[00:35] <chilicuil> Hi there, I'm trying to automate an install setup, via netboot + preseed, I'd like to reuse the /home partition, is there any way to accomplish this?
[05:16] <cleary> hi folks - anyone awake?
[05:17] <cleary> just wanted to introduce myself, and see if there's any life here for support
[05:18] <cleary> I'm looking at using ubiquity-dm as a base idea for an in-house distro config wizard
[05:18] <cleary> it's going to be quite a steep curve, was hoping that there were some people I could actually bounce ideas off
[05:22] <cleary> during my big debugging session today, I found that if some process has locked the debconf database, ubiquity-dm throws an exception, and ubiquity.conf (upstart) script exits with a return code of 0
[05:22] <cleary> ie silently, so I was finding it would start maybe 2 times in 5, depending on how the timing went
[05:28] <cleary> ...everyone's asleep
[05:28] <cleary> is there a better time?
[05:29] <cleary> I'm on australian eastern standard +10/11h
[05:41] <hychen> when ubiquity runs, it locked the debconf database , you can run another process which uses debconf database , such as apt-get
[05:42] <hychen> s/can/can't/
[05:43] <cleary> hi hychen - yeah I understand this
[05:44] <cleary> it gets tricky though, and I appreciate that this is moving outside the scope of "ubuntu"
[05:44] <cleary> but if something else beats it to the lock
[05:44] <cleary> it still exits cleanly
[05:45] <hychen> does any thing shows in /var/log/installer/debug?
[05:45] <cleary> I anticipate this is unlikely to be a situation ubuntu distro will find themselves in
[05:46] <cleary> hychen: yes, I've identified the issue, which was a company init script
[05:47] <cleary> I'm preparing a little patch for the upstart script to at least not fail silently
[05:47] <cleary> my python foo is not up to doing anything deeper in ubiquity-dm/debconfcommunicator
[05:47] <cleary> (wrt to error handling)
[05:48] <cleary> while this will provide little value immediately
[05:48] <cleary> it may save a few hours debugging in the future for someone
[05:50] <cleary> ...I have a history of difficulties with patches for ubuntu livecd components
[05:51] <cleary> I'm here to try and learn how to do it better/make contact with people who are involved
[05:59] <hychen> you can talk with cjwatson who is involved in ubiquity development. he lives in U.K.
[06:03] <cleary> hychen: great - what sort of times does he come online?
[06:04] <cleary> +usually
[06:04] <hychen> maybe 2 hours later? I am not very sure.
[06:06] <cleary> ok, I'm about to finish work here, my nights for the next week are full though. I will leave this client logged in overnight though
[06:09] <cleary> as a general info thing, we currently run about 200 desktops here on an ubuntu based livecd platform. My new interest in ubiquity is due to the transition from 11.04 -> 12.10 as our base
[06:10] <cleary> I've tried to get in touch with colin before to talk about livecd build methods, but didn't get any response
[06:11] <cleary> I'm planning to publish mine, which are based on the pyfll tool used by the aptosid project - forked to use casper instead of their homegrown liveinitramfs
[06:12] <cleary> ...working through the removal of company specific hacks, and sane packaging is proving the sticking point
[06:13] <cleary> it's all part of my education though - my biggest issue is having a community to interract with
[06:15] <cleary> I don't know if it's timezones or what, but I struggle to get a peep out of most irc project support channels I go to (with hundreds of nicks)
[06:16] <hychen> I usually prefer to use mailing list to contact people do not live in the time zone as mine.
[06:17] <cleary> fair enough, as may be apparent from this chat, I'm a bit unstructured
[06:18] <cleary> I find I make a lot of mistakes which are harder to correct quickly via email
[06:18] <cleary> ...something to get good at I suppose
[06:18] <cleary> hychen what's the list for this project?
[06:19] <hychen> 1https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-installer
[06:19] <hychen> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-installer
[06:20] <cleary> thanks, I'll try to get some semblance of point to my ramblings and drop something on there
[06:20] <cleary> I appreciate your time, goodnight
[06:20] <hychen> np, :)
[08:38]  * infinity wonders if he cares enough to try to sort out a good way to parallelise d-i builds.
[09:57] <xnox> cleary: sure, if the db is locked ubiquity process will exit with a non-zero code and the upstart job will fail to start.
[09:57] <xnox> cleary: you can see that in the /var/log/upstart/ubiquity.log
[09:58] <xnox> cleary: the way ubiquity is usually customised to become a configuration wizard is either by (ab)using oem-config mode of ubiquity (where the install has finished already and the end user is customizing their own machine)
[09:58] <xnox> cleary: or by writting additional ubiquity plugins and rebuilding the cd with updated ubiquity.
[09:59] <xnox> cleary: the easiest way to update the livecd is to extract and bindmount the squashfs from the cd, chroot into it, make any changes one needs and the remaster the squshfs and the cd.
[09:59] <xnox> cleary: it is described on the wiki
[12:34] <davmor2> Hey guys this mornings cd the Who are you? page isn't accepting text entry
[12:37] <davmor2> nor is the Keyboard layout page
[12:42] <davmor2> cjwatson: whose best to talk to about this now?
[12:45] <cjwatson> Not sure, let me see if I have time to sync an image before UDS starts
[12:45] <xnox> davmor2: is that on nexus7?
[12:45] <xnox> davmor2: or on desktop?
[12:46] <xnox> there are bugs with compiz/ubiquity/onboard stealing focus from each other and hence not typing properly
[12:47] <davmor2> xnox, cjwatson: Desktop Raring 64bit, On a Lenovo Y580 ideapad, with secureboot and UEFI, selecting the install option from the efi menu.  I have a video of what I get uploading currently I'll share it in a minute
[12:48] <davmor2> I'll try a desktop and install from there next
[12:49] <xnox> davmor2: if you can get internet up, it would be nice for you to try to install metacity and then stop lightdm from tty1 and start ubiquity job again. To see if there is keyboard input when running under metacity instead of compiz.
[12:52] <davmor2> xnox: so drop into tty install metacity, then sudo service lightdm stop, and then do I need to start metacity or just run ubiquity?
[12:53] <xnox> davmor2: stop lightdm; stop ubiquity; pkill -9 X; apt-get install metacity; start ubiquity
[12:53] <davmor2> xnox, cjwatson: http://ubuntuone.com/7OWyqUhmkKeS64gopn5HoQ that's the video
[12:54] <davmor2> xnox: right give me a couple of seconds then
[13:01] <davmor2> xnox: bingo that's worked now
[13:14] <xnox> davmor2: cjwatson: i ponder we should revert to metacity for now in raring and eventually switch to mir.
[13:15] <davmor2> xnox, cjwatson: do you want me to file a bug for this?
[13:15] <xnox> davmor2: bug 1093050
[13:15] <ubot2`> Launchpad bug 1093050 in ubuntu-nexus7 "compiz dies during oem-config and steals the focus so that input fields are unusable" [High,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/1093050
[13:16] <xnox> davmor2: do you by any chance have `ls /var/crash/*.crash` something for compiz?
[13:16] <xnox> davmor2: it would be interesting if you can upload a compiz crash from there to somewhere.
[13:20] <davmor2> xnox: meh I have installed the system, the only crash I have is whoopsie (I'm looking at you ev ).  I'll keep a hold of the cd and I can reinstall, but I'm coming down to Bluefin Tomorrow so I need to prep this machine now.  On friday I'll redo and see if I get a crash report on the failed to install system for you
[13:21] <davmor2> xnox: or I might try it on a box that isn't coming down to London tomorrow, later.
[13:25] <xnox> davmor2: I'm based in london. I can come it tomorrow (although I was not planning) to play around with that machine?
[13:26] <xnox> davmor2: or is that too much bricks to bring in for you? =))))
[13:26] <davmor2> xnox: it's the machine I'm bringing.  I'll need to do some work there which is why I'm going into bluefin
[13:27] <davmor2> but you can certainly have a play in the afternoon
[13:29] <xnox> davmor2: ok. Ping me tomorrow =)
[13:29] <davmor2> xnox: will do
[14:32] <ev> davmor2: whoopsie is crashing on you?
[14:32] <davmor2> ev: on install
[14:32] <ev> davmor2: please make sure you file that one
[14:32] <ev> on errors.u.c
[14:33] <davmor2> ev: Already known bug apparently
[14:33] <davmor2> ev: triaged iirc
[14:33] <ev> okay
[14:35] <xnox> davmor2: bug number?!
[14:39] <davmor2> xnox: I'm just hunting it now
[14:39] <davmor2> xnox, ev: bug #1124293
[14:39] <ubot2`> Launchpad bug 1124293 in whoopsie (Ubuntu) "whoopsie crashed with SIGSEGV in nm_state_change()" [Medium,Triaged] https://launchpad.net/bugs/1124293
[14:39] <ev> oh yes, that one
[14:40] <davmor2> ev: I can file a fresh one if you want
[14:40] <ev> I think it was fixed
[14:40]  * ev digs
[14:40] <davmor2> ev: it says triaged not fixed
[14:46] <ev> davmor2: it was fixed in 0.2.14
[14:46] <ev> thanks for pointing me at the bug
[14:46] <ev> I've closed it out
[14:46] <davmor2> ev: glad to of helped
[14:47] <ev> :)
[14:47] <davmor2> ev: you in bluefin tomorrow?
[14:47] <ev> yup
[14:47] <ev> will you be here?
[14:57] <xnox> ev: yes, he will be.
[14:59] <ev> wonderful
[21:44] <cleary> hi xnox - thanks for the info
[21:45] <cleary> regarding the live cd changes, I have a 'mastering' approach for that (I make my own from scratch, per se) - it's about a 4 min build process which is quicker than any remaster I've ever done
[21:46] <cleary> for the ubiquity plugins, an apt search yields mythbuntu-live-autostart
[21:46] <cleary> I've also seen the ubiquity-slideshow-kubuntu - are these examples of ubiquity plugins worth having a look at?
[21:56] <superm1> cleary: the mythbuntu ones aren't updated for python3 yet
[21:56] <superm1> cleary: but they are certainly representative of what you can do with ubiquity plugins
[21:57] <cleary> superm1: thanks for that - having a poke through it now :)
[21:57] <cleary> s/it/them
[21:58] <superm1> cleary: sure.  i also have put a fair deal of work into two plugins in dell-recovery
[21:58] <superm1> they're quite a bit more intense in the work they do
[21:58] <cjwatson> superm1: Um, I thought I'd done the Python 3 port last year/
[21:58] <cjwatson> ?
[21:59] <cjwatson> see revision log in https://code.launchpad.net/~mythbuntu-dev/mythbuntu/mythbuntu-live-autostart
[21:59] <superm1> cjwatson: for dell-recovery yes, mythbuntu stuff not entirely functional right now
[21:59] <cjwatson> yeah, I thought I'd done it for mythbuntu too
[21:59] <superm1> i was actually just testing them on raring and hitting some problems
[21:59] <cjwatson> is there a bug with logs?
[21:59] <cjwatson> I mean if you prefer to just fix it then be my guest, it's just a surprise that it's broken in a py3-specific way :)
[22:00] <superm1> well they're broke I suspect because mythbuntu-common didn't come to python3 yet and can't with some dependencies that aren't python3 yet
[22:00] <cjwatson> Ah
[22:01] <superm1> but i didn't review the logs closely, just noticed that when i was bringing some of our other tools up to python3 hitting those problems
[22:02] <superm1> the two big ones are python-mysqldb and python-pexpect.  pexpect forked and has a fork that supports python3 but mysqldb upstream just says they're working on it, so we'll see what's best approach
[22:03] <cjwatson> do you really need pexpect?  there are often other ways ...
[22:03] <cjwatson> IIRC anyway
[22:04] <cleary> superm1: realistically, my requirements are basic. If there's code available for your dell ones, I wouldn't mind having a look for curiousity sake
[22:04] <superm1> yeah i think pexpect i'll come up with something else clever, it was just convenient when it was added
[22:04] <superm1> cleary: lp:dell-recovery
[22:04] <cleary> ta
[22:05] <cjwatson> right, time to not be on the computer for a while, shock horror
[22:07] <cleary> superm1: are you a dell employee?
[22:07] <superm1> cleary: yeah
[22:08] <cleary> very interesting :)
[22:09] <cleary> we're big dell fans here - we are a large wine company (3 wineries) with their head office operating off a farm in rural australia
[22:09] <cleary> dell is the only company that honours their next-business-day support options on desktops
[22:09] <cleary> ...out here at least
[22:10] <superm1> great to hear :)
[22:10] <cleary> the linux offerings, while a bit meagre, are also something we're actively supporting
[22:10] <cleary> can't complain about lack of support, but then not support anyone who does something
[22:11] <superm1> unfortunately australia gets grouped with APJ, so you will probably miss out on the offerings we generally make in the US and Europe as they happen
[22:12] <cleary> yeah we have noticed that, ultimately it's not a big drama for us
[22:12] <cleary> I'm maintaining an in-house distro anyway
[22:13] <cleary> we still make a point of buying ubuntu pre-installed where we can - get those sales numbers up
[22:13] <cleary> I'm not sure the demand here is even a blip on the rest of sales, but once again
[22:13] <cleary> we have to support where we can
[22:15] <cleary> I've got coffee to get and training to do - I'll duck off for a bit. Thanks for the chat/info
[22:16] <superm1> well thanks for the support where you can :)
[23:15] <xnox> cleary: plugins as in see /usr/lib/ubiquity/plugins/*
[23:15] <xnox> cleary: or lp:dell-recovery