SWAT's blog

A lot of people do not know any alternatives to the Adobe flash player. Well there is an alternative and it is completely open source: it is Gnash, the GNU flash movie player ( website ). It exists in various flavours for Linux and even for Windows. For example Gnash works on 64 bit Linux (for quite a while now).

Since it is possible that Adobe will ‘update’ their flash software and Gnash will update theirs to keep them in sync, it is likely that you will get stuck with an older version of Gnash and that some flash enabled sites will stop working. The newer Gnash version would ship with the next Ubuntu release or with a backport to the current release. If you can not wait and want the update earlier you could try the gnash firefox plugin . Other downloads can be found at the original Gnash project page or at the getgnash website.

A bi-monthly meeting between LoCos should be a great addition to the teamreports and should stimulate collaboration between the LoCo’s. I also attended a session about laptop keypresses, which was really interesting. The group photo was taken and the launchpad translations will change a bit. Apport rocks and should be used even more (apparently only 10% of the bugs are reported with apport). At the end of the day I went to “Ubuntu All-Stars” and it rocked. That’s about it, the UDS is over and I’ll go home soon, but not yet

The end of yet another fine day at the UDS. Some things that were discussed today:

• Put best practices of the LoCo’s on the wiki (LoCo’s seem important)
• Debugging techniques (the 7 step program)
• The plumbing layer (kernel, udev, devicekit)
• *-jams rock! (we have to add translation- and documentation-jams)

You might notice that my posts get shorter as the UDS progresses…. I wonder why that is….

At the community track we talked about burn-outs, they happen too often and we have to look out for eachother. What do we find fun about Ubuntu: people, technology, choice, helping others, the mission. What we dislike: bureaucracy, secrecy.

There was a nice review of the current governance, who do what they supposed to do, a great talk about the upcoming ext4 and the new user interface design team was announced.

In the evening, we went to the Museum of Computer History, which was just a 25 minute walk away. A healthy pre-dinner walk.

So, it’s Tuesday and the UDS continous. Facts of the day: the ubuntu server community is mostly active on IRC and they have a blog to make them more visible for non-IRC people, Ubuntu developers rock and compiler flags are important. I also followed a quite long sessions about making LoCo teams rock. A few things you can do to make your LoCo rock are: regular events, publicize what you are doing, meetings, install fests / release parties, keysigning and social events.
After the long day we kicked back with Ubuntu unplugged and I enjoyed a nice dinner at the buffet place right across the street (only $23.99 *wink*). I’ll probably upload the pictures once I’m back home (which can take a while).

Today the UDS starts which takes place at Google in Mountain View, CA. They have nice office buildings, lots of parking space, a lot of green (grass, trees, flowers etc.) and it all stimulates creativity. It almost feels like a geek’s home. Bean bags, wifi everywhere (I still have to find a black spot), great food, post-it space invaders, non-stereotype geeky employees, they have got it all.

I followed a community track and at some point the question was asked “So why do you do Ubuntu?” Some of the answers included: it feels like doing charity work, fixing bug #1, equality, learning, great people, freedom of speech/technical/accessibility, sexy.

In the “Enabling 3rd party repositories” session the concensus was that you will still require root for installation and that one uses /opt/vendor if it can’t be built as a normal Debian package. When these repositories are implemented, they will probably also be backported to Hardy (if it catches on).

After a long day I decided to go to bed early, I did not feel well.

So I flew to San Francisco on Saturday (which is an 11 hour flight). After the first two movies (there was a great selection available), your brain turns mush and boredom hits. Just 8 more hours… To cut a long flight short, I finally arrived at the WildPalms hotel.

After a good “nights” rest (waking up at 05:00 due to jetlag), waiting for the breakfast to be served and eventually having breakfast, I find went for a nice long walk. ( pictures ). I saw the main office of Apple and had a good cup of coffee at StarBucks. When I got back to my room, I relaxed a bit and prepared for the Ubuntu Developer Summit which will start tomorrow