The Ubuntu One team has been working hard to fix many of the bugs that subscribers have reported as well as add more great features to the service. We will continue to address more bugs for the next few months leading up to the 10.04 release. Here are a few items that we have recently deployed.

- Fixed problems synchronizing Notes from the Tomboy application. More improvements to the website editing interface to come.

- Enhanced the website to provide easier access to support resources.

- Integrated the service with Ubuntu Single Sign On (Ubuntu SSO). Subscribers can continue to use their Launchpad login credentials. Updates to your account settings (email, password, etc.) can be made the the Ubuntu SSO site or at Launchpad.net.

- Easy link to update your login information (name, email, password) from your Ubuntu One account page.

- Various performance improvements to the website interface for Ubuntu One services.

- Preparation for Ubuntu 10.04 features such as the Ubuntu One Music Store, mobile contacts synchronization, and user-defined folders (synchronize any directory in your home folder).

Detailed release notes are available on the Ubuntu Team Wiki.

Well probably not yet, but the Ubuntu One Music Store is right around the corner.

The team has made great progress since we announced this new Ubuntu feature just a few short months ago at UDSLucid in Dallas. That session was very important for a couple of reasons. It confirmed the community’s interest in having easy access to popular music from within an Ubuntu application. It was also an excellent opportunity to learn some of the community’s concerns and desires. We think we’ve built a music store that everyone will enjoy using at the launch of Ubuntu 10.04 and as it evolves in the future.

There have been some great discussions in blogs and blog comments since bits of the store started appearing in Lucid Lynx Alphas. Now that Lucid Lynx has just passed the Alpha 3 milestone, I thought it was a good time to give everyone a quick update.

The store is currently being thoroughly tested by a small group of users. After we fix some of the initial bugs, we’ll expand testing to a larger group. This should be in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve prepared an FAQ for everyone to learn more about the upcoming music store. Additional information about expanded testing will be posted here so follow this blog or our posts on identi.ca and twitter for more information.

We’re currently experiencing some issues related to our notes service. The main issues are related to creating and editing notes through the website interface.

In order to prevent further frustration, we will temporarily make the notes website interface read-only on Friday morning until the fixes are deployed. This temporary change will not affect notes synchronization through desktop applications like Tomboy. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and we are doing our best to get the bugs coded, tested, and released as soon as possible. You can track our progress by monitoring the following bugs in Launchpad:

• https://launchpad.net/bugs/527374
• https://launchpad.net/bugs/524555

Thank you for your patience and support! If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment here or hop on the #ubuntuone channel on Freenode IRC to chat.

Each day Ubuntu One usually has at least one representative from the team dedicated to addressing subscriber questions, participating in IRC discussions, and responding to bugs. A few months ago, we decided that this would be enhanced by the entire team collaborating for a short period of time on open bugs and subscriber questions. We called it Bug Day.

The goal was to reduce the list of bugs in an undecided state. After a few months, we’ve found this to be very useful in addressing open issues and questions, identifying duplicates, elevating the overall knowledge of the entire team and sharing best practices.

Tuesday is the next Ubuntu One Bug Day, and this time we’re going to try something a little different. We would like invite our subscribers to join us. This will be an excellent opportunity to learn more about the Ubuntu One service, improve your skills and assist your fellow Ubuntu community members.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/BugDays

Date: Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Time: 1400-1600 UTC
Place: Join us in #ubuntuone on freenode in IRC

The Ubuntu One user community is great. In just a few short months, they’ve made some fantastic contributions extending Ubuntu One support to both KDE and Fedora.

One of the top requests we get is for wider support for users who work in a mixed platform environment (i.e., Ubuntu + Windows/Mac). While we offer the web browser option, we realize that the browser has definite limitations compared to the desktop.

This year at PyCon members of the Ubuntu One development team will focus on helping these users. The principal areas we’ll work on are porting to the Windows equivalent of D-bus, inotify, an installer, and a file manager plugin. If you’re heading to Atlanta in February, and this sounds interesting to you, please join our sprint.

We’re pleased to be participating in an Ubuntu Bug Day on Thursday 28 January 2010 and hope you will join us as we triage ubuntuone-client bugs.

Ubuntu Bug Day is also known as HugDay. So what exactly is a HugDay?

The HugDay is a special day where the Ubuntu Community comes together with a shared goal of triaging a specific package or set of packages. Working together allows us to share knowledge and give some much needed assistance to the Ubuntu Developers. The term HugDay is a spin on BugDay but every time someone triages a bug, then someone else should hug him/her. Why? This is a very special way for us to tell everyone that we love contributions! And triaging bugs is a really big contribution.

We look forward to working with you on triaging some Ubuntu One bugs and giving numerous digital hugs along the way!

Date: Thursday 28 January 2010
Place: #ubuntu-bugs on freenode IRC

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20100128

Stuart Langridge summarized an important issue recently on FLOSS Weekly when he said that Linux is all about choice… but not the choice between incompatible data silos. Desktopcouch is a key component of the Ubuntu desktop that enables users to break out of the data silos of today, delivering greater portability across applications.

In case you didn’t know it, Ubuntu One relies heavily on Desktopcouch (which uses CouchDB) for storing and synchronizing subscriber data, such as contacts and bookmarks, to their personal cloud. One of the key initiatives for the Ubuntu One team over the next Ubuntu cycle is to provide more developer resources so more applications can utilize the benefits of Desktopcouch and CouchDB. End users will gain greater data portability across applications as well as the built-in synchronization of CouchDB.

Ryan Paul has posted an excellent tutorial at Ars Technica for developers interested in using CouchDB in their applications. He covers the basics of the Ubuntu One architecture, an overview of how CouchDB is different than more traditional databases, provides simple and advanced code examples, and gives great tips for integrating CouchDB into your application. Read through his article and think about how your application can benefit from the power of Desktopcouch and CouchDB.

sil (Stuart Langridge) was a guest on FLOSS Weekly yesterday. Stuart told Leo Laporte and Jono Bacon all about the Ubuntu One features, our developer resources, and the plans for Lucid. If you missed TWiT Live, the show (episode 99) will be available very soon. Great job Stuart and thanks TWiT.TV.

UPDATE December 13, 2009: Episode 99 is now available.

Apachelog has excellent news: “Ubuntu One KDE Tech Preview”

It is still a tech preview, but Harald Sitter has done some great work to bring Ubuntu One to KDE. Read his post for sample screencasts and links to project files to test it out for yourself. Fantastic job! Thank you to the KDE community.

We have great news for the open source community. thomas has been developing an Ubuntu One client for Fedora! This quote says it all.

“I just synced my first test file to the cloud ! Whee !”

Thanks thomas. Great job! Read more about his adventures on this project.

Are you a developer who would like to use Ubuntu One on another platform? We would happy to help. Join our development team in #ubuntuone on freenode or subscribe to the project mailing list and let’s chat about your project. Our support page has more information on these options.

A few Ubuntu One users have reported a bug (#462828) in the desktop client software that could cause files to become unavailable in some circumstances. As a temporary measure, we have updated our server to display a “Capabilities Mismatch” error to prevent files from becoming unavailable to users.

A client software update will be released very soon in the update channel. Manually running Update Manager will update your client to work with the server and fix the root cause. Throughout this period, all files are still available from the Ubuntu One website.

Contact syncing and tomboy syncing services have not been affected by this issue.

UPDATE: A new client is available now for beta PPA users running 9.04 and 9.10. More updates coming soon.

UPDATE: The updated Ubuntu One client software is now available to those running Ubuntu 9.10 and not using the beta PPA. Please run Update Manager to install the new software.

We started the Ubuntu One service beta in early May of this year. It’s been an exciting six months and the entire Ubuntu One Team have been thrilled with the involvement of the Ubuntu community.

After over a thousand helpful bugs, fantastic feature requests, and always appreciated words of encouragement, Ubuntu One is now a much, much better service. Thank you to the entire Ubuntu community for their support. We couldn’t have come this far without you.

What started out as synchronizing only files, has grown to synchronize Tomboy notes as well as contacts. As we expand the Ubuntu One service, we’re excited about continued daily collaboration with the Ubuntu community.

Now that you can synchronize files and folders with Ubuntu One, what’s next? Tomboy notes of course.

We’re happy to announce that Ubuntu One can now synchronize your Tomboy notes across all of your Ubuntu computers. Setup requires a few changes in the Tomboy preferences for each computer. Don’t worry about figuring it out for yourself because we’re happy to provide step-by-step setup instructions in our Ubuntu One Tutorials.

Tomboy Notes sync is available to all Ubuntu One subscribers. If you’re not a Tomboy user, now is a great time to take the application for a spin. Tomboy is one of the many applications included in the standard Ubuntu 9.10 release and is found in the Main Menu under Applications >> Accessories.

There are many great features included in the 9.10 (Karmic) release. Of course the one that we’re excited about is that Ubuntu One is included. Setting up Ubuntu One is now easier than ever.

After your 9.10 install or upgrade is completed, ensure that you are connected to the Internet and launch the Ubuntu One application found in Applications >> Internet. The web browser will open and you will be asked to login to Launchpad. If you don’t already have a Launchpad account, you can create one. Next, select your Ubuntu One plan and add your computer to synchronize with Ubuntu One. Now Ubuntu One will start to automatically synchronize. It’s that easy.

If you already had files, Tomboy notes, and contacts synchronized from another Ubuntu machine, they will be automatically downloaded to your new Ubuntu 9.10 installation into the “Ubuntu One” folder.

All of these steps can be found in the Ubuntu One Tutorials. This area also includes information about how to setup and use the other great features of Ubuntu One.

Now that we’re getting close to the 9.10 release, we thought it would be a good idea to review the technical and account support options that are available to all Ubuntu One subscribers. These options were selected because they fit closely with how software is often developed for Ubuntu, and, since the Ubuntu One development team uses these tools every day, it should provide a high degree of transparency to all subscribers as we receive suggestions, fix problems, and develop new features.

Launchpad
Launchpad is our primary tool to log bugs, diagnose issues, and track development. Anyone with a Launchpad login (available to everyone) can post bugs which the team reads daily and promptly addresses.

Since Launchpad is very transparent, anyone can read the bugs and help out with resolving issues. We encourage this type of community involvement that is a core aspect of Ubuntu. Launchpad users can also subscribe to bugs so they will be notified at each stage of the resolution.

Answers
Launchpad Answers is a tool that enables subscribers to post more general questions about the Ubuntu One project. Team members answer these questions, but this is also an area where the Ubuntu community often steps in to provide assistance.

Ubuntu Forums
Ubuntu Forums is similar to Launchpad Answers where subscribers can post questions about Ubuntu One features. Forums has a very active community of Ubuntu users that are frequently willing to help with issues and participate in lively discussion.

IRC
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a wonderful chat tool that Ubuntu One subscribers (or anyone) can use to communicate directly with the Ubuntu One development team. Interested individuals can find us in the #ubuntuone channel on freenode. The team is mostly based in England and the Americas, so you’re likely to reach us during normal business hours for these regions.

Account Support Form
Sometimes subscribers have questions about important account topics like credit card payments. Subscribers can go to their Account page to find the Account Assistance form to submit these types of questions directly to the team.

We hope these support resources meet the needs of all Ubuntu One subscribers and would like to hear your opinion. Anyone is welcome to join us in IRC and give us their thoughts.

The Ubuntu One beta is going very well. We have appreciated every bug, IRC message, Launchpad Answers question, and Ubuntu Forums post about the service since the beta launch in early May. This community feedback has been extremely important to the decisions we make and have made in developing the service.

With the release of the Ubuntu 9.10 Beta last week which features Ubuntu One as a default option, we thought we’d share a few more recent updates.

More storage
Ubuntu One offers two subscription plan options: 2 free GB for everyone’s essential storage needs and a $10 USD plan with more capacity. We’re happy to announce that we have increased the size of the paid plan from 10 GB to an incredible 50 GB. Ubuntu One paid subscribers can now backup, sync, and share more of their music, photos, and movies.

Expanded services
Ubuntu One started with files and folders. Now we’re expanding the service to synchronize more desktop applications that people use each day. In Ubuntu 9.10, Ubuntu One will backup and synchronize Tomboy notes, Firefox bookmarks, and Evolution contacts.

Easy setup
Ubuntu 9.10 is the first Ubuntu release with Ubuntu One pre-installed. It now only takes a few clicks to enable automatic file synchronization for your Ubuntu computer or computers.

Subscribe now to try out all of these features and more.