A special thanks to Maiatoday for making this possible!!

Some highlights

• +-35 people
• Ubuntu cake
• Ubuntu badges
• Local Repositories (if I was to estimate it saved +- 300gigs of downloads)
• People did fresh installs, people upgraded
• People had to have their upgrades tweaked (thanks Stefeno)
• Great braai (Barbecue & and thanks Raoul)

Take a look at the pictures of the cakes and badges below after the event there was pretty much nothing left so all in all it was a pretty successful event.

Source files for the badges can be found on Spreadubuntu

A few days ago I announced our new website then yesterday Morgan announced our new planet. We decided to switch away from using a separate planet system in favour of using one of the built in Drupal ones since it would be far more integrated into the whole Ubuntu-za system and allow for easier administration.

How does this affect you??

If you subscribed to the old planets RSS feed you should update it to the new one. We will try to add  redirects from the old urls to new ones but as some rss readers don’t seem to follow redirects we thought it was easier and safer to simply update you guys.

So if you were using http://planet.ubuntu-za.org/atom.xml You need to switch over to http://ubuntu-za.org/planet.rss

It is a little squashed but you can see an overview or simply go to the main ubuntu-za website.

This is just a standard drupal theme which will be released on Launchpad as an ubuntu-za project. It borrows some aspects from the official Drupal theme which is still under construction. This theme was created by Raoul Snyman.

Our server also changed hosting to make shared use of the clug VPS server that was sponsored by frogfoot.

Thanks to every one that made this migration possible, I know it was a lot of work but I do think the reward is already visible with our great new shiny Lucid matching themed website

I would like to give my thanks to the current members stepping down. I wish you all the best for your participation in other aspects/teams in the greater Ubuntu community.

• Alan Pope
• Dennis Kaarsemaker (Seveas)
• Mark Van den Borre
• Mathew Helmke (forumsmathew)
• Stephane Graber
• Szilvester Farkas (phanatic)

I thought it was worth mentioning those 3 irc nicks because they were the board members that along with  Joseph Price(Pricey) accepted me into Ubuntu Membership on the 2rd of March 2009.

Here goes nothing.

If I have learnt one thing about what makes Ubuntu so great is the openness. So rather then sending this application just to the mailing lists I thought it was best to send it to the Ubuntu community via the planets that be. (A copy of this has been forwarded to the appropriate board)

I when I first read this announcement on planet Ubuntu I first thought was finally Africa could have the possibility of  having a representative on the board it is a pity Jonathan Carter beat me to it by just a few months don’t hold this against me.

A answer to a few of the main questions.

Tell me about yourself.

I am currently a 23 year old Mobile Developer.  I am into any thing technical related I guess you could call me geeky. I have a passion for Open Source software for reason that go far beyond a simple GPL licence and spread into the communities that open source thrives on ie Ubuntu.

My activities in the Ubuntu community; I am currently the  loco contact for the South African team. I am also a moderator on a relativity quiet forum. I have also been a member of the beginners team for +-1.5 years and very recently I have been driving a project to rebuild website which was lost during a failed migration of hosts.

“David doesn’t judge you by the colour of your skin, the car you drive, clothes you wear, but rather by the operating system you choose.” — To quote from a friend of mine

Tell me about your best and worse qualities?

I would think one of my greatest qualities is being able to motivate others. I have an abundance of energy and when I put my mind to something I give it 110% and this seems to flow into other people. I guess you can’t really expect people to do things if you cant be bothered to do.

I speak my mind.  To quote paultag ‘David has an ability to “cut” right to the case’. While I don’t necessarily think this is bad it something that is definitely worth noting.

If I were to ask someone to describe you, what would he or she say?

David kind, caring, considerate, and generally think of others over himself. I also think they would mention. He is always willing to try and help and should he be unable to do so he will either know where to point you for better information. He isn’t scared to simply say he doesn’t know the answer but will try to help where ever possible.

—-

Any how I am pretty sure most people will have stopped reading by now so I am going to simply end off by saying I would greatly appreciate if the council would consider my application kindly and this would be my official self-nomination.

For those of you that know me and are willing to sponsor my application please feel free to at my wiki

David Rubin| https://wiki.ubuntu.com/drubin | https://launchpad.net/~drubin

His configuration contains a few handy key bindings, one of which is super+shift+enter which opens up a terminal.  The problem was in the process of copying configs over this binding didn’t seem to work. We tried the standard things

1. Absolute binary paths is /usr/bin/xterm
2. Changing terminals to gnome-terminal
3. Good old windows trick of rebooting
4. xmonad –recompile

None of them seemed to work and we were out o luck so we just decided to remap it to super+shift+g (not 100% sure why G though).  This worked but it bugged me to no end. I eventually got some help in #xmonad on freenode  by vav.

Xev you can get what keycodes are emitted.

xev | grep keysym
state 0x0, keycode 36 (keysym 0xff0d, Return), same_screen YES,
state 0x0, keycode 36 (keysym 0xff0d, Return), same_screen YES,
state 0x0, keycode 77 (keysym 0xff7f, Num_Lock), same_screen YES,
state 0x10, keycode 77 (keysym 0xff7f, Num_Lock), same_screen YES,
state 0x10, keycode 104 (keysym 0xff8d, KP_Enter), same_screen YES,
state 0x10, keycode 104 (keysym 0xff8d, KP_Enter), same_screen YES

As you can see it see it seems to be when num-lock is on the keyevent fired for Enter key changes, I am not sure if this is a Xserver bug or not but other computers don’t seem to exhibit the same behavior?

Any how once you have that worked out fixing it is trivial just simply bind to both key events.

((modm .|.  shiftMask, xK_Return), spawn $ XMonad.terminal conf )
, ((modm .|.  shiftMask, xK_KP_Enter), spawn $ XMonad.terminal conf )

I hope that this might help some one Googling.

Highlights

• Tumbleweed explained basic bug reporting, Debian packaging, translations and gave us a quick demo on building Hello.
• Almost every one upgraded/reinstalled to Lucid some people even did both
• Some one made a 3D render animation of Tux (I really need to find out what his name was and if we can get hold of it)
• Mythbuntu crept into peoples boot screens. See LP bug A fix has since been released
• Michiel started translating things into Afrikaans
• I started using xmonad
• Coke was drunk
• Pizza’s were eaten (Thanks Clug)
• Coffee was made (thanks tumbleweed+maia)
• Milk was spilt
• And nothing blew up

Some Pics

Maia long with a few other people from -za have wiped up a pretty cool post for the even if I do say so my self.

You can find the source for both the English and Afrikaans versions on Spread Ubuntu.

As you can see from the post the event will be at the Shuttleworth Labs at UCT directions between 10am – 5pm on Sunday the 28th March 2010. If you can’t make it for the full time don’t worry just pop in at any point. We will have the full LEG mirror so even if you wont have to worry about downloading all those big packages or worrying about downloading large ISO’s just for testing.

Reasons to come

• Having fun learning from others.
• Get help installing Ubuntu
• Trying out the development release. Don’t worry you don’t need to be a developer or even an experienced Ubuntu user.
• Translations
• Want to save bandwith and come copy the repos
• Learn how to report bugs so that they might actually get fixed!
• Learn packaging
• Watch some cool pre-release demos from Lucid

In preparation  for this event I went and upgraded my laptop to Lucid. I don’t really know how long it took because I did the very trusting thing and went to sleep after entering Y.

I did wake up with a nice shiny blue screen asking me if I wanted to overwrite my grub menu selected keep original and about 5minutes later I had a nice shinny purple lucid looking screen. Woohoo.

I also then reporting my first Lucid theme bug. Before I have every one goes on about oh noes not another move buttons to the right bug report this one is slightly different. It actually requests if the buttons are by default on the left can we make the theme previews or at least the default theme on the left too.

drubin@ubuntu:~$ lspci | grep -i net
0e:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller (rev 01)

One of the first hits in Google was from Dimitar while this blog post has nice detailed instructions. It seems to miss points that make Linux so amazing the first being package management and on this point being able to upgrade your kernel. I found that blog post to be very informative and detailed but the part that made me question things was

Then click on the “Status” button and select “Installed”. Then search for “linux-”. Select all packages that start with “linux-” and then Package -> Lock Version.

What so I wouldn’t be able to do kernel updates? That wasn’t going to do at all. So I did what any good Floss user would do and read the read me from the BroadCom driver page

PRECOMPILED DRIVER
——————-
Some distros (Ubuntu and Fedora at the least) already have a version of
this driver in their repositories precompiled, tested and ready to go.
You just use the package manager to install the proper package. If
its available for your distro, this is usually an easier solution. See
the end of this document for further discussion.

This is something I haven’t seen that often official drivers pointing you to the Distro maintained versions. Linux has come along way in recent years. Any how for all those that happen to stumble here from Google and other places. I just want to mention the easier way to get the drivers working is written in the readme.

Ubuntu:
——
Go to System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
Choose the Broadcom STA wireless driver
Activate

Sometimes the driver does not show up in the Hardware Drivers choices. In
this case, try reintalling the driver from the GUI or shell like this:

From the GUI:
Package Manager (System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager). Click the
Reload button in the upper left corner of Synaptic to refresh your index then
search for and reinstall the package named bcmwl-kernel-source.

From the shell:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get –reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source

In either GUI or text case, after reinstalling, reboot your machine.

Now go back to System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
and you should see the driver enabled and working.

I really hope this helps some one from compiling their own driver and having to maintain it between kernel upgrades. Btw I have upgraded my Karmic kernel to the latest 2.6.31.20.33 with it still working.

I know the timing isn’t great for work people (9am – 10am) so maybe we can think about switching it around or have another one at a pub after work for some beers? One of the main reasons for this time is the idea of starting something like this is to try make it fit into your routine not change your routine to fit it since this makes it easier to keep up with it in the long run.

Why would I carry on using the devel version even if the security issue has been patched?
Simple 0.3.0 isn’t in any released stable Ubuntu repository yet also I like to help out testing/debugging/bug reporting where I can.

Why Weechat over some other CLI client like Irssi?
It started off as a simple I preferred Weechat’s config layout and ease of use and sane default configurations. Also the support from the Weechat community is astounding. People like xt and Flashcode have ported the majority of irssi scripts just to help out people transitioning from Irssi to Weechat. On that note the new changes in weechat’s API make almost every thing customisable and scriptable. I do in fact still still make use of Irssi as a bouncer still until weechat’s relay plugin is stable enough. Hopefully this will be finished soon.

How scriptable is Weechat?
Weechat provides bindings for Python, Ruby(devel version even supports ruby 1.9 now), tcl, Perl, and of course C. Weechat has a very extensive API to plugin to almost every aspect of the Weechat functionality.

Is Weechat available in my language
Weechat supports Internationalization so even if it currently isn’t available feel free to translate it into your own language.

My Favourite scripts/features
First and foremost is weeget this is weechats script manager/updater. Once installed you are able to install/update any other script including its self by simply doing /weeget install $scritpname.

• iset – Allows a simple interface to edit/search for configurations
• weeget – see above.
• buffer_autoclose – basically closes inactive private buffers after a specific period, helps to keep things clean and neat.
• go – Allows for hot jumping to buffers
• screen_away – Script that sets your away status based on whether weechat’s screen is attached or not.
• shell – Allows simple commands to be executed from within weechat.
• urlgrab – Script that helps manage the annoyances of long urls that would normally be unclickable
• aspell – This is a plugin not a script! This highlights spelling mistakes on your input buffers so you can see quickly for those minor typo’s

Tips and Tricks

• Add the alias smart filter. Helps to hide useless info like joins and parts from inactive members of large channels ie #ubuntu-meeting
• Use weechat’s remote access.
• Read the FAQ it contains lots of useful information.

Hope this has been of some help to others.