Interview with Dustin Kirkland: Ubuntu Server Developer

For the first installment in my Ubuntu Developer Interview series, we have Dustin Kirkland, a member of the Ubuntu Server team. As you will see, in each of the interviews, I have some questions that are tailored specifically for each developer, as well as some general interest questions. I hope you enjoy these interviews as much as I have.

How long have you been working with the Ubuntu Server Team?

I officially joined Canonical to work on the Ubuntu Server Team in February of 2008. I’ve been working in and around Linux and open source software since 1998.

How much time do you spend working on Ubuntu?

At least the normal, 40 hour work week, obviously. Beyond that, probably another 10-20 hours per week, working on various other aspects that are outside of the scope of the Server team. That time generally increases around release time and deadlines, as well as when I’m traveling for “sprints”.

How would you describe the path from getting started in the community to becoming a core developer?

Well, I’m not quite a core developer yet. My core developer application was just endorsed by the MOTU Council, and next, I will be interviewed in IRC by the Technical Board. It’s a strange, though healthy, difference from what I’m used to. It’s interesting to be grilled in the public. Compared to “promotions” in the private sector, the process in open, and very public. I certainly prefer the public review of one’s work, and as I said, overall I think it’s “healthy”.

Are there any special plans or new features planned for the Server edition of Jaunty?

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is being held in Mountain View, California at Google’s headquarters 2008 December 5 - 9. There, we’ll establish the formal plan for the Jaunty Server.
There are proposals, however. You can view mine under my Blueprints in Launchpad: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/~kirkland

Right now it seems Ubuntu is known primarily as a “Desktop Distro”. What can Ubuntu do to make strides in becoming more accepted in the Datacenter?

That will continue to be our focus during our week of discussions at UDS. I’m hoping to work on some Green Computing initiatives on the Ubuntu server, to establish Ubuntu as the “green” server option. Again, that’s not blessed, or fleshed out entirely yet. But I think there are some obvious things we can do in that respect.

For someone like myself who is interested in helping the Server version of Ubuntu, but also like me lacks any real “programming skills”, is there a way to get involved with the Server team and help out? If so, where could we get started?

Adam Sommer leads the Ubuntu Server Guide documentation project. He’s always looking for some good, technical non-programming help. Developers generally appreciate Ubuntu users who can comb through the bugs in Launchpad, and “Confirm” bugs that they can reproduce, and close
ones that are no longer applicable. Beyond “Confirming”, if you know the packages/code well enough, you can “Triage” the bug against the correct package. That helps developers focus on the pertinent code. And finally, you might be surprised how many bugs can be solved by one or two lines of code–often fixes to shell or perl or python scripts. These don’t require mad programming skills in C or erlang or something.

Is there anything that Ubuntu could learn from the distro’s that are more “established” as “server distro’s”?

There are lessons to be learned, but I think in general, we’re trying to blaze our own trail in the server market. You speak of the Linux desktop… The Linux desktop had been around for almost 10 years before Ubuntu entered the scene. The success Ubuntu established on the desktop was less about learning lessons from other Distros and more about totally re-creating the desktop Linux market.
Ubuntu created more “new” Linux users than it took away from other distributions. The Ubuntu desktop did this by creating the most user-friendly desktop environment, with the most out-of-the-box support for hardware that Linux had ever seen Personally, my goal is not to “win” over Red Hat, or SUSE, or Debian, or Mandriva server users. Rather, I think a better measure of success
would be landing many first-time Linux server administrators, with them choosing Ubuntu over the many options in the market. Especially in the “data center” you mentioned above, I think there’s still market share to be gained against proprietary Unix and Windows servers. And with Cloud Computing taking hold, this world is about to have billions more OS images running in virtual clouds around the world. We’d like some significant number of those to be Ubuntu servers.

Do you contribute to FLOSS (Free/Libre & Open Source Software) in any other ways?

I have written a few open source projects from scratch, most of which are in Launchpad, and couple I’ve packaged for Ubuntu. I’m hoping to package the rest of them for Ubuntu for Jaunty. These include:

• musica - http://launchpad.net/musica (in Intrepid)
• bogosec - http://launchpad.net/bogosec (packaged for Jaunty, awaiting approval)
• pictor - http://launchpad.net/pictor (hopefully Jaunty)
• lynx-web-app - http://launchpad.net/lynx-web-app (hopefully Jaunty)

I’m also the upstream maintainer of ecryptfs-utils, which I’m extending to support encrypting your entire $HOME directory.

• ecryptfs-utils - http://launchpad.net/ecryptfs

I created and continue to maintain the Ubuntu Manpage Repository, an automatically generated collection of all manpages included in supported Ubuntu distributions:

• http://manpages.ubuntu.com/

I developed a Google Custom Search Engine, which is quite useful for Ubuntu developers, testers and community members. It indexes a number of sites that provide useful information and documentation about Ubuntu, including the Official Documentation, Wiki Documentation, Man pages, Launchpad Blueprints, Launchpad Answers, Ubuntu Forums, Ubuntu mailing lists, IRC logs, Package descriptions, Launchpad Bugs, and Source code changelogs.

• http://people.ubuntu.com/~kirkland/search.html

Based on that work, I helped replace the search engined used by:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/

Also, I blog regularly about Ubuntu and open source software at:

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com

What areas of Ubuntu/Ubuntu Server get you especially excited, i.e., what is your personal passion?

Security, mostly. I love working on new security development and integration within the distribution. I’m hoping to work on encrypted swap, and encrypted home directories for Jaunty.

Now, for some more general questions:

What kinds of computers do you have personally that you use daily?

My daily machine is a Thinkpad t61p running Intrepid, but I’ll probably upgrade to Jaunty around Alpha 3 or 4.
My wife uses the smaller Thinkpad x61. She’s a teacher, so she runs Edubuntu, and she’s non-technical, so she uses the very stable Hardy 8.04 LTS. When I travel, I swap the hard drives between the t61p and x61, and I take the smaller, lighter, longer-battery x61 on the road.
I also have a MythTV front end in every room of the house. I have five ASUS Pundit P1-AH2, with AMD x2 processors ranging from 3800 - 5800, and 1 - 4 GB of RAM, most of which are running Intrepid. And I have one PowerPC Mac mini MythTV frontend running Hardy. These machines also
double as development, test, and cluster-computing systems.
I have an old, tiny Dell Optiplex SX-260 which is my co-lo backup system at my parent’s house 500 miles away, also running Hardy. And I’m also the lead developer and administrator of DivItUp.com (a free web service for splitting bills with friends/roommates), which is running Hardy in a dedicated VPS VirtualBox.

• https://www.divitup.com

What desktop environment/Window manager do you use?

I think I answered most of this in the previous question…
I use Ubuntu/Gnome on my primary system. My wife uses Gnome under Edubuntu/Gnome. Most of my MythTV frontends use Mythbuntu/XFCE, though I do keep at least one around using Kubuntu/KDE4 (just for my own education).
My MythTV backend (also NFS server) runs Ubuntu server (no desktop manager). And Divitup.com runs Ubuntu server in a dedicated virtual machine.

What applications are key to your everyday computer use?
That’s a tough question to answer without just dumping `dpkg -l`
As soon as I boot into my desktop, I launch:

• gnome-terminal
• firefox
• xchat
• pidgin
• evolution
• liferea

Then, I connect to my musica web server, and pick out some music to listen to. Oddly enough, I still use xmms
There are so many more packages, though, required just to get to the point where I’m ready to launch firefox.
My $HOME directory is encrypted, so I need ecryptfs-utils, and pam to mount it, and about a hundred more just to boot the computer. I can’t do anything without ssh’ing to a dozen different machines. GPG, for signing email and package uploads. Multiple suites of build tools to build the packages I work on. This list could go on all day….

Could you share a screenshot of your setup?

Is there anything else you would like to share with my readers?
Witty comments? Sound advice? Funny stories?

Hmm… Get involved! There are many, many aspects of the Ubuntu community, and you can likely find a niche. Development seems to be my niche. Lots of people want to get involved with Documentation. But there’s a lot more than just that. Bug triaging is really valuable. Translations help bring Ubuntu to the far corners of the world. Get involved with your LoCo, and foster the Ubuntu spirit in your community.
Grassroots media and positive public relations, like blogs, and the now-famous The-Matrix-Runs-on-Windows video are so important to our community and success, in that we don’t have Mac-verus-PC commercials airing during the Superbowl or the Olympics. Buy an Ubuntu t-shirt and wear it around. I *always* wear an Ubuntu t-shirt when I fly, and I’ve had dozens of interesting conversations as a result.

Cheers,
:-Dustin

Thanks again Dustin, for taking time to share your knowledge and insight with us!