Canonical has an open Ubuntu Desktop QA Engineer position. If you like GNOME, have upstream experience and are ready to deal with bugs coming from enthusiastic users you might want to consider applying for the job ;)

That's an Ubuntu Desktop Team call for contributors! The team has some rocking contributors already and the feisty desktop is quite good, we are overworked for some time though and it's not easy to keep up with the work to do. The working ambiance is usually quite nice, so if you want to give it a try just join on IRC or the list ;)

The things you can do there:

• help triaging bugs: apport bugs are really nice, they are sent directly to launchpad though which highly increased the distribution bugs workload. Upstream might be interested by the retracing which gives automatic debug backtraces for the crashes.

• give an hand to merges desktop packages with Debian. The list of packages to look at is available on the wiki desktop TODO. Feel free to claim one if you want to work on it. If you have any question or need a sponsor to review and upload your work you can join #ubuntu-desktop on the freenode IRC or the ubuntu-desktop list

• maintain a desktop package. There is quite some packages that could use a dedicaced maintainer or team. The usual work is to merge changes with Debian, send them patches they could be interested in, up to new versions and look at bugs.

• work at packaging new cool things which are not available to Ubuntu yet

• create new teams to work on a group of packages. Daniel recently announced a ubuntu-gnomemm team that some people have already joined, applying that to other domain like the voip (ekiga) could be nice

• update the wiki to make it easier to contribute, list cool ideas we can work on for gusty, etc

This week has been really an amazing one for Ubuntu and GNOME!

• Ubuntu 7.04 is available since yesterday. Edgy was rough on the edges due to the short cycle after dapper, feisty is ROCKING!

  What is new with this version (Ubuntu 7.04 tour)?

  - The installer has now a Windows migration tool

  - GNOME 2.18.1 is available on the desktop and it's a pretty good milestone, congrats to the whole GNOME community for the awesome work

  - Network-manager is now part of the default installation

  - Compiz is available on the CD, you just have to use the desktop effects menu item to try it

  - Easy installation of multimedia codecs

  - Easier install of proprietary drivers

  - The new bug reporting tool apport makes trivial to retrace crash files to get debug backtraces. The bugsquad is doing a rocking work there but there is still lot of detailed bugs which could be useful upstream. If you are upstream you are welcome to subscribe to the package corresponding to your software on launchpad or have a look on bugs there. If you don't want to get distributions bug you can subscribe to the upstream product and you should get mail only when an upstream task is opened

  - And many other changes

• Other good news for Canonical, Ubuntu and GNOME, Canonical has joined the GNOME Foundation's advisory board and is a silver sponsor for the next GUADEC ;)

• Next week Ubuntu will have a new UbuntuOpenWeek with lot of interesting IRC sessions, feel free to join!

• Congrats also to everybody who worked to create the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative

The Ubuntu Desktop Team has started a serie of bugs cleanup days on desktop packages for feisty.

• What is that about?

  The desktop team picks a GNOME package and we work on it during the day to clean the list of bugs, note problems that would be nice to fix for feisty (the next Ubuntu version), run valgrind on applications, write patches and forward useful informations upstream.

• Where?

  Launchpad, the ubuntu-busquad and ubuntu-desktop mailing lists and #ubuntu-bugs and #ubuntu-desktop on IRC

• What's next?

  Tomorrow we will work on gnome-utils. We will send a summary mail about the package on the Ubuntu mailing lists and pick an another package and day for the next cleanup round

Having compiz rocking for feisty would be really nice. Since the previous version didn't work really fine on my desktop (ATI card) I've decided to update the feisty package to 0.3.4 (if you opened bugs on launchpad that would be nice to try to the new version and update them to mention if they are fixed or no) and to give it a new try.

The new version works pretty fine on my laptop (intel video card), not that fine with an ATI radeon 9600 card apparently: the window were not refreshed correctly (GTK widget all grey when opening a window and only displayed fine after resizing the window).

Yesterday gandalfn, who is doing some work around compiz packages for Ubuntu, suggested some xorg option to try to get compiz better.Using 'Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"' fixed that problem and now compiz is working correctly.

There is still some features lacking at the moment to make the switch to compiz easy. One problem is that it doesn't use the keybindings previously configured with GNOME capplet. Another one is how workspaces are working. The NEWS from compiz 0.3.4 mention "Support for multiple desktops (workspaces)". The desktop switcher applet still doesn't agree with compiz apparently (ctrl-alt-left or right don't change the workspace selected on the applet which is confusing). I know there is some libwnck patches available to make it work better with compiz, they add some API though, which means that if we use them and upstream decide to go a different way we will have to break the libwnck package ABI when switching to the upstream version which is not nice. Once those problems fixed compiz will probably be very nice to use ;)