Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and the fixes

So here comes Lucid Lynx, an LTS (Long Time Support) version of Ubuntu after two years, giving so much of expectations. I can see many whistles such as the new theme which tries to wrap Ubuntu in a non-geeky cover, specially the shift from brown to purple. Twitter integration, UbuntuOne, Mac like theme, which still seem whistles to a user, unless he is literally a kid which can rarely be the case for a Linux user. Ubuntu 10.04 was released on 30th of April, with the code name Lucid Lynx. This has become the long time support version of Ubuntu after Ubuntu 8.04, known as Hardy Heron, making a huge expectation from the user base.

I did upgrade my operating system from Ubuntu 9.10. The upgrade had introduced me few bugs, which I have fixed without much difficulty. As there are many users out there facing similar issues, work arounds for many of the bugs can be found online, and that's the biggest supportive force behind Ubuntu, as well as the other FOSS projects, I would say.

Let me share few of the issues I had to fix after the upgrade.

After the upload, when each time the computer started, this annoying error was thrown. "An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb. Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery." I realized this was due to a usb fix I did for Virtualbox for Ubunut Karmic Koala which is no more required after the upgrade to Lucid. To fix this, in terminal,
sudo vim /etc/fstab
Removing the line we had added from the file, "none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devig=123,devmod=664 0 0" from the fstab fixed this issue, according to the Ubuntu Community's help page for Virtualbox/USB.

"The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:Deskbar_Applet". Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration?", an error message was thrown immediately after the upgrade. I deleted it, and it seems I didn't lose any deskbar applets at all.

An annoying bug that I had to fix was, "Desktop effects could not be enabled.", where I was unable to go for the 'Normal' and 'Extra' visual effects from the 'None'. That obviously was due to an error in the graphics card driver, I felt. Command lspci shows the PCI buses and the devices, where we can get the details of the graphics controller installed, where mine was
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07).
This had many workarounds on the web. Anyway I found the reason for the issue as well as a nice fix here, which finally made my Lucid free from the annoying bugs introduced during the upgrade.
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
sudo update-alternatives --remove gl_conf /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf

Though the new purplish Mac-like theme got a huge attention, as I was already using Mac4Lin theme, this new enhancements to the look n feel failed to impress me, as I felt Mac4Lin still leads!

The first software that I tried after the upgrade was, Zekr - A Qur'an Study Tool, which obviously is a cool tool for the Muslim brethren, as I see. As the final note, I really feel that I shouldn't go for 'Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat', which will be released this October. The reason simply is, I am not ready to spend days for downloading the upgrade files of 4 GB and fixing bugs to move from an LTS version to just a normal version.

Input Sources - Mooshabaya

Screencast depicting the Input Sources - Feeds (rss1.0, rss2.0), Scraper, and Files of Mooshabaya. The respective mashups are generated using Mashup Generator of Mooshabaya and can be deployed into WSO2 Mashup Server, as it has the respective implementation of these input sources as host objects. This screencast was captured using XVidCap and modified (video length is reduced to 4 min and 53 seconds) using ffmpeg.
ffmpeg -i in.mpeg -t 00:04:53 -target film-dvd inputsources.mpg

[1] Feed Host Object Guide
[2] Scraper Host Object
[3] File Host Object
[4] Writing a Custom Host Object

Timeline: Community Bonding

April 26th 1900 UTC the names of the accepted projects were announced, and the community bonding period began. Since I have been given svn, blog [1], and the wiki [2] access on 30th of April, I wrote down the timeline in a wiki page of OGSA-DAI. I will record the further project progress and decisions in the ogsa-dai wiki. Tickets will be created for each task that is specified in my proposal using Trac - an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system, used by ogsa-dai project, which I will mark as resolved with the progress.

[1] OGSA-DAI Blog
[2] AlternativePresentationLayers 
[3] REST in OGSA-DAI
[4] The Java API for RESTful Web Services
[5] Governance Model 
[6] Part VI. OGSA-DAI for server developers
[7] Part II. Getting Started
[8] Coding Guidelines - OGSA-DAI

Mooshabaya discussions at research lab

February 22nd, 2010 [Dr.Srinath/A.S.Malinga, K.Pradeeban / CSE Research Lab]

I am writing a switch which will hide the existing menus from mooshabaya if enabled; by default mooshabaya will display all the menus. Dr.Srinath also asked to implement a screen scrapping component. And we will have to make it possible to run the workflow from xbaya itself instead of going to mashup server to invoke it from there. These are the milestones from March 11th demo.

Dr.Srinath asked to come up with a use case, which  will essentially cover all the use cases of Mooshabaya for the demo. He will fix a meeting with Dr.Sanjiva soon. The demo that we will prepare will be sent to Suresh Marru from IU. 

Since modifying Axiom's pom succeeded, I am currently trying to make mbaya a new carbon-orbit bundle, hence reverted the changes that made to axiom for testing.

We also had a discussion about Taverna and other workflow composers, which can be used instead of XBaya, though XBaya became our preferred choice since we are familiar with it and it is convenient when coming to integrate to mashup domain. Project updates and todos at the moment can be found here, where this depicts the overall view of the project.


March 24th, 2010

We had a meeting with the project's internal mentor Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara where we gave an overall idea and an update on the status of the project and got her thoughts and remarks.

We also demonstrated the project to the Project Coordinator Mr.Shantha Fernando and the project mentor Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara for the third formal project evaluations. I described and demonstrated the other input sources (files, feeds, and scraper), the XMLBeans Event generator for the known LEAD Event Types, and mbaya orbit bundle that makes XSUL messenger working as the monitoring module.


April 5th, 2010

We discussed the potential research paper for the project as well as the timeline with Mrs.Vishaka Nanayakkara, and got her suggestions and thoughts.


April 23rd, 2010 [Dr.Srinath/all/ CSE Research Lab]

We had a meeting with the mentor Dr.Srinath Perera where we gave the updates of the projects, discussed the further procedure of Mooshabaya, and the research paper.

May 26th, 2010 [Dr.Srinath/Research Lab]
We showed the screencasts, and showed the final draft paper and got his suggestions and consent. We got his thoughts on the research paper that we had submitted too.

May 27th, 2010
We discussed the draft report with the project's internal mentor, and got her consent and suggestions.

gsoc2010OgsaDaiPres

It's really exciting to start working with Google Summer of Codes for the second time. I had an interest in applying for OMII even for my GSoC 2009, as mentioned in the post "my summer of codes so far" since Taverna and OGSA matched my experience during the internship, where I later applied for Abiword due to my personal interest in Abiword and the project. So this time I didn't have to spend much time to choose OMII and particularly OGSA-DAI. 

After a considerable amount of research myself, and with the assistance of the OMII developers for OGSA-DAI project, Mr.Bartosz Dobrzelecki (bartek) and Dr.Mario Antonioletti (mario) from the University of Edinburgh, I applied for the project "Alternative presentation layers for OGSA-DAI" on 8th of April, where the application deadline was on 9th of April.

I was given access to the ogsa-dai private developer irc on 15th of April, as well as Michal - the candidate for the project "Re-implementation of the OGSA-DAI Distributed Query Processor in Clojure." This has given us an opportunity to interact with the developers well before the "Community Bonding Period" which begins on 26th of April, along with the official announcement of the successful applicants.

OGSA-DAI can be checked out from its svn location. svn co https://ogsa-dai.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ogsa-dai/ My code will be committed to the trunk ogsa-dai/trunk/presentation/cxf. The presentation layer code stays in ogsa-dai/trunk/presentation/, where WSDLs are inside the folder wsdl and the currrent axis presentation layer is inside the folder axis. Hoping a Summer of Love with OMII/OGSA-DAI starting in a very few days, with the hope that University of Moratuwa will lead the GSoC participant count for the forth time (2007 - 22, 2008 - 24, and 2009 -22). Hope to keep blogging my progress on the project here.