Here’s a sample of events and projects that have submitted ads for this Quarter.

Are you looking for outreach? Looking to advertise your Local Team? It’s easy, just create a 220×250 image of your event and post it in this meta thread following the described format. Once the post gets at least six upvotes from the community, the ad will automagically be added to the rotation of existing network ads. (Users withing to vote on ads will need at least 15 reputation to cast an upvote)

Want to support these events and ads on your own blog? Then check out George Edison’s Stack Ad, which will let you run these ads on your own blog!

We can improve Ask Ubuntu by just pointing the user to bug filing advice and promptly closing the question. - Martin Pool

To combat this we’ve mobilized the community to weed out, flag, and close these buggy questions which means a lot of questions will end up closed as off-topic. This isn’t a bad thing – in fact it’s quite a good thing. With each question getting a sign post saying “This is a bug, report your bug to Launchpad” any future users who stumble on to these questions from search engines will now know where to look, instead of finding disappointment in an answer-less ”question”.

We need more help! If you happen to come across a question on Ask Ubuntu that’s a duplicate of an existing bug report, or clearly should be submitted as a bug report, click the “flag” button at the bottom of the post and let us know! The sooner we prune and notify users these are actually bugs the quicker we can get them logged against the appropriate Launchpad project/package. The result will be a more fluid experience for new users and future users (since all these bugs will be fixed!). If you have questions about whether a question is a bug you can join the Ask Ubuntu chat or ask on the Ask Ubuntu Meta site.

• What to do about questions that describe bugs?
• What are some of Ask Ubuntu’s problems, if any?

Since the last election we:

• had over 32,000 questions have been asked
• have seen more than 35,000 additional users join the community
• do over fifteen times as much daily traffic

Once the lens is installed you can use it to answer queries you have while you use Ubuntu. For instance, if you have a question about how to find you Public IP address or how to configure Unity, just type the question or subject matter into the lens and a list of questions, tags, answers, and actions will appear. If you can’t find the answer you’re looking for you can opt to Ask the Question on the site in order to get an answer.

In addition to searching Ask Ubuntu, you can also search for subject matter in other areas. The lens will allow you to filter from one of the man Stack Exchange Q&A sites which cover a wide variety of subject matter from Server Administration, Cooking, Gaming, WordPress, Andriod, Parenting, and many many more.

• How can I configure Unity?
• Do I need to have ‘antivirus software’ installed?
• What are Unity’s keyboard and mouse shortcuts?

There are plenty of other great questions in our catalog of over 30,000. Check out our most linked questions, highest scored questions, and of course our list of unanswered questions (for any that you might be able to help us with)!

 

In length I’m a developer, systems admin, open source evangelical. One of three community elect moderators of Ask Ubuntu, a Juju Charmer, Entrepreneur, Sailor, Cyclist, Gamer, and I like cats. I look forward to reading more about the community’s happenings and contributing to the stream of consciousness that is the Planet!

mkdir -p ~/Projects/charms/oneiric
charm get mysql ~/Projects/charms/oneiric/mysql
charm get phpmyadmin ~/Projects/charms/oneiric/phpmyadmin
juju bootstrap
juju deploy --repository ~/Projects/charms local:mysql
juju deploy --repository ~/Projects/charms local:phpmyadmin
juju add-relation phpmyadmin mysql
juju set phpmyadmin password="password" # Replace password with your actually password
juju expose phpmyadmin

For switching to use the latest upstream, execute the following:

juju set phpmyadmin use_upstream=true

Setting this value to false will revert the installation back to the one provided via the Ubuntu Archives. There are a few other features to this charm which are documented in the readme file.

So, you want to run a Minecraft server in the cloud. First you’ll need to grab juju – if you’re running the latest and greatest Ubuntu release then installation is a pretty straight forward process execute the following lines to add the Juju PPA and install Juju along with the additional charm tools.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:juju/pkgs
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install juju charm-tools

Once Juju is downloaded you’ll want to setup a place to store all the awesome charms that are available including the totally sweet Minecraft charm that everyone is clamoring for. In the terminal make a directory by running the following command:

mkdir -p ~/Projects/charms/oneiric && cd $_
charm update ./

This will create a a charms folder inside of Projects which has an oneiric directory. Charms are organized by release, so all Oneiric (11.10) compatible charms will be placed in the oneiric folder, if a charm was designed for another version of Ubuntu it’d be in that respective code name’s folder.  Then executing charm update to build the database of available charms. At the writing of this post, all charms are developed for Oneiric. Remember this directory, going forward it’ll be known as your “Local Charm Repository”.

Finally, we need to setup an environment for which to deploy these charms to! Run juju once to have Juju create it’s environments file, which is placed in ~/.juju/environments.yaml Since I use Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) EC2, all I had to do was add two extra keys one for access-key and the other secret-key. These are the access and secret keys (respectively) from your Amazon Web Service account. All of this can be found in the documentation

Now you're ready for some charming!

There are a whole bunch of directions you can go in now. You can pull down all the charms in the Charm Browser, you can checkout the list of charms that are still in development/awaiting approval, or you can download the totally awesome Minecraft charm. Lets do that! You remember our Local Charm Repository? Well, all we need to do is use the charm tool to fetch the latest version of the Minecraft charm!

charm get minecraft ~/Projects/charms/oneiric/minecraft

Remember, that’s the absolute path to your Local Charm Repository, so if you changed it make sure use whatever it’s set to. Furthermore, all this does is pull down the charm and place it in a minecraft folder, under the Local Charm Repository. Now that you have the charm, you’ll need to setup the cloud for deployment. This is done via bootstrapping, which will create an instance on the cloud that acts as the gatekeeper and manager for all services and charms you deploy with Juju to the cloud.

juju bootstrap

Bootstrapping can take up to five minutes to complete and it runs in the background. So even though the command completed doesn’t always mean the environment is ready! You can check on the Juju environment anytime by issuing the juju status command. Output, when bootstrapping is completed, will look like this

2011-11-16 13:18:27,464 INFO Connecting to environment.
machines:
  0: {dns-name: ec2-50-19-58-136.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-45bdd926}
2011-11-16 13:18:28,408 INFO 'status' command finished successfully

So we’ve got one machine (our bootstrap!) and it’s all ready to rock and roll. So, lets deploy this badboy

juju deploy --repository ~/Projects/charms local:minecraft

When that command completes, it’ll send a request to the bootstrap machine to spin up a minecraft service (just so you know, charms that are deployed are called services). It’s almost ready to rock and roll! Check on the machine periodically using the juju status command, eventually you’ll end up with the following:

2011-11-16 13:28:14,584 INFO Connecting to environment.
machines:
  0: {dns-name: ec2-50-19-58-136.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-45bdd926}
  1: {dns-name: ec2-50-17-53-192.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-fdb8dc9e}
services:
  minecraft:
    charm: local:oneiric/minecraft-1
    exposed: false
    relations: {}
    units:
      minecraft/0:
        machine: 1
        open-ports:
        public-address: ec2-50-17-53-192.compute-1.amazonaws.com
        relations: {}
        state: started
2011-11-16 13:28:15,711 INFO 'status' command finished successfully

As is shown, there are two machines now, bootstrap and the newly created minecraft machine. We have one service running, minecraft, and a bunch of other information, most importantly the state and public-address. As is shown, the machine is started! So everything went A-OK! All that needs to happen now: Expose the server to the outside world. Exposing simply opens the appropriate ports for a service, if required. In this case we want our server to be available to the rest of the world so they can play! You can do this by running

juju expose minecraft

Running juju status one more time will show that the Minecraft service is now exposed and ready to rock and roll

2011-11-16 13:32:18,630 INFO Connecting to environment.
machines:
  0: {dns-name: ec2-50-19-58-136.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-45bdd926}
  1: {dns-name: ec2-50-17-53-192.compute-1.amazonaws.com, instance-id: i-fdb8dc9e}
services:
  minecraft:
    charm: local:oneiric/minecraft-1
    exposed: true
    relations: {}
    units:
      minecraft/0:
        machine: 1
        open-ports: [25565/tcp]
        public-address: ec2-50-17-53-192.compute-1.amazonaws.com
        relations: {}
        state: started
2011-11-16 13:32:19,558 INFO 'status' command finished successfully

Now, the machine is available on port 25565 (the default port!) Try to connect and this is what you get:

I would have written this post sooner, but I was too busy "testing"

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Marco, I want to configure the server, now I have to log in and configure it.” Nope! Juju Charms are configurable! To get a list of configuration options just run juju get minecraft which should produce the following list

2011-11-16 13:31:06,718 INFO Connecting to environment.
charm: local:oneiric/minecraft-1
service: minecraft
settings:
    allow-nether:
        description: Allow generation of the nether, true or false
        type: string
        value: 'True'
    difficulty:
        description: Level of complexity 1-5
        type: int
        value: 1
    level-name:
        description: Name of the level, will be generated if it doesn't exist
        type: string
        value: world
    max-players:
        description: Maximum players allowed on the server
        type: int
        value: 10
    motd:
        description: Message of the day displayed to users in the server list
        type: string
        value: Juju Powered Minecraft Server
    port:
        description: Port for which Minecraft runs upon
        type: int
        value: 25565
    spawn-animals:
        description: Generate animals, true or false
        type: string
        value: 'True'
    spawn-monsters:
        description: Generate monsters, true or false
        type: string
        value: 'True'
2011-11-16 13:31:07,473 INFO 'config_get' command finished successfully

At this point you can update the configuration at any time using juju set minecraft option=value option2=value [...] an example to change the maximum players and the MOTD would be

juju set minecraft motd="Juju I love you" max-players=5

And in no time flat you’ll see something like this

That about sums up getting started with launching Minecraft in Juju. It may seem like a lot but the majority of this was a one time setup. This is also just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to charms and Juju. I strongly recommend checking out their temporary site and asking questions in the #juju room on freenode.

There were some things that needed fixing. When I reviewed the commit messages this morning I had a hard time figuring out exactly what I had written. I knew it was for the DNS administration section because I remember making the video for it at 3AM. However, the commit messages would have you think otherwise:

34tf000 DELETE DELETE DELETE
cfdae81 I'M A TIGER!!!
5a1f065 DUHHH YOU NEED MORE AJAX
895612f I'M HAVING A GOOD TIME!!!!
d851f46 DON'T STOP ME NOW!
45fe891 Integration of API shit
e4cda3b Moving forward to 0.5 as when DNS completes we'll be a 0.5 release
29e6061 No ID is required
3b58f33 Added updated styles for controls and dropdown
ee0677b Created DNS module and basis
77c08aa Merge branch 'dev' of code.ondina.co:ondina/cp into dev
620cf7e small comment
ac3fdc9 affects-me-button for the outstanding reports list in the feedback form?
9b3639f fixed the input class for width
7700967 Fixed weird submit buttons

These commits seem to correspond to, what Last.FM confirms, is an over hour long repeat of Queen – Don’t stop me now.

Not even I could stop me now.

After doing some rebase magic in Git these commit messages are actual useful. The last cleanup was with code comments. Interestingly enough I was compelled to write detailed descriptions of what I was doing on every other line – as if alert and awake self couldn’t figure it out!

Just one of the many multi-line comments

In all I had a lot of fun working with that much code in that amount of time. I don’t plan on doing this again for quite some time but I think it would be fun to do again. It’s amazing how energizing not sleeping can be.