Last friday, Ubuntu won the HME 2009 award for “Best open source operatingsystem”, voted number one by 6000+ readers of several dutch computer magazines. I went to Utrecht to pick up the award, together with another long-time Ubuntu NL contributor, Sebastian Schauenburg. Pictures of the event are not in yet, but here are some pictures [...]

Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” changes are now aggregated on http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/LucidChanges and on http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/UbuntuChanges
I also created http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/UbuntuStableChanges — aggregating changes in all released versions of ubuntu (UbuntuChanges includes the current development version as well)
Judging by the subscriber count these feeds are still useful :-)

I joined the Ubuntu community in 2004, shortly before the first version was released. Was co-founder of the dutch locoteam in that same year and became member in 2005. Since then I’ve been on many meetings of the community council, as a spectator and later as their secretary. I am currently part of the EMEA [...]

Perl 5 now uses git for version control. After using perforce for 10 years, the perl source is just that little bit more open for contributors. Everyone can now see and download the canonical revision controlled source for perl 5: http://perl5.git.perl.org.
My employer sponsors the machines behind it and the sysadmin time for me to maintain [...]

On the Ubuntu NL servers, we use puppet for centralized configuration management. Some would say it is overkill fpr only a few hosts but keeping systems consistent makes life easier. Here’s how we integrated the debian-style vhost management with puppet:
There’s a class called apache in modules/apache/init.pp, it defines which packages are needed for an apache [...]

While I’m blogging at 4:30 anyway, hete’s something new and useful

Jaunty changes feed: http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/JauntyChanges
All changes feeds combined: http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/UbuntuChanges

Enjoy!

Ubuntu NL has a new forum! Tonight I switched it from punbb to smf, solving a few encoding bugs on the go. The smf importscripts are not the fastet, importing 32000+ posts took over 90 minutes.

Last friday the mails Launchpad sends out for changes to Ubuntu packages changed. The changelog2rss script now knows about that and feeds are being generated again.

Yesterday was the first meeting of the Ubuntu EMEA membership board and I think it was a great success. We managed to process 13 membership applications,10 people were accepted as Ubuntu members. This is a huge improvement for prospective members who now do not have to wait for the Community Council to meet, but can [...]

Ubuntu-nl has outgrown its server. To reduce load on it, I’ve moved the USN and -changes feeds to feedburner. Here are the updated locations:

http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/UbuntuSecurityNotices
http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/DapperChanges
http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/EdgyChanges
http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/FeistyChanges
http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/GutsyChanges
http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/HardyChanges
http://feeds.ubuntu-nl.org/IntrepidChanges (still empty of course :))

Inspired by the latest launchpad news, here is a better version of launchpadduser.py. It does more sanity checking, can be used as a module and allows you to use a different name locally than on launchpad (eg sudo ./launchpadduser.py –launchpad-name kiko christian) Enjoy!
In related news: It’s now happened too often that I had to walk [...]

xs4all, the best ISP in the Netherlands, now offers free wifi at KPN hotspots to its members. This is excellent, since 3 stations I pass when traincoding now have wifi I can use, so I can use documentation when hacking and not look like an arse because I don’t read docs.
The latest quick hack didn’t [...]

Back in 2005, when Ubuntu was still young and #ubuntu small (less than 300 users), I became Ubuntu member and IRC operator. At the latest Ubuntu release the channel peaked at over 1600 and usually has more than 1200 users. It’s been fantastic to see this growth in #ubuntu and related channels.
In the past 3 [...]

Seeing no changes coming in in my rss reader, I realized that I forgot to create a changes feed for Hardy. That negligence has now been corrected
You can find it at the usual place: http://media.ubuntu-nl.org/rss/hardy.xml

The infamous ‘ubotu’ IRC bot is very important to the Ubuntu IRC team and the users of ubuntu-related channels on freenode. Since I administer the bot, it is my task to keep it running and check its status. However, being a lazy git, I’d rather not do too much to accomplish that, hence I let [...]