Open Warrior

Ubuntu Global Jam

The Ubuntu Global Jam took place around the world this weekend. The Ubuntu Global Jam is an international event in which volunteers from LoCos (Ubuntu Local Committees) all around the world get together to work on improving Ubuntu. The purpose of the event is to encourage people to get involved with Ubuntu on a large scale and learn about ways in which the can contribute to Ubuntu. For instance, people can learn about and work on bug fixing, translation, documentation, testing, packaging or anything else that interests them.

The Ubuntu-ZA South African LoCo team hosted a bug fixing event at the Yola offices in Cape Town as part of the Ubuntu Global Jam, with a focus on fixing broken packages in the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric, set to be released in October this year.

Since many of us were from a scientific background we decided to focus on fixing broken scientific packages, though that didn’t really happen and we just ended up fixing things that sounded cool or that we were specifically interested. For instance, given that I am a huge KDE fan, I tried to focus on fixing KDE packages, though I did fix a few others.

Fixing Bugs

We ended up being quite a small group with Stefano Rivera (tumbleweed), a Debian Developer and Ubuntu Master of the Universe (MOTU) leading the group, Michiel Baird who (I think) had a bit of experience fixing Ubuntu Bugs and Marco Gallotta and I who had no experience fixing Ubuntu bugs. Stefano was great in walking us through fixing broken packages – from identifying them, to figuring out what was wrong with them, fixing them and then contributing the fixes back to Ubuntu and in some cases Debian and upstream.

The great thing about the Global Jam is that it encourages everyone to get involved, regardless of their skill level. So even if you’ve never touched source code in your life, you can still help out by testing, writing documentation or translating the software. It was a great experience for me – I’ve always wanted to put my skills to use and get involved in helping to improve Ubuntu, but have never known where to start. The Cape Town Global Jam, under the lead of Stefano, was a great way to get stuck into it and has set the ball in motion for a lot more work to come!

Get Involved!

On a similar note, remember that Software Freedom Day 2011 is less than two weeks away so be sure to get involved! The Cape Linux Users Group and the UCT Linux Enthusiasts Group will be hosting an event on Software Freedom Day at UCT, so check out the Facebook Event if you’re interested in being part of it, even if it’s just to pop in and say hi

I just wrote a KDE service menu wrapper around the Dropbox python CLI. For more information please go here.

On another note, if you haven’t tried Dropbox I advise that you give it a go by clicking here

Aaron Siego, president of KDE e.V recently made a post titled “Getting into KDE hacking” which reminded me of the reason I started this blog in the first place – to detail my journey into the world of KDE hacking.

Truth is though, that I haven’t posted anything related to KDE hacking since I started this blog, mainly because I haven’t had the time to do any of the great free software things I plan to do. Anyway, Aaron highlight 6 steps to getting involved in KDE hacking, and so far I’ve completed the first one which is learning Qt4. So not all is lost, I am one step closer to developing free software for the desktop environment which I have grown to love over the years (more on that another time).

A couple of months ago I had the idea to start up a site, openwarriors.org, which I would use to highlight “individuals committed to open source.” So I went ahead and registered the domain, uploaded a placeholder index page (which is still there) and waited for the right time to get started on the project.

Now that I’m on a seven week holiday I have the time to get started on my openwarriors.org project. However last night I started doubting the project, the reason being that if it becomes successful I won’t be able to sustain it, one because of the bandwidth costs and two because of the time that I’d need to put into it.

Since I’ve really been getting into open source hacking in recent times I decided to make my ventures into it’s world the focus of openwarriors.org and thus (for now) scrapping the original idea. So, I’ve started this blog on iblog.co.za and named it openwarriors.org. In this blog I will detail my experiences with open source hacking, primarily focusing on KDE and specifically KDE4. And thus I announce my holiday project: in order to get a good feeling for Qt and KDE4 development I’m going to develop a KDE4 Financial Calculator. For this project I’ll detail my setting up of KDE4 for development, the resources I use to learn how to create KDE4 applications and any other interesting things I might run into while experimenting.

However KDE won’t be the only focus of this blog, anything which I find interesting relating to open source software will be posted here, so keep a look out…