Ubuntu Studio 16.04 Released

This is a few days late now, but I wanted to send out the message that a new version of Ubuntu Studio was released last Thursday 21st April 2016. Even though I have helped out a bit with some previous releases, this is the first release that I have REALLY been involved in. And I am very proud of the results, and what the Ubuntu Studio Team have achieved.

More details about the release and how to download it can be found here.

London – April 2016

Last weekend, we took a long weekend in London. I did a work trip in Hitchin on the Friday whilst Antje and Alexander did some site seeing. I caught up with Pat McFadden and John Alexander (old colleagues/friends) at the Fullers pub at Kings Cross. It was great to reminisce and find out what all my other old colleagues were up to as well.

The next day, we all visited the Harry Potter tourist spot at Kings Cross Station and bought Alexander a magic wand. We also went to Paddington Station to visit Paddington Bear.

It was also nice to have a good old curry and a pub Sunday Roast Lunch. The Sunday lunch was also great because it involved catching up with my old friends Andrew and Kath. We worked out that it had been more than 10 years since we last had a beer together. It will not be that long before the next one (I hope)!

Scooter ramps in Fælledparken

A few weeks back, Alexander and I took his scooter to Fælledparken to try out the scooter ramp they have there now. It was great fun, and we could see from the other older kids that there many tricks to learn!

My Debian contributions – March 2016

Due to  a lot of work in Ubuntu in the run up to the 1604 release, I have not been so busy in Debian this last month. But there was a bit:

• Packaged node-json-localizer. Sponsored by Thorsten Alteholz
• Adopted mudita24. First upload sponsored by IOhannes m zmölnig
• Ported python-laditools to python-enum34 from python-enum and became an uploader within the Debian Multimedia Team. Sponsored by James Cowgill.
• Uploaded a couple of new abcmidi releases.
• Uploaded a new node-convert-source-map release.
• Uploaded a new node-cross-spawn-async release.

My contributions to Ubuntu – March 2016

In preparation for the Ubuntu Studio 1604 (Xenial) release coming up in April, I was very busy testing ISO images (1st Beta and Final Beta), confirming the bugs picked up by the testers, and trying my best to get them fixed.

Here is a run-down:

• Imagemagick – There were two bugs to do with the Ubuntu Studio menu. Firstly, there were two entries for Imagemagick in the menu, and only one of them had the icon displayed. Secondly, none of the options actually worked. After selecting them, nothing happened. I discovered upstream in Debian, that the issue of the two icons was known about, and had actually been fixed by completely restructuring the imagemagick binary packages in the version uploaded to Debian Experimental. As the maintainer stated that the experimental version is not yet ready for mainstream, we could not sync this version to Ubuntu. In addition, there was no fix to the issue that nothing happened when selecting the menu item anyway. I prepared a fix which disabled the 2nd desktop file, and set “Terminal=True” in the other desktop file. I had to re-base this patch several times on top of other fixes for Imagemagick that went through. Unfortunately, the patch has not been sponsored yet, and will not be in the Xenial release. I will have to try and get it included in a SRU after the release. At least I managed to remove the duplicate menu item in our ubuntustudio-menu package, and this was uploaded by Kaj Ailomaa.
• Qjackctl – I continued with Len Ovens and Dmitry Shachnev to work on a problem when the option to use Qjackctl from the system tray resulted in the icon not being shown, then menu not working, and if the option to “minimise to the system tray” was chosen, everything would freeze until Qjackctl was killed. Installing appmenu-qt5 made the icon appear, but it was not animated, and the menu was blank. I forwarded information from Dmitry upstream to Qjackctl.
• Gladish – Gladish had been removed from the Ubuntu Studio seeds earlier because of an unresolvable conflict between the python-enum package and python-enum34. Python-laditools required python-enum, but other packages required python-enum34. Eventually, I managed to work out that it was simple to port python-laditools to enum34, got it uploaded into Debian (thanks James Cowgill), got it synced to Ubuntu (thanks Artur Rona), and placed Gladish back on the Ubuntu Studio seeds.
• Ubuntustudio-look – I discovered that I had made a mistake when merging in some changes to the plymouth-theme-ubuntustudio package by Didier Roche, and the icons for the animated splash screen had got left in their old directory. So we weren’t seeing the lovely animation when installing and starting Ubuntu Studio. This was repaired over several uploads by Kaj Ailomaa (thanks for Krytarik Raido for identifying my errors).

After encouragement from the Ubuntu Community Council to apply to become an Ubuntu Member (during the regular IRC meeting to check-up on Ubuntu Studio), I updated my Ubuntu wiki page and asked my Ubuntu Studio team members to endorse my page. After the 1604 release, I will follow through on this and apply.