Yesterday, during the final UDS party, I had an idea to improve Ubuntu development, but I didn't know if it could be a good idea or a stupid one, so I talked to Daniel Holbach and David Planella about it and they were happy to hear about it and Daniel told me to talk about this directly to Mark (and I did it).

Let's explain the basic idea. From an UDS and the next one, it would be useful to have a development sprint where people can talk about assigned UDS blueprints, at which point they are on their tasks, if they have any problems and if they will finish them within the next UDS. Of course Canonical cannot organize another meeting, it would be very expensive, so the idea is: why don't we use Google Hangout to organize the sprint? I has a limit of 10 people, I know, but we could select (for example) 5 from the community and 5 from Canonical. There would be parallel meeting and tracks, we would use the same blueprints used during the last UDS and we would add further notes. The attendees would be able to listen and watch the stream and make questions through the available chat.

I don't want to write more details here because I don't think it's the right place (and probably it's not the moment to write a similar blog post, since I'm still in th SFO Airport), my idea is to create a wiki page to explain all the details, so everyone would be able to add more ideas and see if it's doable or not.

So, what do you think about? I think we should try, it doesn't cost anything except some hours in the week we'll organize it. I wait for your comments then.

After upgrading my desktop PC to Ubuntu 12.04 (actually my main machine) I started experimenting many Xorg crashes and instability issues. I reported the bug, but I had to find a solution or I should have rolled back to Ubuntu 11.10. The problem (from my point of view) is of the new Nvidia 295.40 binary drivers. I also tried an older version (295.33) experiencing the same problems. I then decided to give the Nouveau opensource drivers a try.

I must say that in over 24 hours I didn't have a single Xorg crash. My desktop is very stable and Nouveau drivers are pretty fast: I can watch a 1080p video on Youtube in full screen without having any problem. The only problem with my machine is that I'm using a VGA Switcher to share my monitor wit Xbox (see this old post), so my monitor capabilities cannot be detected automatically and I had to do some manually tuning of the Xorg configuration.

First of all I had to resolve a very annoying problem: the screen was blinking every 10 seconds and this really hurted my eyes. To fix this I had to add a kernel parameter: drm_kms_helper.poll=0
you need to add this string in /etc/default/grub to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter. After this your line should look like this one: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash drm_kms_helper.poll=0"

Don't forget to execute: sudo update-grub from the command line.

Then I had to create a proper xorg.conf setting my resolution (1680x1050) manually:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "DVI-I-1"
    VendorName     "Asus"
    ModelName      "Ancor Communications Inc VW222"
    Modeline "1680x1050R"  119.00  1680 1728 1760 1840  1050 1053 1059 1080 +hsync -vsync
    Option      "PreferredMode" "1680x1050R"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Monitor        "DVI-I-1"
EndSection

How do you generate the Modeline line? It's very simple. Just execute: "cvt -r 1680 1050" in the command line and you'll get a line similar to the one I added (of course substitute those numbers with the resolution you want).

You have to save this file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot your system to use all the new settings. Now my system runs nicely and very fast! I'm really enjoying the new Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. I just hope that Nvidia guys will fix the sta
bility issues of their driver as soon as possible, so I'll be able to choose again between the opensource driver and the closed source one (faster with 3D stuff, but more unstable as you can see).

A big thanks to everyone in #nouveau IRC channel on Freenode. They were very kind to help me configuring their opensource driver.

With BlackBerry PlayBook you can now use Qt libraries to develop your applications. The problem is that QML components are not available yet (they will be available with CascadesUI in the near future), but you can use Symbian qt-components to develop your application UI. This should also make the porting of an existing Symbian Qt application easier.

We suppose you have already built and installed QtQNX under this directory: ~/QtQNX/ARM/ (please change it matching the folder where you installed it).
At this point you have to get qt-components sources using this command:

git clone git://gitorious.org/qt-components/qt-components.git qt-components

Now enter the directory you just checked and compile the components:

cd qt-components
QTDIR=~/QtQNX/ARM/
./configure -symbian
make

Whend you complete all the previous operations, you'll have two directories inside qt-components/imports, please copy them inside the QtQNX installation directory:

cp -R imports/Qt ~/QtQNX/ARM/imports/
cp -R imports/com ~/QtQNX/ARM/imports/

That's all for now. In the next posts I'll show you how to use these components, providing a small code example. In the mean time you can find more informations here http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Native-SDK-for-BlackBerry-Tablet/QML-symbian-qt-components-for-PlayBook/td-p/1574275

Yesterday in Pistoia (Italy) we had the Ubuntu Global Jam and about 15 people attended the event. We began with an introductive talk by Paolo Sammicheli about the Italian Ubuntu Community and how it is possible to contribute to Ubuntu. We divided in two small groups, one translating from English to Italian (coordinated on IRC by the people of the community) and another group leaded by Marco Trevisan, learning how to implement automatic tests in Unity code (in particular he introduced us Autopilot, more information here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/QA/Autopilot ). Next time I would like to ask people to register to Launchpad and sign the Code of Conduct before attending the global jam. We wasted a lot of time with this task.

At the end of the day me and the other people from Pistoia, took the other people for a quick tour around the city where we had the possibility to eat some tasty food. It was a very amazing day and people who started collaborating for the first time were very happy! I think this has been a successful day, at least for us. I hope the other LoCo are having a good Jam as well and I really can't wait for the next Ubuntu Global Jam.

Few days ago I decided to move my Xbox 360 from the room where is the TV to the room where I have my desktop PC. I wanted to avoid wasting precious space on my desk, so I decided to share my 22'' monitor with the Xbox and I bought a VGA Switcher. With this product you can easily switch the VGA signal between your PC and the Xbox and also the audio signal.

The problem with this solution is the fact that your monitor is not anymore attached directly to your graphic card and this causes problems detecting the monitor capabilities. Please note that the switcher doesn't reduce the resolution you can have, it just make the graphic card impossible to detect the correct resolution.

If you have an Nvidia graphic card you can use the nvidia-settings tool to manually set the configuration and to save it to a file, so during the next boot even if Ubuntu won't be able to detect the proper resolution for your monitor, it will simply apply the configuration found in xorg.conf

Please remember to also set the refresh rate of the monitor (I was having a very bad resolution until I didn't choose 60 Hz in the settings window). If you don't have a Nvidia graphic card (and the proper tool) to generate a xorg.conf file or if you just want to give a look at my configuration here you have a copy:

# nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings
# nvidia-settings:  version 280.13  (buildd@rothera)  Thu Aug 11 17:28:49 UTC 2011

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Ancor Communications Inc VW222"
    HorizSync       31.0 - 81.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 8800 GS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "CRT-0"
    Option         "metamodes" "1680x1050_60 +0+0; nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Remember to save the file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and on next boot you will have the right resolution even with your VGA Switcher in use.

Using more than one computer, often it would be useful to have a way to synchronize settings among multiple computers. For example you change the desktop wallpaper on your office PC and you want to find the same wallpaper when you go back home on your personal PC or on your laptop. Language settings, online accounts, privacy settings ecc... are only few examples of settings you could want to have synchronized.

Ubuntu One already gives you 5 Gb space for free and it's available for everyone activating it. It's a perfect place for storing a shared folder with all those settings. Of course not a simple folder, a special one. Applications use settings taken from usual ~/.appName and a daemon takes care of synchronizing data once you're connected to Internet. Just like Ubuntu One does with your documents.

How do I choose which settings to synchronize? First of all you have to activate an Ubuntu One account, if you don't have already done it, then you just have to choose the settings you want using this tool available in Ubuntu System Settings

What? A mockup?! Isn't this tool available yet??!! Exactly This tool is not available yet, but I think it would be an interesting feature to talk about for the next (not precise, I mean 12.10) Ubuntu release. What do you think about?

Even this time Pistoia Linux User Group decided to join the international event "Ubuntu Global Jam" organizing it in collaboration with Ubuntu-it Community. The international event will be on March 2nd, 3rd and 4th and we have decided for March 3rd (saturday) from 15:00 CET to 19:00 CET. This event will be organized in a room made available by Circolo ARCI Bonelle. We'll have a room capable of about 100 people and a smaller one with 4 PC and a big table for people who want to bring their own laptop. Wifi internet connection will be available for everyone.

The event will be introduced by a talk made by Paolo Sammicheli of the Ubuntu-it Community and then we will divide in some smaller groups that will dedicate to different tasks. One will be coordinated by Paolo Sammicheli and will be dedicated to testing and bug triaging. Another group will do some translations from english to italian and will collaborate directly with italian translation team talking with them on a dedicated IRC channel. The last group will be leaded by a very good Unity rockstar..... (suspance)...... Marco Trevisan! People collaborating directly with him will try to help fixing some bugs or at least they will learn how to get started to bug fixing (probably we will pick a bitesize bug and we will fix it together).

We've created an event on Facebook and invited all our friends to attend. We really hope that many people will partecipate to this opportunity to make the next Ubuntu version more... "precise"!

CuteSoma (Soma.fm client for Nokia N9) has been available for 4 months now and it's the right time to publish some interesting statistics about downloads. First of all I didn't expect so much interest and I wasn't sure to have so many downloads, due to the fact that Nokia never advertised this device properly. But luckly lot of people don't care about advertising and buy a product anyway if they know it's one of the best available on the smartphone market.

I'm really happy to notice that the number of downloads is growing each month, this motivates me to continue with development (well... when my N950 comes back from Nokia, since I had to send it because it was broken).

I want to thank all the 3658 people that downloaded CuteSoma until now and all the people that are sending me their feedback, ideas and patches (yes Cornelius Hald, I'm talking about you ) you're giving me a big opportunity to learn C++/Qt/QML.

If you try to install Nokia QtSDK on Ubuntu using the Nokia installer (that provides a newer version than the one distributed in Ubuntu Software Center) you could get an error like this:

(Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_1_3_en.run:3126): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_style_get: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

to fix it, you need to run the installer with a specific parameter:

andrea@centurion:~/Downloads/Qt$ ./Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_1_4_en.run -style cleanlooks

and everything should work!

I've been a Flickr pro user for 4 years, but the pro account costs 24,95$/year and I was looking for something cheaper. Anyway I was thinking that after all, even if I don't renew my account, I can always access to all my pictures.... wrong! If you don't renew your pro Flickr account you can only access to the low resolution version of your own pictures. That's not acceptable for me, so I decided to download all my pictures and upload them somewhere else. Here comes the second disappointment: there is no automatic way to download all your pictures.

I simply had no time to write an application by myself, so I started searching on Google to see if there was something available to do this simple task. At the beginning I only found abandoned tools (closed source, the API was expired ecc...), paid tools, Windows only tools ecc... but finally I found this post http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/

There is a Python script that automatically downloads all your Flickr pictures getting the highest resolution available, you can download the script from here https://github.com/dan/hivelogic-flickrtouchr

The usage is very simple

mkdir FlickrBackupFolder
python flickrtouchr.py FlickrBackupFolder

A browser's window will be opened and you'll be prompted for authorization. After that, all you pictures will be downloaded.