All I Needed To Know, I Learned... Using/Developing/Maintaining Ubuntu Okay, not quite, but that's a feature! Daniel T Chen (0xC88ABDA3) Association for Computing Machinery of Virginia Tech,

Disclaimer All opinions and mistakes herein are by yours truly.

Synopsis Every human can make the world a better place by contributing to Free Open Source Software.

Why Contribute To FOSS? Boredom Procrastination (read: should be studying/coding instead) Frustration + too much free time (read: procrastination) Curiosity Necessity Probability of imminent profit

Free Open Source Software As an industry Nearly the state of most computer science curricula Driven by profits As a service* What you don't learn in most computer science curricula Driven by humans As an ideal Varying definitions of “free” and “open”

What Is FOSS As An Industry? Revenue-generating Product (technical) support contracts (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle,...) Contracted software development (federal, …) Process dictated by business requirements Character actors/actresses (e.g., crackers) Process dictated by ? Usability and maintainability consequences Open source vs. open APIs

What Is FOSS As A Service? Humans are part of an ecosystem osophy Keeping the ecosystem in scope Globally connected humans helping one another Using/Developing/Maintaining FOSS to create tools to bridge humans Your resources Imagine if every human devoted one hour per week to FOSS

What Is FOSS As An Ideal? Drama! Open Source Initiative → Free Software Foundation → the-point.html Debian Free Software Guidelines →

What Does Your Curriculum Include? Typical computer science curriculum Lectures Lab work Extracurricular requirements? Reading and lab work above and beyond required/stated on syllabus Social – yes, social – requirements Professional development ACM events Mentoring

What Should Your Curriculum Include? Probably everything in the previous slide FOSS at every level Objective: make using/developing/maintaining FOSS straightforward Outreach

What is Ubuntu to you?

Lessons Learned in FOSS Scale your efforts Teams! Documentation! Public version control system(s) Blogs, Twitter/Identi.ca, Facebook,... Bug triaging is hard Manage your resources Keep purpose in scope Enjoy yourself

FOSS Bundles Most major (read: popular) Linux distributions simply bundle finitely countable FOSS components Maintainers must make sure those components play together nicely What happens when those components aren't tested against other components in the distribution?

Surprise, Software Has Bugs! If you want to learn a system thoroughly, fix its bugs You can be a rock star by helping resolve bugs There are plenty of bug trackers for FOSS projects Ubuntu has ~50 K open bugs tracked in Launchpad → Imagine if every human fixed one FOSS bug

Why Doesn't My Sound Work?!

(Re)Introducing Terminology Open Sound System (OSS) Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) Free Firewire Audio Drivers (FFADO) High Definition Audio (HDA) Subsystem identifier (SSID)

Why Sound Doesn't Work out of the Box Audio codec manufacturers enjoy the one-up game, too ALSA/OSS/FFADO simply doesn't support the hardware [yet] Initialising audio devices is nondeterministic A Linux distribution can't please every potential user – “more than one way to do things”

The User-Developer Paradigm, or We're Wrong As a Community Sheer volume of sound issues noted on issue trackers, blogs, forums, and more, demotivates people “A lot” of publicly available information actually is misinformation “Closed world assumption” exists for Linux sound Developers are users, too

So What's the Problem with Codecs? AC'97 and HDA implementations vary widely Computer manufacturer and model information are insufficient for troubleshooting Even ALSA performs hardware differentiation (by SSID) poorly [for many computers]

“When I was your age...”

“I walked uphill both ways...”

“through snow and broken glass...”

Troubleshooting ALSA Where does my audio issue originate? ALSA alsa-{kernel,driver}/linux Mixer label strings – massive confusion! alsa-lib User-supplied configuration files (asoundrc) alsa-plugins PulseAudio/GStreamer/Phonon GNOME session race condition(s) Non-Free software components

Further Questions? IRC → irc://irc.freenode.net /ubuntu-motu /*ubuntu*-devel YouTube → Ubuntu home page → /developerzone Mailing lists → /mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-devel-discuss