Antonio Rosales
• Foundations: Steve Langasek

Bugs…

One of the bugs that has long effected Summit has been that a blueprint had to have a specific status. This will finally no longer effect us! If a blueprint is marked anything other than Obsolete or Superseded it will now show up on the schedule as long as it is approved by a track lead. A huge thanks to Steve Kowalik and William Grant for getting this fixed!

Another issue that seemed to confuse people is having to register attendance in Launchpad in order to be able to use the features of Summit. This is no longer the case! You are now able to register as attending in Summit without any need to visit Launchpad (a Launchpad account is still required).

If you find that you have any issues with Summit or vUDS you can contact the track leads or you can contact me. If you find any bugs in Summit, please tell us about it!

See you next week!

I have been a Google Chrome user for a while now, and I have two different ‘Users’ in Chrome. The default user is my personal account, and then I have a work account. For my personal email I use a Google Apps Gmail account and just check my email with Chrome. I use Thunderbird to check my work email. For a while now I have had an issue where I click a link from Thunderbird and it tries to open in my default Chrome user. This doesn’t work very well as I am not logged into most of my work accounts on my personal user. This drove me nuts! Now I have to copy and paste the URL into the work user Chrome window. After a little Googling tonight, I was able to setup Thunderbird to open URLs in my work user Chrome browser. Life is much better now! To do this, I had to add two lines to prefs.js. On Ubuntu 13.04, prefs.js is located at ~/.thunderbird/ /prefs.js where is what appears to be a random set of numbers/letters followed by .default.

The two lines I added are:

user_pref(“network.protocol-handler.app.http”, “/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –profile-directory=’Profile 1′”);
user_pref(“network.protocol-handler.app.https”, “/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –profile-directory=’Profile 1′”);

If the profile-directory for the Chrome user you are wanting the links to open in is different than what I have, you may need to edit the directory name. This worked for me on Raring (what will become Ubuntu 13.04) with Thunderbird 17.0.4.

Friday I decided to create a new OpenPGP key to migrate off of my 1024D keys to something a little more current as far as how secure it is. With this, I created a 8192R key. I have also created a transition statement. If you trust me and wouldn’t mind signing the key and uploading it back to the keyserver after you are complete, it would be very much appreciated.

Yesterday Anthony Lenton released django-openid-auth version 0.5 which includes support for Django 1.1 through 1.4. It also has quite a number of bug fixes in the release as well. The new version is available from PyPi today. I plan on getting the new version into Raring soon if someone else doesn’t get to it first. I will also work with the Debian maintainer to get it into Debian soon.

Hot on the heels of the announcements of the Ubuntu SDK and the Touch Developer Preview, we bring you the first ever Ubuntu SDK Days.

On Thursday, 14th March and Friday, 15th March a number of app developers and Ubuntu SDK creators will get you started writing apps for Ubuntu on multiple devices. It’s surprisingly simple, and since the announcement we’ve seen many early adopters try out the SDK and the first apps up and running. We will  answer your questions, talk about best practises and show you the power of the SDK.

Here a quick overview over the sessions we’ll run:

• Installing and Configuring the SDK
• Writing your first app with the SDK
• Writing games with QML and Javascript
• Live update from the development progress of the Touch Core Apps
• Several Q&A sessions
• Making the best of the Ubuntu App Design guidelines
• More about the SDK skunkworks projects
• Introducing Friends and Gwibber QML
• Writing a new generation of Scopes
• Lightning talks and Project demos

How to join

Participating is easy: just head to http://ubuntuonair.com to watch the sessions on the schedule. Videos will be available after the event, to ensure you can watch the content even if you couldn’t make it to the session you wanted.

You can ask your questions on the chat widget on http://ubuntuonair.com or join the #ubuntu-app-devel IRC channel on Freenode directly.

Check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuSDKDays/ to see the timetable of the event, be there for lots of fun and bring your friends – and your questions too!

Most people are probably aware by now that this Tuesday, 5 March starts the first of the new virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit events. In order to handle the changes nicely, we have made some changes to the Summit Scheduler. The changes that we made allows a meeting and/or a summit to be set as ‘virtual.’ When a meeting is set as virtual, the meeting page will render with a new virtual layout. This layout includes the Google Hangout broadcast, the IRC channel via the webchat client, and the Etherpad, all embedded on in the page. The required participants for a meeting will also be given a link to participate in the hangout. Both the embedded broadcast and the hangout link have to manually be added by the track lead prior to each meeting. If the hangout broadcast isn’t available when you visit the page, please be patient and wait for the data to be added. Once the information is added to Summit, the meeting page should automatically load the hangout broadcast.

Please don’t forget to test using hangouts prior to UDS starting so that we can minimize the number of issues we have with the hangouts. A “best practices” guide has been created for use during the Ubuntu On Air events. Please take the time to look at these practices before Tuesday.

Yesterday we released Ubuntu Touch Preview images for four devices. This is a huge milestone for Ubuntu. We always wanted Ubuntu to be everywhere and the Preview shows quite nicely how well the vision of a design family across different form factors works.

There is quite a bit of work to be done, we all know that, but it’s a giant opportunity for us, the Ubuntu community. Everybody can contribute to the effort and we can show the world how we believe software should look like.

How you can help? Easy.

• You can install the Ubuntu Touch preview images on a device and test them.
• You can help out designing and shaping the Ubuntu Touch Core Apps.
• If you are a bit more experienced with bringing software up on new devices, you can help us porting Ubuntu Touch to new devices.

Did the last point find your interest? Excellent, because we just took the wraps of our Ubuntu Touch Porting guide. This also marks the start of our Ubuntu Touch Port-a-thon. We want to get Ubuntu Touch up and running on as many devices as possible.

If you don’t mind some tinkering, maybe some kernel building, some configuration meddling and flashing your device repeatedly, you might just the person we’re looking for.

The porting guide should help you understand

• how Ubuntu Touch works internally,
• which bits are generally involved and where to find them
• how to submit patches
• how images are put together
• how to test them and
• where to find help

To get you started and into the mood, you might want to join us today, at Friday 22nd February at 15:00 UTC on http://ubuntuonair.com when two super heroes of the Ubuntu Touch project, namely Ricardo Salveti and Sergio Schvezov, are going to talk to us about the technical aspects of the phone and the tablet.

Reliable sources tell us, there’s going to be a surprise announce during the hangout as well.

This is the opportunity we always wanted. Let’s make it happen. Bring Ubuntu to the world in all its beauty.

We’re thrilled to announce yet another significant milestone in the history of the Ubuntu project. After having recently unveiled the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, today we’re publishing the full source code and images for supported devices.

For developers and enthusiasts only

While a huge amount of Engineering and Design work has been put into ensuring that the foundations for our user experience vision are in place, we want to stress that the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview is currently work in progress. We are releasing the full code at this point to align to our philosophy of transparency and open source development.

We recommend to install the Touch Developer Preview only if you are a developer or enthusiast who wants to test or contribute to the platform. It is not intended to replace production devices or the tablet or handset you use every day.

Flash your device

All that said, let’s get on to how to install Touch Developer Preview from a public image on your device.

What to expect after flashing

Not all functionality from a production device is yet available on the Touch Preview. The list of functions you can expect after installing the preview on your handset or tablet are as follows. For detailed information check the release notes.

• Shell and core applications
• Connection to the GSM network (on Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4)
• Phone calls and SMS (on Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4)
• Networking via Wifi
• Functional camera (front and back)
• Device connectivity through the Android Developer Bridge tool (adb)

Supported devices

The images we are making available today support the following devices:

• Galaxy Nexus
• Nexus 4
• Nexus 7
• Nexus 10

I’m all set, show me how to flash!

You will find the detailed instructions to flash on the Ubuntu wiki.

Install the Touch Developer Preview >

Contributing and the road ahead

These are exciting times for Ubuntu. We’re building the technology of the future, this time aiming at a whole new level of massive adoption. The Touch Developer Preview means the first fully open source mobile OS developed also in the open. True to our principles this milestone also enables our community of developers to contribute and be a key part of this exciting journey.

In terms of the next steps, today we’re making the preview images available for the Ubuntu 12.10 stable release. In the next few days we’re going to switch to Raring Ringtail, our development release, which is where development will happen on the road to our convergence story.

You’ll find the full details of how the infrastructure and the code are being published and used on the Ubuntu wiki.

Contribute to the Touch Developer Preview >

Presenting the Ubuntu SDK Alpha

But there’s more! To further celebrate the Touch Preview, we’re very proud to bring some exciting news that app developers will surely enjoy: the Ubuntu SDK Alpha release.

In fact, development of the SDK still keeps happening in the open and on a rolling release basis. But coinciding with the Touch Developer Preview, we thought that the latest release came with so much goodness, that we decided to label it in celebration.

Feature highlight: remote app deployment

Perhaps the coolest feature ever since the SDK was released: you can now deploy and execute the apps you create straight from the IDE.

Applications developed with Qt Creator can now be seamlessly and securely transferred and executed to a device just moving two fingers. Remember this shortcut: Ctrl+F12.

Inline with how easy and lightweight the process of creating a phone app is, a lot of work has been put into ensuring all complexity is hidden from the developer, yet it works solidly. Behind the scenes, SSH key pairing with the remote device works on-the-fly.

Here’s the lowdown:

1. Plug in your mobile device running Ubuntu on the USB port of your computer
2. Make sure your device is also connected to a wireless network (SSH key pairing happens over the air)
3. Start Qt Creator from the Dash, and select the new Devices tab
4. Press the Enable button to activate Developer Mode
5. Once the device is connected, you can develop your QML projects as usual (check out the new project wizard as well) and press Ctrl+F12 to install and execute your app on the remote device

Tooling updates

With Qt Creator at its heart, the set of tools app developers use on an everyday basis to author their software, have seen major improvements:

• Qt Creator has been updated to the bleeding edge version: 2.7. We expect this version to continue maturing together with the platform and the SDK.
• Ubuntu application templates and wizard are now available to easily start creating apps that run on the phone and tablets.
• The visual user interface designer in Qt Creator now works with QtQuick 2, the framework upon the Ubuntu SDK is based.

User Interface Toolkit updates

The UI Toolkit is the part of the SDK that provides the graphical components (such as buttons, text entries, and others) as building blocks that enable the basic user interaction with the underlying system. A new component, polishing and bug fixing have set the theme for this release:

• The MainView component has been added, with closer integration to the HUD and the shell. Learn how to use MainView.
• PopOver component polishing, general bug fixes and improvements

Install the Ubuntu SDK Alpha

By now we’re pretty certain you’re looking forward to installing and putting all of that development goodness to the test.

That’s an easy one, if you haven’t yet install the Ubuntu SDK.

If you already installed the SDK, just run Update Manager from the Dash and update the Ubuntu SDK package as prompted. Or alternatively, if you prefer the command line, just fire up a terminal and run ‘sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-sdk’.

And that’s pretty much it! Be sure to check out the release notes for any additional technical details too.

Let us know what you think

We’d be delighted to hear what you think and get your feedback on how you are using the SDK and ways in which it could be improved. So do get in touch with us or report a bug if you find any issues.

Time to start developing beautiful apps now!

We’re thrilled to announce one of the most expected resources for Ubuntu app developers: the App Design Guides.

The App Design Guides site is the first installment of a live resource that will organically grow to provide guidance and enable app developers to build stunning, consistent and usable applications on a diversity of Ubuntu devices.

Together with the Ubuntu SDK preview, the App Design Guides complete yet another chapter in the Ubuntu app developer story. Developers have now the tools to create beautiful software, along with all the information related to UX, behaviour, patterns and visual design to ensure their apps provide a solid, clean and enjoyable user experience.

And consistent with the Ubuntu philosophy and our beliefs, all of these tools and guides are available to everyone as open source and for free.

Show me the Ubuntu App Design Guides! ›

Updating the core app designs for Ubuntu App Guides compliance

We have recently kicked off a community-driven process to design and implement a set of 12 core apps for Ubuntu running on phones. The first stage of the project consisted in asking community members to participate in the submission of designs to be used as input and food for thought for the core app developers.

The response so far has been overwelming:  over 50 community designers signed up for this initiative, submitting nearly 90 mockups on the Ubuntu MyBalsamiq site we set up for this project.

Following the App Design Guides go-live, it is now a great opportunity to ensure those designs follow the guidelines for a consistent app experience on Ubuntu. Therefore, we’d like to ask everyone who submitted a design to review them and update them to make sure they are inline with the App Design Guides.

Reminder: if you want to collaborate in this design project, just drop an e-mail to David Planella <david(dot)planella(at)canonical(dot)com> and Michael Hall <michael(dot)hall(at)canonical(dot)com>.

Open design and collaboration

Continuing with the trend of open and collaborative design, we want to hear from you!

The Guides are a resource that will grow together with the needs of app developers, so we’ll greatly appreciate your feedback on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list (remember to prepend the subject with [Design]) and if you’ve got any questions about them, just ask on Ask Ubuntu.

Stay tuned for updates and for some visual designs for core apps from the Canonical Design team coming soon!

So, when I’m not busy working on Ubuntu, or on LXC, or on Edubuntu, or … I also spend some of my spare time preparing the upcoming NorthSec 2013 security contest which will be held from Friday the 5th of April to Sunday the 7th of April at ETS in downtown Montreal.

NorthSec can be seen as the successor of HackUS 2010 and HackUS 2011 which both were held where I currently live, in Sherbrooke, QC. This year, we’re moving to Montreal, in the hope of attracting more people, especially from other Canadian provinces and from abroad.

I’m personally mostly involved with the internal infrastructure side of things, building the Ubuntu based infrastructure required to simulate the hundreds of servers and services used for the contest. All of that while making sure everything is rock solid and copes extremely well under pressure (considering what our contestants tend to throw at us).

I also usually get involved with some of the tracks, mostly the networking one, trying to think of really twisted setups ranging from taking over an active IPv6 network to hijacking IPs by messing with a badly configured BGP router (taken from past editions).

Outside of our twisted network challenges, we have quite a few more things to offer, here’s the current list of tracks for this year:

• Trivias (they seem easy but people are known to have wasted hours on them)
• Web (sql injection, xss anyone?)
• Binaries (because we know you love those)
• Networking (my track of choice)
• Reverse Java

And if anyone manages to finish everything, don’t worry, we’ll come up with more.
As far as I know, we never had a single team get bored in the past two editions

So if you’re interested in computer security, want to try to prove how good you are at finding security flaws and exploiting them or just want to see what that thing is all about, well you should consider a trip to Montreal in early April.
All the details you need are at: http://www.nsec.io/en

If you are a company interested in helping us with sponsorship, I hear that we’re always looking for more sponsors. So if that’s something you can help with, feel free to contact me directly at: stgraber at nsec dot io

For quite some time now we have had some information about how to join the Ubuntu community at www.ubuntu.com/community. This documentation has traditionally been pretty limited, doesn’t really help get people started effectively, and doesn’t represent the humanity and personal nature of being part of the Ubuntu community.

We want to change that in this cycle.

At UDS we had a great discussion about solving this problem. The challenge that we were faced with in refreshing this content is that the Canonical web team own these pages and have limited bandwidth for incorporating changes and improvements. As such we agreed to transition this content to a site where we can more readily make improvements and updates.

This week I asked Michael Hall to deploy WordPress (which we agreed at UDS as our platform) with the Ubuntu theme to CanoniStack. Today we had a discussion to flesh out the information architecture for the site (largely inspired by the current IA). We are now in a position where we have the skeleton of the site and we want to produce some awesome content tuned to the needs of new community members, as well as other content for our entire community (such as information about governance and the code of conduct).

To get this content in shape we have created a series of pages on pad.ubuntu.com for each page of content and we are transferring our existing content to these pages. We as a community can then collaborate on these pages and ensure they are crisp, concise, and provide all the information we need. When these pages are complete we can then transition them to the WordPress instance. When the content is there we will then ask the Canonical IS team to deploy it.

Help Us! Join the Docs Jam!

To get this content in shape, on Thursday 13th Dec 2012 we are going to be holding a documentation jam to work together and get this content refined and finalized. This is how it works:

• You can see the list of pages and the links to the pads by clicking here.
• We will spend the day working on the content, refining and improving it and ensuring there are no typos.
• All the content should be writting using Markdown format; this makes it simple to write and merge into the WordPress site. For how to format your content with Markdown, see this guide.
• We will coordinate this work in the #ubuntu-doc channel.

The day after we will then move the completed content over to the WordPress site and finalize any stylistic changes. We should then be in good shape to get things moved over to production.

We are looking to our wider community to help us get this content rock solid. If you have a few hours (or longer) to help with this effort, please join us in #ubuntu-doc on Thursday 13th Dec 2013!

This is a personal post and does not neccessarily represent the views of Canonical or the Ubuntu community.

Today Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation wrote a critical post accusing Ubuntu of shipping spyware (which is referring to the online search capabilities of the Ubuntu dash).

He goes on to suggest “in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.“.

This is FUD.

When controvosies such as this kick off from time to time about Canonical and/or Ubuntu, my approach has never been to try and convince our critics that they are wrong. My goal is not to turn the unbelievers into worshippers at the church of Ubuntu. My only goal has been to ensure that everyone who participates in the debate trades in facts and not in misinformation and FUD; there is enough misinformation and FUD on the Internet without us all adding to it.

If someone has an accurate set of facts and accurately respresents the topic but is critical about the position…no problem. We can then engage in respectful, accurate debate that will likely enrich all perspectives and ultimately result in better software.

The goal of the dash in Ubuntu has always been to provide a central place in which you can search and find things that are interesting and relavent to you; it is designed to be at the center of your computing experience. Now, this is a big goal, and we are only part-way along the way to achieving it.

Today it is not perfect – we need to improve the accuracy of the results, present the data more effectively, and continue to expand the coverage and capabilities of the data in dash searches. With each new release of Ubuntu we get awesome feedback from our community and users and we strive to refine and iterate on all of these areas so that subsequent releases offer a more and more compelling experience, freely available and sharable for all.

Naturally, privacy is critically important to us in doing this work. In the eight year history of Ubuntu and Canonical we have always put privacy forward as a high priority across the many, many different websites, services, and software that forms the Ubuntu platform and community.

The challenge of course is that privacy is a deeply personal thing and the way in which you define your privacy expectations will likely radically differ from each of your friends, and vice-versa.

With this in mind, just because someone may have differing views to mine on the implementation of privacy in software doesn’t mean they are wrong. Likewise, just because my views may differ to theirs doesn’t mean I am wrong. We are all different and we all manage our information and our expectations around information sharing in different ways.

Just look at Facebook; the privacy debates there have been raging on for years and have encompassed many different views and perspectives ranging from “I want to control every detail of my privacy in Facebook” to “I don’t care, if it is on the Internet, I don’t care who sees it”, and everything in-between.

We want Ubuntu to be a safe, predictable, and pleasurable platform for everyone, irrespective of their personal views on privacy, but we also respect that there will be some folks who don’t feel we are doing enough to represent their particular personal privacy needs.

When we implemented the Amazon search results feature we didn’t get it 100% right with the first cut in the development release of Ubuntu, but that is how we build Ubuntu; we add software to our development branch and iterate on it in response to feedback and bugs. We did exactly this with these functional and privacy concerns…responding and implementing many of the requirements our community felt were important. We will continue to make these improvements in the future in much the same way.

Now, some of you may share Richard’s concerns over some aspects of this feature, and as I mentioned earlier, I am not here to convince you otherwise. Richard has every right to share his views on privacy, and who am I to tell him or you that he is/you are wrong?

What concerns me more is the FUD in his post. Statements such as:

In your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.

…and

Any excuse Canonical offers is inadequate; even if it used all the money it gets from Amazon to develop free software, that can hardly overcome what free software will lose if it ceases to offer an effective way to avoid abuse of the users.

These statements simply generate fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Ubuntu; a project that has a long history of bringing Free Software to millions of users around the world with an open community and governance.

But then again, this is not particularly surprising from Richard.

I have tremendous respect for Richard and his fantastic work in laying the foundations for the Free Software and Open Source world that we have today, but I think he is short-sighted at times. His views on software projects are pretty binary: either a strict set of ethics (defined by him) are observed, or it should be shunned.

The challenge here is that freedom is also a deeply personal thing.

I believe that freedom is far more than simply freedom of source code or a specific policy around privacy. When I got involved in the Free Software community 14 years ago my passion from then onwards was not driven by creating awesome Free Software code, it was more about creating awesome Free Software experiences that open up technology, education, creativity and collaboration to everyone. Free Software code is simply one mechanic in how we deliver these experiences; it is not the be all and end all of what we do.

A completely free set of source code that implements a system that is difficult to use, lacks the features that users want, is not competitive with proprietary competitors, and/or does not offer a desirable and delightful experience is not going to bring Free Software to the wider world. It may bring Free Software to a passionate collection of enthusiasts (as we saw back in the early days of Linux), but in my mind true freedom is software that is not just available to all but usable by all, even those who are not enthusiasts.

Just look at the success of Apple. General consumers have voted with their feet, and people want beautiful, desirable products that let them do useful and fun things with their friends, families and colleagues. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t achieve this with Free Software.

In Ubuntu we want to build a platform that is even more beautiful, elegant and delightful than Apple, but is infused with the Free Software values that empower that technology, education, creativity and collaboration in everyone.

But unfortunately, as far as Richard is concerned, if Ubuntu doesn’t meet his specific requirements around privacy or Free Software, irrespective that it has brought Free Software to millions of users and thousands of organizations, and despite the fact that you might not share his viewpoint, you should shun it.

This just seems a bit childish to me.

Let’s turn the tables around. Do I agree with everything the Free Software Foundation does? Not at all, but I do think their general body of work is fantastic, worthwhile, and provides an important and valuable service, and I would never want to suggest you should boycott them if you disagree with one part of what they do. Quite the opposite, I would encourage you to see their website, donate, and consider joining them as they provide a valuable piece of the wider Free Software ecosystem, in much the same way Ubuntu provides another piece. Let’s work together, not against each other.

UPDATED: I posted an apology to Richard about to refering to his position as ‘childish’ you can read it here.

A few months ago the second edition of my book The Art of Community was released. You can buy the book in print or for your e-reader/tablet, or you download the Creative Commons licensed PDF. If you download the free PDF all I ask is that you put a review up somewhere online to help spread the word about the book. If you are reviewer for a website/magazine and want to review the book, please get in touch with me and we can coordinate a review copy.

For those of you who have not released a book yet, it is a bowel-shakingly nerve-wracking experience. You invest months of your spare time into writing it, and you really want people to enjoy it. This nervousness is particularly amplified in the case for a book that you write about your profession, such as The Art of Community was for me.

Little did I realize that writing a second edition would be even more nerve-wracking. You see, the first edition of the book did pretty well; it had four-and-a-half star ratings on Amazon and performed favorably in the reviews. While naturally thrilled with the response, a big chunk of me concluded that this positive response was simply down to dumb luck.

Then, when I started writing the second edition, my worries ballooned. I was now concerned that my rookie-luck with the first edition could be washed away with a poorly written and released follow-up edition, thus tarnishing the reputation of something I was already proud of. Now, this might sound a bit silly to some of you, but this was actually keeping me awake at night throughout the writing process. When I finally clicked send to submit the final manuscript to O’Reilly I was a combination of relieved that it was complete, but also nervous that my writing was now cast in stone, ready for the feedback cycle to begin.

So, with a nervous gulp, the second edition was released. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions with the first few reviews; it takes time to take the pulse of opinion in your readers, so I left it for a few months to see how it did.

It has now been those few months since it’s release and fortunately it seems the second edition is doing great too. If the Amazon.com page is anything to go by (and I think it is generally could summary of feedback), it has received positive reviews and maintains a four-and-a-half star rating with 43 reviews.

In reading the page, it seems Amazon pulls out summary quotes from its range of reviews and the summaries (which can be a combination of good and bad quotes). It starts with this one:

Referencing his experiences as community manager of Ubuntu, Jono Bacon provides best practices.

…then this:

The stories laced throughout the book show practical applications of the material and make it a thoroughly enjoyable read.

…and then this:

In other words, this is one of the best books I have had the pleasure of owning in some time, and has earned a permanent spot on the book shelf.

I will take ‘em! I was pretty surprised and flattered to see these summaries. Thank-you to everyone who has purchased and reviewed the book. If you enjoyed the book and haven’t reviewed it yet, please do post your review either on your blog or wherever you purchased it.

About The Book

If you are unfamiliar with what is in the second edition of The Art of Community, here is a rundown of the content, coverage, and interviews. Remember, you can buy the book in print or for your e-reader/tablet, or you download the Creative Commons licensed PDF. If you download the free PDF all I ask is that you put a review up somewhere online to help spread the word about the book.

1. The Art of Community
2. Planning Your Community
3. Communicating Clearly
4. Processes: Simple Is Sustainable
5. Supporting Workflow with Tools and Data
6. Social Media New!
7. Building Buzz
8. Measuring Community
9. Managing and Tracking Work New!
10. Governance
11. Handling Conflict and Relationships
12. Creating and Running Events Expanded!
13. Hiring a Community Manager
14. Community Case Book New!
15. Onward and Upward New!

Foreword

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief at Wired magazine, and author of the New York Best-selling The Long Tail.

Also includes the foreword from the first edition with Leo Laporte, founder of the TWiT Network.

Chapter 1: The Art Of Community

I begin the book with a bird’s-eye view of how communities function at a social science level. We cover the underlying nuts and bolts of how people form communities, what keeps them involved, and the basis and opportunities behind these interactions.

Coverage Includes:

• Collaboration-Driven Ethos
• The Essence of Community
  • Building Belonging into the Social Economy
  • The Basis of Communication
  • Unwrapping Opportunity
• A Community Manager: Becoming the Community
  • Cracking Open the Personality
  • Trust Is Everything
  • The Value of Listening
  • Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You
  • Theory Versus Action: Action Wins
  • Becoming Yourself
• Moving Forward

Chapter 2: Planning Your Community

Next we carve out and document a blueprint and strategy for your community and its future growth. Part of this strategy includes the target objectives and goals and how the community can be structured to achieve them.

Coverage Includes:

• Planning for Success
  • Community: The Bird’s-Eye View
• Teams: The Building Blocks of Belonging
  • Finding Your Place
  • Units of Belonging
  • Read Versus Write
  • Read-mostly communities
  • Write-centered communities
• Meritocracy
• Working Together Is Success
• Diversity
• Designing Your Community
  • Baking in Openness
• Building a Mission Statement
• Building a Strategic Plan
  • Structuring the plan
• Filling Out the Plan
  • Brainstorming Ideas
  • Technique 1: Question assumptions
  • Technique 2: Think outside the box
  • Technique 3: Let’s make it suck
• Pulling Together the Threads
  • Teams: Divide and Conquer
  • Identify how we can divide our community into teams
  • Define the scope of each team, and help team members understand that scope
  • Understand the extent and range of collaboration among our teams
  • Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively
• Documenting Your Strategy
• Financially Supporting Your Community
  • Revenue Opportunities
  • Online advertising
  • Selling
  • Donations
  • Sponsorship
• Wrapping Up

Chapter 3: Communicating Clearly

At the heart of community is communication, and great communicators can have a tremendously positive impact. Here we lay down the communications backbone and the best practices associated with using it.

Coverage Includes:

• He Said, She Said
• Building Your Communication Channels
  • Striving for Clarity
• Choices, Choices
  • Communication fetishism
• The Mediums
  • Mailing lists
  • Discussion forums
  • Social media
  • IRC
• Leading by Example
  • Daily Communication
  • Netiquette
  • Avoiding bikeshedding
• Longer Writing
  • The mechanics of writing
  • Don’t write like an institution
  • Untwisting the tail
  • Setting tone
  • Inspiring your community
• Summary

Chapter 4: Processes: Simple Is Sustainable

We now move on to focus on putting the facilities in place for your community to do great things. In this chapter we build simple, effective, and nonbureaucratic processes that enable your community to conduct tasks, work together, and share their successes.

Coverage Includes:

• Eyes on the Prize
  • Keeping Things in Perspective
  • The Impact of Processes
• Building Great Processes
  • Breaking Up the Puzzle
  • Building a process
  • Process Considerations
  • Simplicity is key
  • Avoiding bureaucracy
  • Transparency
• Assessing Needs
  • Community Cycles
  • Leading by example: Ubuntu
  • The Gates of Your Community
  • Reviewing new developers: In depth
  • Assessing Contributors
  • Managing Feedback
  • Gathering feedback
• Getting Buy-In for Your Processes
  • Document Them
  • Make Them Easy to Find
  • Using Your Processes
• The On-Ramp: Creating Collaborative Processes
  • Identifying the On-Ramp
  • Developing Knowledge
  • Determining Contributions
  • Growing Kudos
• Process Reassessment
  • Building Regularity
• Moving On

Chapter 5: Supporting Workflow With Tools and Data

We continue our discussion of community facilities to build workflows that are driven by accessible, sensible, and rock-solid tools that enable your contributors to do great work quickly and easily.

Coverage Includes:

• Understanding Your Workflow
  • Roles
• Building a Simple Workflow
• The Mechanics of Collaboration
  • An Example: Ubuntu Bug Workflow
  • Getting to know the problem
  • Breaking down the conversation
  • Lessons learned
  • Building Great Infrastructure
  • Software As a Service
  • Avoiding Resource Fetishism
• Technical Considerations
  • Bug Tracking
  • Bug reporting
  • Bug triage
  • Source Control
  • Collaborative Editing
• Building and Maintaining Transparency
  • Tool Access
  • Communications
  • Reporting
• Regular Workflow Assessment
  • Gathering Structured Feedback
• Moving On

Chapter 6: Social Media

We now take a look at social networking, what it is, how it can help us, how to avoid the hype, and how to harness it in our communities.

Coverage Includes:

• Don’t Be That Guy/Girl
• Being Social
• Social Media Services in a Nutshell
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
• Harnessing Social Media
  • Broadcasting
  • Getting more eyeballs
  • Tuning up your messages
  • Avoiding social media overkill
  • Feedback
  • Where to look
  • Debates
  • Asking for feedback
  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Campaigns and awareness
  • Events
• Social Media on Your Terms
  • Controlling the Fire Hose
  • Optimizing How You Post
  • Being Socially Responsible
  • Organizing a Community Event
  • The buildup
  • At the event
  • Running a Campaign
  • The preparation
  • The buildup
• Providing Community Updates

Chapter 7: Building Buzz

With a solid foundation in place, we move on to build excitement and buzz around your community and encourage and enthuse every man and his dog to get involved and participate.

Coverage Includes:

• Mindshare
  • The Mindshare Opportunity
• The Building Blocks of Buzz
  • The Mission
  • Uniting Together
  • Inspired Words
  • Becoming the Advocate
  • Getting It Right by Not Getting It Wrong
  • Honesty
• Setting Up Your Base
  • Aims
  • Staying Current
  • Building Conversation
  • Getting Online
  • Syndication
• The Buzz Cycle
  • Planning
  • Buildup
  • Announce
  • Review
• Buzz Targets
  • Announcing Your Community
  • Attracting Contributors
• Building Alliances
  • The Professional Press
  • The Amateur Press
  • Blogs
  • Blog wars
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
• Events and Conferences
  • Choosing Events
  • Submitting your paper
  • Promoting your talk
  • Delivering Presentations
  • Creating attractive slides
  • Long versus short presentations
• Summary

Chapter 8: Measuring Community

Although many consider community touchy-feely and unmeasurable, this chapter confronts the myth and guides you in tracking, monitoring, and otherwise measuring the work going on in the community so that it can be optimized and simplified.

Coverage Includes:

• Community Self-Reflection
• The Foundations of Feedback
  • Defining Purpose
• Hooks ’n’ Data
  • Statistics and Automated Data
  • The risks of interpretation
  • Plugging your stats into graphs
  • Surveys and Structured Feedback
  • Choosing questions
  • Showing off your survey reports
  • Observational Tests
  • Measuring Mechanics
  • Gathering General Perceptions
  • Perception of you
• Anonymity and Privacy
  • Anonymity
  • Privacy
• Moving On

Chapter 9: Managing and Tracking Work

Continuing on from measuring our community, we now explore methods by which you can ensure that your community projects and participants stay on track and deliver great results.

Coverage Includes:

• Credibility and the Need to Track Progress
• The Importance of Tracking Our Work
  • Tracking the Right Things
  • Within the Context of a Company
  • Defining value
  • Communicating up and down
• What We Need to Manage
• Tracking Projects
  • Structuring Your Projects
  • Managing Work Items
  • Structuring work items
  • Documenting work items
  • Visualizing Data with Burndown Charts
  • Using burndown charts
  • Observing burndown patterns
  • Generating additional information
  • Building burndown charts into your workflow
• Tracking Growth and Decline
  • Visibility Is Key
  • Ensuring Effective Processes
• Tracking Health
  • Promoting a Feedback Culture
  • Building a Set of Generals
• Reacting to Community Concerns
• Moving On

Chapter 10: Governance

Our next stop is the wide-ranging and seemingly complex topic of governance. We explore what options are available for a low-friction, capable, and representative governance strategy for your community.

Coverage Includes:

• Accountability
• Governance Does Not Suck
• Governance and Community
• The Case for Governance
  • Follow the Leader
  • Engage the People
  • Aspire to Inspire
  • To Bring Peace
• Learning from the Leaders
  • Dictatorial Charismatic Leadership
  • Enlightened Dictatorship
  • Delegated Governance
• Setting Up a Community Council
  • Designing a Council
  • Responsibilities
  • Structure
  • Commercial sponsorship
  • Membership
  • Codifying Your Council
  • Nominating and Electing Council Members
  • Forming a new council
• Ubuntu Governance Example
  • In the Beginning…
  • The Structure of the Ubuntu Community
  • Mark Shuttleworth
  • Community Council
  • Technical Board
  • Team councils
  • Membership
  • Ubuntu Member
  • Developer
  • Council or Board Member
  • Escalation
• Expanding Governance
  • Knowing When It Is Time
  • Building the Subcouncil
  • Escalation
  • Communicating Between Councils
• Summary

Chapter 11: Handling Conflict and Relationships

One of the most sensitive topics in community leadership is handling conflict. In this chapter we explore how to identify, handle, and prevent irksome conflict; handle divisive personalities; and unblock problems.

Coverage Includes:

• The Nature of the Beast
  • The Structure of Strife
• The Calm Before the Storm
  • Contentious Personalities
  • Profiling the polemical
  • Sharing feedback about personality issues
  • Poisonous people
  • Barriers to Input
  • Problems with Responsibility
  • Lack of Justice
• The Conflict Resolution Process
  • The Role of a Facilitator
  • Be objective
  • Be positive
  • Be open
  • Be clear
  • Resolving the Conflict
  • Part 1: Calm and reassure
  • Part 2: Get the facts
  • Part 3: Discuss
  • Part 4: Document
  • Part 5: Reflect and maintain
• Dealing with Burnout
  • Detecting and Treating Burnout
  • Required rest and relaxation
  • Work/Life Balance
  • Addiction
• Handling Absence
• Handling Bereavement
• Summary

Chapter 12: Creating and Running Events

Events offer an excellent opportunity for your community to bond, be productive, and have fun, and this is where we cast our beady eye in this chapter.

Coverage Includes:

• Building Family Values
• Events
• Getting Organized
  • Step 1: Identify Requirements
  • Step 2: Find Help
  • Step 3: Set Deadlines
  • Step 4: Make Time
• Organizing Physical Events
  • Common Attributes
  • Location/venue
  • Accommodation
  • Equipment
  • Date/time
  • Cost
  • Registering attendance
  • Catering
  • Insurance/unions
  • Organizing a Sprint
  • Organizing a Summit
  • Structure and scheduling
  • Inside a session
  • Event-specific notes
  • Organizing an Unconference
  • Event-specific notes
• Getting Sponsorship
  • Understanding Your Needs
  • Finding and Handling Sponsors
  • Setting expectations
  • The pitch
  • Handling the Money
• Case Study: The Ubuntu Developer Summit
  • The Ethos of the UDS
  • How It Works
  • The Organizational Team
  • Organizational cadence
  • The Venue
  • Meeting room requirements
  • Location
  • Facilities
  • Assets
  • Infrastructure
  • Room Layout
  • The Timetable
  • Opening keynotes
  • Plenaries
  • Lightning talks
  • Sessions
  • Scheduling
• Organizing Online Events
  • Common Attributes
  • Mediums
  • Online Discussion Meetings
  • Choosing a time
  • Advertising the meeting
  • Setting the agenda
  • Running the meeting
  • Organizing Online Tutorials
  • Scheduling
  • Preparing for a session
  • Running a session
• Summary

Chapter 13: Hiring a Community Manager

We now explore some advice and guidance for organizations that want to hire a community manager to conduct and implement the wide range of topics that we have discussed throughout the book.

Coverage Includes:

• Why Community Building Has Become a Big Business
• The Role of a Community Manager in the Corporation
  • Setting Expectations
  • Scope of the Role
  • Risk
  • Breaking Tradition
  • Control and Reporting
  • The ability to enact change
  • The Responsibilities of Community Engagement
  • Salary
  • Communicating Expectations to the Candidate
• Managing Your Community Manager
  • Induction
  • Internal reputation
  • Community reputation
  • Strategy
  • Management and Communications
  • Weekly engagements
  • Community feedback
• Summary

Chapter 14: Community Case Book

Next I present a fascinating collection of interviews from accomplished community builders about how they created their own inspirational communities to help round off your knowledge with the experiences of these leaders.

Includes Interviews With:

Chapter 15: Onward and Upward

Finally, we close The Art of Community with some additional resources and events to continue your journey.

Coverage Includes:

• Building Our Own Community
  • Social Media
  • Videos
• The Community Leadership Summit
  • How It Works
  • Joining Us
• Keeping in Touch

Anyone who met me probably knows that I like to run everything in containers.

A couple of weeks ago, I was attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen, DK where I demoed how to run OpenGL code from within an LXC container. At that same UDS, all attendees also received a beta key for Steam on Linux.

Yesterday I finally received said key by e-mail and I’ve been experimenting with Steam a bit. Now, my laptop is running the development version of Ubuntu 13.04 and only has 64bit binaries. Steam is 32bit-only and Valve recommends running it on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

So I just spent a couple of hours writing a tool called steam-lxc which uses LXC’s new python API and a bunch more python magic to generate an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit container, install everything that’s needed to run Steam, then install Steam itself and configures some tricks to get direct GPU access and access to pulseaudio for sound.

All in all, it only takes 3 minutes for the script to setup everything I need to run Steam and then start it.

Here’s a (pretty boring) screencast of the script in action:

This script has only been tested with Intel hardware on Ubuntu 13.04 64bit at this point, but the PPA contains builds for Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 too.

To get it on your machine just do:

• sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/stable
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install steam-lxc
• sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/lxc /var/cache/lxc

Then once that’s all installed, set it up with sudo steam-lxc create. This can take somewhere from 5 minutes to an hour depending on your internet connection.

And once the environment is all setup, you can start steam with sudo steam-lxc run.

The code can be found at: https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-lxc/lxc/steam-lxc

You can leave your feedback as comment here and if you want to improve the script, merge proposals are more than welcome.
I don’t have any hardware requiring proprietary drivers but I’d expect steam to fail on such hardware as the drivers won’t get properly installed in the container. Adding code to deal with those is pretty easy and I’d love to get some patches for that!

Have fun!

(tl;dr: Edubuntu 14.04 will include a new Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu tablet edition with a lot of cool new features including a full feature Active Directory compatible domain.)

Now that Edubuntu 12.10 is out the door and the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen is just a week away, I thought it’d be an appropriate time to share our vision for Edubuntu 14.04.

This was so far only discussed in person with Jonathan Carter and a bit on IRC with other Edubuntu developers but I think it’s time to make our plans a bit more visible so we can get more feedback and hopefully get interested people together next week at UDS.

There are three big topics I’d like to talk about. Edubuntu desktop, Edubuntu server and Edubuntu tablet.

Edubuntu desktop

Edubuntu desktop is what we’ve been offering since the first Edubuntu release and what we’ll obviously continue to offer pretty much as it’s today.
It’s not an area I plan on spending much time working on personally but I expect Jonathan to drive most of the work around this.

Basically what the Edubuntu desktop needs nowadays is a better application selection, better testing, better documentation, making sure our application selection works on all our supported platforms and is properly translated.

We’ll also have to refocus some of our efforts and will likely drop some things like our KDE desktop package that hasn’t been updated in years and was essentially doubling our maintenance work which is why we stopped supporting it officially in 12.04.

There are a lot of cool new tools we’ve heard of recently and that really should be packaged and integrated in Edubuntu.

Edubuntu Server

Edubuntu Server will be a new addition to the Edubuntu project, expected to ship in its final form in 14.04 and will be supported for 5 years as part of the LTS.

This is the area I’ll be spending most of my Edubuntu time on as it’s going to be using a lot of technologies I’ve been involved with over the years to offer what I hope will be an amazing server experience.

Edubuntu Server will essentially let you manage a network of Edubuntu, Ubuntu or Windows clients by creating a full featured domain (using samba4).

From the same install DVD as Edubuntu Desktop, you’ll be able to simply choose to install a new Edubuntu Server and create a new domain, or if you already have an Edubuntu domain or even an Active Directory domain, you’ll be able to join an extra server to add extra scalibility or high-availability.

On top of that core domain feature, you’ll be able to add extra roles to your Edubuntu Server, the initial list is:

• Web hosting platform – Will let you deploy new web services using JuJu so schools in your district or individual teachers can easily get their own website.
• File server – A standard samba3 file server so all your domain members can easily store and retrieve files.
• Backup server – Will automatically backup the important data from your servers and if you wish, from your clients too.
• Schooltool – A school management web service, taking care of all the day to day school administration.

LTSP will also be part of that system as part of Edubuntu Terminal Server which will let you, still from our single install media, install as many new terminal servers as you want, automatically joining the domain, using the centralized authentication, file storage and backup capabilities of your Edubuntu Server.

As I mentioned, the Edubuntu DVD will let you install Edubuntu Desktop, Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu Terminal Server. You’ll simply be asked at installation time whether you want to join an Edubuntu Server or Active Directory domain or if you want your machine to be standalone.

Once installed, Edubuntu Server will be managed through a web interface driving LXC behind the scene to deploy new services, upgrade individual services or deploy new web services using JuJu.
Our goal is to have Edubuntu Server offer an appliance-like experience, never requiring any command line access to the system and easily supporting upgrades from a version to another.

For those wondering what the installation process will look like, I have some notes of the changes available at: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1289041/
I’m expecting to have the installer changes implemented by the time we start building our first 13.04 images.

The rest of Edubuntu Server will be progressively landing during the 13.04 cycle with an early version of the system being released with Edubuntu 13.04, possibly with only a limited selection of roles and without initial support for multiple servers and Active Directory integration.

While initially Edubuntu branded, our hope is that this work will be re-usable by Ubuntu and may one day find its way into Ubuntu Server.
Doing this as part of Edubuntu will give us more time and more flexibility to get it right, build a community around it and get user feedback before we try to get the rest of the world to use it too.

Edubuntu Tablet

During the Edubuntu 12.10 development cycle, the Edubuntu Council approved the sponsorship of 5 tablets by Revolution Linux which were distributed to some of our developers.

We’ve been doing daily armhf builds of Edubuntu, refined our package selections to properly work on ARM and spent countless hours fighting to get our tablet to boot (a ZaTab from ZaReason).
Even though it’s been quite a painful experience so far, we’re still planning on offering a supported armhf tablet image for 14.04, running something very close to our standard Edubuntu Desktop and also featuring integration with Edubuntu Server.

With all the recent news about Ubuntu on the Nexus 7, we’ll certainly be re-discussing what our main supported platform will be during next week’s UDS but we’re certainly planning on releasing 13.04 with experimental tablet support.

LTS vs non-LTS

For those who read our release announcement or visited our website lately, you certainly noticed the emphasis on using the LTS releases.
We really think that most Edubuntu users want something that’s stable, very well tested with regular updates and a long support time, so we’re now always recommending the use of the latest LTS release.

That doesn’t mean we’ll stop doing non-LTS release like the Mythbuntu folks recently decided to do, pretty far from that. What it means however is that we’ll more freely experiment in non-LTS releases so we can easily iterate through our ideas and make sure we release something well polished and rock solid for our LTS releases.

Conclusion

I’m really really looking forward to Edubuntu 14.04. I think the changes we’re planning will help our users a lot and will make it easier than ever to get school districts and individual schools to switch to Edubuntu for both their backend infrastructure with Edubuntu Server and their clients with Edubuntu Desktop and Edubuntu Tablet.

Now all we need is your ideas and if you have some, your time to make it all happen. We usually hang out in #edubuntu on freenode and can also be contacted on the edubuntu-devel mailing-list.

For those of you going to UDS, we’ll try to get an informational session on Edubuntu Server scheduled on top of our usual Edubuntu session. If you’re there and want to know more or want to help, please feel free to grab Jonathan or I in the hallway, at the bar or at one of the evening activities.

One of our top goals for LXC upstream work during the Ubuntu 12.10 development cycle was reworking the LXC library and turn it from a private library mostly used by the other lxc-* commands into something that’s easy for developers to work with and is accessible from other languages with some bindings.

Although the current implementation isn’t complete enough to consider the API stable and some changes will still happen to it over the months to come, we have pushed the initial implementation to the LXC staging branch on github and put it into the lxc package of Ubuntu 12.10.

The initial version comes with a python3 binding packaged as python3-lxc, that’s what I’ll use now to give you an idea of what’s possible with the API. Note that as we don’t have full user namespaces support at the moment, any code using the LXC API needs to run as root.

First, let’s start with the basics, creating a container, starting it, getting its IP and stopping it:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import lxc
container = lxc.Container("my_container")
container.create("ubuntu", {"release": "precise", "architecture": "amd64"})
container.start()
print(container.get_ips(timeout=10))
container.shutdown(timeout=10)
container.destroy()

So, pretty simple.
It’s also possible to modify the container’s configuration using the .get_config_item(key) and .set_config_item(key, value) functions. For those keys supporting multiple values, a list will be returned and a list will be accepted as a value by .set_config_item.

Network configuration can be accessed through the .network property which is essentially a list of all network interfaces of the container, properties can be changed that way or through .set_config_item and saved to the config file with .save_config().

The API isn’t terribly well documented at this point, help messages are present for all functions but there’s no generated html help yet.

To get a better idea of the functions exported by the API, you may want to look at the API test script. This script uses all the functions and properties exported by the python module so it should be a reasonable reference.