We did found a bit artificial to have a cadence. We were suppose to put out a release every two weeks but we end up doing it as often as we could (or made sense), as we were not in control of when the new software was landing in our plate.

Since then, I’ve this nagging thought that Scrum might not be appropriated to service teams or teams with a large portion of maintenance/customer support work. I have found iterations shorter than 2 weeks, can be over burden by the demo, planning and sizing overheads. In the other hand, two weeks is too much time for teams with Service Level Agreements of days or hours. It also seems a bit cumbersome for short project (~1 month), were you end up with 2 or 1 iterations… What to do!?

In Canonical several teams have used Kanban in order to improve their development processes, so I started reading up on it when I stumbled on this excellent article on Kanban vs Scrum.

The author won me over straight away by not trying to decide which of the two practices is best but instead doing a great job at remaining impartial.

Looking back at the Symbian Foundation’s integration team it seems that Kanban would have been better suited. It retains the focus on making information visible while concentrating on reducing WIP.  It seems better suited to a “specialist” team, where most members share the same skills and work on similar tasks. Scrum seems to work better for cross-discipline project teams.

Also, the emphasis on managing constant flow of work is one that resonates with teams that have a work “currency” measured in days of effort (bugs?) rather in large projects lasting months at the time.

While Scrum has been very successfully adopted by the Certification team at Canonical, My previous experience with the Integration team had stopped me from cheering on Scrum in teams that have a constant flow of work. Now, we are thinking on going Kanban! Don’t get me wrong, we are going to continue using Scrum. It is just a case of using the right tool for each job. I will keep you posted on how it goes.

If you have any advice, tips or gotchas that you could share with us, I would be most grateful if you could drop your comments here!

Time to try something new (by theonlyanla)

As part of the Certification website, we provide a feedback mechanism through Launchpad Answers. Over the last year, we have seen a trend of questions around:

• Most models are sold with different graphics cards , processors… so which one is the one listed as certified?
• Does the system listed as certified works with a version of Ubuntu that I can download from Ubuntu.com? Or only with the one that the manufacturer sales?
• What release is this model certified for?

To address these questions, we have introduced some changes to the website. We now display what components are included on the certified system in the search results. We’ve also added a icon to indicate if the system is only certified with a vendor image or with the standard Ubuntu image.

The new and simpler search interface eliminates confusion on what data is presented. A small filter box has been added to the website allowing  users to select the device type, Ubuntu release and image type that they are interested in.

If you have any comments on the new website design, I would really like to hear from you!

The Ubuntu community is great. It provides users and developers with lots and lots of useful information. This means that sometimes finding the right informationfor you can take a bit longer than expected.

The odm.ubuntu.com portal content is a selection of the best articles in the Ubuntu community sites that are relevant to device manufacturers (OEM and ODMs) engineers. The content has been selected by the Canonical Hardware Enablement team and builds on the good work of the Ubuntu Kernel team.

We will continue to add and improve the content of the portal over the coming months, including news on tools and techniques to help you better integrate Ubuntu with your hardware. Please let us know if there is specific content you would like to see there.

On top of that I am growing frustrated with my DVR. Last week the new series of “The Mentalist” was broadcasted in the UK. I did set the record in advance but somehow it clashed and did not get recorded. Even with the missed show only one-click away, in the TV channel’s website, it turns out that my only options were to wait for a repeat on TV in 4 days or go upstairs and watch it in the office desktop. Why is it so complicated!?

All of this frustration got me thinking and I have come up to some conclusions of what the future of my home computing is going to look like.

Centralised Content &  Specialised Consumption Devices

So it turns out that I am not going to give up my E-Ink screen for reading books. Why? Because it doesn’t hurt my eyes like an  tablet screen does. Neither I am going to convince my son that watching Peppa Pig in the iPad is not any better than watching it on TV. Why? Dunno, he isn’t talking yet.

The future for me looks like it is going to involve a lot of different devices, and I am fine with that as long as:

1. I don’t have to charge them too often – once a month would about right,
2. They are flexible and powerful enough to get them to do what I need them to do when I need it done,
3. I can get all my content in all of them!

The good news is that the technology to allow all of this to happen is already being designed. Point number 3, is the easy one! you just need an Ubuntu One account. Point 1&2, I have considered them incompatible for a long time, until I heard about big.LITTLE.

big.LITTLE is going to be BIG

How do you make a low powered device that gives you plenty of battery life, yet is capable of processing complex tasks? ARM seems to have a pretty good answer: big.LITTLE.

Big.LITTLE is a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that pairs up to four top notch dual-core A15 processors with four very low powered  dual-core A7 processors. The beauty is that they have very similar feature-set and architecture. ARM expects to be able to switch between them depending on the tasks asked to performed without the operating systems noticing the difference.

In a nutshell, it’s like being able to choose between a Prius or a Ferrari engine without having to change cars! Just choose the one that suits your needs better for today’s journey.

This is one of the technologies that is going to ignite the next personal computing revolution. I’ll tell you all about the other ones soon

Since Microsoft talked about their plans for Secure Boot at /Build2011, there has been lots of things said on the matter. With more than 16,000 people signing the Free Software Foundation statement on “Secure Boot vs Restricted Boot”, it is clear that this is an issue that needed some attention.

It is great to see companies like Red Hat and Canonical getting together, and coming up with recommendations that benefit the whole industry. The paper is well worth the read, Enjoy!

Padlocks of love by Wlodi

]]> http://victorpalau.net/2011/10/28/red-hat-and-canonical-agree-on-secure-boot/feed/ 0 Victor Palau Padlocks of love by Wlodi http://victorpalau.net/2011/10/18/ubuntu-11-10-on-arm/ http://victorpalau.net/2011/10/18/ubuntu-11-10-on-arm/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:52:00 +0000 Victor Palau http://victorpalau.net/?p=1259 ]]> I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM now for a couple of days and I have to say: It Rocks! Ubuntu has had a long history of supporting ARM Systems on a Chip (SoC) since 2008, but Ubuntu 11.10 is a significant milestone.

Introducing.. Ubuntu Server on ARM – Technology Preview

Canonical announced back in August that Ubuntu Server 11.10 would include the first ARM version of the product, and here it is. While this is just the first step on an exciting journey, it is worth to celebrate that the voyage has started. I look forward to see what 12.04 LTS brings us on this space!

Playing with Ubuntu on ARM (Toshiba AC100)

It is hard to really grasp the full experience of Ubuntu on

ARM when you are playing with a development board. For this reason, we have released a demo image for the Tegra2-based (Nvidia) Toshiba AC100.

Running Unity 2D, it shows off  that Ubuntu on ARM is a great platform for computing, in a very compact design and with a very long battery life. For all these reasons, this is my system of choice to take to UDS-P.

If you have a Toshiba AC100, I encourage you to install Ubuntu 11.10 in it!

TI OMAP4 Panda Board

Powered by the Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processor, the Panda Board packs in “a dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU, a PowerVR SGX540 GPU, a C64x DSP, and 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM“.  Providing an affordable and competitive design tool for the embedded mobile space.

Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM is available in Headless and full image for Panda. You can find download links and installation instructions here. You can also find there Ubuntu 11.10 for OMAP3 (Beagle Board).

Freescale IMX53 QuickStart Board

The IMX53 Family is oriented towards automotive solutions. Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM is the first release of Ubuntu to provide support for the IMX53 QuickStart Board. You can find download links and installation instructions here.

Linaro and Ubuntu

Both the TI OMAP4 and Freescale images are based on the Linaro outputs for those SoCs. This has greatly our capacity to support ARM development boards.

Android has managed to make the phone industry boring. All the phones look the same, they run the same apps, they run the same services..YAWN! Do you feel the same way? The problem to me is that 1-2 years ago a phone was the only tech item that you really needed to access all services and do anything you could possibly want.

Since then, thanks to tablets and e-readers amongst other the phone is no longer the ultimate convergence device. I am back to carrying multiple gadgets and a never-ending battery charging nightmare. Can someone invent the evolution on computing devices? please..

So, this week Apple is launching the Iphone 5 – will see…

The Ubuntu Friendly program is now on its test phase. One think that we could really do with is some more real user data to test website views. The Ubuntu Friendly feeds from test submissions from Launchpad.

So what do I need to do?

You need to run the recently improved System Test tool. This tool is in the default Oneiric image and the run-time has been reduced to under 15 minutes (disclaimer: this depends on how powerful is your system!)

If you are not sure how to find this tool, just go to the Unity Search lens and type “System Testing” and click in the icon that looks like a computer screen with a tick mark.

Just follow the instructions and, if you don’t mind, ping me a comment back on this post with how long it took you to run it and any other feedback you might have!

Go on, it is Friday don’t you know…