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We just held South Africa's (possibly Africa's) first PackageJam! I would like to thank everyone who attended for making it such an enjoyable event.

There were 10 of us that made it, and although only planned for a morning, we ended up staying until late afternoon.

My personal aim for the event was to just assist enough to get people over that first 'i don't know whats going on hump' and hopefully encourage and get some more developers and MOTU's from South Africa!

Very often the MOTU wiki pages can appear daunting, but its really not that bad, but you have to just start somewhere.

We started with general introductions, watched all the awesome dholbach MOTU videos and landed up in the lab where everyone looked at packaging specific things they were interested in.

We had the upstream author of 'gosmore' and 'virtaal' and also two bzr developers which was awesome!

Although nothing was actually packaged on the day, im hoping to be sponsoring some stuff really soon!

Rock on guys :)

More photo's can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35619044@N07/sets/72157620498148669/

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Some resources that we used:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/GettingStarted
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopers
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Teams
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek
http://daniel.holba.ch/harvest
http://packages.qa.debian.org/
http://qa.ubuntuwire.com/uehs/
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Basic

Thanks to the guys that attended the Global Bug Jam - Johannesburg, South Africa!

Although there were only 4 of us, we had an awesome time and managed to do 71 bugs in the couple of hours we were together. I also think we were the only group to do something officially on the African continent (I hope i'm wrong though).  I hope that the stuff learnt today will continue to be used to improve our great distribution.

Some more pics from the event are located here... http://picasaweb.google.com/stefan.lsd/GBJ2009

With 71 bugs, you will be pleased to know that the ZA team is 5th on the list! (I suspect this may change as the US wakes up!)

Preliminary stats can be found here - http://daniel.holba.ch/five-a-day-stats/

We were watching the bugjam video by Daniel Holbach, and the one thing that I took from it was that fact that it doesn't matter how many bugs you fix, but as long as you get together and have a good time. I think everyone had a good time, all learnt and happily managed to give something back to Ubuntu.

Special props to Robyn (rpenhall) as a first time launchpad user (and even non Linux user!). She registered a LP account this morning and despite not knowing Linux or Ubuntu at all, did amazingly and was able to contribute to Ubuntu. It really just shows that anyone, doesn't matter what kind of experience you have, is able to join in.

I really hope to see more of the same and new guys next time! (We have a package jam in planning that is going to rock!)

I think a highlight for me was joining the streaming video from the 'Brummie Jam' - I have no idea where that was, but they sounded english! It really felt as if it was a global effort watching the English eating chocolate cake and chatting about bugs.

Thanks everyone for all the work (and don't stop now!!)

PS: For the guys that didn't come, you can still contribute! Add your name to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Events and help give some bugs some love! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/HowToTriage may be useful!

PPS: This is actually my first post to Planet Ubuntu, although I have been a member for some time.

Ubuntu Developer Week runs from Sep 1st to Sep 5th!

In just two years, Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distribution in the world with millions of users and a spot regularly at the top of Distrowatch. Ever wondered how Ubuntu development works? How to get involved yourself?

Ubuntu Developer Week is a series of online workshops where you can:

* learn about different packaging techniques
* find out more about different development teams
* check out the efforts of the world-wide Development Community
* participate in open Q&A sessions with Ubuntu developers

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Join me on irc.ubuntu.com #ubuntu-classroom to learn more from 18:00 South African Time. stefanlsd is my nick - so please feel free to chat to me.

See the time table here

Ubuntu Developer Week

Someone in the office was trying to get an Ipod 3rd gen nano to work under Ubuntu Hardy 8.04. Requirements were it should be easy to use like iTunes.

We tried Amarok and Banshee. I think we could of tried Rythmbox a bit more. gtkpod is a bit too hardcore and ugly.

We ended up settling on Banshee. Needed to do the following to get it to see the ipod. apt-get install ipod podsleuth libipod-cil.

Banshee saves an audio cd by default to FLAC. To be able to transfer this to your ipod. you need the lame encoder for mp3. Right click the ipod and say properties. It must appear here. If it isn't, do apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly

That should hopefully sort it out.

I am at a point in my life when I don't care about being a zealot. By that I mean that I don't care that im not one. I really think this war and zealotry between linux distributions needs to end. Specifically package management. Ok. I don't care that .deb is easier than rpm. I dont care that rpm spec file's are hell. I don't care about the ego's and pro / merits of one over the other. I will gladly learn how to work with either of them if we could just please standardise on one of them.

On a Windows system, you get the .exe, double click and install. We really need one unified package management that makes it easy for any linux newcomer to just double click and install.

I recently did some work at a government department and one of the IT people wanted Linux to play with. No problem. Have a look at ubuntu. Great. He got it installed, music and videos playing. ok. Groupwise... ok. Thats released by Novell and its in RPM. Yes, there is a forum post how you can use alien, convert it, make a deb, relink the java. Fine. The fact is that the stupid end user cant do all of this!

Take the .deb developers. Take the .rpm developers. Put them in a room and make them work a new standard out, that everyone agree's to. Failing that, frame them like poor Hans... (hans reiser)

anyways. enough :)