The GTK+ version of the package is published in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic. While upstream is continuing to do regular releases of the GTK version, they are focusing on the KDE version and have changed autokey to refer to the KDE version, while renaming the GTK version (formally autokey) to autokey-gtk. To make matters worse, upstream releases both as separate tarballs, and the packages conflict with one another.  (due to technical limitations)

What’s the proper proceedure for handling this in Ubuntu? Should -gtk conflict with autokey, replace it, with  autokey-qt being available as an option, or should I just keep things as they are and have the package “change out from under” users when they upgrade?

While I still have no idea what the cause was, the solution was a simple `sudo rm /var/cache/apt/*cache.bin`.

The meeting will immediately follow that of the OLPC Learning Club, and we’re expecting some spillover. In addition to packaging mentoring offered by several Ubuntu MOTUs and Developers, we’ll be teaching basic QA during the event. Our *specific* QA focus is that of the Sugar packages for jaunty (which are being hammered out as we speak by Morgan Collett), but the bug jam aspect of the meeting will be more open ended.

Gallaudet University
Student Academic Center / Student Union Building (SAC/SUB)
Lower Level, Flex Rooms A and B
Saturday, February 21, 2009
10:00-13:00 OLPC LCDC
13:30-18:00 Ubuntu Bug Jam

Usually we maintain Sugar packages in Debian’s Git services at Alioth. Ideally, every Ubuntu SugarTeam member is also a Debian OLPC maintainer on Alioth, who have the rights to push Debian/Ubuntu-spesific fixes upstream. When we are close to a freeze or are unable to work with upstream (Debian) to meet our 6-month-release-cycle-deadline, we are forced to diverge from their repositories. Keep in mind, however, that we have the full expectation to merge at the soonest juncture.

It was something we *had* to do, since, as Jonas Smedegaard, the primary maintainer in the team, has stated numerous times that he doesn’t want to maintain multiple branches (stable from a few months ago and unstable of the most recent series), at least not yet. This was obviously a problem, was we had to meet Ubuntu’s FeatureFreeze. (getting exceptions, as we had to do last time, are not fun

Morgan Collett uploaded the core suite last week and we’re working on squashing bugs and handling the other activities.

Let’s hope we’ll be able to make this the best release of Sugar-in-Ubuntu ever!

For those of you who can’t wait for it to land in Medibuntu, here’s the command to get it: (you’ll need fakeroot and alien installed)

wget http://www.java.net/download/jdk6/6u12/promoted/b03/binaries/jre-6u12-ea-bin-b03-linux-amd64-22_dec_2008-rpm.bin
chmod +x jre-6u12-ea-bin-b03-linux-amd64-22_dec_2008-rpm.bin
./jre-6u12-ea-bin-b03-linux-amd64-22_dec_2008-rpm.bin
fakeroot alien jre-6u12-ea-linux-amd64.rpm
sudo dpkg -i jre_1.6.0_12-1_amd64.deb

Everything was working fine, until I attempted to suspend: it failed to wake from its slumber. Hibernate had a similar problem, although in that case the system didn’t even attempt, returning to the gnome-screensaver immediately after switching to a tty.

I googled for a bit and came across a bugreport on Launchpad, which was currently in the “won’t fix” status pending testing of the new kernel. The bug hadn’t been touched in a while, so I decided hey, testing Jaunty should be easy, I’ll give it a whirl. Wrong.

The first problem was _getting_ Jaunty, my internet fails epicly and I don’t want to upgrade my main installation. I initially dismissed partitioning, because I didn’t want to risk data loss. I came upon LiveUSB: it would require burning a liveCD but did not cause me to have to change anything on my hard drive at all. That was a bust; the first flash drive I tried (brand new PNY 8gb), according to the BIOS, didn’t even have a valid boot partiton. My second drive was corrupted after the first failed resume, but at least it booted.

So, having exausted that option, I decided to see what I could do with the LiveCD itself. The helpful folks in #ubuntu-installer suggested using the “persistance” option in the boot command line which requires you to either create a loopmounted filesystem on a FAT disk (which I’ll pass on, thanks), or making the sole partition on the disk a ext(2,3)-formatted volume labled “home-rw”. This didn’t work on my SDHC 4GB card, nor did it work with my USB key. I’m back where I started.

In the end, I just enabled intrepid-propsed, upgraded to the new kernel that’s been in testing almost since the release, and my S/R problems went away. Oh well, I guess Jaunty testing will have to wait until after feature-freeze.