Category Archives: Canonical voices

Help translate Edubuntu 11.10

Posted on 2011/09/06 by Stéphane Graber

Now that the release of (Edu|Ku|Lu|Myth|Xu|U)buntu is just a month or so away and all the UIs aren’t supposed to change till release, it’s time to help making sure everything is translated.

One of my goals for Edubuntu 11.10 was to have all our custom components (installer steps, LTSP, Arkose, …) supporting translations as early as possible so people can just boot our DVD and get a fully translated environment right out of the box (yes, we ship all the langpacks).

While that goal has been relatively easily reached, Edubuntu still needs some help getting everything translated. Here are a few links to some parts of Edubuntu that need some love:

All of the above weren’t translated at all in Edubuntu 11.04 so they definitely need help to get as good as the rest of the distro.

More information on helping translating Ubuntu (not only Edubuntu) can be found on the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations

Thanks!

Posted in Canonical voices, Edubuntu, Planet Ubuntu | 1 Comment

Arkose 1.3.1 released

Posted on 2011/08/18 by Stéphane Graber

Last week I was in Austin, TX where a bunch of people with interest in getting containers working on Linux were meeting for the Oneiric Container Sprint.
We all had a very productive week with a lot of work being done on LXC, the kernel namespaces and Arkose.

Right before the Ubuntu Feature Freeze last Thursday, I released Arkose 1.3 brining most of the features I wanted for Ubuntu 11.10.

Here’s a brief list of the new stuff Arkose can do:

  • All the UIs and CLIs now support translation with an initial (rough) french translation already available.
  • DBUS filtering is now included in Arkose and available through the wrapper. The gedit example profile is using it.
  • It’s now possible to temporarily modify a wrapper profile before starting it.
  • Device support has been changed to no longer be limited to /dev/video* devices.

Some bugs have also been fixed, most of them in Arkose 1.3.1 (released yesterday):

  • Make the Global Menu integration (dbusmenu) work with Ubuntu Oneiric
  • Update the test suite
  • Fix arkose-cli’s help to be a lot more accurate
  • Restrict LXC’s configuration to the bare minimal
  • Use point-to-point network configuration in filtered mode (rather than a /30 per container)
  • Make sure everything in the container gets properly killed on exit
  • Fix Arkose to handle command line parameters properly (instead of just ignoring them)

That’s all available in current Ubuntu Oneiric as well as in the arkose stable PPA for Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.

Sadly one feature didn’t make it in time for Feature Freeze, that’s the advanced firewalling in filtered network mode. I’ll probably be working on it on the side and push it to a 1.4 branch that’ll be used for Oneiric+1.

I’ll now mostly be focusing on bugfixes for the remaining of the cycle and polishing some of the existing features. So please, test it and file bugs!

If you want to help with the translation effort, you can go translate Arkose on Launchpad or just send me a .po and I’ll do it for you.

For these who want to run the current upstream code, get the bzr branch:
bzr branch lp:arkose

Posted in Arkose, Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Leave a comment

Introducing Arkose’s protocol aware DBUS filtering proxy

Posted on 2011/08/02 by Stéphane Graber

As part of my work on Arkose, trying to make desktop application containing easy, I’ve been working over the last month or so on a protocol aware DBUS proxy.

I based my work on Alban’s DBUS proxy for N900, made the proxy work with multiple connections and added support for logging and filtering of the connections.

The result is profiles like this one:
outgoing;org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties;/com/canonical/menu/*;PropertiesChanged
outgoing;com.canonical.AppMenu.Registrar;/com/canonical/AppMenu/Registrar;RegisterWindow
outgoing;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;LayoutUpdated
outgoing;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;ItemsPropertiesUpdated

incoming;org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetAll
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetLayout
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;Event
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;AboutToShow
incoming;com.canonical.dbusmenu;/com/canonical/menu/*;GetGroupProperties

Which in this case will allow the applications using the proxy to access the global menu DBUS API and receive events from the Global menu, but not for example dump your gnome keyring.

Here’s the output you’d get when running gedit using the above profile:
http://www.stgraber.org/download/gedit-dbus-arkose.log

Now that the proxy works as expected, I’ll work on integrating it into Arkose itself and expose it in the wrapper GUI.

To try the proxy, you can grab Arkose’s trunk branch at:
bzr branch lp:~arkose-devel/arkose/trunk/

Build the proxy (you’ll need glib and dbus) and then run it with:
./proxy /tmp/arkose_dbus profiles/dbusmenu.conf

Starting clients like this:
DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/arkose_dbus gedit

Posted in Arkose, Canonical voices, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 6 Comments

State of IPv6 in Ubuntu Oneiric

Posted on 2011/07/26 by Stéphane Graber

One of my focus for the Oneiric development cycle is to make sure we get proper support of IPv6 both at install time and during regular use of the system.

To achieve this, I started working on the list of all possible scenarios I could think of with all possible combinations of IPv4 and IPv6. Then checked how well these were supported on Ubuntu.

Since Ubuntu 11.04, we now have a DHCPv6 aware DHCP client but that’s not working as well as it should because Network Manager didn’t do IPv6 by default back then and because the DHCP client configuration for IPv6 wasn’t too clear (dhclient wasn’t requesting any attribute).

Most of these issues are now fixed in Oneiric with Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre‘s great work on updating Network Manager in Oneiric to have IPv6 on by default and make sure people don’t have to wait for IPv6 to timeout to get their IPv4 connectivity.

The result is something like you can see below, on a network that has both DHCPv4 and stateless DHCPv6:

The use cases that are currently tested are:

  • Single stack: SLAAC IPv6-only network
  • Single stack: Stateful DHCPv6 IPv6-only network
  • Single stack: Stateless DHCPv6 IPv6-only network
  • Single stack: DHCPv4 IPv4-only network
  • Dual stack: SLAAC + DHCPv4 network
  • Dual stack: Stateful DHCPv6 + DHCPv4 network
  • Dual stack: Stateless DHCPv6 + DHCPv4 network

For these interested, you can look at the following files to get some example DHCPv4, DHCPv6 and RADVD configuration:

It’s worth noting that you have to start a separate dhcpd server for IPv6 (with the -6 flag) as dhcpd can’t answer both dhcpv4 and dhcpv6 at the same time. You need two separate daemons with two separate configuration files.

As you can see from the files above, I have a pretty complete IPv6 test setup, running on libvirt. I’m now working on automating all of this so we can get some easy regression testing of IPv6 support on Ubuntu.

During our sprint last month in Dublin, Colin Watson also got netcfg to support IPv6 thereby making debian-installer working with IPv6. The missing piece now is ifupdown support of DHCPv6 (so you can configure DHCPv6 in /etc/network/interfaces) and we should then have Ubuntu install on IPv6 from the alternate/server disks.

IPv6 support is starting to look really good for Oneiric and should be awesome for the next LTS.
If you’re already running Oneiric on an IPv6 capable network, please test the new Network Manager and if you encounter any problem, please file bugs or poke me so I can add some more tests to my list!

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, IPv6, Planet Ubuntu | 20 Comments

Busy week for Arkose

Posted on 2011/07/05 by Stéphane Graber

So last week I was in Dublin with my colleagues hacking on Oneiric. Most of the week has been spent either testing/fixing Ubuntu’s IPv6 support (more about that soon) or working on Arkose.

On Monday I released version 1.1 that was mostly bugfixes and introduced a new profile for Skype. Then after that I started working on the interesting stuff to end up releasing 1.2.1 on Thursday evening.

The new features are:

  • Filtered network support (one interface per container, routed/firewalled)
  • Video devices passthrough  (useful for Skype)
  • Support bind mount of files (thanks to Colin Watson)
  • Reworked UI for the wrapper

A lot of bugfixes also went in during the week. Now when Arkose crashes or raises an exception, it should deal with it properly, unmount everything and exit rather than leaving you with a lot of entries in your mount table.

The new Skype profile now lets you start Skype in an environment where it’ll only be able to see its configuration file, run on a separate isolated X server, access pulseaudio on a separate socket and only access the few video devices Arkose detected.

During the week I also spent some time talking to the Ubuntu Security team who also happen to be upstreams for Apparmor. In the future Arkose should start using Apparmor in cases where we don’t need an actual LXC container (depending on the profiles).

I also started working on a protocol-aware DBUS proxy based on the work from Alban Crequy so that Arkose should soon be able to filter what DBUS calls an app is allowed to do and prompt the user when accessing restricted information (keyring, contacts, …).
I’m hoping to have this merged into Arkose’s trunk branch this week.

After that I plan on spending some time implementing the network restrictions on top of the new “filtered network” support I introduced last week. Initially that should cover restricting an app to non-private (rfc1918) networks and eventually support fine grained filtering (destination and port).

Version 1.2.1 is available as tarballs on Launchpad or from the bzr branch or in current Ubuntu Oneiric. PPA builds are also available for Maverick and Natty.

Posted in Arkose, Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment