andrewsomething's questions

Is there a non-hacky way to change the color of just the header in an app using the Ubuntu SDK? MainView has a headerColor property, but that is used as the first step of gradient. Currently, I'm just putting a colored rectangle up there:

Rectangle {
    id: headerBackground
    height: header.height
    width: header.width
    anchors.top: parent.top
    color: "#288369"
}

But this causes a number of issues, most notably it is incomparable with a ListView that fills an entire page. A full example can be found in this gist.

It's strangely hard to find any documentation on accessing geolocation information for Ubuntu Touch specifically and even Qt5 more generally. The Qt Mobility APIs provided this in Qt4, and they seem to have been split into separate libraries in Qt5. These libraries were apparently removed from the Qt 5 distribution and are now considered optional add-on modules. As they are now "add-ons," the Qt website doesn't seem to publish their documentation anymore. There are Ubuntu packages for them, but installing the SDK doesn't actually pull them in. So it is unclear if they will be available on the phone or not.

The correct package seems to be qtdeclarative5-qtlocation-plugin , which can be accessed in Qml with import QtLocation 5.0

Trying to simply get latitude and longitude has been an exercise in futility. Looking at older Qt4 docs, I tried:

import QtQuick 2.0
import QtLocation 5.0


PositionSource {
    id: src
    updateInterval: 1000
    active: true

    onPositionChanged: {
        var coord = src.position.coordinate;
        console.log("Coordinate:", coord.longitude, coord.latitude);
        }
}

Sadly, this just segfaults...

So my question, simply stated, is how can you access geolocation information on Ubuntu Touch in Qml?

I'm attempting to deploy a Django app from bazaar branch with juju using the python-django charm. I've followed the quick start directions from the README.md file:

juju bootstrap
juju deploy --config mydjangosite.yaml python-django

juju deploy postgresql
juju add-relation python-django postgresql:db

juju deploy gunicorn
juju add-relation python-django gunicorn
juju expose python-django

My mydjangosite.yaml file looks like:

mydjangosite:
    vcs: bzr
    repos_url: lp:mydjangosite

It seems like the quick start directions must be missing something. This successfully deploys a running Django instance, but it's just the hello world app that displays:

It worked!

Congratulations on your first Django-powered page.

If I ssh into the Django instance, I don't see my bzr branch anywhere. /srv/python-django/ just contains the default juju Django project files.

I'm looking to deploy my Django application using juju. Quickly looking over the charm store, I noticed there are two different charms to do this. One simply named python-django and another called django-rainbow.

The python-django charm is described like:

This charm will install Django. It can also install your Django project and his dependencies from either a template or from a version control system. It can also link your project to a database and sync the schemas. This charm also come with a Fabric fabfile to interact with the deployement in a cloud aware manner.

And django-rainbow like so:

Django-rainbow is a full-fledged Django web project deployment charm. One can deploy many projects onto a single instance by maintaining individual config files pertaining to the project. Django-rainbow is a safe and convenient platform for development or production web server management. Web sites are updated instantly using mercurial based versioning. Your django-rainbow project file can be stored for future use, allowing anyone using juju a fail safe method to develop and deploy your project without creating conflicting structure. Django-rainbow is a "Set it and forget it" platform leaving development issues with the developers :)

What are the differences and why would I choose one over the other?

QML files opened with gedit don't have syntax highlighting. Is there a package providing a gtksourceview lang.spec file for QML? If not, has anyone written a lang.spec than can be installed locally?

For some time now, I've been using virt-manager to manage my virtual machines. When I want to copy a file from the host to the vm, I have been using scp to copy via ssh over the network. This is kind of tedious, and there must be a way to share a folder similar to VirtualBox. So how can I best share a folder between a KVM host and guest using virt-manager?

With the new friends-app landing in Ubuntu, it occurred to me that adding support for Instagram in the timeline would be cool. I also thought I might take a stab at it myself, but I'm having a hard time finding any documentation.

Is there a spec describing what is needed from each protocol? How does auth work? Would support need to be added to ubuntu-online-accounts first or is there a way for friends to register the new protocol?

It's very new and has a very hard to Google name, so any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated.

I've seen animated GIF images of screen casts (like the one below) promoted a few times on this site as a way to improve answers.

What toolchain is being used to create these? Is there a program that does this automagically, or are people taking screencasts, converting them into a series of static frames, and then creating the GIF images?

I was using first Tasque and then GTG on Ubuntu and Astrid on Android with Remember The Milk as the backend. Recently, Astrid has dropped support for Remember The Milk, and both Tasque and GTG's support for syncing with RTM has always left something to be desired. So I'm looking for a new solution, and I'm open to leaving RTM especially if it is for something that isn't proprietary.

What have you found to keep your tasks lists in-sync between Ubuntu and Android?

In particular, I'm looking for a desktop based program on the Ubuntu side rather than something in the browser. Astrid has treated me well, but I wouldn't mind trying something else. Currently, it can sync with Astrid.com, Google Tasks, and Producteev. Anyone know of a desktop app that supports any of those?

I'm new to Linux and Ubuntu. People keep using ~/filename in their answers to my questions. What does ~/ mean?

I would have thought that juju shutdown would move the instances in the deployment from "running" to "stopped." Instead it actually terminates all instances. Are juju deployments inherently ephemeral? Is there any way to stop and restart an juju deployment?

So I've recently played around with Juju, and I see quite a bit of potential. But there are a few things I don't exactly understand. Most notably, I'm not sure of the purpose of the "bootstrapping instance" (aka "bootstrapping node" or machine “0”).

Using the example from the user tutorial:

$ bin/juju status
machines:
  0: {dns-name: ec2-50-16-61-111.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-2a702745}
  1: {dns-name: ec2-50-16-117-185.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-227e294d}
  2: {dns-name: ec2-184-72-156-54.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-9c7e29f3}
services:
  mysql:
    formula: local:mysql-11
    relations: {}
    units:
      mysql/0:
        machine: 1
        relations: {}
        state: started
  wordpress:
    formula: local:wordpress-29
    relations: {}
    units:
      wordpress/0:
        machine: 2
        relations: {}
        state: started

Machine 1 is the mysql instance, and machine 2 is the wordpress instance. What exactly is machine 0 up to?

There are numerous ways to build Debian packages in a clean and reproducible environment. Two of the most frequently used are pbuilder and sbuild. Personally, I've always used pbuilder. I find pbuilder much easier to use and maintain. I haven't been able to find any side by side comparison of the two. What am I missing out on?

What advantages are there in using sbuild over pbuilder?

I'm looking for a way to reboot into Windows from Ubuntu on a 10.10/Vista dual boot system. The specific use case is that I would like to be able to ssh into my running Ubuntu instance and issue a command that will initiate a reboot directly into Windows.

I found a promising blog post, but the script that it suggests isn't working:

#!/bin/bash

WINDOWS_ENTRY=`grep menuentry /boot/grub/grub.cfg  | grep --line-number Windows`
MENU_NUMBER=$(( `echo $WINDOWS_ENTRY | sed -e "s/:.*//"` - 1 ))
sudo grub-reboot $MENU_NUMBER
sudo reboot

man grub-reboot isn't much help, but it seems to be leading me in the right direction:

set the default boot entry for GRUB, for the next boot only

WINDOWS_ENTRY=`grep menuentry /boot/grub/grub.cfg  | grep --line-number Windows`
MENU_NUMBER=$(( `echo $WINDOWS_ENTRY | sed -e "s/:.*//"` - 1 ))
echo $MENU_NUMBER

This returns the expected value, but on reboot the first menu entry is still highlighted. Any ideas why this isn't working or suggestions for other solutions?

Inspired by the recent issue with the Gawker network sites, I've been re-evaluating my password management. What strategies do you use to keep passwords safe? I'm particularly interested in software-based solutions available for Ubuntu, but any interesting ideas should be shared. Bonus points for solutions which are available on Android as well.

In the 10.10 release, Unity on the netbook edition used ConnMan. As Unity is now moving to the desktop for 11.04, will that mean that ConnMan will replace NetworkManager on the default Ubuntu desktop as well?

So since I started using askubuntu.com I've spent entirely too much time here answering other people's questions. Now maybe someone could help me with that by answering this one. I'm looking for time management software for Ubuntu.

There are a number of these programs floating around for Windows. RescueTime is one that is very popular. The key features that I'd like to see in a linux app that RescueTime has are:

1. Automatically records what application you are using, including what websites you visit.

2. Reports and graphs on your time usage.

3. Notifications for when you have spent too much time on "distractions."

While RescueTime doesn't officially support linux, there is an open source RescueTime Linux Uploader. Unfortunately, it seems to only support Firefox and Epiphany for website tracking. I'm a Chromium user.

The other major drawback to RescueTime is that it is a web service. I'd much rather not upload detailed information about how I spend my time to some third party. Google already knows too much about me as it is.

Project Hamster, a GNOME time management app, comes so close. Sadly, it does not automatically track what you are doing. If I had enough discipline to manually report to an applet what I was up to, I doubt I'd need this. (How cool would it be if they provided some Zeitgeist integration to handle that part?)

Etckeeper is a great tool for keeping track of changes to your configuration files in /etc. A few key things about it really stand out. It can be used with a wide variety of VCSs: git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr. It also does auto commits daily and whenever you install, remove or upgrade package. It also keeps track of file permissions and user/group ownership metadata.

I would also like to keep my "dot files" in my home directory under version control as well, preferably bazaar. Does anyone know if a tool like etckeeper exists for this purpose?

Worst case, I imagine that a simple cron job running bzr add && bzr ci once or twice a day along with adding ~/Documents, ~/Music, etc to the .bzrignore Anyone already doing something similar with a script?

While I'd prefer bazaar, other options might be interesting.

I found a problem with an application on Ubuntu.

Questions :

• How do I best report the issue?
• What sort of information should I provide?