OSCON: Ubuntu BOF

The Ubuntu BOF was pretty good. We had about nine people there, spanning seasoned pros like Jeff Waugh and newbies like myself. Since I called the BOF to order, I got to ask a lot of stupid questions, and luckily I got them all answered. What follows is some random notes that I scribbled down in a sticky:

Regarding repositories, my questions were around problems that I am encountering when I put in some quirky repositories (Multiverse and beyond). The problem is that the Ubuntu update thingy will look at all repositories, and start giving you packages from the non-stable area. Jeff recommended the following:

• main, and universe repository - recommend only keeping the Ubuntu repositories active
• apt-get install pkg = version#, to force specific version
• there is some package pinning stuff that you can do in apt, but it sounds complicated

update-rc.d --> manage startup scripts in Debian / Ubuntu. All this does is to manage the symlinks, I think. In Debian, everything in /etc/rc2.d that is executable will be launched -- there is no funny business.

For questions about the mythtv packages on Ubuntu, I was told to IRC. On the Freenode servers, #ubuntu, I should talk to mdz (Matt Zimmerman) about the mythtv package. I suspect that there might be a bug in the startup sequence, so that mythtv-backend doesn't start properly on boot.

Debian documentation is installed with Ubuntu and applies to Ubuntu.

• debian developer policy documents are good to read for questions about system startup, etc.

Ubuntu is building a linux hardware database - Ubuntu Device DB (system tools). Can report to central server. This allows the Ubuntu folks to press hardware vendors to support Ubuntu -- because they can back that need up with actual usage statistics.

Finally, someone told me that I can use "evolution --force-shutdown" whenever I want to restart Evolution cleanly, rather than just killing all of the processes. I'll have to try that the next time Evolution crashes.