(Planet people: sorry if this pops up >1 time...when I add another question, Blogger thinks it has to bump it up in the RSS feed)

Following tradition, here's my Karmic FAQ:

1. How should I download?
   • Torrents, to keep the strain off the servers. There are IPv6 torrent files available as well, as a test so Canonical can see how many Ubuntu users are on IPv6 and thus how much support to give it. They don't list KTorrent as one of the clients that can do the IPv6 torrents, but I'm using it right now.
   • Or if you have a Beta or RC .iso sitting around zsync to the final
2. I have a netbook. What are my options?
   • Ubuntu Netbook Remix is still around, but it's now joined by Kubuntu Netbook Edition
3. How's audio?
   • Well, it's working fine for me, but Daniel has a "caveats" blog post (updated link). There is now a linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic package so you can get ALSA updates
4. Where'd Add/Remove go?
   • It has been replaced by the new Ubuntu Software Center
5. Does Ubuntu Software Center sell proprietary software? I heard it did.
   • Not yet. There are plans in about a year to allow those commercial developers who are willing to support Linux to sell apps through it.
6. Can I use Ubuntu One with Kubuntu?
   • Yes, just install the ubuntu-one-client-gnome package.
7. Why Empathy? I like Pidgin!
   • You're welcome to keep using Pidgin, but here are a few things Empathy has going for it:
     • It's the GNOME default
     • It can do audio/video chat
     • The Telepathy framework lets it integrate better into the rest of the desktop
     • As Jono mentioned you can do desktop sharing through it
8. What happened to GDM theming?
   • The new GDM uses the GTK theme for the gdm user. To change it, you'll need to run gksudo -u gdm gnome-appearance-properties and select a new theme
9. Wasn't Gwibber supposed to be included?
   • Gwibber 2.0 was not ready in time. It is available in Universe.
10. New theme yet?
    • Yes! Softer icons, chocolate highlights, and orange wallpaper
11. Can Amarok play CDs yet?
    • Yes
12. Do Intel graphics not-suck this time?
    • Yes, they're very nice actually! Thanks to KMS, Intel graphics users can expect instantaneous resume from suspend!
13. How's Kubuntu's network manager?
    • It works this time
14. I upgraded from Jaunty and now have no sound. What do I do?
    • Run uname -r. Does it say "2.6.31-14-generic"? If it still says 2.6.28-16-generic, you're not running Karmic's kernel. Some people are having trouble with GRUB not showing new kernels. Try running sudo update-grub and then rebooting.

Additionally, I wrote an overview of Ubuntu and Kubuntu for another blog, if you'd like to check that out.

PS: Let me know in the comments if there's anything you think I should add!

Americans between ages 20 and 30 probably remember the Care Bears, a TV show where the Care Bears (which look like teddy bears), who are from Care-a-Lot fight off mean characters with the power of caring. Their attack is called the Care Bear Stare and their tummies have little icons that light up and shoot whatever their power is at the enemy. I'm not sure why, but one was Grumpy Bear. There was also Funshine Bear, Friend Bear, and a few others, including Cheer Bear. Cheer Bear's motto was "when in doubt, SMILE!" and had the power to make others happy.

Where am I going with this? Yesterday, Amber commented that Daniel Holbach* has a contagious smile, and somehow I immediately thought of Cheer Bear. James Westby agreed that putting the two together kinda made sense. So, I did:

It does make sense, right? I mean, you just can't hang around the guy without getting at least 1 hug (more likely: a half dozen) and a huge grin.

Yeah yeah, off topic for this blog (again), but Jorge Castro said I had to blog the picture of his Care Bear coworker.

* To those who don't follow Ubuntu development and thus going "uh…who's Daniel Holbach?" He's one of Ubuntu's Community Council members, and a developer, and…ya know the list's too long.

Say you want to find out where an email came from. Maybe it was threatening or phishing or spam. How do you gather evidence of what servers passed it to you to give to the authorities? You need the full headers. They contain all the routing information. Keep in mind, though, that it is possible the sender was making use of an open relay instead of their own mailserver.

• KMail: View -> Headers -> All Headers
• Evolution: View -> Message Source (or Ctrl+U)
• Thunderbird: View -> Headers -> All
• GMail: Hit the down arrow next to "Reply" on the message, then choose "Show Original"

Now just copy and paste this into a file and hand over to whomever is dealing with the sender.

TRIGGER WARNING: Victims of violence or sexual assault may want to stop reading.

With all the discussion of sexism in FOSS this year, a certain individual calling himself MikeeUSA is back. I realize many people are not aware of this individual. He is notorious in certain circles for very good reasons. 2005 is the earliest record I know of him harassing women involved with Debian and LinuxChix. And last year, he sent death threats to many women involved in Debian development.

He's back, pasting the same comment to many blogs repeatedly. Not everyone has removed the disgusting comment, so I'm sure you can find it if you want. But, here's a summary of his beliefs:

1. Hans Reiser was justified in murdering his ex-wife since she divorced him; the only down-side is that he can't code while in prison
2. Men have the right to rape women, and rape laws are stealing that right
3. Pretty much all laws that require treating women as well as you treat your dog require stealing men's rights
4. etc.

I hope you can see where this is going. Obviously nowhere good.

My advice? Do not engage; he is not receptive. Delete with impunity. Note also that he uses Tor, so an IP address block on your blog comments won't work; email address block should work for a while. Also, warn the others, and tell women you know involved in Free Software that if this guy comes after them in any way, they NEED to speak up.

Yes, I know, this blog has been very offtopic for a while now. I'm sorry. The software I'm most impressed by at the moment isn't packaged in Ubuntu though! I know, I need to go file a FFe to get it synced from Debian so I can write about it.

This video was released at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on Thursday. It's very simple, made up of footage from last year's event. Also very cool. Have a look.

Some day, I will get myself to Tuscon to attend this event.

Ohio LinuxFest was fun as usual. Others have already written about it on their blogs, so I'll save some of the repetition. Three of the guys from Southeast LinuxFest approached me about talking there next year. ZaReason had a table showing off their Terra A20 netbook and a couple machines that are not yet available for sale (yay! previews!). Earl asked me about an audio problem they were having with one of the preview machines, so I got out a Karmic UNR stick and booted from it. Turns out it works fine in Karmic. Go ALSA people!

I've got photos from the wedding, pre-party, event, and after-party on my Flickr. There are three videos of Greg Grossmeier dancing like Carlton from Fresh Prince. I've also got a video of a MacBook failing to properly detect a projector when we (the speakers) were testing our laptops with the projectors on Friday. For the record, xrandr --output VGA1 --same-as LVDS1 --mode 1024x768 ; xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x768 was all I needed (note: too lazy to learn to use the GUI).

I told everybody I'd post my slides on my blog so here's the Slideshare link.

I've mentioned Ohio LinuxFest here before, but hey…it's almost time! I'm currently at the "checkpoint" on the trip to Columbus. By that I mean, a coworker and I are crashing at our bosses' house. We're leaving in about 4 hours.

I'm working on my slides. My talk is called "Sysadmins' Rosetta Stone" and is about all those little things that trip you up when you switch from Debian or Ubuntu to Red Hat or Fedora…or vice-versa. It's aimed at system administrators, though, so fair warning. I just took a second look at the schedule, and it appears I am scheduled to speak at the same time as my coworker and boss, Scott Courtney and David Boyes. They're talking about IBM VM. I wonder if the opening line will be "back in my day…" ;-)

I'm thinking I'll also go to Cat Allman's "Getting Started in Free and Open Source" to get ideas for sharing with beginners and Dru Lavigne's "BSD for Linux Users," since I have a friend that's always trying to switch me to FreeBSD and every time I use OSX I have to relearn the flags for various commands (ex: ls --color is ls -G on BSD…I think). Elizabeth Garbee is an excellent speaker, so I think I'll attend her "How to Use Open Source to Pay for a College Education." After her…well, I'm not so sure. Maybe Mike Badger's "Programming for the Young and Young at Heart" to get tips on teaching kids, or maybe Tom Callaway's "Legalities of FOSS from a Hacker's Perspective." After that, Jorge is doing "Building a Community Around Your Project." For the last time slot with choices, I'm still unsure about Patrick Wagstrom's "Be a Wonk! Open Source, Government Policy, and You" or Catherine Devlin's "reStructured Text: Plain Text Gets Superpowers."

PS: New blog theme

This is the 4th year the DC LoCo Team has had a table at the Takoma Park Folk Festival. In 2006, Kevin (the LoCo leader) says the table was well off the beaten path. Very few visitors. 2007 was my first year participating. That year we got a better spot, just around the corner from the lawn area where the main stage is. Anybody wanting to reach the main stage from that side of the building had to go past us. We got about 120-150 visitors. In 2008, we had the same spot, and this time the OLPC Learning Club folks got a table to our right and the hackerspace, HacDC was to our left. Again, we got about 150 visitors.

This year, though? We were on the edge of the lawn. Hard to get from the food to the main stage without passing us. Well, we lost track of pressing the button on the counter for large swaths of time because we were so swamped, but of the times that we remembered…362 visitors. Yeah, WOW!

We find that having OLPC XO laptops seems to attract folks. "Is that the laptop from the news?" and then we get to explain Free Software and oh hey look, we have CDs for another Linux distro here called Ubuntu… Mel Chua was there in the morning. She used to work on OLPC, and I heard the reason she had to leave early was to fly down to NC to Red Hat headquarters for new employee orientation. Woot for Mel! Mike Lee came in the afternoon to take her place as Resident OLPC Expert. He runs the OLPC Learning Club.

I'd say about ½ the people who came to the table last year said they either already used it or someone in their family used it or they remembered us from the year before. That's about 75 people. This year, probably 100 said that sort of thing, maybe 100 more said they'd heard of Linux in general but not Ubuntu and isn't it hard to use? That means we had at least 160 people who'd never heard of this before but know now and another 100 who got some more information. Yay! Hundreds more than last year! This is what I like about being at a folk festival instead of at a tech conference. We're not preaching to the choir, to the techies who already know all about Linux and have made up their minds about it already. We're talking to the "human beings" mentioned in Ubuntu's tagline. Several people also asked for lists of netbooks that come with Ubuntu pre-installed.

I think we went through 3 boxes of Ubuntu CDs. Unfortunately, we only got to give out 5 Kubuntu CDs because that was all Kevin happened to have lying around. It seems our Jaunty ShipIt pack didn't include any, and he didn't open up all of the boxes in advance to count.

Taking care of the booth this year, aside from Mel and Mike on OLPC duty, were Kevin Cole (runs the DC LoCo), Other Chuck (I don't know his last name, but he's known as "Other Chuck" since Chuck Frain runs the Maryland LoCo and that's not him), Daniel Chen (y'all know him by now, right?), and me (oh come on). And as in years past, Barry Warsaw (Canonical, maintains Mailman & Python) stopped by the table. He has his son trained to give double-thumbs-down to Windows, hehe!

For photos of all the fun, check out my Takoma Park Folk Festival 2009 album on Flickr. It, er, appears I need to learn about a better color setting for my camera in really bright sunlight because everything's blue-ish, except for people's brightly-colored shirts. Excuse: it's a week old, I haven't gotten used to it yet! Though I did find the setting for brightly-colored flowers. Lots of photos that'd make nice wallpapers in my Flickr now.

Every now and then, I see people make the following claim:

Ubuntu has a root password; they just don't tell the user what it is.

Rubbish. Some versions claim it is a randomly generated one. Rubbish. There is no root password, and this statement mustn't be confused with "the password is carriage return" (a usage RMS tried to popularize at MIT). Take a look at /etc/shadow, if you will (sudo less /etc/shadow). On a default install, the first few lines will look something like this:

root:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
daemon:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
bin:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
sys:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
sync:*:14438:0:99999:7:::

Contrast this with the line containing your user's name.

test:$6$.XQFA5P3$JYH9CpZS00DUAPDXcxc5qzP2vaNLrGj2TB5dlLj6rEVCOMpTt5XmFH7eL2TiDtXGApTknWhO6phpGyuac3DCU.:14470:0:99999:7:::

What is different? The second field (the part after the first ":") is a "*" for those system users and a long jumble of numbers and letters for the human users. The "*" means that the user cannot login using a password. The long jumble of numbers and letters? That is a hash of the user's password. In this test user's case, that is a hash of the string "password". If you're interested in the other fields, see man 5 shadow. This password has been encrypted with SHA-512, as evidenced by the $6$ at the start of the hash. See man crypt for a list of other possible prefixes. Note that $1$ means MD5, a hash which has been rather thoroughly broken. Since 8.10, SHA-256 and SHA-512 are available and will be used if you reset your password. If you've still got an MD5 hash in there, it's likely a good idea to do so, if only because it means you haven't changed your password recently enough.

This rumour usually comes up in the context of someone pointing out that if you are a remote attacker, you can guess that root has all the power and so all that is needed is to brute force root's password. In Ubuntu's default setup, this won't work because there is no password that would succeed, regardless how long you spent generating new passwords to try. Instead, the attacker would need to guess the correct combination of user-who-has-sudo-access and password—something exponentially harder. Well-meaning but misguided folks, attempting to protect us Ubuntu users from a false sense of security, then warn us that no, we're wrong, Ubuntu does have a root password. Well, the evidence is in /etc/shadow for all to see. Ubuntu has a locked root account, just the same as if one were to run sudo passwd -l (see man passwd).

I learned that apparently the recent cases of adult images in conference talks hasn't received as much attention as I thought it had. Given that I heard about Matt Aimonetti's CouchDB talk at the Golden Gate Ruby Con in April from an old coworker, Sarah Mei of DevChix, and hypa7ia on #ubuntu-women all in the span of one day, I was under the impression it was something anyone who reads blogs or tweets or dents and is interested in software development had heard about it. My boyfriend is sitting here going "um, wasn't that horse beaten to death?" Apparently not. It seems not to have penetrated the open source blogosphere. Check out links from that Geek Feminism Wiki article on Aimonetti's talk for blog reactions to it, or just Google for "CouchDB", "Aimonetti", and "GoGaRuCo" (some combination thereof should work). And by the way, a thong doesn't make a woman's rear any less naked. Really. It doesn't exactly cover anything.

Noting that I said "cases," I should point out the one that happened just a couple weeks ago at FlashBelt. This one was even more NSFW. If you want the full account, check out the email the Geek Girls Guide received describing it. It's mind-boggling.

I really thought these events needed to be brought to the attention of those who had not yet heard about them. Hopefully, more repeats can be avoided if conference organizers are aware of the need to watch for such things. I've already suggested having a look through slides at OLF to Bethlynn.

I notice in the comments on David Schlesinger's blog posts about RMS's "EMACS virgin" tangent at Guadec/Akademy a lot of folks telling him to stop being a "pseudo-feminist" or implying that he thinks women are defenseless and need a big strong man to protect us, or whatever.

We don't need knights in shining armor, but we do need allies. For example, if someone has demonstrated that they are a misogynist, do you really think they will listen to a woman when she says that was offensive? Um, no. They'll call her oversensitive and try to blame it on PMS or tell her she just doesn't belong in that group and should go back to her knitting circle. This is where the male feminists come in. Being male, they have a chance of actually being listened to. That is, if they aren't dismissed as gender traitors first. The traitors have to be discredited. And that's why one of the first things you'll see in a comment or hear is that the male feminist needs to stop treating women like delicate flowers who can't defend themselves.

And this isn't the first time I've seen these sort of comments. Oh, and Matt just sent me a link for guys wondering about how to behave in feminist discussions.

At SELF, Bethlynn Eicher made a bold prediction: Bug 1: Microsoft has a majority market share will be closed in the next 24 months. The date she named on her blog is 30 June 2011. She keeps pointing out in her blog that we're at GhandiCon 3. "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

I'm listening to Season 1 Episode 20 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast, and they had Matt Zimmerman on there. Someone asked Matt if he thought Bug 1 would be closed in the next 4 years, and he said that sounded a little ambitious.

I'm just amused by the wildly differing expectations. I am reminded of Martin Owens's blog post Ignition Advertising in Ubuntu where he points out that people like to use things that are popular. If we don't say that "like nobody uses it" they'll be more likely to try it. In computers, this makes total sense. If you need help with a little question, do you call the help desk, or do you ask the person at the next desk over "hey, how do I add a printer?" Likely the latter. Historically, Linux has kind of lost on this front. It's why we have LUGs and LoCo Teams. I think that as we get more users, the momentum to gain more users will grow because being kind of popular makes it easier to become more popular. There's a point we need to hit where it'll become really easy to get new folks interested. How quickly we reach that point determines whether Bethlynn or Matt will be right.

Two polls below. Is Bethlynn right? What's your prediction?

Ohio Linuxfest is now in its 7th year, but that's nothing compared to the 40 years that UNIX has been around. The theme this year is the Past, Present, and Future of UNIX & Linux.

Doug McIlroy will be keynoting. If you haven't heard of him yet, he was Kernighan, Thomson, & Richie's boss back at AT&T; Bell Labs when they were creating UNIX and C. He's credited with creating the UNIX pipe ("|") as well. Peter Salus, known for his books "A Quarter Century of UNIX" and "The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin" will be keynoting as well. And finally, Shawn Powers of Linux Journal fame will be giving a keynote on "Fixing the Economy with Linux."

As with last year, Bdale and his daughter Elizabeth Garbee are expected to speak. Jono has also agreed to speak.

But these six people can't be it. If you've got something to say, why not submit a proposal? The call for presentations is only open a few more days—it closes on the 8th. Get your proposal in!

If you're not that interested in speaking in front of a large crowd, registration is open too. There's free admission, or for $65 you can support the fest, get a T-shirt, and have lunch. There's also a professional package that includes a day of training in addition to what's in the supporter package. That one is $350. There's more to that, but the details aren't fixed yet, so I won't post them yet. There are going to be BoFs and parties of course. LPI certification level 1 testing is expected to be available again as well.

And as I've mentioned before, there is going to be a Diversity in Open Source workshop day. Proposals are being accepted for that as well. Details on the linked page.

Finally, Ohio Linuxfest is now on Identi.ca and has a group there as well. This is in addition to the Twitter account that already existed.

I'm sitting here with Amber Graner, Lyz Krumbach, Andrew from the Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo, Jimmy from the Florida LoCo, and a few others. We're in a BoF chatting about how LoCo Teams can reach out. I think Amber will be posting notes later.

Amber led another BoF earlier today called "Why Not You?" about trying to get the folks we recruit involved. She was saying how for years people would talk about Linux and give Linux stuff to her husband Pete, but nobody would ever ask if she wanted to get involved. It wasn't until Pete gave her a CD and told her to have at that she started doing anything. One thing mentioned by Daniel Chen was that after an installfest, give everybody a live cd. They've got their system installed, now they can show it off and pass on the live cd to a friend.

I mentioned how after I'd shown Ubuntu to my mom and wow'd her with "it doesn't need it" being my response to her anti-virus question and "you can figure it out" being my response to her "how do I type stuff?" question, she went off and started telling her friends how fast and easy Linux is and how great it is that it doesn't get viruses. Based on that, I think the very first experience someone has is the most important. If they have any trouble at first, they're not going to want to recommend it. That's why I think things like hardware support are so important for working out of the box. When they can plug in their printer and have it work without needing a driver cd or anything, that'll impress them.

Amber said that when she's got someone who's nervous about showing up to a LUG or a LoCo because they don't think they'll fit in, her recommendation is: bring cookies. If you bring cookies, suddenly you're the most important person in the room, everybody wants to talk to you. It becomes an ice breaker to introduce you to the group.

Earlier today, I was in Starbucks with my boyfriend picking up a bunch of coffee for the event. We started chatting with this guy who said he's heard of Linux from his computer-science-professor wife, but don't people have trouble with it because it's not very good or easy? I told him "there are 400 people in the Hendrix Center." "You got 400 people down to Clemson for Linux?" "This is small because it's the first year. Last year in Ohio they had 1200." He was floored. He came over and was looking around, then he found me and said, "I was expecting a bunch of students, but this here is middle America. Who are all these people?" I said, "well, that's a Red Hat table, they sell support for servers. OpenSUSE is like Novell's SUSE and popular on desktops…" "But what does everyone here do?" "There are students, system administrators, developers, everything. That woman over there's a housewife." (That's when I pointed at Amber). He went and fetched a bag with information about SELF because he didn't have time to stay but wanted a way to be able to find people from here and find out about next year's.

Now one thing that impresses me is the sheer number of women here. Like I said in the last paragraph, there are about 400 people here. OLF had 1200. There have to be 3x the number of women here as were at OLF. I asked how they managed this. I was told they didn't consciously try to get female attendees, but they think the fact that they asked a lot of women to speak early on resulted in those women (even the ones who aren't speaking here) promoting it in their arenas. For example, Rikki Kite was asked to speak. Though she's not here, she promoted it. She's on LinuxChix Live, so plenty of women would've seen her blog about it. OLF is having a "Diversity in Open Source Day" on Sunday, so I really hope we'll be seeing more diversity this year.

In the tradition of the FAQs I did the last few releases...

1. Where can I get the Jaunty torrent?
   • Ubuntu Tutorials has compiled a list of all of them together.
2. Why should I use a torrent?
   • It takes a load off of the servers so you'll get your ISO faster
3. Anything Kubuntu users should know?
   • If you upgrade or use the DVD, you'll get PulseAudio. Don't worry, just sudo aptitude purge pulseaudio if you don't want it. I use it with Kubuntu because I've got Ubuntu too, and PulseAudio can do neat things, but anyway…
   • Quassel is the new default IRC client
   • Amarok 2 doesn't do CDs, iPod Touch, or iPhone
4. I don't like these new black bubbles. How do I get rid of them?
   • Install sudo aptitude install gnome-stracciatella-session (or click on the package name). Log out, and on GDM, open the Options menu and go to Session (menu names may vary by theme) choose the Stracciatella option instead of just choosing GNOME. Log back in.
5. What happened to the little orange update notifier icon?
   • The update manager window will open on its own within a day of when security updates become available. As for regular updates, the update manager will open a week after the last time you updated.
   • If you want the old way back, run this: gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
6. How do I re-enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?
   • Check out Alberto Milone's instructions
7. Anything I can experiment with?
   • If you've got Intel graphics, there's a disabled-by-default acceleration method called UXA that uses DRI2. I think this means it's supposed to be all whiz-bang like higher-end graphics cards. It certainly gives me smoother animations. Warning: it's disabled by default because there are some graphics cards that misbehave horribly when it's enabled. For example, with i965, X will crash if you suspend while compositing is enabled and you're using UXA. The workaround would be to drop out of Compiz to Metacity or disabled Kwin's compositing before suspending. Instructions and card-specific warnings are on the wiki. By the way, if you have a totally blank xorg.conf and can't figure out how to fill it out, run sudo dexconf -o /etc/X11/xorg.conf
8. What changed in PulseAudio?
   • It's now using autospawn, which means that if it crashes at some point, you're not left with silence. It'll start back up next time you try to play music or listen to a podcast or whatever it is you're doing that requires sound.
9. How do I get rid of PulseAudio?
   • This has changed, since it's using autospawn. You need to disable that by editing /etc/pulse/client.conf and changing "autospawn = yes" on line 26 to "autospawn = no". Additionally, if this is a clean install, not an upgrade, you'll need to add your user to the audio group with sudo adduser USER audio replacing USER with your username.
10. Where are the release notes?
    • Glad you asked! Release notes are right here This blog post is just the highlights of things I see asked a lot.

I can't think of anything else. If you've got another question to add, post it in the comments.

I'm also pleased to say that the Intel 965 wireless and graphics are working extremely well in Jaunty. Yay! My computer's happy. X doesn't lock, VT switching works, no more kernel panics (I attribute the panics I had to Intel 965 wireless since my brother and I have matching laptops, except for that wireless card, and his doesn't crash, and mine did). So, thank you to the people who work on making Intel drivers be lovely.

Valerie Aurora over at Red Hat has just posted on her blog about ext3 and ext4 and fsync() issues we've all heard so much about. As she says there, rename in ext4 now implies fsync() so that issue should calm down.

However, 2.6.30 is defaulting to data=writeback, which means it only writes the metadata to the journal—not the actual data. This is how XFS, ReiserFS, and a few others work, and it's much faster than ext3's default data=ordered. It's also somewhat less awesome at ensuring your data doesn't get lost. She's asking that people test patches (linked from her blog) for a new journal mode called "guarded" (created by Chris Mason) which she says will be faster than "ordered" but still have its data consistency guarantees.

So on actual Ada Lovelace Day, I was a little :( at being the only person on Planet Ubuntu that blogged for it. Plenty on Planet Ubuntu Women, but Planet Ubuntu was empty. And none of the guys involved posted anything.

But yay! They were just a little late. James Westby and Matt Zimmerman both joined in. Matt wrote about his mom, which I thought was pretty cool. And Miia Ranta joined in as well.

I did just realize that there are two women I should have given a little shout-out.

One is Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of ZaReason, the company that made my computer. She's a hardware geek, so it's only natural, right? She said they're considering expanding into the "make their own components" direction so they won't be constrained by what barebones brands offer. Neat! They sell t-shirts too. There used to be Little LinuxChick shirts, but now there's this cute one that says "friends help friends use Linux" with a silhouette of two teenage girls on laptops. Also, she's raising a few FOSS munchkins. Her 5 year old installed Ubuntu (the 7 year old helped by reading the words for her) to prove the neighbor wrong about Linux being hard to install. And the 7 year old is already programming. I think the fact that there's a photo of him on Flickr using 3 laptops titled "Mom, what's the kernel? Where is it? Can I mess with it? Why not? Just tell me where it is so I can play?" is hilarious and wonderful. She's obviously a great influence on her kids.

The other is Amber Graner, the "average user mom" who's been blogging her adventures learning to use Ubuntu (and trying Fedora and OpenSUSE), and making everyone go "oh…oh yeah…I guess we could make that easier…that's a good point…." She's providing great constructive feedback, and she's just so excited to learn. I ♥ people that love to learn. I hope her love of learning is something her kids pick up. In my mind, she's the perfect person to have promoting Ubuntu (which she does!) because she proves that anyone that's willing to give learning an honest try can use it—it's not a geek OS.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, named for the world's first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. It's interesting to me that while the first programmer was a woman, and all of the ENIAC programmers were women, there are so many more men than women in technology fields nowadays. Ada Lovelace Day is a day to highlight women who rock in the tech world. Since here in FOSS-land, the FLOSSPOLS survey reports that only 2% of developers are women, compared to 28% in the commercial sector, I decided to write about a Linux kernel hacker: Valerie Aurora.

By default, Ubuntu uses the "relatime" mount option. It decreases the number of metadata writes on ext3. It turns out, Valerie created relatime because one of our friends discovered that Mutt couldn't tell which mailboxes had new mail when using noatime.

I think she really loves (or hates?) fsck. I can't tell which. She's responsible for some patches that shorten the amount of time needed to fsck an ext2 partition, along one that gets a 50% improvement on RAID 5 systems with ext3 and ext4. She also worked on a new filesystem architecture called ChunkFS. The goal of ChunkFS is to deal with the fact that as hard drives get bigger, fsck times get longer. She wants to be able to fsck smaller parts of the filesystem at different times, to avoid day-long fscks in the future. The white paper is interesting. And yes, she wrote a working prototype. Oh, and you know ZFS? The filesystem from Sun? She worked on that too, back during the architecture phase.

It's not all filesystems though. She's got patches in libc to make malloc() more efficient. She worked on the TCP/IP stack. She was the maintainer for SMP PowerPC support in Linux. Device drivers? Done that too. She's done it all.

She's not keeping that knowledge locked up though. Not by a long stretch. She's spent countless hours mentoring. She taught Linux kernel development classes at IBM, and she was even kind enough to teach kernel hacking classes for LinuxChix (on the old site). One time, she held a real-time kernel development Q&A; session on the LinuxChix IRC server. She also used to writes "Kernel Hackers' Bookshelf" for Linux Weekly News

Valerie was one of the first people I met in LinuxChix. Immediate first impression? Wow, she's smart. Second impression? Don't mess with her. She's tough. You may have seen her HowTo Encourage Women in Linux write-up. If not, check it out. Possibly, you said something that offended someone and were directed to it. If that did happen, I hope you read it. It's the link everyone uses for those situations.

Valerie Anita Aurora was once known as Val Henson, but she recently changed her name. She chose the middle name "Anita" after Anita Borg, a computer scientist that strove to encourage women in technology fields. Pretty cool name change, eh? Just bringing this up in case "wait, that sounds like Val Henson..." was on your mind.

Seriously, they're not. At least, I don't think they are anymore. They used to scare the crap out of me.

The first time I joined the #ubuntu-devel channel (slightly under a year ago) and said "hi, um, I have a patch. What do I do?" I was all scared. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock) popped up and offered to make it into a debdiff since I said I didn't know anything about packaging. The patch ended up not being usable because um, oops, memory leak. Wait, what? No teasing about making a newbie mistake like that? And I actually got credit in the changelog for figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it? Wow. Hmm, helpful people, not arrogant about what they know that I don't? Maybe being developers doesn't have to automatically make them scary. Maybe.

Soon after that I became friends with Jordan and with Daniel Chen, who lives nearby. Daniel showed up to our LoCo's Gutsy and Hardy installfests, and at the Hardy one I convinced him to start mentoring me on how audio works. They're both nice guys, just know that mentioning brokenness in QA to Jordan or in audio to Daniel will very likely result in a long, drawn-out analysis of the situation. You've been warned.

OK so at that point, those two stopped being scary, and the rest stayed frightening. Skip to last October, when I went to the Ohio Linux Fest (be there! we're having a Women in Open Source event on Sunday, so let's get that female:male ratio up, alright?). Wow, a whole bunch of Ubuntu and Kubuntu folks showed up. Rich Johnson, Jorge Castro, Jono Bacon, Greg Grossmeier, Steve Stalcup, Jacob Peddicord, and more that I forget. Guess what? It turns out they're all really nice people too! Well, Rich has his moments. Better without the beer...or tequila. Oh, and don't drunkenly moon Jono unless you want to relive the experience, sober, in front of 1200 people. Moving on…

So I think by that point I was probably subscribed to ubuntu-devel-discuss. That's a mailing list I recommend you join if you want to contribute. That's where discussion between users and developers happens. If you've got an idea and want to flesh it out enough to put up on Brainstorm, or are taking a Brainstorm idea and trying to figure out the technical details to write a specification, get opinions on how possible it sounds, etc. go there. It's a more relaxed atmosphere than either the ubuntu-devel mailing list or #ubuntu-devel. It tries to bridge the gap Amber noted in her 'Community v. "Community"' post.

About a month ago, I started setting my IRC client to join #ubuntu-devel by default, and I subscribed to the ubuntu-devel mailing list. On the mailing list, I'm much more talkative than on the IRC channel. It's more discussion-oriented than the channel, it seems. The channel seems to be more full of terse "<Y>X: did you upload $package? <X>Y: no, not yet, writing changelog now" sort of stuff. At that point, I still felt like ducking behind a couch every time I spoke in there, in case anyone cyber-threw something at my head. I don't feel like that anymore. Just lurking and seeing how interaction works there has made it less scary. It's not that they're trying to be scary. They're just trying to be somewhat professional. Sometimes I'll look into the channel and see someone make a joke. And every morning, without fail, Daniel Holbach says "good morning" to the channel when he wakes up. And then it's a reminder that "oh yeah, they're normal people too."

Oh, I also started joining #ubuntu-women and #kubuntu-devel around that time. Lydia is a KDE developer that's almost always in #u-w. She's really nice and helpful. And of course, everybody (except IRC spammers) loves Sarah Hobbs, AKA Hobbsee. I know, it's sad that I can't think of other women developers. Where are you, ladies? Why aren't you in #ubuntu-women? Women who aren't involved: why not? We in #ubuntu-women will show you how. Why do you think that channel exists?

Why am I writing this? Well, the point is: the Ubuntu Developers aren't scary people. They're actually really nice people. So if you're intimidated by the prospect of speaking up in development related areas when you've just started out and can't point to a list of things you've done, remember: they're not scary, they're unfamiliar. There's a difference. The image of developers being way up high, far from users, knowing how everything works, and not making mistakes? All in your head. Why do you think there are so many bugs? ;) Please don't be afraid to help out because you think you're not good enough. You'll learn. Everybody involved totally sucked at this stuff at one point.

Oh, and Daniel Holbach and Scott Kitterman both agreed that when they started out, they also found the whole thing intimidating. To lower the intimidation level, read on: Scott doesn't know C. Neither does Jordan. Daniel says pointers are his weakness. Mine too—especially when passing them into functions. I put in one & and get a *? Or do I put in a ** and get a *? What if the function declaration wants a **? And like I said, my first patch attempt in Ubuntu had a memory leak (Steve Langasek caught it, it didn't get to the archive, don't worry). And that doesn't make everybody go "you can't code, go away" when I try now.