Ubuntu-Planet on svij | Sujeevan Vijayakumaran

All-remote workspace at home

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 16:10:00 +0100

It’s been a little over 1,5 years since I joined GitLab as my first all remote company. About half a year ago, I wrote about what I learned in one year at GitLab. In this blog post I will describe my setup how I work because I got several questions about it over the last time. I can also blame dnsmichi who published a similar post about his setup ;-).

I can certainly recommend the page about “Considerations for a Productive Home Office or Remote Workspace“ in the GitLab Handbook about All-Remote.

The Desk

Even long before I worked from home full time I bought a standing desk. I own a IKEA Bekant which only has a “up” and “down” button which is a bit annoying since I always have to hold the button when I want to move the desk up or down. Back in 2017 I’ve written a blog post about my experiences with it in German.

It’s also always good to have some sort of cable management hidden underneath the desktop. Otherwise, your legs will always touch the cables, and it will look ugly.

As part of the desk, I do have three (or should I say four?) arms mounted. One for my 32” 4K Samsung Screen, one for my Notebook-Stand, one for my microphone and an additional cheap „magic arm“ for my Canon EOS 700D which I use as a Webcam.

The Screen

As mentioned above, I’m using a 32" Samsung 4K display. A lot of folks I know are using ultra-widescreen monitors, which I personally do not like that much because they most likely have a smaller resolution. I rather prefer to use a 4K screen without scaling so that I have more space available for my windows.

I used to have a 28" 4K screen, which was a bit small when you want to use it without (much) scaling. Moving forward I hope I will not need to scale it though. For now, my glasses are a good “bugfix” for my eyes, so I can work without scaling on the system side.

The Laptop and The Dockingstation

I used to have Thinkpads in the past, but I recently switched to Dell XPS. I have two Dell XPS 13. One for work (in white) and one private (in black).

While I personally prefer to run ArchLinux (btw I use Arch!) I’m running the latest Ubuntu LTS on my work laptop.

The laptop is connected to a CalDigit TS3-Plus which is my docking station. This was one of the few docking station which supported 4K@60Hz back when I bought this. I would prefer a docking station with more USB-ports. Right now I have another USB-Hub (hidden under the desktop) because the ports provided by most of the docking stations out there are not really enough for me.

Audio and Video

As already mentioned above, I use my Canon EOS 700D as my webcam. I’ll mostly use an 18-55mm lens. The camera is connected to an elgato Cam Link 4k. The biggest downside of this setup currently is that the format is not perfect, as the HDMI-output has two black bars on the left and right side of the video.

I try to keep my background as boring as possible, that’s why all of you will mostly only see my yellow wall behind me.

As a microphone, I use an M-Audio Uber-Mic. It’s being used in meetings and also for my (German) podcast TILpod which I record remotely with Dirk Deimeke. For listening in meetings and also for videos/music, I’m using my Sony WH-1000X3.

Lighting

I do not have a perfect lighting solution yet. I do have a small desk light which is okay for the desk itself but not for video calls. The main light in my office is an IKEA Floalt which can be dimmed.

What else is on the desk?

Stream Deck, mostly for changing audio settings
a mechanical keyboard (HyperX with brown Cherry MX switches)
a boring Logitech mouse
a big mouse pad
a wrist rest pad
some old Logitech speaker
a Brother printer/scanner
a YubiKey 5 NFC
a few (water) bottles

What do I use for on the go?

I didn’t really travel that much for obvious reasons. However, I do have these items as well:

a no-name 8-in-1 Hub with multiple USB-Ports, HDMI, microSD and SD and USB-C Power Delivery.
a cheap no-name clip-on micrphone because the Laptop-internal microphone are mostly crappy anyway
a LAN cable just in case
a USB-C cable
my Sony WH-1000X3

One year at GitLab: 7 things which I didn't expect to learn

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 21:15:00 +0200

One year ago I joined GitLab as a Solution Architect. In this blog post I do not want to focus on my role, my daily work or anything pandemic related. Also, there won’t be a huge focus in regard to all remote working. I rather want to focus on my personal experiences in regard to the work culture. I’ll focus on things which I certainly did not think about before I joined GitLab (or any other company before).

Before joining GitLab I worked for four German companies. As a German with a Sri-Lankan Tamil heritage I was always a minority at work. Most of the time it wasn’t an issue. At least that’s what I thought. At all those previous companies there were mostly white male and with very few (or even none) non-males especially in technical and leading roles. Nowadays, I realize what a huge difference a globally distributed company makes with people from different countries, cultures, background and gender.

There were sooo many small things which makes a difference and which opened my eyes.

People are pronouncing my name correctly

Some of you might (hopefully) think:

Wait that was an issue!?

Yes, yes it was. And it was super annoying. Working in a globally distributed companies means that the default behavior is: People are asking how to correctly (!) pronounce the full (!) name. It’s a simple question, and it directly shows respect even if you struggle to pronounce it correctly on the first time. My name is transcribed from Tamil to English. So the average colleagues simply tries to pronounce it in English, and it’s perfect and that includes the German GitLab colleagues. In previous jobs there were a lot of colleagues who didn’t ask, and I was “the person with the complicated name”, “you know who” or some even called me “Sushiwahn”. One former colleague referenced me to the customer in a phone call as “the other colleague”. That was not cool. If you wonder on how to pronounce my name: I uploaded a recording on my profile website on sujeevan.vijayakumaran.com. I should’ve done that way earlier.

The meaning/origin of my name

I never really cared about the meaning of my name. So many people have asked me if my name has a meaning or what the origin was. I didn’t know, and I also didn’t really care. My mum always simply told me “Your name has style”. My teammate Sri one day randomly dropped a message in our team channel:

If you break down your name into the root words, it basically translates to “Good Life (Sujeevan) Prince Of Victory (Vijayakumaran).

That blew my mind 🤯.

#BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate

So many terrible things happened in the last year in the world. When these two movements appeared it was a big topic in the company. Even with messages in our #company-fyi channel which is normally used for company related announcements. While #BlackLivesMatter was covered in the German media, #StopAsianHate was not really covered in the German media at all.

Around the time of #BlackLivesMatter my manager asked in our team meeting how/if it affects us even if we - in our EMEA team – are far away from the US. I had the chance to share stories from my past which wouldn’t have happened for the average white person in a white country. This never happened in any other company I worked before. When the Berlin truck attack at a Christmas market (back in 2016) happened it was a big topic at lunchtime with the colleagues. When a racist shot German Migrants in Hanau in February 2020 it was not really a topic at work. At one of the attacks Germans were the victims in the other it were migrants. Both shootings happened before I joined GitLab. When there was a shooting in Vienna in November 2020 colleagues directly jumped into the local Vienna channel and asked if everyone is somewhat okay. See the difference!

Languages

We have a #lang-de Channel for German (the language not the country!) related content. There are obviously many other channels for other languages. What surprised me? There were way more people outside of Germany without a German background who are learning or trying to learn German. It’s a small thing but it’s cool! There were many discussions about word meanings and how to handle the German language. Personally that got me thinking if I should pick up learning French again.

Meanings of Emojis

There are a lot of emojis. Specially in Slack. At the beginning it was somewhat overwhelming, but I got used to it. One thing which confused me right after I joined was the usage of the 🙏🏻 emoji. Interestingly the name of the emoji is simply “folded hands”. But what is the meaning of it? When I first saw the use of it I was somewhat confused. For me as a Hindu it’s clearly “praying”. The second meaning which comes to my mind is use of it as a form of greeting – see Namaste. However, there are so many colleagues who use it for some sort of “thanks”. Or even “sorry”. Emojis have different meanings in different cultures!

Different People – Different Mindsets

Since GitLab is an all-remote company our informal communication is happening in Slack channels and in coffee chats in Zoom calls. In the first weeks I scheduled a lot of coffee chats to get to know my teammates and some other colleagues in other teams. The most useful bot (for me) in Slack is the Donut Bot which randomly connects two persons every two weeks. I don’t have to take care to randomly select people from different teams and department. And honestly I most likely would be somewhat biased when I would cherry-pick people to schedule coffee chats.

So every two weeks I get matched with some “random” person. This lowers the bar to talk to someone from some other department where I (shamefully) thought: “Oh that role sounds boring to me.” But if it sounds boring to me that’s the first sign that I should talk to them. Without the Donut Bot I would’ve most likely not talked to someone from the Legal department, just to give one small example. And there were also a lot of engineers who didn’t really talk to someone from Sales, like I am part of the Sales team. Even though we do not need to talk about work related stuff I generally learned something new when I leave the conversation at the end.

However, the more interesting part is to get to know all the different people in the different countries and continents with different cultures. There are many colleagues who left their home country and live somewhere else. The majority of these people are either in the group “I moved because of my (previous) work” or “I moved because of my partner”. The most surprising sentence came from a Canadian colleague though:

I’m thinking of relocating to Germany for a couple of years since it’s easily possible with GitLab. All my friends here are migrants and I really want to experience how it is to learn a new language and live in another country.

That was by far the most interesting reason I heard so far! Besides that my favorite question I ask those people who moved away from their home country is what they’re missing and what they would miss if they moved back. This also leads to some fascinating stories. Most of them are related to food, some to specific medicine and some reasons are even “I like the $specific_mentality over here which I would miss”.

I left out the more obvious parts of a globally distributed team like getting to know how life is in the not-so-rich countries of the world. Also, I finally understood what the difference between the average German is compared to the average Silicon Valley person. The latter is way more open to a visionary goal while the average German wants to keep their safe job for a long time (yes, even in IT).

Mental Health Awareness

We have a lot of content related to Mental Health which I still need to check out. It’s a super important topic on so many different levels. At all my previous employers this was not a topic at all. I might even say it’s generally a taboo topic. One thing which I definitely did not expect was the introduction of the Family and Friends day which was introduced in May 2020 shortly after I joined the company and it happened nearly every month since then and was introduced because of the COVID-Lockdowns. On that day (nearly) the whole company has a day off to spend time with their family and friends. My German friends reaction to that was something like:

Wait didn’t you join a hyper-growth startup-ish company? That doesn’t sound like late-stage capitalism what I would have expected!

In addition to that, there’s also a #mental-health-aware Slack channel where everyone can talk about their problems. I was really surprised to see so many team members to share their problems and what they are currently struggling with. I couldn’t have imagined that people share very personal stories in the company and that includes people sharing their experince with getting help from a therapist.

As someone who is somewhat an introvert who struggles to talk to a lot of people in big groups in real life this past year (and a few more months) has been relatively easy to handle in this regard as I only met four team members in person so far. However, the first in-person company event is coming up, and I’m pretty confident that getting in touch with a lot of mostly unknown people will be easier than at other companies I’ve worked for so far.

Things which I totally expected

There are still things which I expected to work as intended. Here’s a short list:

All Remote and working async works pretty damn good and I really don’t want to go back to an office
Spending company money is easy and definitely not a hassle
Not having to justify how and when I exactly work is a huge relief
Not being forced to request paid time off is an unfamiliar feeling at the beginning, but I got used to it pretty quickly
Working with people with a vision who can additionally identify with the company is great
No real barriers between teams and departments
Values matter

For me personally GitLab has set the bar for companies I might work for in the future pretty high. That’s good and bad at the same time ;-). If you want to read another story of “1 year at GitLab” I can highly recommend the blogpost of dnsmichi from a month ago.

UbuCon Europe in the retrospective

Sun, 27 Nov 2016 12:30:00 +0200

Last weekend the very first UbuCon Europe took place in Essen, Germany. It was the second UbuCon where I was the head of the organisation team. But this one was the first international UbuCon, which had a few more challenges compared to a national UbuCon. ;)

This blog posts focuses on both: the event itself and some information about the organisation.

Thursday

The first unofficial day of the UbuCon was Thursday, where some people already arrived from different countries. We were already ten people from five different countries and we visited the Christmas market in Essen, which opened on that day. Gladly we had Nathan Haines with us, so he could translate all the alcoholic drinks from German to English, because I don’t know anything about that. ;)

Friday

The first official day started in the afternoon with a guided tour through Zeche Zollverein. We were 18 people, this time from eight different countries. The tour showed us the history of the local area with the coal mines which were active in the past. They showed us the whole production line from the coal mining to the processing. The tour took two hours and after that we went to the Unperfekthaus, where the first social event of the weekend took place. There, we were roughly fifty persons mostly drinking, eating and talking.

It was also the first chance to see familiar and new faces again!

Saturday

Saturday started with my quick introduction to the event. After that Canonical CEO Jane Silber hold the first keynote where she talked mostly about the IoT and the Cloud. I was glad that she followed my invitation, even though she had to leave after lunch. The day was packed with different talks and workshops.

I sadly couldn’t join every talk but the talks from Microsoft about “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows” was quite interesting. Laura Czajkowskis talk about “Supporting Inclusion & Involvement in a Remote Distributed Team” was short but also interesting. The day ended with the raffle and the UbuCon Quiz. Everyone could buy an unlimited amount of raffle ticket for 1€ so there were a few people with more than ten tickets. We mostly had different Ubuntu USB-Sticks, three Ubuntu Books, Microsoft T-Shirts, a Nextcloud Box and the bq Aquaris M10 Tablet which were pretty popular. Funnily some people won more than one prize. The UbuCon Quiz afterwards was funny too. The ultimate answer to every question seemed to be “Midnight Commander” :). After the quiz the second social event started and was joined by about 80 persons.

Sunday

After the long Saturday the started again at around 10 o’clock in the morning. There were different talks and workshops again. Daniel Holbach did a workshop on how to create snaps, Costales did a talk about his navigation app uNav. Later Alan Pope talked about how to bring an app as a snap to the store. Elizabeth K. Joseph was talking on how to build a career with Ubuntu and FOSS and Olivier Paroz talked about Nextcloud and the upcoming features.

The day and also the conference ended on 5pm. At that time many people were already on their way back home.

Conclusion

We’ve welcomed 130 persons from 17 different countries and three continents. Originally I didn’t expect that many people from other countries. In the end there were 55 % attendees from Germany. In the last year we had a similar amount of people who attended the German UbuCon. Personally I’m pretty happy that the event took place without big issues or problems. The biggest problem was just the payment which was rather complicated for most of the people. It was a good decision to use the Unperfekthaus as a venue for our event. We didn’t have to organise food and drinks, because that was already included. The projectors were already setted up and even the WiFi worked without problems. The mix of the talks were good too: We had different levels of talks, for beginners and for advanced users and developers.

At this place I want to thank to a lot of people. First of all to Canonicals Community-Team including David Planella, Michael Hall, Daniel Holbach and Alan Pope who helped us with the overall organisation and where always ready when we needed help. Also, thanks to Marius Quabeck and Ilonka O. who joined the weekly hangouts with the Community-Team and helped in a lot of smaller and bigger organisation stuff, too. Jonathan Liebers and Jens Holschbach actually brought the UbuCon to Essen, even though the Unperfekthaus wasn’t the first choice. Ilonka and Veit Jahns also helped with the handling of all the submitted talks and workshops. Sarah, Peter and Philipp were on the wrong place at the wrong time and got recruited to handle the registration desk: Thanks and Sorry ;)! Last but not the least Torsten Franz and Thoralf Schilde from the ubuntu Deutschland e.V. who were our legal entity to host the UbuCon and handle all the bills.

Also: Never forget the Sponsors: Microsoft, otris software AG, Nextcloud, bytemine, b1 systems, ubuntu-fr and Ubuntu User.

Besides the help in the organisation I also want to thank every speaker and visitor who actually formed the content of the conference. I’m really glad that so many people said that they liked it and I’m really looking forward for next years UbuCon Europe which will take place in Paris, France!

See you there!

UbuCon Europe Plannings and Call for Contributions

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 18:00:00 +0200

It’s been a while, since my first announcement about UbuCon Europe 2016 which will take place from the 18th to 20th November 2016 in Essen, Germany. That means: Mark your calendars! Check out our travel page on how to get to Essen! And finally: Submit your talks and ideas for talks or workshops!

While we were running the UbuCon Germany in the last years, we learned that many speakers picked a talk which were requested by the audience. So be sure to also submit your idea for a talk or workshop, which you would like to hear to idea@ubucon.eu!

We have a few talks already in our pipeline, sadly nothing fixed yet. I hope that we can announce the first speakers in the next weeks. If you want to join and help our team to organise the event, just send me an email (svij ät ubuntu.com).

More information are on UbuCon.eu!

UbuCon Summit and SCALE 14x in Pasadena

Sat, 06 Feb 2016 22:00:00 +0200

From the 21st to the 24th the 14th Southern California Linux Expo took place in Pasadena. Since many years, there is also an UbuCon happening. This year was the first time when the newly created “UbuCon Summit” took place.

The people who are involved in the international Ubuntu-Community probably heard about the UbuCon Summit. It is the new attempt by Ubuntus Community Team and the community to bring the community back together, after the end of the Ubuntu Developer Summits. The Ubuntu Developer Summits got abandoned in 2012 because it was too expensive. Personally I didn’t have a chance to visit a Ubuntu Developer Summit, mainly because I wasn’t much involved in the international community back then. I couldn’t decline to jump at the chance to attend the UbuCon Summit.

At this point I want to thank everybody who donated to the Ubuntu Community Donations program. Without that I wouldn’t have the chance to go to the UbuCon Summit, Thanks everyone!

Day 0

After a long (and delayed) flight, I arrived in Pasadena. The day “0” was the day before the UbuCon Summit officially started. It was the first meet and greet at a wine bar. For me it was the first time to meet a couple of people which I only knew online before, so I was really happy to finally meet Nathan Haines, Richard Gaskin, Michael Hall, José Rey, Elizabeth K. Joseph and all the others which I forgot to mention.

Day 1

At 10 o’clock in the morning the UbuCon Summit officially started. Before the keynote by Mark Shuttleworth started, Nathan Haines and Richard Gaskin as the main organisers of the event, welcomed everybody in their welcoming speech. The ballroom was already full at that time, there weren’t that many free seats left. Mark mainly focused Snappy, Containers and the Internet of Things on his keynote, interestingly the Phone did only get a small reference at the end of the keynote, when he slightly touched the topic of convergence. After his talk, a few lightning talks followed. Sergio Schvezov talked about building snap packages with snapcraft, followed by Jorge Castro about Gaming on Ubuntu. Didier Roche presented the tool “Ubuntu Make” and was followed by the new Kubuntu lead Scarlett Clark. She was really shy, so it was just a couple of minutes long talk about the current tasks of the Kubuntu project. After that the group photo followed, which is not yet public. (Where is it Nathan? ;)).

After lunch, the actual talks started. Nathan Haines started with “The Future of Ubuntu” and on the same time Sergio Schvezov and Canonicals Product Manager Manik Taneja talked about snappy. I’ve attended the snappy talk, where I didn’t learn much new stuff, because I was already familiar with the basics of snappy. After that, my own talk followed about the project Labdoo.org. The project aims to collect old and used laptops in industrial countries, which are not used anymore or got replaced by new hardware. This was actually my very fist talk in English, as a non-native English speaker this was a harder step for me. Anyhow only 15-20 people attended my talk and I was already done after 30 minutes, because I was too nervous and also spoke too fast so I ended up forgetting half of the stuff… Beside my not that great performance at my talk, Jono Bacons talk was on the same time, where all the people went.

After these talks, three more talks followed in two tracks. I didn’t follow the next talks completely, so I had more time to talk to so many other cool people.

At the evening there was the Canonical-sponsored social-event. I had another priority for that time, so I went to the talk “Floss reflections” by Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Jono Bacon and Keila Banks. It was followed by Bryan Lundukes amusing “Linux Sucks” talk which you shouldn’t miss seeing on YouTube. Finally, I joined the social event at the Brazilian bar afterwards. It was totally worth! :)

Day 2

The second day was mainly the Unconference-Day. But before that the second keynote of SCALE took place. Cory Doctorow talked about the topic “No Matter Who’s Winning the War on General Purpose Computing, You’re Losing”. One interesting slot followed after the keynote. The “Ubuntu Leadership Panel” discussed many things, including positive and negative aspects in the last year. The panel included Daniel Holbach as part of the Community Counil, David Planella as the Community Team Manager, Olli Ries as the Director of Engineering, Mark Shuttleworth as the Ubuntu Founder, Elizabeth Joseph as a former Community Council Member, Nathan Haines as part of the LoCo Council and José Rey as a UbuCon LA organiser.

One of the sponsors of the UbuCon Summit was Dell. Barton George, founder of “Project Sputnik” - the ubuntu powered Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition - also talked about the project in a lightning talk. After that the raffle took place, where I sadly didn’t win, boo! A cool thing about Barton George was, that he was very open and cool to talk to, he even started talking to people (like me) and was interested what we do in the community. The second lightning talk was by Michael Hall about Ubuntu Convergence Demo, he even connected his Nexus 4 to the projector to make the demo. Alan Pope and Jorge Castro followed then by the instructions about the unconference sessions. There were many sessions which were spontaneously added to the schedule. The sessions covered topics like “Snappy for Sys-Admins”, “Snap Packaging”, “In App Purchases” or “Attracting Non-Ubuntu App Developers”. Sadly the amount of people radically reduced. There were only like 30-40 people in all unconference session altogether and the bigger part of these were Canonical employees. The UbuCon Summit ended in the afternoon, after the Unconference-Session.

During the Unconference-Session the exhibit hall opened, where many companies and project had their booth, of course there was also a booth from Canonical and Ubuntu. They had different ubuntu devices, like laptops, phones and a drone running snappy Ubuntu, even though it wasn’t really snappy but rather slow…

At the afternoon it was time for Bad Voltage Live! It was really cool and not only because I listen to their podcast regularly. The beginning was delayed because Jono Bacons Macbook (running Mac OS and Keynote) had issues playing audio. That was funny, but they somehow got managed to fix it partly. I recommend watching the recording on YouTube, specially the beginning with all the audio issues!

After the show there was another social-event, the after party of Bad Voltage, which was sponsored by a sponsor, again at the wine bar.

Day 3

The third day was the first SCALE-only day and it had a huge schedule with up to ten simultaneously talks. Like the other days, also the third day started with a keynote, this time again from Mark Shuttleworth. The topic of his talk was “Free Software in the age of app stores”. The talk was pretty similar to his talk on the opening of the UbuCon, so I would say that there was like 20% new or other stuff in it.

I’ve visited a few talks on Saturday, mainly “Continuous Delivery of Infrastructure with Jenkins”, “Building Awesome Communities with GitHub” from Jono Bacon and “Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos: Compared”. Sadly my unterstanding of the container technologies aren’t that high currently, so I didn’t understand most of the talk. But beside that the other talks were pretty good.

On the other time I was mostly walking around in the exhibit hall, also sometimes standing and talking with people at the Ubuntu booth. There were a lot of people at the Ubuntu booth and many were interested in convergence. One guy was so much excited about the Nexus 4 and the attached screen/keyboard/mouse that he said “This is so awesome, I would kill for it!”. It was kind of strange, but made a good laugh. ;-)

At the end of the day the “Game Night” took place in a smaller part of the exhibit hall. The idea and the realisation were great! There were a lot of people playing different types of games in the hall, like table tennis, pinball, kicker table or even with Lego. I didn’t see many people with their phones in their hands (except for making photos) and nearly no person who was using their laptop.

Day 4

The last day started with the keynote of Sarah Sharp about “Improving Diversity with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”. This keynote was in fact very interesting and she mentioned many points which I didn’t think of. She started her talk with the instruction to raise your hand if you’re male and then proceed with the second clause if you’re white. So I had to put down my hand again. All these people had to say “Improving diversity in open source communities is my responsibility.” While I generally agree with that, I was a little confused because I didn’t have to raise my hand because I’m not white. Personally I never had (and never directly heard about) any issues in open source communities because I’m not white. Beside that point her talk really impressed many people. She even got standing ovations afterwards.

Next talk for me was “From Sys Admin to Netflix SRE“ from two Netflix guys. This was a talk again, where I couldn’t follow completely because I didn’t know much about the sys admin stuff. The third and last talk for me was from Dustin Kirkland about “adapt” which was quite interesting.

Conclusion

Looking back at the event, I’ve noticed that I skipped too many talk slots. Even though there were many talks at the same time, so I had to decide which one I should go to. Compared to German Linux or Open Source Conferences I’ve noticed that the (felt) percentage of attending women were higher than in Germany. One cool point of SCALE is also that they help young and new people to talk at conferences. I’ve never seen kids under the age of 15 talking in front of many people yet. Sadly the video and live-streaming recording weren’t that great. The YouTube channel gets all the talks slowly added. My talk is also available with broken slides and bad audio quality.

I really enjoyed UbuCon and SCALE. It was the first time to go to a Linux and Open Source Conference which was not in Germany and it was also the first time at an international Ubuntu event. At the end I talked to so many people and also skipped some talks because I was talking to different people. I hope to have the chance to go to another UbuCon Summit in the next year and hope to see you all there again! :-)

Beside the UbuCon Summit the next bigger UbuCon is the UbuCon Europe which takes place in Essen, Germany from the 18th to 20th November 2016! Me as the organiser of the event hopes to see you there too!

Attending UbuCon Summit US in 01/2016

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 18:50:00 +0200

2016 will be my favourite „UbuCon-year“. The first UbuCon Summit in Pasadena will take place and at the end of the year the first UbuCon Europe will take place in Essen, Germany from 18th to 20th November. In the latter I’m the head of the organisation team.

The UbuCon Summit is just around the corner and I’m really looking forward to attending the event. It’s the first time that I requested money from the Ubuntu Community Donations Fund which got thankfully accepted. The schedule is complete since a few days and there are many interesting talks, including the opening keynote by Mark Shuttleworth. I’m also going to give a talk about the Labdoo Project, which is a humanitarian social network to bring education around the globe. This will be also my first talk at a conference in English ;-).

If you live in South California and didn’t hear about UbuCon Summit yet, you should definitely consider visiting this event. It’ll be cohosted by the South California Linux Expo which alos have many interesting talks.

I’m looking forward to meeting all my old and new friends. Especially those which I didn’t meet yet, like Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines, who organises the UbuCon Summit. See you there!

This was the Ubucon 2015 in Berlin

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 20:15:00 +0200

Last weekend the 9th Ubucon in Germany took place in Berlin. It was the first time that I was the head of the organisation team for the vent. After 2012, it was the second time that we were guests at HWTK in the Center of Berlin. It was as always hosted by the ubuntu Deutschland e.V..

Friday

Traditionally, the Ubucon begins on a Friday. Personally, I was in Berlin in the early morning, so I had time to see a bit of Berlin. In this case I’ve met SturmFlut for the first time and Riccardo Padovani for the second time. After we visited a couple of things in Berlin, I went to the venue to set up the rooms for the Ubucon. Thankfully we had many people who helped! After (nearly) everything was setup, we went over to the museum “Story of Berlin”. There, we had a really interesting tour through a fallout shelter and the museum. We did learn how they would organise the bunker, if there would be a worst case scenario. In the museum itself, we learned many things about the history of Berlin. We were roughly 20 people in the museum, later on, we moved to the Restaurant called “Route 66” where 40 people came together for the social event.

Saturday

We opened the registration booth of the Ubucon at 9 o’clock in the morning. At the same time the catering-service delivered the canapé, sandwiches, bread rolls and salads. Funnily, these guys were also happy Ubuntu users. :-)

As the main organiser, I opened the Ubucon at 10 o’clock. The schedule of the event did contain many Ubuntu topics - that was different in the last years. We had 28 talks and workshops in 4 to 5 tracks. Personally I didn’t attend any talks before lunch. Later Simon (aka SturmFlut, the panda guy) and me did the talk about the UbuContest, where we handed the prizes of the contest to the winners. Luckily Riccardo Padovani, Michał Prędotka from the FallDown Team and Jorik van Nielen from “Click the Cookie” made their way to Berlin. Simon made some really cool videos for the UbuContest, which you should watch: Intro Video, the unofficial Ubucon-Video, Falldown, and Monster Wars.

After our talk, David Planella gave a speech about “The Ubuntu Phone and the road to convergence”, which was interesting and also contained some new information which I didn’t know yet. We had a camera guy, who sadly only got managed to record the second half of the talk. The video might be online in the next weeks. My second talk was my actual first English talk about Snappy Ubuntu Core with Daniel Holbach and Oliver Grawert. The day ended with the “Linux-Quiz” where the most funny part was how often the quiz application has crashed. ;-)

After the talks roughly 50 people headed over to the Cum Laude Restaurant for the second Social Event, which was actually a candle light dinner ;-).

Sunday

Due to the clock change the night to Sunday was an hour longer. Sunday is mostly the day where fewer people are coming over. Also, the day is a bit shorter, because the last talks ends at 3 PM. At 9 o’clock in the morning, the most motivated people where the two guys from the catering service during the delivery of the food. Personally, I visited some talks again. This time the systemd-Daemons talk from Stefan Betz and the “What is Cloud?” talk from Kristian Köhntopp. After the lunch, Simon talked about “Linux and Supercomputing” and in the last slot I organised a quick discussion round to gather ideas of the next Ubucon, which will be the UbuCon Europe!

Conclusion

It was the fourth Ubucon I’ve attended, the third where I was part of the organisation and the first as the head of the organisation team. It was definitely more stress-free than I would have expected. This was possible because we had a great team who help whereever they could. Thanks to Torsten Franz and Dominik Wagenführ for the work before the event. Thanks to Peter and Adrian who helped a lot in Berlin. A big thanks goes also to Lynxis, who brought his hardware and setup the whole network, which was working flawless.

We had nearly 120 attendees this year. The number is nearly the same as in the last years. If you want to see some photos, David Planella has uploaded a few on flickr.

For the next year we’re hoping to get a bit bigger. The 10th Ubucon in Germany will be the UbuCon Europe, taking place in Essen, Germany! There is already a website on ubucon.eu and a Launchpad-Group where all the organisation stuff will be discussed. During the Ubuntu Online Summit, we will also have a session to gather more and new ideas. If you want to help or bring up some ideas, feel free to join us!

UbuContest recapped

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 19:30:00 +0200

The last weeks and months were very intensive in terms of my Ubuntu activities. I’m not only doing the last preparations of this years Ubucon Germany where I’m the head of the organisation team for the first time, also we successfully ran the first community-driven app developer contest called UbuContest. The contest was initiated by SturmFlut and me, and we thankfully got the support from Daniel Holbach, David Planella and Canonical. Additionally, we had jury where I was part of!

I was really surprised by the variety of the submitted entries, but I was also sad, that we only had two developer teams, therefore we didn’t have a third place in the team entries. Also, we didn’t have that many submitted nominations for the technical and non-technical prices. While this was a good idea from SturmFlut, I think we didn’t advertise this enough. It seemed that many people didn’t really understand our initial idea to support not only app developers. Anyway, this is one of many good points to improve the contest in the future.

The UbuContest actually had two goals: bring some fresh new open source apps to the store and advertise the Ubucon Germany, which takes place in Berlin on 23rd to 25th October. The first goal was achieved, many of the apps were new and I’m also happy that three winners are coming to Ubucon! tl;dr: Achievement unlocked! ;-) The winners were announced on the Ubucon website.

If you’re around Berlin next week, don’t forget to visit the Ubucon!

Review: Beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac Users by Nathan Haines

Mon, 12 Oct 2015 22:25:00 +0200

Fellow Ubuntu Member Nathan Haines has recently published his first book “Beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac Users”. Nathan asked me to review his book, I couldn’t decline it.

What is in it?

The book is divided into six different chapters and two appendices. It was written by Nathan Haines, who is a long time Ubuntu User, Ubuntu Community Contributor and organisator of UbuCon at SCaLE. The book was published by Apress and has a length of 244 pages.

The book starts with some information about the author, about the technical reviewer and the acknowledgments. In the introduction Nathan gives a decent introduction into Ubuntu, where he covers the main topics of Ubuntu. This includes the special parts of Ubuntu, the philosophy and some information about Linux itself.

The first chapter deals with the installation of Ubuntu. It not only covers the standard Ubuntu Desktop Installation with Unity, but also the different flavors. This includes Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME and also Ubuntu Server. He gives detailed instructions how to install the system and what the effects of the different actions are. The title of the book is saying, that it is targeted for Windows and Mac users. Therefore, the whole instructions are written in way that Windows and Mac users see the differences between the systems and they can also create the installation DVDs and USB-Sticks from their system. It also covers the installation of a dual-boot installation, either with Windows or with running Mac OS X alongside Ubuntu.

The introduction and installation already covered roughly a quarter of the book. In the second chapter, the topic is how to getting started with Ubuntu. In this part, it gives an introduction how to use the Unity Desktop, where you find the Dash, what the indicators are and showing how to use the Unity-HUD. It also covers the installation of software and updating the system using the Software Center. The book is not only about Ubuntu , it also gives a guidance how to set up your Ubuntu Desktop in a network with Windows, especially how to connect to a Windows-Machine using RDP or how to access files in the local network using the SMB-Protocol.

The third chapter is all about productivity at home and work. It showcases all the different applications that are either pre-installed or are installable and helps you to get things done at work and at home. Precisely, it covers basic instructions of FocusWriter, HomeBank, Evolution, Thunderbird with Lightning, using Google with the Online Accounts feature, Empathy, FreeMind and others.

The fourth chapter handles the media entertainment. This basically covers the usage of DVDs, VLC and how you can organize your music and podcasts with Rhythmbox. Additionally, it also covers the applicactions Brasero, DeVeDe, Shotwell, Audacity and a few more programs. The topic of the fifth chapter is the command-line. The author gives an introduction on how to use the basic commands of the command-line, which tools are available and why it might be good option to use it. On the following pages, there are also explanation how to use nano to edit files, alpine to read mails and use irssi to use IRC.

The last chapter is all about power user tools. This includes the topics how to manage processes, disks and thumb drives or how to use multiple workspaces properly. Additionally, the reader gets some information about the commands to install applications through the command line or how to work with virtual machines.

The book ends with two appendices covering the Ubuntu release strategy and the future of Ubuntu, with Snappy and Ubuntu Phone.

How well is it written?

As the title of this book already say, this book is mainly targeted for beginners who already used Windows or Mac OS X. The explanation are always straightforward and mostly not complex. The reader of the book gets a good overview of Ubuntu and how to use most of the pre-installed software. Nearly every application is also presented by a screenshot.

As a beginner, you shouldn’t have any problems to getting started with Ubuntu with this book. You see that the author is very experience with Ubuntu, which is actually true ;-).

Critique

The most parts of the book covers topics on how to use different applications. Mostly one application per category was picked, which were then explained. All the explanations were neither too short nor too long. Nathan always mentioned other similar programs of the same category. Anyway, sometimes the selection was a bit surprising. In my opinion one of my important programs for Ubuntu beginners is the LibreOffice Suite, which isn’t covered in this book. Instead of LibreOffice, FocusWriter was focused. On the other side there were also a few applications which I wouldn’t expect, like the command-line mail client alpine. This is the only small minus point for me. Except this, the book is perfect for beginners! As an experienced Ubuntu users, you probably don’t learn many new things. Even though, I found a couple of applications which I never heard of.

Book-Details:

Title: Beginning Ubuntu for Windows and Mac Users

Author: Nathan Haines

Publisher: Apress

Pages: 244

Visiting bq: How bq tests and develops their devices

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 16:30:00 +0200

Recently, I got an invitation from bq for the launch of their first Android One in Spain and Portugal. The event took place in Madrid. A couple of journalists and bloggers from Germany (including me) and France were also invited for a tour through the offices and labs from bq in their headquarters in Madrid. There, they showed us some details about the development of their smartphones and how they test the hardware. While the presentation of the Android One Smartphone wasn’t that much interesting for me, the latter part of the event was even more interesting!

Transparency side note: bq paid me the trip to Madrid!

Company Presentation

At the beginning the deputy CEO Rodrigo del Prado, who I also met in London at the Ubuntu Phone Launch Event, presented the recent developments of bq. The company itself is pretty young and widely unknown to “normal” people outside from Portugal and Spain. While they started with selling Ebook-Readers, they now focus and Smartphones and Tablets running Android. As a side-project they’re also selling the first both Ubuntu Phones, which shouldn’t be news for the Ubuntu Planet ;-).

Currently bq focuses on the European market. They develop the hardware and software in Madrid, but they’re manufactured in China. There are currently no plans for enter the north-american market - so you probably can’t expect a bq Ubuntu Phone in the US in the near future.

Development

BQ did tell us a lot details about their development process. In a couple of charts, they showed us how long they need to develop a device from scratch: 9 months. In the first two months they mainly focus on working at the first prototype. Two teams do work in this stage: the visual designers and the mechanic designers. The first group of designers are responsible for the appearance of the device, the mechanic desigerns work on the internal hardware design. All hardware components, like the board, the screen, etc. must fit together, so both teams has to work closely together. In this early stage of the development only nine people work on the prototypes.

After finishing the first prototypes, the first test-production starts with only 80 devices. In the next three months bq works on the “Engineering Verification Testing”, where they test the general functionality of the hardware. They’re also implementing corrections and making improvements on the hardware. This phase also includes the first basic tests in power consumption, temperature, camera and many more. In the mean time, the software developers are starting their work on the kernel and porting the software.

The third phase is the “Design Verification Process”, where they continue to improve the devices. The number of devices is a bit higher now, with roughly 140 sample devices. This is also the stage, where the software developer are working on the full stack - not only the hardware support any more.

After that, the bigger tests are starting in the “Process Verification Test”. This is an unofficial beta-release of the device, where all the developments and tests from the previous phases. The main target of this stage is, to find as many bugs as possible. The hardware of the device is nearly fixed, if they find bigger problems in this stage, they have to go back and nearly have to start again. The overall number of testing devices are 2000. In the 8th and 9th month, the device will finally go into the mass production. After that, only OTA-Updates will follow.

Lab-Tour

After the presentation, we had a guided tour through the offices and labs from bq. This was by far the most interesting part of the day. We had the opportunity to talk to the Engineers and other Employees working on the phones and tablets. At the beginning, we visited the designers. Before we entered the room, they covered the walls, because there were a few new devices, which are not announced yet. While I did see some details about new devices, I sadly didn’t see any signs of the new convergent device running Ubuntu, which was announced to release this year.

Anyway, there were only two young designers, who work on the appearance of the devices. They work closely with the mechanic designers and the bosses to create a good looking device. On their desks there were many drafts of phones and also dummy phones.

The mechanic designers are responsible for the internal hardware design. This includes the board with the CPU, RAM, WiFi and all other hardware components. The board also has two micro SIM slots and a micro sd slot. When you look on the pictures, you actually see how much space these three things are consuming. Knowing that, it isn’t surprising, that many companiess doesn’t want micro sd slots and dual sim. The rest of the device is essentially the battery, the screen, the chassis and cables and antennas. The hardware designers are also responsible for the power consumption and the quality of the radio antennas. The production of the device is completely done in China, while the QA-Process is done in Spain.

BQ runs seven different tests in their labs. The “Vibration Test Machine” doesn’t test the vibration motor, but they put the device into the machine, which vibrates heavily. The goal is to make sure that no parts of the device are getting loose. This test will run several hours. The other test checks the connections and buttons of the device. So it will plug and unplug USB-Cables, Headphones and press the volume and power buttons. With this test, they want to make sure that the quality is good enough for many years. The third test could be named the “Bendgate”-Test. If you remember the Bendgate from the iPhone 6+, you might remember, that the device got bend, when you put it in your back pocket of your jeans. BQ are running those tests on their devices, also for a couple of hours. Most people break the screen or the glass of the screen on their device, here they execute two different drop tests. The simple one just drops the device from a small height, like you drop your phone onto the table. The “Tumbling Test Machine” on the other side simulates dropping your phone from a higher height. The last machine is a huge machine, which raises much dust. With this test they’re making sure that there won’t be any dust in the device, like under the screen or on the camera lens.

Conclusion

We had a good view into the production and testing details of bq. They were also open to any questions. BQ answered the question, why they’re also selling Ubuntu Phones and Android One Phones, that they want to be open for other opportunities to don’t miss any new options. Therefore, they also said, that they were quite surprised by the amount of sold Ubuntu Phones. During the visit I also made a video about all the testing machines, which you can watch here on YouTube. The video is in German though, but you’ll get the most of the stuff, if you read this article ;-).

Interview with Ronnie Tucker about Full Circle Magazine

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 21:30:00 +0200

This is an interview with Ronnie Tucker, the creator and founder of „Full Circle Magazine“. You can find the translated German article in this Ikhaya Article.

Hey Ronnie, thanks for joining this interview. First of all, the most of our readers might not know you, so can you say a few words about yourself, who you are?

Ronnie: Thanks for having me. I’m the editor, and founder, of Full Circle magazine which I started (on a whim) about eight years ago.

I suppose, that’s not your day job, what do you do in “real life” except on working on FCM?

Real life consists of stock control and stock management in the licensed trade. In other words: I try to make sure people don’t steal booze.

You’ve have released the 100th issue of FCM a few days ago, what is your main motivation to keep working on this magazine?

It’s my way of giving something back to the community. And since so many people seem to like Full Circle, I never get tired of doing it.

So, what was the starting point of FCM? I mean how did this project start?

I saw a post on Ubuntu Forums where someone was looking for help in making an Ubuntu magazine. I replied, but got nothing. The post was old. At that point I thought ‘why not’ and decided to start an Ubuntu magazine of my own with help (initially) from the Ubuntu Forum members.

That’s actually a cool way to start a exciting project. Which topics do you actually cover, is it only Ubuntu?

The forum was a good starting point as it was through there that the name originated, and the first regular writers (and helpers) emerged.

The major cover is Ubuntu, but I’d publish anything that’s related to *buntu or any derivative of Ubuntu (eg: Mint, etc.)

Can anyone (like me) submit their own articles for FCM or how do you handle them?

Absolutely anyone can submit an article. I end up sounding like a broken record at times when I keep saying ’no articles = no magazine’. And that would be sad!

Do you have (or had) any problems with a low number of submitted articles?

All the time! Hence, my constant harrassing of readers trying to get submissions. We get thousands of downloads each month yet very few submissions. Most people think they don’t know anything, but they do! Everyone has something they can write about. Even if it’s just some simple advice, or reviewing software/hardware they have/use.

That actually remembers me to our German (kind of) equaivalent magazin (called freiesMagazin.de) which also - sadly - have the same problem. Except the authors - how many people are working on an issue each month?

I gather up the articles and put them in a Google Docs folder. There are about 10 proof-readers who go through them correcting any mistakes, and after that there’ll be several (independent) teams translating.

And after that, which programs do you use to produce the magazine?

Articles are stored on Google Docs, so any text alterations are done there. Any image resizing is done in GIMP, and all the layout work (and creation of the PDF) is done in Scribus.

Hm, wasn’t that LibreOffice in the past?

There are some edits done in LibreOffice prior to uploading to Google Docs, but not so much these days as Google Docs is pretty good at converting ODT to Docs format.

You mentioned earlier, that the magazin has “thousands of downloads”. Do you have an actual number?

There’s no definitive number of downloads as there are multiple places to get each issue (the main site, Google Play, Issuu, Magzter, etc.) but for the main site for FCM#100 there were almost 2,500 downloads on launch day followed by another 1,500 downloads, then about 1,000 per day thereafter. After about a week it’ll sit at about 500 downloads per day. Roughly.

Are you satisfied with number of downloads and the feedback of the readers?

Never! I always want MORE! :)

Haha, then you can explain me, why a reader should download the FCM? I mean, you could also publish single articles in a blog, isn’t FCM a bit old-fashioned?

True, but the PDF only weighs in at 10-15MB and a LOT of our readers don’t have fast broadband (me!) or fiber optic, so a lot of readers like downloading the PDF for offline reading. Same idea with the EPUB for mobile devices.

Anyway, over those 100 issues, what was the most interesting or funny moment, which happened? Or which you can’t forget?

Oh definitely the first December issue way back. I decided to go silly with it and put a Santa Tux on the cover and use tinsel and baubles in the issue. A good dozen or so readers complained it was too Christian. I’m not religious. I just did it for a laugh. Sometimes I just can’t win…

Oh wow. So, I’m nearly done. Any question or topic which I forgot or might be important for you?

Just to encourage readers to send in articles. Even if your not a native English writer, the proof-readers will tweak your article, so don’t worry about any language barrier. And I do try to publish everything I get. Unless you write negatively about ‘Windoze’ for several pages. At that point I’ll bin it as I’m not about to get into throwing mud at Windows, or Microsoft.

Alright, thanks for the interview!

My pleasure!

Visiting FrOSCon …

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 20:50:00 +0200

Last weekend, on the 22nd and 23rd August, the FrOSCon took place in St. Augustin (next to Bonn) in Germany. It is one of the bigger Open Source Conferences and my first visit. Short summary: It was great! There were many talks, too bad there were many on talks on the same time, but luckily all talks were recorded.

Personally I gave to talks: about Snappy Ubuntu Core and about Ubuntu Phone. You can watch both talks here and here, both talks are in German. Both talks had many attendees. (Here is a small photo!)

On Saturday I didn’t visit more talks - on the evening, after the talks, there was a free barbecue for everybody! Also, the entrance to the conference was completely free in this year, which I strongly support.

On Sunday I went to the Talk of Benjamin Mako Hill about „Access Without Empowerment“, which was the only English talk which I visited. I also visited a few more talks, if you are interested to watch the other talks, you can have a look here.

The rest of the time was I mostly talking to people at the Ubuntu Booth, mostly showing and presenting my Ubuntu Phones. Besides that we had a small Taskwarrior-Meetup with Dirk Deimeke, Wim Schürmann and Lynoure Braakman which was quite funny and interesting ;).

I really like to visit different Open Source Conferences, mostly to learn new stuff and talk to old and new friends. This time I’ve met many „old“ friends and also met new guys. Surprisingly, I had the chance to meet and talk to Niklas Wenzel from the Ubuntu-Community, who is involved in the development of different apps and features of Ubuntu Phone (and he’s way younger than I would have expected) and also Christian Dywan from Canonical.

I’m really looking forward to the next conferences, which will be Ubucon in Berlin and OpenRheinRuhr in Oberhausen later this year!

Review bq Aquaris E5 - Ubuntu Edition

Sat, 11 Jul 2015 15:45:00 +0200

The second Ubuntu Phone on the market is also the second phone from the spanish manufacturer bq. The Aquaris E5 is available to buy since a couple of weeks, it’s the bigger brother of the E4.5, which was the first Ubuntu Phone.

Software

The bq Aquaris E5 runs the same software as the E4.5 and the Meizu MX4. I’ve covered the software features on my review of the Aquaris E4.5. Like my review of the Meizu MX4, this review will not cover all the software features. Instead, I will only mention the software features which are associated with the hardware of the E5 itself in the upcoming sections.

Hardware

The Aquaris E5 is powered by a Quad Core MediaTek CPU with a Frequency of 1.3 Ghz. The GPU has a frequency of 500 Mhz. The size of the RAM is 1 GB.

It is exactly the same CPU, GPU and RAM which are also built in to the E4.5. You’ll notice the overall speed is pretty much the same on both devices. The startup time of apps are still pretty slow, with roughly five seconds. You’ll also notice that the system is sometimes laggy and stuttering, especially when you switch between scopes. Anyway, the speed inside of apps are good.

The device is 8,65mm thin and therefore thinner than a centimeter. It is also slightly thinner than the E4.5. The bigger display, with a size of 5", results in a length of 14,2cm and a width of 7,1cm. Like on the E4.5, the bezels are pretty huge, because of the non-existing Android-Buttons, which are present on the Android-Version of the E5. It has a similar size as the Meizu MX4, but it is a few centimeters slimmer.

The design is exactly the same as on the E4.5. You’ll find a micro-USB Port on the bottom, next to the speakers. On the left side, you have both dual-SIM slots and on the right side there are the volume- and power-buttons. On the top, you can insert the microSD card, with a size of up to 32 GB.

The Screen

Like the name already suggests, the E5 has a 5" screen with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. This is a pixel density of 294 ppi. The E4.5 on the other side has only a 4.5" screen with a resolution of 540 x 960 and a pixel density of 240 ppi. You directly notice the difference between those screens. The higher resolution results into sharper images, icons and fonts. The screen isn’t as good as on the Meizu MX4, but still not bad at all.

The Camera

This phone has two cameras, one on the front and one on the backside. The front camera takes photos with 5 Megapixels, the camera on the back with 13 megapixels.

The photos are slightly better than on the E4.5, but they’re still washy and the reproduction isn’t that much better. You can use is for a few simple photos anyway.

Battery life

The battery life is pretty good! On a „normal“ usage, you can easily use the phone for two days. This is a similar battery life as on the E4.5, which has become pretty good after a couple of software updates.

Haptics and Quality

The overall finish is good, especially for a device which goes for 200€. There are not many differences in the build quality compared to the E4.5. The backside is made of hard plastic, which is a bit slippery, but still feels better in your hand than most other smartphones with plastic backcovers. The frame around the display is also made of plastic, which may easily results in scratches.

Conclusion

The bq Aquaris E5 is solid device. On the software side there aren’t any big issues. Also the hardware of the E4.5 and E5 is so similar that one is as good os the other when it comes to running the installed software.

Anyway the bq Aquaris E5 is still a device for Ubuntu enthisiasts. You’ll a get a pretty good device for 200€. The price is only 30€ higher compared to the E4.5, but includes a bigger and better display.

Review Meizu MX4 - Ubuntu Edition

Sun, 05 Jul 2015 11:20:00 +0200

Since the end of June one can buy the Meizu MX4 in the EU, if you manage to get an invite. I’m in the group of the „Ubuntu Phone Insiders“ and got the device a few of weeks ago. It’s time for a review!

A few months back I did a long review of the bq Aquaris E4.5. The Meizu MX4 is the third available Ubuntu Phone, next to the Aquaris E4.5 and the Aquaris E5, both from bq. The MX4 is the first device from the chinese manufacturer Meizu.

The Software

I’ve already covered all the software features in my review of the Aquaris E4.5. The software on both phones is pretty much the same. The installed apps and scopes are the same. Over the last couple of months Canonical rolled out a few updates of the system, this included the update of the base system from 14.10 to 15.04 Vivid Vervet. Many bugs were fixed and many features were added. Therefore, this article doesn’t mention many software features.

All software features which are associated with the hardware of the MX4 itself, are mentioned in the upcoming sections.

Hardware

The Screen

One of the best things about this device is the screen. The size of the screen is pretty big at 5,36 inches. It has a high resolution of 1920 x 1152 pixels which results in a pixel density of ~418 ppi. The Aquaris E4.5 on the other side has 240 ppi on a 4.5 inch screen.

Besides the numbers, the screen is truly very great. The fonts, the photos and also app icons are pretty sharp on this screen. Also, the brightness and the colors are excellent.

On the other hand, the user interface doesn’t yet make the most out of the high resolution. App icons and fonts are pretty huge, the App Scope e.g. only shows three app icons next to each other. This will be hopefully fixed with the next OTA software update. So you can expect that the higher resolution will be better used in the near future.

The Camera

Next to the display, the camera is another thing which is great. It makes photos with 20,7 Megapixels and the photos are pretty good! The camera of the Aquaris E4.5 makes washy photos with a low color reproduction even on good lighting conditions. The MX4 on the other side even makes good photos in low light conditions.

There is one disadvantage though: The camera doesn’t seem to focus properly in low light conditions. Therefore, pictures get blurred pretty easily.

Mobile data and WiFi

Many people criticised the missing LTE support on the bq Aquaris E4.5. The MX4 does support the LTE frequencies used by european network providers. It also supports HSDPA. The phone has one Micro SIM slot on the backside, you have to remove the back cover to insert the sim card.

There is obviously also WiFi available. The automatic switch between mobile data and WiFi is really buggy, it often happens that the device doesn’t connect automatically to the saved WiFi Access-Points, even if they’re available. If you manually click on the WiFi Access-Point then it does connect normally. Similar things happen the other way around: sometimes it says that you’re still connected to the WiFi, even if you moved out of coverage. I hope this will be fixed in the near future.

Battery life

The battery has a capacity of 3100 mAh. It powers the MediaTek Octa-Core CPU, 2GB of RAM and the big display. Sadly there is a bug in the system, which consumes too much energy even if you the phone is idling in standby. Therefore the battery often discharges very fast. A similar bug was also present on the Aquaris E4.5, but that one was fixed a few weeks before it got delivered to the first customers.

You can remove the back cover of the phone, but the battery cannot be removed.

Haptics and Quality

The overall finish is great. The frame and the backside are made of aluminium. The device isn’t creaking on any point. It has a higher build quality than the Aquaris E4.5. The screen is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 which should be scratch-resistant. Anyway my phone got a few scratches after I carried it in my pocket for a few weeks. The glass on the camera on the other side is protected by a Saphire Glass. Also, the back cover got a small scratch. There are three hardware buttons on the device: two volume buttons and the power button. The volume buttons are on the left side and the power button at the top. The position of the latter is a disadvantage because you can’t easily reach it with a finger. There also is a soft home button below the display.

Even if the device is pretty big, it feels comfortable in my hand. At the beginning you have to be carefully to get used to the slippery back. Otherwise you might drop it.

Performance

The phone is powered by a MediaTek Octa-Core CPU. It has four ARM Cortex-A17 cores and four ARM Cortex-A7 cores. It follows the big.LITTLE CPU architecture. The higher powered cores are only used when they are really needed, otherwise the lower powered cores are being used. This results in a lower overall power consumption.

Theoretically the CPU can be pretty fast. In practice the system isn’t as fast as you might expect when compared to high end Android phones. There are still many stutters when you switch between scopes. The start-up time for apps is still relatively high at roughly three seconds.

The device has 2 GB of RAM, but it seems that apps are often killed and automatically restarts when you switch between them. This is another bug which is currently worked on, but it really is annoying for the end user.

Conclusion

Actually the device has pretty good hardware, particularly the display is really good. The sad thing is, that the software isn’t in a satisfying state. The Aquaris E4.5 definitely has much better software support than the MX4. For example there is the soft home button below the display which also includes the notification LED, which is actually not working right now. When you press the button, you switch to the first scope. This is actually a breach with the Ubuntu Phone UX design, which doesn’t need any buttons besides the power and volume keys. One often accidentally presses the home button when one use a bottom edge gesture.

Another big problem is the overheat of the device. Even if you only use the phone for a couple of minutes it heats up extremely. It’s not happening all the time, but if you play games or use the browser for example, then the temperature goes up to beyond 40°C.

Besides of all the negative points, the MX4 is still faster than the Aquaris E4.5 on a daily usage. The apps are starting faster, but many elements of the system are still laggy and stuttering, similar to the Aquaris E4.5. It seems for me, that the MX4 didn’t get much love from the developers compared to the E4.5. The latter device has a far better hardware support. Many things will be hopefully fixed with the upcoming updates. The issues with the battery and the WiFi-Connection are one of the things which are annoying every day. Anyway the MX4 will be in my pocket next to my Nexus 4 with Android. The bq Aquaris E4.5 was mostly off and at home. I really love the screen and the camera and I hope that software will get better over time!

Announcing Ubucon Europe 2016

Fri, 05 Jun 2015 22:00:00 +0200

A few days back we announced the 9th Ubucon 2015 in Germany which takes place in Berlin. Next year would be the 10th Ubucon in Germany and we think, we can make something special!

Back in March Costales asked on Google+ a few fellow „Ubuntu Phone Insiders“ (including me), what would we think about an Ubucon Europe. While most of the people said that it would be great, nothing much happened … until now! :)

Ubucon Europe!

We - the organization team of the Ubucon Germany - are extending next years Ubucon Germany to the Ubucon Europe 2016! We’re currently in the early days of planning and we need feedback from you all. The Ubucon Europe will take place in Essen, Germany on a weekend in September or October 2016. The exact date and place is not fixed yet, we’re currently settling that, thus we have two options in Essen.

Essen one of the many cities in the Ruhr area, which is located on the River „Ruhr“. There are a couple of airports nearby most importantly the international Airport in Düsseldorf. You can travel from Düsseldorf Airport to Essen in roughly 30 minutes by train.

Feedback needed!

We’ve just registered the domain ubucon.eu which will be the place where future announcements will go. But firstly we need feedback from you for further planning. Usually we have roughly 150 attendees each year at Ubucon Germany. We actually don’t have any idea how many people are interested in a European Ubucon and how many people are willing travel to Essen to attend the event.

Therefore, we would be happy, if you can send me an email (to svij@ubuntu.com) and tell me, if you are interested in attending the Ubucon Europe next year. Additionally, it would be great to hear from where you are coming and if you are interested in giving a talk or workshop. Any other comment is welcome too! We additionally do need more people in the organization team, so if you are willing to help organize the Ubucon Europe, please let me now, we have plenty of work to do! :-)

9th Ubucon 2015 in Germany

Sun, 24 May 2015 23:45:00 +0200

This year we’re going to organize the 9th Ubucon in Germany. This time it will be held in the capitol Berlin starting on the 23th and ending on the 25th October 2015. I was a member of the organization team for the since 2013, but this year I am the head of the organisation team.

We also started the „Call for Papers“. The main language is German, but we might also allow talks in English. I’m really looking forward to the event. And I’m also hoping that more people will visit the Ubucon. In the last years we had roughly 100-150 attendees. This years slogan is „Community in Touch“, which includes the opportunity of getting in touch with the community and „Ubuntu Touch“.

What's coming next…

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 18:20:00 +0200

Yesterday I have finally finished my Bachelor (yay!) after roughly 3,5 years. Therefore, I’ve got a bit more time to focus my work on different open source projects (next to my full time job). In this blog post I’m sharing my current plans.

Taskwarrior for Android

In 2012 I’ve started the development of a Taskwarrior compatible app for Android. Taskwarrior is a really cool CLI tool to manage your todo list. After I didn’t have much time to continue the development, I’ve stopped developing the app in late 2013.

A few days back I finally got time to restart the development. I’ve already done a few commits. Anyway, I started from scratch - again. This happened for several reasons, mainly the code was a big mess and the Android API changed in different ways. One bigger mistake was, that I wanted to include too many features of the original Taskwarrior.

My current plan is, that the app can sync with the task server and have a nice, simple to use user interface with the most important Taskwarrior features. The minimum required Android Version will be 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

Time will tell, when the first release will be ready…

Taskwarrior for Ubuntu Phone

After I’ve got my Ubuntu Phone at the Ubuntu Phone Insiders Launch Event, it’s a good reason to also develop a Taskwarrior app for Ubuntu Phone. This might happen after I released the Android-App. Hopefully not too far away from today. :-)

Ubucon Germany

It’s the first time that I will be the head of the organization team of the German Ubucon. Sadly we don’t have any date or place to announce yet, so we might don’t have an Ubucon this year in Germany. The Ubucon took place in different places in Germany since 2007. This year would be the 8th Ubucon.

Anything else?

Beside of the above new projects I will continue my work on my other projects, like my team membership at the German Ubuntu website ubuntuusers.de. And I will also travel to different events to support the Ubuntu Booth. :-)

Ubuntu Phone: A deep look into the bq Aquaris E4.5

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 17:30:00 +0200

Two years ago Canonical announced the project “Ubuntu Touch”. A few weeks back they released the first phone which is running Ubuntu pre-installed. This article focuses on both: the hardware and the software.

The last time I have used an Ubuntu Phone is roughly 1.5 years ago on a Nexus 4. Since then many things regarding the system has changed.

The Software

Using Ubuntu on your phone is quite different from using any other mobile operating system like Android or iOS. The biggest difference is the big use of gestures which you can use from every edge of the display.

Scopes

If you turn on the phone for the first time you get a quick introduction how to use the Ubuntu Phone. Everyone who never used an Ubuntu Phone should not skip this introduction, because it really helps you to use the phone. After that introduction you can set a password or a PIN to lock your device.

If you press the power button, then you see the Welcome-Screen. There you see different information of your usage of your phone. That includes the number of sent and received short messages, number of calls and the number of taken photos and videos. You can swipe the Welcome-Screen to both sides to unlock the phone. If you have set up a lock mechanism, it will be shown there.

What are scopes?

After you unlocked the device, you see one of the scopes. Scopes are one of the special features of Ubuntu Phone. There are two types of scopes: aggregated and branded scopes. Both type of scopes show different information to the users. Branded scopes have an app-like experience. Aggregation scopes on the other side are bringing content from different sources to the screen. It’s like a good summary of different sources.

Ubuntu Phone uses a different approach compared to other mobile operating systems. On Android or iOS you mainly have app icons and a few widgets in grids, while you have different scopes on Ubuntu Phone. The benefit is that the user does not have to go through all those apps if there are suitable scopes which are bringing the content easily to the screen.

Pre-installed scopes

If you unlock the device the first time, you see the Today-Scope. This scope shows you a couple of information of the current day. These are the current date, today’s weather divided into morning, evening and afternoon including the temperature. Additionally, it shows today’s appointments, the next holiday and a list of the last calls and messages.

After a swipe to the left, you reach the NearBy-Scope. This scopes aggregates different information from your current location. The scope shows the weather of your current position and a couple of other interesting information. It mainly uses yelp to gather the information. In the default setting it shows places of interest, restaurants or schools. This all depends on your current location. Additionally, it shows a couple of photos from Flickr and Wikipedia articles of your current place. A rather cool feature is that you can set your current mood. Depending on that, the scope shows different content. You can choose between “I’m Bored”, “On The Move”, “I’m Hungry”, “I’m Thirsty” and “I’m Stressed”. If you are currently on the move, you can set it to “On The Move” and it will show the next bus stop and railway station. If you click on one of those, it will launch HERE Maps and shows the way to it. Funnily the option “I’m stressed” displays shoe and fashion stores. On the other side “I’m Hungry” shows you a couple of restaurants right next to you.

The third scope is simple. It’s just the app launcher where you find all apps in a grid. The apps are divided into two groups: commonly used apps and all the other apps. The commonly used apps are fixed: Telephone, Messaging, Contacts, Camera, Browser and the Clock. Using the drop down menu you can filter the apps using categories like Games, Social Networking or Productivity.

The fourth scope is the news scope. It displays news from different news pages like BBC, Engadget or Euronews. You can actuall configure the sources, but sadly you can only disable the given sources.

There are a couple of other pre-installed and pre activated scopes like the music, video and photo scope. All three scopes presents local content and content from the internet. For example, if you shot a few photos and videos and copied some music songs to your device, they will be shown on the scope. Furthermore, it shows different content from YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Instagram. That all depends on the specific scope and accounts.

All described scopes are pre-installed and are activated when you turn on the device for the first time. There are still plenty of other scopes which you can activate when you swipe up from the bottom edge. There you see the names of all scopes in a list. You can activate or deactivate scopes by pressing the star on each scope.

There are many scopes which just cover different websites like BBC, cnet, Amazon, ebay, Reddit and many more. All these scopes are aligned to those specific websites. Consequently, you can search the website using the scope’s searchbar. For example you get a few results if you search for items on the ebay or Amazon scope. The only thing is that you can’t actually buy anything in the scope itself. It will just launch the browser.

Gestures

Next to the scopes, another noticeable thing are the system-wide gestures. On the right and on the left side of the screen you have two gestures which can be used globally in any app or scope. If you swipe from the left side, you can access the quick-app-launcher similar to the Unity app-launcher on the desktop. This can be opened when you do a short swipe. If you do a long swipe, you switch to your home scope. On the other edge of the display you can switch between the apps. Either you can do a short swipe, then you switch easily between two apps, or a long swipe brings you to a 3D overview of all opened apps. There you can close an app with another swipe or you can switch to the app by clicking on it.

On the top edge of the screen you can access the notifications and the quick-settings. In Ubuntu these are called indicators. The cool thing here is, that you can start swiping from a specific indicator. That means that you can swipe down from the battery indicator, which will show you the quick-settings of the battery. Same thing when you swipe down from the notification indicator. If you misplaced your finger you can simply switch to the other indicator by moving your finger to the right or left while swiping down.

The bottom edge of the screen does not have a global gesture. This gesture is based on the app you are currently using. The app developer can implement this gesture in their app.

Core- and System-Apps

There a several pre-installed apps which you need for your daily use of a smartphone. This includes the telephone app to place calls, the messaging app to send and receive SMS and MMS messages or the contacts app to organise your contacts. Additionally, there is obviously a camera app to take photos and videos. The camera doesn’t have any special features but it can take HDR photos, tag your photos with your current GPS position or you can use the autotimer.

There is also a browser, which sadly doesn’t have any settings. Therefore, you can only type in the URL of a web page, bookmark a web page and open and switch between tabs.

A pretty nice app is the gallery app to view your photos and videos on the device. The photos and videos are grouped by date. So you can scroll vertically to see the photos of different days and you can scroll horizontally on a specific date to see all thumbnails of the photos of that day. You also have the possibility to edit photos. This functionality is rather basic so you can cut details of a photo or you can automagically improve it.

The only available messaging app is Telegram. Other messengers like Google Hangouts, Threema, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger are not (yet) available. The Telegram app is working completely, you can send messages to individual persons or to groups.

There are a few other apps which I don’t mention in detail here, like the Clock, Music, Weather and Todo app.

All named apps are native Ubuntu Phone apps. There are quite many other pre-installed apps which are mainly packaged WebApps. For example WebApps for Amazon, eBay, Facebook, GMail, Twitter or YouTube. Some of them supports hardware interfaces or notifications. Twitter notifies you for every Twitter-mention or DM, GMail notifies you for a new E-Mail.

In the system settings you find the same settings you can also change via the indicators, but here you have a few more options. For example you can add online accounts for services like Evernote, Soundcloud, Flickr, Facebook, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Fitbit, Instagram, Vimeo or Google. Additionally, you can set the Date and Time, Security and Privacy and you find the Update-Manager for apps and the systems.

Ubuntu Store

The Ubuntu Store is the place where you can find apps and scopes for your Ubuntu Phone. You can download scopes and apps for free or there are also a few paid apps. To enter the store you need to log in into your Ubuntu One account. Currently (March 1st) you find more than 800 apps. One guy developed an unofficial website where you can search and find all items in the store.

Many apps are only WebApps. The quality varies strongly. Anyway you find a few good apps, like the Terminal to use the command-line on the phone. You also find an E-Mail-Client named “Dekko” where you can set up your IMAP account. This app is still in beta, so there are still a few basic features missing. You can’t actually receive push E-Mails and you can’t automatically fetch your mails. You can only fetch the mails manually. Another app is the calendar which isn’t pre-installed. Like the contacts app you only have the possibility to synchronise your appointments using Google Calendar. “Fahrplan” is a nice app, if you are a frequent user of public transportation. You can plan and check your trip using this app.

The hardware

The bq Aquaris E4.5 has a Quadcore-MediaTek-CPU with a clock rate of 1.3 GHz. The display has a size of 4.5" with a resolution of 540x960 pixels. It has 1 GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage which you can extend with extra 32GB by using a microSD card. The operating system is already using 2.5 GB of the internal storage.

The smartphone is 6.7 cm wide and 13,7 cm high. On the front side you have obviously the display, the ear cap, a front camera with 5 Megapixels and a notification LED. On the rear you find the 8 Megapixel Kamera with a Dual-LED-Flashlight.

The device is only 9 mm thin and weighs 123 gram. It is relatively light. On the bottom edge the device has the microUSB connection and the speakers. On the left side it has two microSIM slots and on the top you can insert the microSD card and you can connect your headphones.

The camera

The camera can take photos with a resolution of 8 Megapixel. If you take and view photos or videos on the device itself, it does look good, but if you view it on your computer then you see that the quality isn’t really good. The colors are washy and even on pretty good lighting conditions the color reproduction isn’t very well.

If you take photos on low light, you see many disadvantages of the camera. The photos do have a high image noise.

You should not forget that the phones price is only 170€, so you can’t expect really good cameras in the phones in this price area. The quality of the photos is enough for some simple photos.

Haptics and Quality

The haptics of the phone is pretty good. The back cover is made of flat hard plastics with the disadvantage that it is a bit slippery. Also, the build quality is good, you can’t hear any creaking when pressing the device on different spots.

I pretty much like the design. It looks like the phone is divided in two parts, because the front half is a bit smaller than the back half of the device. I’m using the device for three weeks now and the back cover doesn’t have any scratches. Sadly the front does have some scratches. You can see and feel it on the border of the display. Even though the display itself does only have a few scratches, which you can only see when you have good eyes. Anyway you should avoid carrying the phone and your keys in the same pocket.

Overall impression

Ubuntu Phone as a system and the device are in a rather good shape with a few restrictions. You do need to learn to use the device which takes a while. But afterwards you might use the device easier and faster than other devices with another operating systems. At the start it’s hard to use the correct gestures. Personally I managed to perform a gesture which I didn’t want to do. Therefore, I often ended up in another app. For example this happened while swiping between all the scopes.

Basically the system is quite fast and doesn’t have too many “minutes of silence”. But the system does stutter a few times a day. It is extremely noticeable when swiping between different scopes and refreshing their content. Complete crashes of the full system don’t really happen. There are mainly crashes when using scopes or apps.

I pretty much like all the Core apps which are in a good shape. As a developer, I see how native Ubuntu Phone apps should look and behave.

On a few spots you notice that the device or the system is rather slow. If you have taken a few photos and then you open the gallery app, it takes some seconds to display the overview. The gallery app slowly builds up the thumbnails and the overview. The same thing happens, when you are viewing the photos. Sometimes you have to wait up to five seconds to view a single photo.

Besides these issues there are many small other issues which you notice every day. Most of them can be fixed by upcoming software updates. The phone will get monthly updates. Even tough I already got two system updates in three weeks. One really annoying bug is the battery bug. The phone consumes a high amount of energy even if you don’t use the phone. Therefore, the battery is empty quickly. The developers are currently working on a fix.

Conclusion

Canonical released the first Ubuntu Phone with bq. The hardware isn’t too bad, even if the display doesn’t have a high resolution. You’ll get a device for 170€ from bq with a quite good build quality. The device and the system does have a few bugs, hick-ups and lags.

Anyway, I personally wouldn’t recommend this device for end users because there are still many apps and scopes missing, to have a nice smarpthone operating system. This phone is mainly targeted for early-adopters, Ubuntu enthusiasts and developers. I hope the ecosystem around Ubuntu Phone will expand quickly. And anyway I’m really looking forward to the future improvements of Ubuntu Phone! Especially I’m waiting for the Meizu MX4 with Ubuntu pre-installed.

Canonical CEO Jane Silber about Ubuntu Phone

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 12:00:00 +0200

During the “Ubuntu Phone Insider Launch Event” I had the chance to do an interview with Cristian Parrino (Vice President Mobile Canonical) and with Jane Silber, who is the CEO of Canonical. I’ve already published the interview with Cristian Parrino.

Hi Jane and thanks for joining the interview. Could you please tell me a few words about yourself?

I’m Jane Silber and I’m the CEO of Canonical.

Canonical just launched the first Ubuntu Phone today, what is your favourite feature of the phone?

There are certain apps which I really like. I really like the gallery app, I find it a pleasing experience to use. And in terms of the user experience I love the right edge swipe, I love the way you can swipe from the right edge and see all the open apps and flick up to close them. It pleases me! Sometimes I open a bunch of apps and play with that thread just because I think it’s just beautiful.

Are you already using Ubuntu Phone as your daily phone?

I use it as a daily phone I really admit that I also carry an Android Phone. I have a Nexus Phone which I use as my Ubuntu Phone, I don’t have one of the new bq. I’m looking forward to getting one of those. And I also have some friends who are addicted to WhatsApp so I use my Android phone for the one purpose to talking to friends on WhatsApp. But I’m slowly, slowly, slowly are converting them to Telegram. So I message them on Telegram and they’re starting to get it. And Telegram is a great app so it works fine.

Do you have any feature on your Android Phone which is not present on Ubuntu Phone yet?

No, there’s nothing which I miss other than WhatsApp. There is no specific feature on Android which I don’t have on Ubuntu.

Let’s talk about the business. What is the business model of Ubuntu Phone, how is Canonical making money?

There is a unit charge that OEMs shipping Ubuntu Phone are paying us. And depending on the region and the services included there is revenue share on some of their services, if a user buys different things. The exact details of that we keep confidential as a piece of commercial information. But it is a system where both parties are collaborating and work together. And both parties benefit.

How about developers? Let’s say I want to create an app for Ubuntu Phone to make money?

It’s the same sort of revenue share program for developers for publishing apps and scopes. It is small now because there is a limited user group right now.

What is the main difference between Ubuntu Phone, Android and iOS?

I think for the Ubuntu Phone what users will notice most is the experience. You have a difference experience of bringing content to the user in the form of scopes as supposed to a grid of app icons. And on that people can react positively and negatively because of the change. But if they give it a try and use it, it is a very pleasing experience. Additionally you get very used to aggregated content from different sources. There are many differences under the cover but I think from the user perspective it is the new experience that scopes can bring with bringing content.

But now, I have a question for you! From what you have seen so far what do you think the people appreciate the most?

I also think that scopes are a pretty nice feature. It’s not comparable to systems like Firefox OS which has just apps. In my opinion Ubuntu Phone has a better idea, so let’s see what happens.

What also scopes are allowed to do, or what hardware partners can do is to differentiate between the phone to highlight different services. They have customisation opportunities so people are able to choose and have a meaningful difference between different phones from different operators. So you will potentially get a different experience with Meizu and bq.

So what are the differences between …

Right now if you buy an Android Phone the operators try to do something different then other operators. So they mess around with Android. They customize it in different ways and you get a lot of fragmentation. And that is also very difficult for developers.

What we can do with scopes and frameworks is to allow a same baseline for developers. In different regions we can also offer an experience for that region or country. If an operator for instance has a set of services which they want to highlight.

Services like…?

Services like Cloud Storage, Music, Video, so there can be customisation on that level. And the user can also say “I don’t want to get my music from grooveshark”. It allows a very high level of customisation without fragmentation that has haunted some other ecosystems.

So different OEMs will probably have different pre installed apps and scopes?

Yes. And users can also change them in a very consistent way and developers can target them in a consistent way without having that fragmentation that other systems have.

This new bq Phone with Ubuntu is launching in Europe next week, what about the US market or asia?

In asia we will launch with Meizu. We will launch Meizu phones both in Europe and in China. The US will follow after that but we are not ready to announce anything. We have plans.

So no date? Or first half of the year or second half of the year?

No dates. ;-) Meizu will absolutely start first and the US we are not announcing yet.

Alright thanks for the interview!

Cristian Parrino from Canonical about the release of Ubuntu Phone and future plans

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 07:45:00 +0200

On the 6th February I’ve attended the “Ubuntu Phone Insider Launch Event” which took place in London. There I had the chance to talk to Cristian Parrino. Thankfully he agreed for an interview, where he talked about the current state of Ubuntu Phone and a few feature plans, which weren’t publicly known yet.

Hi Cristian and thanks for joining the interview. First of could you tell me a few words about yourself?

I’m Cristian Parrino and I head up the mobile program at Canonical. So all things Ubuntu Phone.

When did you join Canonical?

Exactly five years ago next week!

What did you do at the beginning?

I headed up Online Services, so created the team which created Ubuntu One.

Then you shut it down.

I shut it down (laughs). It’s a full life-cycle of a product.

Hopefully you won’t shut down Ubuntu Phone?

No, I think there’s a very very slim chance for that. We want people to love it. It will take a life of its own.

Today you launched the very first Ubuntu Phone, what is your favourite feature?

It has to be scopes, which is the almost achieving answer because there are so many features all in one place. But scopes are essentially redefining how people are interacting with their phone. You know where the confident services that you used to finding behind apps and app icons all the sudden comes alive directly on the screen. You know where the information are richer, more engaging, faster and unfragmented.

Are you already using your Ubuntu Phone as your daily phone?

I am, yeah, absolutely!

The bq Phone or another one?

You actually have the first real bq phone. I still have an Android Version of the bq phone reflashed with Ubuntu. Still a bq phone, but you actually have even before anybody at Canonical the very first production of Ubuntu Phones.

A few people asked me, if they can buy Android Version of the bq phone and flash it with Ubuntu?

They could. The problem is that … obviously we have a version of Ubuntu which you can always download from the web. Unlike on the desktop where you encourage people to download and use it every day, on the phone side it’s for developers. It is the same codebase, but what a manufacturer does with scopes is that they create an experience thats unique to the device. So for example the bq device is launching with an experience that has a news scope, photos scope, video scope, music scope, NearBy scope for location services, that has a much richer experience than the version you download from the web that has an app scope and a whole bunch of blank scopes.

It’s a developer build which we have on the web, while the user build is the one that goes into the devices. So we actually can’t fully appreciate what the Ubuntu Phone is all about unless you get your hands on a preloaded Ubuntu Phone from bq.

bq is the first one after that … Meizu?

It’s Meizu, yeah.

… next month?

Well, we’re in February, so I think the best-case scenario is next month. What definitely is going to happen next month is that we will show the Meizu devices at MWC in the first week of March. We don’t know yet for sure but we are hoping that we can sell those devices in March as well. It could be March, it could be April.

__ So what happened last year, when you said that Canonical will release the first Phone in 2014 ;-). What happened there?__

I hope we get a little better this time. I think we are a little bit more accurate now.

What were the main problems of the really long delay?

Tons of stuff, right. You’re doing something for the very first time and you wanted to get it just right. Also, predictable things like supply-chain related, production chain sustainability were building a screen with the android icons. How long does it take to turn around actually the production line for the same screen but without the Android buttons. Just a myriad of different things which you just resolve as they come up.

So the Hardware of both phones with Android and Ubuntu are not exactly the same?

Yes, the only difference is the screen. It has the same resolution but one has icons for Android and the other one doesn’t, because Ubuntu doesn’t require physical buttons.

Well even Android doesn’t require physical buttons.

Yeah, it has this overlay three icons.

Yeah, it depends on the manufacturer…

How many people are currently working on Ubuntu Phone?

Oh my … that’s a difficult question. I’m gonna guess about 350 to 400 people just inside Canonical, but obviously there is a community that contribute across the board from development to usability to a whole number of things. Ubuntu is always much more than just Canonical.

If I want to contribute to Ubuntu Phone, where should I go?

Depends, what do you want do. Are you a developer, a community contributor or…?

Let’s say: As a developer.

As a developer I think the best thing to do, for you individually as a developer, but also to increase the value of Ubuntu Phone, is to start to use the scope toolkit. That’s the truly revolutionary about this phone which makes it incredible easy to use any API to create an experience that is app-wide that doesn’t cause a fraction like an app does.

Which programming language or any other thing do I need to know to start developing an app?

Just about anything you know. JavaScript, C++, Go…! We’re using a UI toolkit, so you are essentially mapping API of your own service or own content or whatever it is to a toolkit that gives you a lot of flexibility.

Other smartphone operating systems support running Android apps on their phone. Why isn’t Ubuntu supporting Android apps?

Because I don’t think any platform that just aims to be a “me too” has a chance to succeeding. From a user perspective what’s the motivation of buying a phone that gonna give you an Android-Clone but not quiet?

Regarding to the future, what are the future plans for Ubuntu Phone in the next two years?

In the next two years, if we fast forward to the end of that timeline is the dream of convergence. You know a phone that does all the things which we talk about today that changes the way users interact with their phones. But that also becomes the heart of all your personal computing devices. So back to what we hinted in the Ubuntu Edge campaign where your phone becomes to your pc, when you dock it.

So you are planning around two years to have an Ubuntu Edge like phone with all the features which were announced back then?

Well hopefully we will be faster than two years, but two years ahead I want that phone which is also my pc in the market. Even this bq phone is a significant step in that direction. There are foundations in the phone that makes us closer to that conversion vision. But right now we focus on teaching the world that there is another way to enjoy phone instead of just apps and app icons. It’s time for a change.

Personally I think Ubuntu Phone has better ideas than Firefox OS which has just another system with webapps.

Right. From a user perspective they don’t care if it’s a webapp or not. On Ubuntu Phone you get a richer experience with an impressive amount of services. You get your scopes on Ubuntu so the experience will be richer. And it slowly gonna get better. Thats a starting point of thousand scopes and apps without even selling a single phone is an amazing amout of course.

Let’s go back to the topic about manufacturers. Next to bq and Meizu, are there any other manufacturer in the pipeline?

Yes, but forgive me if I don’t mention them yet.

Ohh!

They won’t be very happy if I do. (laughs)

But you are actually going well, because there is a group which we call insiders, which you are part of, which means that as soon as we are ready to talk about next manufacturer, you are first to know about it.

Is there a timeline?

I would say before June we will probably name another manufacturer for a market that we haven’t yet touched.

That means? ;)

That means it’s a market where we haven’t yet offered a solution – it’s the US. So we hope to announce something for the US in the next six months.

Alright, thanks for the interview!

You’re welcome, thanks for being here, it is really great to have you here.

Thanks!

Labdoo Laptop-Donation to a school in Sri Lanka

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:45:00 +0200

Labdoo is an international project which focuses to bring used laptops to schools in developing countries where those laptops can be used by the pupils.

Labdoo

Every year many people are buying new laptops. This is especially the case in industrialized countries. Consequently, there are also many still working laptops which have been used for a couple of years, but no one uses them anymore because they are too slow. At the same time there are many countries where young people don’t have access to computers and the internet for educational purposes.

Labdoo is a project which aims to collect those used laptops and brings it to educational institution, like schools, in developing countries.

The laptops are collected in so called „hubs“. In those „hubs“ the laptops get prepared, e.g. defective parts are replaced and Edubuntu with a collection of educational software, such as an offline wikipedia and learning software, are installed.

So for example if there are some defect parts, they got replaced and all laptops get Edubuntu with a collection of educational Software, like an Offline-Wikipedia and Learning-Software.

The delivery of the laptops to a school is done by volunteerslike all the other work, too. There are many people travelling around the world. Costs are covered by the travelling person, but usually it comes down to just needing some available space in your luggage, which you tend to have. For the Labdoo project it is important that the delivery is as friendly to the environment as possible, thus taking laptops along with your luggage is preferred to sending parcels. Also by delivering these laptops in person you might be able to see happy children.

If you have a laptop you can contact one of the Labdoo-Hubs. Most of these hubs are located in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, but there are also a few hubs in Spain, USA, UK and a couple other countries. You can donate Laptops (at least Pentium 4), eBook Readers, Tablets and other IT-Devices or parts such as network-hardware, RAM, keyboards, mouses and so on.

Everyone who donates a laptop gets regular updates about the current status via E-Mail. You e.g. get a notification if the laptop is ready for delivery, on the way to a school or successfully delivered and in use at a school. On the website you can view photos of the delivery, so you can be sure that your donated laptop arrived at a school.

My Labdoo-Cycle

Personally I heard about Labdoo back in 2012 in an article on ubuntuusers.de. Additionally I talked to Ralf Hamm, a highly involved person in Germany, at the OpenRheinRuhr in Oberhausen in 2013 and 2014. There he got me motivated to help the project.

My parents are from Sri Lanka and we were planning a trip to Sri Lanka anyway. This was a perfect situation to contribute to the Labdoo project. I decided to do as much as possible by my own.

Step 1: Get some laptops

Firstly I needed a couple of laptops which I could bring to a school in Sri Lanka. This was the easiest part because I knew that I had an old laptop in my office. Therefore I asked my employer, the otris software AG from Dortmund, whether we could donate a few used laptops. This got accepted easily, so my employer donated two laptops. All companies who donated laptops are listed on a donation page on the website of the Labdoo project.

Step 2: Find a school

Interestingly enough this was the hardest part. Many schools in Sri Lanka in or around bigger cities already had computers, because the government are slowly rolling out funds for computers. At this step I got help from my mother, who supported and likes my idea. After a few weeks of making many phone calls, my mother finally found a school who really needed Laptops.

The school „Thadchanamaruthamadhu G.T.M.S“ is far away from the bigger cities in Sri Lanka. It is located roughly 100km air-line distance from Jaffna, in the northern province of Sri Lanka. The school is located in the small town Madhu, which got visited by Pope Francis a few days before I went there.

Step 3: Preparing the laptops

Preparing the laptops wasn’t hard. The Installation is image-based, so I simply had to download the image from the website and used CloneZilla to install the Edubuntu system.

Step 4: Transport to Sri Lanka

The fourth step is the transfer to Sri Lanka. I securely packed the laptops in our luggage. The weight of the laptops and the docking-station was roughly 8kg.

Step 5: Transport to the school

The delivery of the laptops took nearly twelve hours. In the early hours of the day we started our trip at 7 am in Jaffna, after a few sight-seeing stops on the way we arrived at the school at midday. The journey was long and stony. Many streets in the area of the school didn’t have a solid pavement. It was also laced with road holes. You could say that the school was „in the middle of nowhere“. The way to school was also long for the pupils, because there weren’t many houses around the school.

After we arrived at the school, we were welcomed by the principal. After a short introduction we prepared the handover of the laptops. To my surprise the school made a great effort to say thanks. The whole school met at the schoolyard. This included roughly 300 pupils and 20 teachers. There a teacher and the principal thanked us for the laptops. After that, the principal wanted us to have a word wth the pupils. Due to the basic knowledge of the Tamil language, my dad held a short speech. At the end the pupils thanked us with a “Thank you, Sir”. After that I gave the science teacher a short introduction to Ubuntu.

Conclusion

The donation and the delivery of the laptops were really interesting. I really want to encourage everybody to help the Labdoo project in any way possible. Everyone who has an old, unused laptop can donate it. Compared to the „One Laptop Per Child“ project, Labdoo focuses on old and already used laptops instead of producing new laptops. It was really cool to see all these happy pupils at the school. I will try to continue to support the Labdoo project personally. One part where everybody can help can help the project is spreading the word. Don’t throw away old laptops, donate them! This is not only important for techy-people, it is also good to know for non-techy people.

Review of Ubucon 2014 Germany

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 14:00:00 +0200

Last weekend the german Ubucon took place in the town of Katlenburg-Lindau. It was the 8th Ubucon in Germany and it was the third time that I attented an Ubucon as a visitor and as a speaker.

Preparation

It was the second time that I participated in the organisation of the Ubucon. Last year I was part of the organisation team for the event in Heidelberg. This time the organisation was rather „silent“. In my opinion it was sometimes too silent on the mailing list. The town where the event took place was rather small, therefore there were fewer speakers and also fewer visitors compared to the last two years. First I didn’t expect that the event would be great, but luckily I was wrong!

The event

Friday

The first day of the event was friday. All visitors and speakers got a name plate with their full name and their nickname at the front desk. Last year, my name was actually too long. This time only one character was missing. Atleast I got used to mistakes in my name. :-)

The opening keynote was hold by Torsten Franz who was also the head of the organisation team. After this, he was talking about „10 years Ubuntu, 10 years Community“. Later a part of the visitors went to the first Social-Event which took place at a castle next to the school. Personally I didn’t go to this event.

Saturday

The second day started at 10 o’clock in the morning. It was the first time that I did a workshop, which also started on that time. I talked about „Git for Beginners“. At the beginning we had a few issues with the Wifi. This also affected my workshop, because it took a rather long time for the participants to download and install git. Therefore, I changed a few things of my workshop, so afterwards the participants didn’t need a working internet connection. I planned about 3 hours, but we finished after about 2,5h.

On the rest of the day, I didn’t attend any talks. I rather talked to all the other nice people :-). At the evening we had two Social-Events. A big part went to „Theater der Nacht“ („Theatre of the night“). The other smaller part stayed at the school, where two persons played Live-Music. The Live-Music was quiet good, but all the other people who went to the Theatre said, that it was really great. It seems that I missed something. Bernhard took a few really nice photos in there.

Sunday

On Sunday I only attended to talks. The first one was about LVM, the other one about systemd. Both talks were hold by Stefan J. Betz. and they were really informative and also a bit funny.

At the afternoon the Ubucon ended. We had really many people who helped to clean up and pack everything. Therefore, many people could leave earlier than expected.

The location

The location was great! I didn’t expect that a primary school was a good place for a Ubucon, but it is! The technical infrastructure was really good. The school had several „Smartboards“ with projectors. At the entrance area there was a big hall, where you can sit and talk if you’re not in hearing a talk. In this hall there were several computers with different Linux-Distributions and Desktop-Environments.

It was the first time that we had a Gaming-Lounge. There were two rooms which contained four Ubuntu-PCs with large TVs and also two Table football. The idea was great and also the rooms were nice. There were many people who played games there. I hope that we will have a similar Gaming-Lounge on future Ubucons.

All speakers got a nice gift-bag from the local organisation team. This bag mainly contained several items of the region. In my bag there were a few sausages, wine, beer and a sauce. Personally I don’t eat and drink that stuff, but it was a really good idea and gesture!

On all our Ubucons, the entrance fee of 10€ includes the money for food and drinks. On the last few years we had only two or three different types of bread roll. This time we also had bread rolls, but we also had Bockwurst and different types of soups. All of them were really tasty and everybody had a bigger choice to eat something which they like.

Conclusion

This years Ubucon was great! Compared to last years Ubucon we had a smaller amount of attendees but this time the organisation team in Katlenburg was really good. They had different really good ideas, like the Gaming-Lounge and the gift-bag for all speakers.

I simply hope that next years Ubucon will as good as this years Ubucon. The place is not fixed yet, we are going to search for another place for next years Ubucon. By shifting the place of the Ubucon every year, all attendees will see different cities and you can also meet different new nice people. The latter reason is my main reason why I attend and help to organize the Ubucon.

If you’re looking for a few nice photos of this years Ubucon, have a look here. Bernhard Hanakam took some really good photos.

German Ubucon in Katlenburg

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 12:10:00 +0200

This year the 8th German Ubucon takes place in Katlenburg, which is a rather small city next to Göttingen. The last Ubucon took place in Heidelberg and that was the first time that I joined the organization team. So this year I am also a member of the organization team of the Ubucon. Personally I attended two Ubucons: 2012 in Berlin and 2013 in Heidelberg. Last year we hade the slogan „Build your conference“. Everybody was invited to make requests for talks. The actual list was quiet long. Many speakers picked up some topics, so a big part of the Ubucon was built by the attendees. This worked out very well, so we do it again! :-) Nevertheless we have another slogan for this years Ubucon: „10 years Ubuntu, 10 years Community“.

We started the organization at the end of last year. The Ubucon starts in eight months, so we have plenty of time to organize everything. We already started our „Call for Papers“ and we also got our first submission for a talk.

I am really looking forward to this years Ubucon. The team in Katlenburg, who organizes the local parts of the event, are really motivated. There will be some cool stuff, which I cannot announce now ;-). The location of the event is a primary school, which is rather unusual. The last Ubucons usually took place in a public or private university. An interesting fact is, that this primary school has an „open source background“: They migrated the schools computers from Windows to Ubuntu. :-)

Thoughts about Ubuntu Planet

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 07:00:00 +0200

It was really interesting for me, to read the discussion about the future of the Ubuntu Planet. The first thing is that I am a new Ubuntu Member with the ability to post to the planet. I do not blog regular, so I did not know if I will use the ability to post to this planet. As you see, this is at least my second blog post on the Ubuntu Planet.

Personally I did not read the Ubuntu Planet at all before I finished my application for the Ubuntu membership. After that I added the planet to my feed reader and started reading.

Except this planet, I am reading the planet at planet.ubuntuusers.de in German. As the member of the „Ikhayateam“ of ubuntuusers.de, which writes articles and controls the planet, I regularly check the planet. Over there, we (the team) had many discussions which blog posts we want to see in the planet. We also focused what our users want to read. Consequently we defined some rules. You can find the full rules in our Wiki.

The rules are divided into three parts: „acceptance criteria“, „code of conduct“ and „violation of the rules“. As we do not have anything similar to the Ubuntu membership program over there, the blogs must meet the acceptance criteria. Currently we have nine criteria. Each blogger has to apply to get the chance to publish their blog posts to the ubuntuusers planet. We only accept Open-Source, Ubuntu- and Linux-related blog posts. Private or off-topic blog posts are not allowed. Additionally we want a specific tag or feed for the planet. This could be something like an ubuntuusers-tag or simply an ubuntu-tag. The article must contain the full article, and it is not allowed to include any ads or links to commercial products. As we are a German website, we only allow German blog posts. Also we do not want to have any nonactive members, the blog must exist for at least two months. We regularly check if the blogs are active. Nonactive blogs get a message and may be removed, if the stop blogging.

The above text contains the main rules of the planet. While some readers like this rules, some readers does not like it. This does also apply to the bloggers. The most of the times the bloggers follow our rules. There are not many blog posts which we need to remove. In the last six months there were not more than five invalid posts, which we hide afterwards.

Some bloggers did not like our rules, so there was one guy who started his own (kind of) planet. OSBN.de (Open Source Blog Network) is the name of that planet. It also has a few rules, but it is less strict than the rules of the ubuntuusers planet.

I personally do not think this rules should be applied in a way comparable to the Ubuntu Planet. Personally I prefer Ubuntu-, Linux- and Open-Source-related blog articles. I generally agree with Jono and Randall.

I am a new Ubuntu member with the possibility to post articles to this planet. Funnily I do not have the possibility to publish my blog posts to the ubuntuusers.de-Planet, because I do not blog regular enough, to get accepted. In my case I will mainly blog about my LoCo Activities in Germany if this is interesting for the Ubuntu planet.

With this article I mostly wanted to show you, how we at ubuntuusers.de are handling the planet and which content we want to see. Maybe this should give some of you some ideas what you should blog and what not.

Hello Ubuntu-Planet!

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 16:00:00 +0200

Hello Ubuntu Planet!

I am the first Ubuntu Member in 2014, and I thought it might be a good thing to say hello. My membership application got approved on the 2nd January 2014. You can find my application in the wiki.

Anyway, I am introducing me here again. My Name is Sujeevan Vijayakumaran, mostly online active under the name „svij“. On the contrary of my name, I am German and I live in the Ruhrgebiet, working as a full time Software Developer and still studying IT at a small private university in Dortmund.

The most of the people here should not know me. My contributions to Ubuntu are mostly LoCo-Activities in Germany. The biggest German Ubuntu website is ubuntuusers.de. It is a really big website with a great wiki, with forums, a planet and our own news site „Ikhaya“. Back in 2010 I started contributing to the German version of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. After a few months I joined the Ikhayateam and started writing articles about Ubuntu, Linux and Open Source Software. Last year I was elected to one of leader of ubuntuusers.de. This year, I got reelected, so I am doing this „job“ again.

Beside my contribution to ubuntuusers.de I am also active in representing Ubuntu at several conferences in Germany. I have attended the OpenRheinRuhr three times, the CeBIT 2012 (just one day), the LinuxTag in Berlin (also just one day), the Software Freedom Day in Hamburg, and two German Ubucons, which took place in Berlin (2012) and Heidelberg (2013). At last years Ubucon I was also a member of the organization team. I will also be co-organising this years Ubucon in Katlenburg.

Besides my Ubuntu-related contribution, I was also an editor of „freiesMagazin“ for about a year. freiesMagazin is a free magazine, with articles about Open Source Software. The magazine is comparable with FullCircleMagazine. I left the team a few months back, but I am still contributing as an article writer to that project.

Both two projects does not include coding. But I am also starting my first small software project, which you can find on my github-Account. I am currently writing an Android App for Taskwarrior, which includes support for Taskwarrior 2.3 main feature: syncing. That project did not get much love in the last few months, but I am really trying to finish and publish my first version in the near future.

In the future, I will sometimes post articles on the Ubuntu planet. My blog was German-only until today, but this might change. I will probably post only a few articles to the ubuntu planet. But we will see, maybe I will post more ;-).

My blog is static and is made with pelican. Therefore I do not have a comment section here. If you want to contact me, you can send a mail to svij at ubuntu dot com ;-).

PS: You can also find me on Twitter and Google+