Ubuntu Contributions

Many Ubuntu developers are also prolific free software developers and contribute to other projects, notably to Debian.

System Boot

• Canonical employee Scott James Remnant developed from scratch Upstart, a modern event-based init daemon. Upstart is now default init system for Ubuntu, Fedora, Meamo, Chrome OS and Frugalware Linux.

• initramfs-tools was originally written by Jeff Bailey for Ubuntu, and later became Debian's default initramfs system.

Package Management

• The dpkg Breaks field was implemented by Ian Jackson for Ubuntu.

• dpkg triggers were implemented by Ian Jackson for Ubuntu.

• Ubuntu developed a simplified front-end to apt called gnome-app-install (originally written by Ross Burton, but then developed for some years by Michael Vogt of Ubuntu).
• Ubuntu developed a system to notify users about package updates (update-manager, update-notifier).
• Ubuntu is heavily involved in the development of apt, python-apt and Synaptic.
• An application to view and install deb packages called gdebi was developed by Ubuntu.

• Software Center is a modern utility for software management in Ubuntu and Debian

• Aptdaemon allows normal users to perform package management tasks, e.g. refreshing the cache, upgrading the system, installing or removing software packages.

Installation

Ubuntu developers have made a number of important contributions to debian-installer:

• debootstrap progress via debconf, and a good deal of what became the first-stage task installer glue
• base-installer kernel selection refactoring and test suite
• much of udev support and devfs path removal
• pcmciautils support
• chunks of debconf maintenance effort such as the progresscancel and escape capabilities
• reserved username checks
• some of rescue mode
• translation handling work in cdebconf that saved about 20MB of run-time memory

In addition, we developed a custom graphical installer, Ubiquity, which uses debian-installer for many of its back-end tasks.

Jockey

Third party driver installation UI: https://launchpad.net/jockey

Crash interception

Apport intercepts signal and Python crashes, package installation failures, and potentially other problems, creates debug reports, sends them to a bug tracker, and has tools for post-mortem recombination of core dumps and debug symbols. It was ported to Fedora by Will Woods a while ago.

Brainstorm / IdeaTorrent

The engine that powers http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com is open and is being modified to be more project-neutral. http://ideatorrent.org/

LTSP5

https://launchpad.net/~ltsp-upstream

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/LTSPQuickInstall

Ubuntu was the first distro implementing the ltsp upstream MueKow specification of the next generation LTSP in 2005/6 (more detailed history).

The implementation is including some improvements like:

• Dropping the insecure XDMCP model that allowed you to even take screenshots from a networked X stream
• New sound implementation based on alsa
• A new way of handling local block devices as well
• New printserver to replace the unlicensed lp_server shipped with former ltsp versions
• Deep integration with the GNOME Desktop
• An LTSP specific display manager called LDM which simply acts like a graphical ssh client
• Multiple appserver support out of the box
• Deep integration with the debian installer and the Ubuntu alternate CD for a comfortable out of the box install for LTSP servers
• Deep integration with the Ubuntu hardware autodetection mechanisms dropping the need for configuration of thin clients in most cases
• Automatic swapping over the net if ram on a client is low
• Dropping the need for nfsroot resulting in massive client speedup through a unionfs/aufs mount on top of an nbd blockdevice that uses squashfs

Debian joined the development after 6 months supplying large contributions

Fedora recently picked up the Ubuntu code as well with the Fedora 9 release

Gentoo is working on an LTSP5 implementation based on this code as well.

OpenSuSE uses the existing LTSP5 code to implement a similar setup wrapped into their kiwi liveCD build scripts.

The upstream development which was led by ubuntu for 2.5 years was switched to a completely new model of cross distro team effort in October 2007; each participating distro has an upstream development contact in the ltsp-upstream team through which they can directly submit code to the launchpad bzr trees.

OpenSSH

• Host and user key blacklisting support, mitigating the OpenSSL RNG vulnerability

• ConsoleKit support

OpenSSL

• Cert blacklist checking, generation, and packaging, mitigating the OpenSSL RNG vulnerability

OpenVPN

• Cert blacklist generation and packaging, mitigating the OpenSSL RNG vulnerability

Xorg

• Fixes and quirks for variety of issues in -intel, -ati, other drivers, and the X server.
• Participated with Fedora (and later Mandrake) in the early development of the Xrandr-1.2 gnome-display-properties capplet (subsequently taken upstream), contributing significant QA and stability bug fixes, and a revert dialog.
• X-Kit, a python library for parsing/modifying xorg.conf files. Used in EnvyNG and elsewhere through Ubuntu.

KDE

System Settings, the KControl replacement, was maintained and pushed into KDE 4 by Kubuntu developers.

printer-applet, part of KDE 4.1, was written by Jonathan Riddell

guidance-power-manager, part of KDE extragear, was written by Kubuntu developers.

Bazaar

Canonical sponsors development of Bazaar, a distributed revision control system used by many projects. Also, Bazaar is now a GNU project. http://bazaar-vcs.org/

Gnome

Canonical employs/employed some Gnome developers: Jeff Waugh (employed in 2004-2006), ...

BugZilla

Canonical is heavily involved in the development of upstream bugzilla and sponsership the upgrading the gnome-bugzilla . Full story

NotifyOSD

Notify OSD provides a notification system that provides simple and elegant bubbles that can convey different types of information, but are always dismissable by simply moving your mouse over the bubble, to fade it.

Application indicators

Application indicators provide a simple and effective API to provide an application icon in the notification area in the top-right part of the screen, and provide simple, accessible, and complete access to key parts of your application. With bindings for C, Python, and Mono, you can integrate your app into the Unity desktop quickly and easily

Unity

Unity provides a complete, simple, touch-ready environment that integrations your applications and your workflow. New Free and Open Source Shell for gnome desktop from Canonical and Ubuntu Community , started as a new generation for ubuntu netbook edition in ubuntu 10.10 using Mutter . For ubuntu 11.04 it has been decided to use unity with compiz as shell for gnome 3 instead of default gnome-shell . * Main Project Page

Canonical Multitouch

Infrastructure, libraries, and tools developed by Canonical in support of multi-touch hardware

Canonical is deeply committed to the future of computing and how humans interact with computers on a daily basis. Multi-touch technologies are the next step in this area, and this project groups aims to collect our efforts in this field centrally on Launchpad.

Patches

During package maintenance and bug triaging we develop countless fixes and send them to upstream. (e. g. the ones we submit to Debian, see also http://patches.ubuntu.com ).

Servers/Bandwidth

http://svn.gnome.org/ and http://l10n.gnome.org/ are hosted by Canonical. Launchpad provides hosting to many projects including Inkscape and Miro.

UFW

Ubuntu developed ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall), a frontend to iptables: https://launchpad.net/ufw

Netbook User Interface

Canonical has developed a new UI for netbooks (mini laptops), licensed under GPL3. https://launchpad.net/netbook-remix

Uncomplicated-VM-Builder

Soren Hansen and many others are contributing to this tool. https://launchpad.net/vmbuilder

AppArmor

AppArmor Linux application security framework.

John Johansen still contributes to AppArmor since he joined Canonical, along with a few others.

Ubuntu led the successful charge to got AppArmor into the 2.6.36 kernel.

"Canonical is committed to AppArmor's development and to that end in order to do it properly it needed to go upstream," Pete Graner, Manager of the Ubuntu Kernel at Canonical told InternetNews.com. "I wouldn't call that a victory, it's the right thing to do."

• https://launchpad.net/apparmor

Launchpad

Which has been recently open sourced. https://launchpad.net/launchpad

PowerNap & PowerWake

Thanks to Dustin Kirkland https://launchpad.net/powernap

Byobu

Thanks again to Dustin. https://launchpad.net/byobu

Ubuntu Font Family

The Ubuntu Font Family are a set of matching new libre/open fonts in development during 2010-2011. The development is being funded by Canonical on behalf the wider Free Software community and the Ubuntu project. The technical font design work and implementation is being undertaken by Dalton Maag. Members of the Ubuntu core development team are packaging the font in .deb format. The font was released under a libre-licence and is now packaged in Ubuntu 10.10.

• http://launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family (project)

• http://fonttest.design.canonical.com/ (in-webbrowser online testing/feedback)

• http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family/+bugs (bug reports, please do contribute!)

Germinate

Germinate is a package available in Debian and Ubuntu which starts with lists of packages (called seeds) and grows them into a full list of packages including dependencies and (in additional lists) suggests, recommends, and sources for each of these lists.

Mago

Mago is a desktop testing initiative, built on top of the LDTP GUI testing framework (http://ldtp.freedesktop.org/), that aims to have a set of processes and code to make writing automated test scripts easier and more reusable.

Although we started this effort as an Ubuntu project, the framework and many test cases work for vanilla GNOME.

* https://launchpad.net/mago

Xpresser

Xpresser is a Python module which enables trivial automation of Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) via image matching algorithms.

* https://launchpad.net/xpresser ...