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As has by now been announced more-or-less left, right, center, top, bottom and everywhere else in the universe, Ubuntu Brainstorm went live today.

The idea behind Brainstorm is pretty simple and yet immensely powerful. It offers a place for Ubuntu users to post their ideas about how Ubuntu can be improved: new features, tweaks... just about anything can be listed on Brainstorm as a means of suggesting what you think can be improved about Ubuntu. Moreover, other users can vote for (or against) the ideas that have been posted.

The upshot is that the Ubuntu community, QA team and development teams have an excellent source of ideas for things-that-need-work. Obviously there have been Launchpad bug list to go off before now but the thing about bug lists is that the majority of the things on them are bugs; the feature ideas, if any, have been hard to find as a result.

Henrik Omma, who, I think, was the first to announce Brainstorm (being that it's his baby), demonstrated it to the Launchpad Bugs team when we were sprinting in London a few weeks back. It looked cool then, it looks cooler now with live data on it and already having seen a decent flow of users. I'm sure it's going to rock.

If you're a digg user you can digg the announcement of Brainstorm here.

I thought you might like to hear this story, since it pertains to ourfavourite distro and also to our shop's products.

Picture the scene, if you will: A man, bearded, long-haired,dashingly^Whandsome^W generally me-like, walks through the centre ofLancaster on a busy Wednesday afternoon. He's wearing, proudly, theUbuntu Hoodie as purchased from the very wonderful Canonical shop forthe small sum of roughly twenty of your human pounds.

He passes a group of school kids, perhaps fifteen or so in age, who areloitering with malice aforethought in what passes for the city's mainsquare.

An exchange* follows, with the following dramatis personae:

• KID #1: Stereotypical straggly-haired youth: acne-ridden and squeaky of voice.
• KID #2: Second stereotypical straggly-haired youth, but with less acne and wearing braces on his teeth.
• MAN: Our Ubuntu-hoodie-wearing hero.

KID #1: Mate! 'Scuse me mate!

MAN: Hamnoo?

KID #1: Does it say "Ubuntu" on your top?

MAN: Yep.

KID #1: Cool! Ubuntu rocks!

MAN: Glad you like it. You've tried it then?

KID #1: Yeah. Like, I have to run Windows for school, right, but yeah, I play wi't Live CD for, wassisname - Gutsy. Liked it.

KID #2: What's Ubun-thing?

KID #1: It's like Windows but not, you know, a bag of shite, like.

KID #2: Cool. It's cool, right?

KID #1: Yeah, it's well sick**. I'll get you a CD of t'internet if you want.

KID #2: Yeah, cool.

MAN: You can get CDs made if you want to give it out to your mates. [gives shipit address and details]

KID #1: Yeah, I'll do that. Cheers

... and our hero wanders off into the sunset***, happy to have helpedspread the word a little further.

Footnotes:

• * I've edited out the less intelligible East-Lancs dialect so as to make this readable for anyone who's not me.
• ** 'Sick' is, I'm told by my other half, who's a trainee teacher, the new yoof speak for 'Good'.
• *** Well, Woolworth's, but you get the idea.

I'm waiting for Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced Juice, by the way) to download at the moment so that I can do some virtualised stuff. Well, more accurately, so that I can do some virtualised stuff without having to wait for ever and ever and ever for X to start when I don't need it. Since JeOS is only 151MB of ISO as opposed to the server install's 600-odd MB, I figured that it might make things slightly quicker all round to just download the new, no-bells-or-whistles flavour of Ubuntu. I'll let you know how it goes.

It's not just the unwieldy nature of, say, the Gnome desktop when running under VirtualBox that concerns me. Just half an hour ago I had to power down my machine and do some fairly hefty maintenance with a can of compressed air and some thermal transfer paste to ensure that my backup script, which runs once every six hours, didn't make my CPU overheat. Something tells me that it's getting close to the time when I'm going to want to build myself a new PC. Maybe I'll see if I can get this one to last 'til April and then stick Hardy on the new one as a fresh install. Yes, that sounds like a good idea. (And also, by having just written that, I've talked myself out of spending the money that I was thinking of spending on a new bass on PC bits; it's always nice to be able to talk myself out of things I don't really want to do).

Right. The JeOS install is running in a new VirtualBox instance. The CPU is currently running at 61° C; let's see how it does (it got to 70° last time around).

"So what news from the wilds of Lancaster?" I hear you ask. Well, dear reader, once again I have been consumed by work, work and a bit more work. It seems like I haven't done much besides hack on Launchpad since I returned from Massachusetts last month. Not that I'm complaining about that - after all, hacking on Launchpad is what keeps me in new bass money - but it's been nice this weekend to not think about it, at least for a while. Launchpad version 1.1.12 will hopefully be rolled out this week. After that we as a development team will be taking time off for Christmas, ready to start on the next development cycle in January. I think that in terms of improvements Launchpad 1.1.12 is going to be a pretty good release. I've managed to get quite a few bugs fixed and new (and in demand, I might add) features added this cycle, and I'm absolutely certain that other members of the team will have done that and more besides.

All of which means that, once again, I haven't had much time to write. Normally, not having written anything would have seriously pissed me off by now, but I've been enjoying my work so much (apart from the bits where I find myself still hacking at 11 o'clock at night and unable to make sense out of what turns out in the morning to be the simplest of problems) that I haven't really had time to get annoyed at myself. I plan to do some scribbling over Christmas (I did have an idea for a Christmas story which I might try and jot down this week if I have the time).

Other than that, life continues pretty much as normal chez Binns. Tomorrow night I'm going to be at a wedding party, which means that for the first time since I joined Canonical I'm going to have to get my hair cut. Whether I get it cut short or just shorter I've yet to decide. Part of me wonders what I look like under this great shaggy mass; another part is glad to have a warm covering in the winter months.

And finally, dear reader, the JeOS install is more-or-less complete. Bon. And the CPU temp never went above 61°. Très bon.

The news just came through that Dell have officially unveiled two systems available in Europe (including the UK) with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) installed on them. This is very cool, and represents another step along the road to fixing bug #1. From the press release (ubuntu.com):

Dell today unveiled two consumer PCs in Europe – the Inspiron 6400n and the Inspiron 530n – with the Ubuntu 7.04 Linux operating system factory installed. Available now in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, the systems are Dell’s first steps to meet the needs of the Linux enthusiast community outside of the United States.

Information about the systems can be found in the following locations:

• General information: www.ubuntu.com/dell
• In France (from August 8th): www.dell.fr/ubuntu
• In Germany (from August 8th): www.dell.de/ubuntu
• In the United Kingdom (from August 8th): www.dell.co.uk/ubuntu

[The Disclosure Bit]

I am an employee of Canonical, the company that supports and backs Ubuntu. Yes, Canonical is the really-cool-company I've mentioned. I work as part of the Launchpad development team. So now you know.

Well, it's about time, frankly. Via the BBC :

Computer maker Dell has chosen Ubuntu as the operating system for its range of Linux computers for consumers. 

This makes me happy for a lot of reasons. For one, it's Ubuntu, which I use all the time and on whatever systems I can and second - and probably more importantly - it means that someone is offering Ubuntu as a no-effort-to-install system to consumers, which rocks my socks off.