Continuing Snapcraft Docs Days

In March we had our first Snapcraft Docs Day on the last Friday of the month. It was fun and successful so we’re doing it again this Friday, 28th April 2017. Join us in #snapcraft on Rocket Chat and on the snapcraft forums

Flavour of the month

This month’s theme is ‘Flavours’, specifically Ubuntu Flavours. We’ve worked hard to make the experience of using snapcraft to build snaps as easy as possible. Part of that work was to ensure it works as expected on all supported Ubuntu flavours. Many of us run stock Ubuntu and despite our best efforts, may not have caught certain edge cases only apparent on flavours.

Goodbye WordPress!

For a long while my personal blog has been running WordPress. Every so often I’ve looked at other options but never really been motivated to change it, because everything worked, and it was not too much effort to manage.

Then I got ‘hacked’. :(

I host my blog on a Bitfolk VPS. I had no idea my server had been compromised until I got a notification on Boxing Day from the lovely Bitfolk people. They informed me that there was a deluge of spam originating from my machine, so it was likely compromised. Their standard procedure is to shutdown the network connection, which they did.

My Ubuntu 16.04 GNOME Setup

This is a post for friends who saw my desktop screenshot and anyone else who likes Unity and is looking at alternatives. A big thanks to Stuart Langridge and Joey Sneddon whose linked posts inspired some of this.

The recent news that upcoming versions of Ubuntu will use GNOME as the default desktop rather than Unity, made me take another look at the GNOME desktop

If you’re not interested in my opinion but just want to know what I did, then jump to “Migration from Unity to GNOME” below.

Dell XPS 13 9360 Review

On the ‘Tasty Different Cow’ (don’t ask) episode of the Ubuntu Podcast - we reviewed the latest Dell XPS 13 9360 Laptop shipping with Ubuntu.

Dell kindly sent us the review unit for a couple of weeks, and while we talked all about it on the podcast, I thought I’d jot some notes down here in case I missed anything or it’s not clear in the audio version.

Announcing Snapcraft Docs Day

Snap is a simple archive format for big things.

Snapcraft is a delightful tool for automatically building and publishing software for any Linux system or device. Our documentation and tutorials are great for getting started with snapcraft. We can always improve these though, so this Friday, will be our first Snapcraft Docs Day.

• When: Friday, 31st March 2017, all day
• Where: #snapcraft on Rocket Chat
• Who: Developers & documentation experts of all levels

Why we’re doing this

The goal is to ensure our documentation and tutorials are useful and accurate. We’re keen to get people testing our documentation, to make sure it’s clear, understandable and comprehensive. If we’re missing anything, or there are mistakes then file those issues, or better yet, fix them yourself.

READ MAP

We have a lot of documentation and help in the Ubuntu project, and much of it is quite hostile to new users. We have IRC channels, mailing lists, dense & out of date wiki pages, lengthy and hard to consume forum posts & lengthy out of date tutorial videos. We also have some more modern tools such as AskUbuntu and Discourse.

A little while ago I bought a Zoostorm PC from Ebuyer. It’s a farily basic (but powerful) i7 based system with 8GB RAM and a 1TB hard disk. This is to replace my older (but still fully working) Mesh PC. The newer one is more power efficient, quieter, a lot faster, and all Intel inside - the previous desktop was nVidia based.

I wanted to migrate from the install on my old Mesh PC to a new clean install on the Zoostorm. I could have just yanked the disk out of the Mesh and put it in the Zoostorm, but I did it slightly differently. I’m typing it up here for my own notes but also to find out how other people do it, and to get any tips.

I’ve been playing with the python-elements but it seems like the project is dead.

The upstream website has gone and the packages has had no updates for some time. I’d like to create a simple demo/game along the lines of some of the mini games you find in WarioWare on the Nintendo Wii. The Python Elements (and box2d) libraries seem to fit the bill but I don’t want to code using something that is going to disappear.

I recently took delivery of a new HP ProLiant MicroServer which I wanted to use for various small/home office server type tasks. It’s a cracking little server, ideal for small offices and home users who want a small, low-power server. With only one fan in the case it’s fairly quiet with most noise coming from the hard disk supplied, and any more you put in it.

The reason I got it was because HP are currently giving £100 cash-back (until end of January 2011) on the ProLiant MicroServer. Given how cheap it already is the cash-back makes it even more attractive! It’s not super powerful and certainly not “pro server grade” kit, but perfect for my needs.

For a few years I’ve owned a variety of webcams which I’ve used under Debian and Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop computers. As many others do, I’ve used them with the likes of Skype & Ekiga for video calls and camstream & guvcview for just capturing images. More often than not though, my webcam is pointing out into the garden, taking images and uploading them to my website. I frequently get asked how I set this up, so rather than explain lots of times, I figured I’d blog it.