ArbCamp will be tomorrow night, in the upstairs of the downtown Cottage Inn’s, so this is kind of last minute, but I think it’ll be a very cool event. It’s an UnConference, and people will be self-organizing a variety of sessions, and the possibilities are endless.

Good thing they are both open source!!

If anybody wants to get together for lunch/dinner to talk about TurboGears, Python, or web development feel free to drop by the booth, and we’ll set a time and place. You can also leave a comment here, or e-mail me (my address is my first name at compoundthinking.com).

Over on Planet Turbogears, I found this comparison between two of my favorite things. Roland calls Turbogears “The Ubuntu of webframeworks =)” because both bring together existing components and add a little bit of their own special sause to create the best possible total user experience.

I love it!

There are a lot of people hacking on the Linux kernel all around the world. And while they mostly work on this or that sub-system, there are a lot of cross-cutting concerns. Not only that t there are any number of people working on cleaning up old kruft, so you’d expect that they would either need to be very well coordinated, or they would have a lot of patch related pain.

But they don’t!

This is the result of the widespread use of a distributed version control system, where every single linux developer can publish their own source tree, and cherry pick patches from anybody else’s source tree. This, when combined with a set of maintainers — who get patches, aprove them and put them in their own trees and then work with Linus to get them moved into the “official tree” — creates a remarkably effective system.

For people who want to transfer ideas from Toyota’s Product Development success into software development distributed revision control is an all important tool. But unless you let go of your fear of duplication of effort, you’ll never see the full value of Bazzar–NG.

The key to Set Based Development as practiced by Toyta and Honday is the ability to break down your product into different components, with various interfaces. Then you develop the various components concurrently, and work on several approaches to each of the components simultaneously. As you move forward toward product release, you have a series of integration events, where the interfaces between components are defined more and more concretely.

Other critical components for making set based development work are:

• clear documentation of the design decisions for the various approaches for each components — even those not used in the final product
• a single technical lead who can focusing the vision for the entire product when selecting from among the various alternatives

If you do set based development right, you will always have a safe bet, and you’ll almost always have one or two experimental pieces that turn out great — even if they don’t turn out to be a good fit for the specific product you are working on right now.

But this only works if you can leverage tools like Bazaar-NG to make sharing patch sets easy, and make branching and merging custom development trees painless. Of course, no tool is going to take away the need to document trade-off curves, or make good technical choices for you or your distribution team. But distributed version control tools should make it easier to have lots of choices, and easy to find the right ones for your project and fit them into your product.

IBM is the first out of the starting gate. They have certifies Unbunu Linux for use with DB2. This just validates my view that there is a compelling case for Ubuntu Linux in mainstream businesses.

Does this mean they Ubuntu will have to change it’s slogan to “Linux for Human Beings (and Large Multi-National Corporations)?

OK, so I just got out of a BOF session with Mark Shuttleworth and the LTSP guys. And there was a lot of good information in there, which is definitely worth sharing.

To start the session, Mark talked a bit about why he got interested in working with the LTSP guys, and why he thinks LTSP is important. The whole thing started as they thought about what is happening in the open source world that is unique and special, and one of the first things that came to mind was LTSP. Not only that, but it was important to one of Mark’s other projects which had to do with providing a cost effective way to supply computing infrastructure to Schools in South Africa.

Mark went on to say; “I think LTSP is a good solution for a whole host of problems, but it is starting where infrastructure and support costs are critical.” It seems that for Mark getting into the cost-critical sections of the market will provide great stories that drive the technology into other more change averse market segments.

Another critical piece for Mark is his agenda to unify the user experience across various technologies. “It works the same when it boots from USB, or from the Live CD, or from the hard drive, or from the network.” If we are going to see open source take off on the desktop users have to believe that they know what is going to happen, and that the same thing is going to happen every time; “Predictability and reliability are key.”

The Ubuntu team worked hard to make sure LTSP works with the same bits as the live CD, witch works with the same bits as the hard drive install, and that works the same as if you had booted off of a USB key or USB hard drive. They also worked hard to put out a proof of concept release edubuntu, which is great, but now the focus has to shift into making this easy to customize for individual educational needs.

I think Mark is exactly right on all of these points, and that the integration of LTSP into has produced something that is easier to manage, and it is only going to get cleaner and better over the coming year.

Matt Zimmerman, Oliver Grawert, and others have put a lot of work into integrating LTSP into Ubuntu, and creating a new flavor of Ubuntu called edubuntu. And this week Jim McQuillan, Oliver, and a bunch of other folks have cut the boot time of a Ubuntu LTSP in half, and come up with a bunch of other improvements.

And today the LTSP conference is officially getting started. Already even before the conference got started officially, there has been lots of cool stuff going on with local sound, support for local USB devices, an easy to use gui based network PXE boot manager, etc.

Jim says “By this time next year, Ubuntu will have touched more people with LTSP than we have up to this point.” So it looks like 2006 will be an even bigger year for LTSP than 2005 — and 2005 was a great year, with first ever distro integration, best in show at Linux World, and a lot of cool stuff.

OK, so this is the blog entry that I have been trying to write all week.

Over at Toyota and Honda they design cars with an interesting model which I’ll call the “Lean Product Development” model. This is model is very different from the traditional processed used in product design, and the studies show that Lean Product Development is significantly more productive that the traditional processes. In other words Toyota and Honda can design more cars with better quality per year than their traditional counterparts, and they do it with significantly smaller design teams.

But, what the heck does this have to do with Open Source development? Well, in several important ways the open source development methodology mirrors the Lean Product Development methodology. This relationship is a huge topic, and one I can’t claim to have understood fully or to be able to cover completely today.

So for today, I’ll focus on the idea of Set Based Development. Toyota designs some specifications for interfaces between components, and then they design multiple engines, multiple transmissions, multiple alternators, etc concurrently. Then they document the various trade-offs for each of the components, and they bring them together in a series of integration events, where they refine the interfaces, and eventually select the best engine from the pool for this particular model.

This has several advantages, Toyota can work on a revolutionary hybrid engine, with almost no risk, because should the hybrid engine not work or fail to meet the design goals of the car, there is always another choice.

So, this morning Martin Pool showed of bazaar-ng, which is important because it is an example of open source set based development, and because it is an great tool for doing set based development. About a year ago, Canonical decided that they would like to have better tools for distributed revision control. They then started two projects bazaar and bazaar-ng. Bazaar was a conservative project based on incementally improving the best available tool, and Bazaar-NG was research project to see what revolutionary improvements were possible.

This is what Ubuntu Linux does all day do all the time, they have various pre-release events, where all the various packages which might be in the distribution, and if some new package isn’t cutting it they can roll back to something more stable.

For example, it turns out Bazaar-NG is now faster than Bazaar, has a better interface, is easier to extend, and is generally better. So after a lot of testing, Canonical is switching entirely over to Bazaar-NG.

I’ll write more later about why bazaar, and distributed version control, is such an important for set based development.

Before NT 4 came out Microsoft was non-existent in the server market, then by the time Windows 2000 Server came out Microsoft was one of the largest players in the same market. We also know that NT 4 Server was unstable crap, so what happened? How did Microsoft make a huge dent in the server market with such a troubled product?

The most important of which is the fact that Microsoft already owned most of the desktop market. At the most basic level people would much rather not have to support two different operating systems.

This is something that is already happening in the Ubuntu world, just this morning I talked to someone who moved all his Red Hat and Debian servers to Ubuntu. He started with Ubuntu on his desktop, and loved it, and decided that it would be easier not to have to deal with all those differences.

Beyond that Microsoft made it pretty easy to integrate their desktop with their server. And sometimes they did some crazy possibly illegal stuff to make sure other server systems wouldn’t work as well with their desktops. This only worked because they had a monopoly on the desktop, and it was only possible because they weren’t particularly interested in taking the moral high ground.

Of course Ubuntu has neither the monopoly or the slippery moral stance of Microsoft. So, Ubuntu is taking the exact opposite approach on this front, the server should just work, and it should just work with as many client OS’s as possible.

Well, there’s a lot going on here in Montreal. I’ve been attending most of the Ubuntu Server related BOF (Birds of a Feather) sessions. There seems to be a lot of attention being paid to making Ubuntu an even better server platform.

Ubuntu Server already today has a lot going for it. It has a very stable debian heritage, along with the ability to push out new server packages more quickly than debian.

I have been using Ubuntu on a couple of non-critical servers since last November, and I have had no complaints. And there was some movement toward server support for both Warty and Breezy, but this looks like the largest push so far.

Of course the Ubuntu team is planning on having stable packages of server software that they will able to support for five years. They also want to have these packages work “out of the box” as much as possible. Not only that there are plans to:

• have community testing of server hardware,
• work out a program with vendors to certify their hardware against Dapper Drake
• improving the debian-installer recovery mode with lots of shiny new coolness
• create integrated SSL support for all the applications require it
• include stuff necessary to support vendor server tools for configuration and remote management

There is more going on, but much of it is still not in any kind of determined state. But it is good to see all this forward momentum for Ubuntu on the server.

My first day at the Ubuntu Developers Conference (UBZ) has been a lot of work and a lot of fun.

There are a few key decisions going into the next release cycle that inform everything else.

As I mentioned yesterday the next version of Ubuntu is going to be supported for a long time. In order to make that happen, the Ubuntu Distribution team is going to make a couple of minor changes to the release process. Most of these come under the basic theme of minimizing large scale changes.

Earlier on in the discussion of the Dapper process Jeff Waugh suggested the possibility of not syncing up to the latest stuff in Debian unstable on this cycle, and just moving forward from 5.11 base. The idea behind this suggestion was to limit the number of unknown bugs that would be added to the distribution. However, Matt Zimmerman pointed out that ” Debian and upstream fix more bugs than we do, hands down” so this idea has been rethought a bit.

That said, there is going to be an overall reduction in the number of new crazy things going into Ubuntu. But as of last night there will be one major exception — the LiveCD based installer.

This is making it in, not just because it will make the user experience better, but also because with a LiveCD installer Ubuntu will only have to ship one CD through ship-it. And that in turn means they will be able to support more than one flavor of Ubuntu. This means that they will be shipping Kubuntu cd’s for all the KDE centric folks out there.

But all of that comes from this morning’s first talk, and since then I have been participating mostly in talks about Ubuntu Server stuff, and I’ll try to blog about that more soon.

Dapper Drake is the code name for the next version of Ubuntu Linux. It will not just be supported for the standard 18 months, but for 5 years on the server, and 3 years on the desktop.

This is possible because we are looking at a confluence of upstream stability. GCC, x.org, the kernel, and other key components are now at, or are quickly approaching stable releases, so it only makes sense to capitalize on this to produce a long-term stable release.

This is not a move away from the 6 month release cycle that Ubuntu is now famous for. So, there will be 10 new Ubuntu versions before Dapper Drake is no longer supported.

It will be interesting to see what this does for Ubuntu in the enterprise. I’m sure that some large enterprises want this, but I’m also pretty sure that they are going to want a few other things too.

I will have more updates on stuff that was discussed today this evening.

I’ll be flying out to Montreal on Saturday to attend Ubuntu Below Zero. I’m a serious fan of Ubuntu Linux, and of the people that make it happen. And I’m excited to start participating more in the whole Ubuntu community.

So far my contributions have been in giving talks on Ubuntu at LUGs and conferences, helping install Ubuntu on a lot of people’s machines at various install fests, reading the Ubuntu mailing lists, and assuring questions for the folks around Ann Arbor who have Ubuntu related questions. But I am really looking forward to crossing over the line from consumer/advocate/helper of a pre-existing product to someone who participates in the development of the new version.

I want to make sure that it is drop-dead easy for developers working on Rails, TurboGears, Cake, or any of the next generation of web development frameworks to live and breathe Ubuntu.

I also want to make it easy to create a meta-package with the tools that a small business needs to get up and running on Linux quickly and easily. We have all the pieces in place (well, calendaring needs a bit of work, but it looks like it’s going to be there soon!). Unfortunately, there’s so many choices and the configuration and integration project still too hard.

A lot of small businesses set up Microsoft SMB Server 2000 as their first server. It’s cheap and easy and it works — mostly! — and then when they grew out of it, they are stuck paying thousands of dollars for upgrades to the “real” Microsoft back office products. And for a small company all that money that could be more profitably spent in developing their core business.

All of this resolves down to my key goal — I want to reduce the cost of entry for small business, and make it easier for new companies to get started without the need to go to venture capital firms. Ubuntu, Linus, and open source generally can reduce the need for significant capital expenses early in the life of a small business, and in the end that is going to improve the economic outlook for small businesses, and help the economy, and facilitate innovation.

For those of you who don’t know I think Ubuntu Linux is one of the most interesting, exciting and useful new things to hit IT in the last year. In the less than 1 year since their first release they have:

• Released a high-quality distro 2 more times (as of today!)
• built a sizable community of developers and maintainers
• Gathered a huge international community of people who help new users
• Brought the “it-just-works” philosophy to a whole new level in the Linux world
• Made their distribution popular with people new to Linux, as well as kernel hackers

They spend their entire advertising budget shipping free CD’s to anyone who asks for one. There are going to be release parties all around the world today and tomorrow.

I started using Ubuntu Linux last November when I could not get ZABBIX to compile on my SUSE 9.0 box because some of SUSE’s MySQL and NetSNMP libraries used non-standard compile options, and would not link up correctly.

While I was recompiling and getting these things running on SUSE, I installed Ubuntu on another box, just to test it out, and before you know it ZABBIX was working on the Ubuntu box without having to re-compile anything.

And I fell in love with the clean interface and user friendly setup. To me the most amazing thing is that the setup is very friendly to both nubies and “power-users,” which works great for me because I find that no matter how much I learn, sometimes I’m still a nubie.

I think the Ubuntu people understand how Viral Marketing works, and are making a remarkable product which has the potential to change the way we interact with our computers and perhaps more importantly the way we interact with the people that build the software we run.

Interacting with the Ubuntu community is great due to the simple — but extraordinarily powerful — code of conduct. This is probably the most important hack the Ubuntu people have come up with, in terms of creating a thriving community, and bringing in new developers. Which goes to show that some of the biggest market changing innovations are not particularly technical, or even all that new.

If you are interested in learning more, please visit http://ubuntudetroit.org/tour/quicktour.html

P.S. If you install Ubuntu 5.10 you might also be interested in an installer for MP3 and other multi-media support — Easy Ubuntu.