LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT 2.0 Support in Debian/Ubuntu

A LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT 2.0 recently arrived at our house. Of course it only comes with proprietary support for Windows/Mac, so I set out to see what FOSS support for the hardware I could find.

I found nxt-python. It wasn’t packaged, so I packaged it up and uploaded to Debian (from whence it came to Ubuntu). It’s now in for the next release of both distributions (Wheezy/Precise).

This is a bit different than the provided software (which compiles code, downloads it to the NXT, and then runs it untethered). For nxt-python the nxt needs to be connected to your computer via USB or bluetooth. It’s a lot of fun and it’s given me a chance to introduced our youngest child to the idea that there’s more to computers than point and click.

Currently user level access to the device doesn’t work, it has to be accessed by root. Fixing that is on my TODO.

I hope someone else out there has an NXT and enjoys this too.

UPDATE: Added a udev rule and uploaded again, so anyone in plugdev can access the NXT brick.

Using Kontact/Kmail Again

I’ve used Kontact or it’s email client component, Kmail, as my main mail client since, I think, 2005.

That was until I upgraded my main laptop to 11.10 with KDE 4.7 (and Kmail2). I tried, but I just couldn’t get it to work (I know it worked for some, just not for me). In Kubuntu we even tracked kdepim (the KDE component where Kmail lives) updates and when 11.10 was released it was at a post-4.7.2 snapshot when the rest of the KDE SC was still 4.7.1.

It wasn’t enough for me. I was stuck in Thunderbird (which is not a bad mail client, just not the one for me) until last week when KDE SC 4.7.3 and Soprano 2.7.2 made it into oneiric-proposed for testing and I upgraded that same laptop. It still took a bit of fiddling to get everything working, but it’s usable for me now.

These same updates were copied to oneiric-updates in the last day, so they are available for everyone now.

We are also testing KDE SC 4.7.4. For now it can be installed from the . Please give is a test and see how it goes. It should be even better.

Notifications in iOS5

I just ran across this review of IOS5 and was struck by this bit:

Notifications: iOS 5 includes the new notification center. It works just as well on the iPad as it does on the iPhone. I have found, however, that it needs some fine-tuning to balance the right amount of information with the least amount of interruption.

With the old system, incoming notifications (push alerts from apps, messages, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) popped up on the screen and required the user to dismiss them before returning to their task. In order words, they were a total and complete annoyance.

With the new system, messages can be set up to arrive in a number of different ways–including not at all. If and when they do arrive, they appear at the top of the screen in a tiny little bar. If you want to access that message right away, swipe it to the left and you’ll be zipped into that app. If you just ignore it, it fades away. You don’t have to do anything to dismiss it, and it doesn’t interrupt what you’re doing. Thank GOD!!!

Interesting.

KDE 4.0 for Kmail: Kmail2/Akonadi in 11.10

This will be Kubuntu’s first release with the new Kmail2 that uses Akonadi to store all your mail related data (and more) in a database. It is slow, unreliable, and extremely resource hungry. It can be made to work, but the situation is not good. My advice is to be careful about upgrading and test things in a VM/on a spare computer before upgrading to 11.10 if Kmail is important to you.

I put a lot of effort into making sure we had every upstream bugfix available for Akonadi and the KDEPIM related packages, so I think this is as good as it gets for now. Hopefully it’ll be better in KDE SC 4.7.3 and 4.8. In the meantime, please make sure to give feedback to bugs.kde.org.

Personally, I’m caught because hardware support for my laptop is much better on 11.10. I’m thinking I’ll probably go with a 10.04 vm just for kmail and do my best to ignore kmail2 for now. Good luck.

Update: Improved the title.

python2.7 default python in wheezy

python | 2.7.2-7 | wheezy | all
python | 2.7.2-7 | sid | all

This took a lot of work from a lot of people. Thank you everyone.

Fortunately there won’t be a python2.8, so we don’t have to do this again.

kde4libs | 4:4.6.5-0ubuntu1 | natty-updates | source

As of today, KDE SC 4.6.5 is in natty-updates for all users. This brings 11.04 up to date with the final KDE SC 4.6 update produced by KDE plus some additional high priority fixes. This is the third time in a row we’ve done this:

kde4libs | 4:4.4.5-0ubuntu1.1 | lucid-updates | source
kde4libs | 4:4.5.5-0ubuntu2 | maverick-updates | source
kde4libs | 4:4.6.5-0ubuntu1 | natty-updates | source

Enjoy the bug fixing goodness.

This just in … Bazillions of apps not the key to success

One of the ideas that has had currency in Canonical (perhaps in other parts of the Ubuntu community too, I’m not sure) is that getting more applications available to Ubuntu users will be a critical part of getting Ubuntu into mass use. This was well presented by mpt at UDS-N in this presentation (starts about 2:49).

Personally, I think this is the wrong focus. I think it’s critical that things people use every day are brilliant and reliable. My daughter’s number one issue on Kubuntu (our Ubuntu flavor of choice) is random X (actually Intel driver related) crashes. Until the core parts of Ubuntu (platform and high use applications) are rock solid and interoperable with their proprietary counterparts (yes LibreOffice/OOo, I’m looking at you), 23 different solitaire apps, of which 21 are “not very good”, just don’t matter.

So I was pleased to see today a new study that seems to support this view.

Sometimes the system works …

If you look at the Ubuntu Philosophy, one of the things it says is:

We believe that every computer user … should be able to use their software in the language of their choice.

Although things like a project philosophy are usually pretty abstract, sometimes they can make it easy to figure out the right thing to do.

Earlier today, Ahmed El-Mahmoudy came on the #ubuntu-motu IRC channel and asked about if it would be too late to include a fix for Bug 757540 in Natty. As a member of the Ubuntu Release Team, I decided to look into it.

The reporter of the bug, Burkut, is a Uyghur translator for Ubuntu. In order to fix a long standing problem with Uyghur text not rendering properly in Ubuntu, he had contacted the upstream for the relevant font and asked them about extending it to support Uyghur.

This was done in a new release that just came out yesterday.

In short order, Burkut reported the bug, Ahmed El-Mahmoudy packaged the updated font and asked for Ubuntu Release Team review, as part of that review, Burkut tested the new package and gave us test results, I approved the Feature Freeze exception, and Dustin Kirkland sponsored the upload.

Usually we don’t like to update package versions close to release, but given:

We believe that every computer user … should be able to use their software in the language of their choice.

it really seemed like the right thing to do. Thanks to everyone invovled.

If you don’t know about the Uyghur people, Wikipedia, as usual, has something about them.

Lept. Looks pretty good.

About this time in the Maverick development cycle I posted Look before you leap – Kubuntu Maverick (for the record, things were significantly improved by the time Maverick was released, but not great). I’ve been running my netbook on Natty since Alpha 2 and just upgraded my main laptop today. Natty looks pretty good so far. My Kubuntu systems feel faster and I’m so far not seeing any of the stability/performance problems or odd display effects that still trouble my systems on Maverick.

Much improved all the way around. I still recommend looking before you leap (try the system out with a live image to make sure it’s working well), but I’m much more optimistic at this stage of the release cycle than I was last time.

DNS and Python

If you’ve ever needed to care about DNS and Python, you probably know about pydns (python-dns) and dnspython (python-dnspython). Both have been around a long time (dnspython hit 1.0 in 2003 and the origins of pydns are long enough ago that they are lost to the mists of time – I think dnslib.py, from which it is derived was initially developed with Python 1.5). They each have their advantages.
Until recently, if you needed DNS functionality and you’re interested in Python 3, you were out of luck. Last month I had some business travel with long airplane rides that I put to good use and I ported pydns to Python 3. Upstream took the changes and released it as py3dns, so now you have a Python 3 DNS option. Packages are available in Debian Wheezy/Unstable and in Ubuntu Natty as python3-dns. It passes all the tests (better than the existing pydns), but I know test coverage is incomplete, so take it for a spin and let me know if there are problems. The code isn’t pretty (it’s set of minimal changes to get to a working Python 3 port), but it seems to work OK.