Desktop Team Updates - Monday 20th September 2021

[robert.ancell]

Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week. If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of Discourse .

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Updates - Monday 13th September 2021

[robert.ancell]

• Improved test coverage of Dart libraries.
• Reviewed Flutter Linux shell texture support.
• Worked on ESM desktop specification.
• Built D-Bus service for desktop apps to access Ubuntu Advantage status.
• FIxed a couple of D-Bus bugs in glib.
• Reviewed ubuntu-desktop-installer PRs.

[jibel]

• WSL
  • Publication of daily Ubuntu images for Impish to the Microsoft Store are now fully automated.
  • Reviewed several PRs to complete the work on the text OOBE.
  • Started on the packaging of system_setup and running the installer from the snap package without snapd running on the system.
• ESM
  • Reviewed the specification.
• Customer meetings

[till-kamppeter]

• CUPS Snap: Waiting for @ijohnson’s pull request on snapd for the cups printing interface to get merged by the snapd team. Good News: I talked with @ijohnson and he will finish this in October, so that we have the full JJ cycle for testing and user application snappers can finally easily upload to the Snap Store. Also discussed with @sergiusens and @ijohnson about a possible snapcraft extension to ease snapping user applications which print.
• CUPS Snap: Updated the included cups-filters to 1.28.10.
• cups-filters: In IPP-attributes-to-PPD-options auto mapper rules considering “ColorMode” also with prefix (like “cupsColorMode”) now.
• HPLIP Printer Application, Debian: Reviewed/Tested new Debian printing maintainer Thorsten Alteholz’s HPLIP 3.21.8 Debian update (in experimental now). Asked him for thoroughly documenting the update method and committing his work to the GIT, so that I can use it as base for the Snap.
• Ubuntu Office Hours: @hellsworth’s update of last week raised my interest in the Ubuntu Office Hours on the “Ubuntu OnAir” YouTube channel and so I talked with @madhens and worked out the “Summer of Printers” episode on October 7, about OpenPrinting’s participation in the Google Summer of Code, with me and some students, also to inspire volunteers joining OpenPrinting. See also my announcement. Thanks a lot @madhens and @hellsworth!
• Linux Plumbers Conference 2021: The OpenPrinting Micro-Conference is taking place on this Monday (Sep 20), 14:00 -18:00 UTC! With Michael Sweet (author of CUPS, main creator on IPP and driverless printing), me, and others to discuss the newest development in printing (Watch live for free on YouTube, Instructions to join the discussion/chat for free) Prepared the slides for my three sub-sessions, struggled with LibreOffice, tested conference system log-in and AV, invited students to participate, issued free conference pass for Thorsten Alteholz, new Debian printing maintainer, announced the event in my September News Post, all slides are available on the schedules page (mine also with *.odp sources). Hope you will all enjoy the OPenPrinting MC and Linux Plumbers in general. Update: Recording on YouTube.
• OpenPrinting: Posted the September news post with announcements for Linux Plumbers, Ubuntu Office Hours, and the results of this year’s Google Summer of Code.
• Bugs.

[vanvugt]

• Answered and sorted lots of bugs in Launchpad and upstreams (backlog stats are here).
• Spent half the week figuring out how to debug and then fix the plymouth live session shutdown bug. Prepared a patch for impish which is now released and included in daily images 2021-09-18 onward.
• Triple buffering progress:
  • Redesigned the native (Wayland) changes to eliminate code duplication and simplify reuse in future branches. Very time consuming because it required retesting multi-monitors and Nvidia all over again.
  • Made a great start on a new design rebased on unified buffer management for Wayland. I expect unified buffer management will need to land first in mutter 42.

[jpnurmi]

Desktop Installer

• Implemented installation type page
• Implemented select guided storage page
• Reviewed and merged configure secure boot page
• Worked on manual partitioning
  • Preliminary UI for add/edit partitions
  • subiquity storage v2 API discussions
  • Adapted to subiquity’s storage v2 API
• CI improvements, UI tweaks, preparation steps for upcoming pages

[didrocks]

• WSL
  • Publication of daily Ubuntu images for Impish to the Microsoft Store are now fully automated.
  • Reviewed several PRs to complete the work on the text OOBE.
• MIR
  • Reviewed and discussed various aspects about rust packaging in Ubuntu.

[hellsworth]

• Organized the next indaba (this Friday, Sept 24 @ 5pm UTC) that will be all about Flutter!!!
• LO snap:
  • fixed github action not building
  • added tag and release for 7.2.0 that includes the jpeg fix
  • built 7.2.1 and it’s in --edge (lgtm), going to release it to stable early this week
  • filed ugly fonts bug
• worked on network-manager bug, got stuck, @jibel unstuck me (Thanks! )

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• audio-record auto-connection was granted
• filed feature freeze exception bug to track changing the desktop-minimal seed and the release upgrader code to make the firefox snap the default in impish
• filed a bug to request rustc update for firefox 94
• merged profile import code into the snap’s stable branch

chromium

• updating stable to 93.0.4577.82
• updated beta to 94.0.4606.50

Ubuntu Desktop Installer

• reviewed and merged a number of pull requests

other

• updated ubuntu-wallpapers’ AUTHORS file
• uploaded new ubuntu-wallpapers for impish

[seb128]

• did GNOME updates
• fixed the bluez build with the new glibc
• update the thunderbird candidate snap to 91.1.1