Ask Ubuntu update for October 2012

12.10 release
As most of us know, 12.10 was released earlier this month. As always, we have users running into issues and questions that are in need of some love and if you can spare some time to help some of the users, that would be greatly appreciated. Here’s the link to the latest 12.10 questions asked on the site. Do remember to answer the given question with adequate explanation. Pretty screenshots when and where necessary would be a nice addition!

Ask Ubuntu’s second birthday

It might come as a pleasant surprise to many as Ask Ubuntu celebrated its second birthday earlier this month. Having been launched to the public on October 10, 2010 along with the release of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, the site has since seen significant growth keeping in tandem with the rising popularity of Ubuntu across the world.

New milestone: 100,000 answers
Second birthday notwithstanding, Ask Ubuntu clocked yet another milestone of 100,000 answers this October. With over 70,000 questions and 80,000 users, Ask Ubuntu is fast growing into the go-to place for all your questions about Ubuntu ranging from the recent Ubuntu Nexus project and application development to the juju charms and the general troubleshooting.

Ask Ubuntu session in UDS
We have a separate session in UDS-R to discuss the continued Ask Ubuntu integration and other Ask Ubuntu related tasks. The session is scheduled to be on November 1st in the evening and everyone who has a keen interest in Ask Ubuntu is invited to attend either physically (if you happen to be in Copenhagen, Denmark) or remotely through IRC. Given that the current scheduled time is subject to changes, you are advised to keep an eye on the UDS-R schedule.

StackIRC – IRC bot that posts questions from Stack Exchange sites
We are glad to announce that our wonderful community member George Edison has written an IRC bot that posts questions of a particular tag in IRC channels. The bot is already running in IRC channels #juju, #ubuntu-community-team and #ubuntu-app-devel with plans to cover more channels in the near future.

You can also set up your own bot if you are interested in tracking specific tags in Ask Ubuntu or other Stack Exchange sites in IRC. Instructions for setting up and using the bot can be found here: https://github.com/nathan-osman/StackIRC

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of October.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of October:

• What are the differences between sudo, su, visudo, chroot and gksu?
• How can I instruct Nautilus to pre-generate PDF thumbnails?
• Find directories that DON’T contain a file

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

*Requires 20 reputation to participate in the chat.

Markdown syntax highlighting in Vim and Nano in Ubuntu

This is more of a personal reference post more than sharing it for the public.

Markdown has started pervading the Internet more than anything. From Stack Exchange and GitHub to Reddit and Tumblr, big names use Markdown for marking up text online.

Now, some of us want the cool syntax highlighting in our favourite command-line text editors. At least I did and I did find an elegant solution for both Vim and Nano. Unfortunately, I almost forgot what I did when I reinstalled my system and had to pour through the Internet again to get back the system. Hence, I thought, why not document somewhere so I can just refer to it whenever I need to get back the markdown syntax highlighting?

Vim
Plastic boy has done a splendid job prepping up a syntax for Markdown. Summing up the steps in simple commands for those in a hurry:

wget http://plasticboy.com/dox/vim-markdown.zip
mkdir .vim
unzip vim-markdown.zip -d ~/.vim

That’s about all you need to do to setup syntax highlighting in Vim.

Nano
Another set of commands for setting up Markdown syntax highlighting in Nano:

wget https://raw.github.com/serialhex/nano-highlight/master/markdown.nanorc
echo "include $HOME/markdown.nanorc" > .nanorc

You might also want to edit your .nanorc file and include .mkd file extension to be recognized as markdown.

See also: Syntax highlighting in Nano.

Now that you have done setting up Vim and Nano to highlight markdown syntax, have fun writing!

Ask Ubuntu update for September 2012

Marco Ceppi’s interview with OSS Watch
Marco Ceppi, one of the community moderators of Ask Ubuntu, was interviewed by Mark Johnson for OSS watch. Marco Ceppi explains the target of the site are “those people who have a problem, go to a search engine, then click a link and expect a fix.” Marco also notes that there were resistance to Ask Ubuntu initially but the general Ubuntu community has fully accepted Ask Ubuntu for what it brings to the table.

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of September.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of September:

• How to get an email notification when an USB storage device is inserted?
• What is the purpose of the -9 option in the kill command?
• How do I lock the screen from the terminal?
• What is the equivalent of the “tracert” DOS command?

Wikipedia page
The Wikipedia article for Ask Ubuntu has been updated to include the updated Alexa page rank as well as the number of users and questions on the site. As it is on Wikipedia, if you think the article could be improved upon, feel free to edit it and add more information as you see fits. We are always looking for more help.

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

*Requires 20 reputation to participate in the chat.

Why I think Jorge Castro is actually a bot!

Time and again, someone starts to wonder if Jorge Castro is a human or really a robot disguised as one. With the amount of things he does in Ask Ubuntu, I think it is only fair that someone wonders the true nature of him. With the need and curiosity to dig out the truth behind the greatest mystery of all time in Ask Ubuntu, I set out to collect some hard hitting facts about some of his activities in Ask Ubuntu.

Of the 161860 posts that are on Ask Ubuntu, Jorge Castro has managed to edit a staggering 14605 of them and vote on a good 18588 posts. If you can’t comprehend that, here’s the deal in a much simpler way: Jorge edited 9.02% of all posts on Ask Ubuntu and vote on 11.48% posts.

Pretty graph of Jorge Castro’s roller coaster reputation:

Now, if you are wondering why the reputation seems to have stopped after a while, it is because Jorge Castro has turned into a true altruist, giving away his hard-earned (!) reputation as bounties. He has given away nearly half of what he has earned overall, to the point that he now has given away more than what he has currently. A staggering 191 offered bounties for a lump sum of 22,550 reputation.

Here’s the not so full set of stats about Jorge Castro (it took a good couple of minutes to populate the data):

Statistics for Jorge Castro (235):
- Reputation: 21761 ⚫ 36 ⚫ 168 ⚫ 340
- Member of askubuntu.com since Thu Jul 29 19:07:34 2010
- Last activity on Tue Sep 25 22:29:36 2012
- 20818 views of profile page

- Asked 109 questions
- Answered 735 questions (336 accepted answers, 45.71%)
- Commented 2682 times (received 919 'great comment' votes)
- The average comment received 0.34 votes (min: 0, max: 8)

- Voted on 17696 posts (16764 upvotes, 932 downvotes)
- Edited 15709 entries (13213 without re-tagging)

- Total votes received: +5457
- Received 5475 up-votes (1362 on questions, 4113 on answers)
- Received 18 down-votes (2 on questions, 16 on answers)
- Average score 6.47 (12.48 on questions, 5.57 on answers)

- Views of questions: 385218 (min/avg/max: 29, 3534.11, 52034)
- Views of answers: 1809185 (min/avg/max: 15, 2461.48, 212807)

- Reputation from questions: 7012
- Reputation from answers: 46138
- Average reputation per day: 27

Without needing to say, I think Jorge Castro is indeed a bot.

_{By the way, we are in the midst of getting askjorge.com aliased to askubuntu.com.}

Ask Ubuntu update for August 2012

Earlier this month, one of our community moderators Marco Ceppi was asking for feedback on how Ask Ubuntu is working for most of the users. The feedback received has been generally positive, suggesting that Ask Ubuntu has been nice and helpful for the general public. Not possible without the kind contributors. Here’s a flower for your generosity:

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of August.

And this month’s special mention goes to msPeachy for helping the site by improving the posts with her edits:

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of August:

• Is “laptop-mode-tools” still relevant for 12.04 and the 3.x kernels?
• Why isn’t VLC the default Video player?
• How to prevent my screen from dimming when watching YouTube?

New review system
The new beta review system that has been doing the rounds in other Stack Exchange sites has finally landed in Ask Ubuntu. It promises to make reviewing the posts less painful than ever before. One caveat though: You need at least 2000 reputation to review at the moment.

Ask Ubuntu on Trello
If you already didn’t know, Ask Ubuntu has a Trello board. For those of you who use Trello board to organize your team workflow and want to follow or chip in with the administrative work, feel free to join the Trello board and contribute or collaborate as you see fits.

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

*Requires 20 reputation to participate in the chat.

Ask Ubuntu update for July 2012

Ever since the 12.04 release, Ask Ubuntu has done beyond pulling its own weight. With the site receiving almost 180 questions and about 138,000 visits every day, it might be surprising to see the high level of quality maintained in most of the posts but all thanks should go to the community and the moderators who are working tirelessly to get everything in order.

Highlights of this month:

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of July:

• How can I undo the last cd command?
• Why is swap being used even though I have plenty of free RAM?
• How are packages actually installed via apt-get install?

Ask Ubuntu on Google Plus
Ask Ubuntu has a fan page on Google +. People who are active on Google + can circle us there and receive regular updates on interesting and useful content on the site. A circle containing all of our splendid community moderators has been created and shared as well. Feel free to circle them and show your support and appreciation. Another circle containing the top users of Ask Ubuntu is in the works and will be shared shortly once we have finished forming the circle.

Second year anniversary
It’s been two years since Ask Ubuntu first entered the private beta on 28-7-2010. The first question to be asked on the website was George Edison’s How to get the “Your battery is broken” message to go away? Since that remarkable day, over 60,000 questions and 85,000 answers have been posted on the site, making Ask Ubuntu one of the most useful repository of collective knowledge regarding Ubuntu. Join us as we celebrate an important milestone in the history of Ask Ubuntu as we continually transform the site into a great source of information for millions of Ubuntu users across the world.

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If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

_{*Requires 20 reputation to participate in the chat.}

Test Quantal kernels on Precise

Earlier yesterday, before I upgrade to Quantal, I thought I would test Quantal kernels on Precise to help the Ubuntu Kernel team to provide better hardware support for 12.04. Surprisingly, the entire process was as easy as it ever can be.

I’ll just leave them in point form here. So, if anyone wants to test them, they know what exactly to do.

• Check the Wiki page for kernel testing.
• Download the script from the wiki page. Check the modules that you should be testing for.
• Install the Quantal kernels as per the instructions provided.
• Add yourself under each relevant kernel module on the Wiki page.
• Boot into Quantal kernels. Check whether all the hardware is working fine. You can follow the basic instructions provided to guide you on testing.
• If there are issues, report bugs on Launchpad. If there aren’t any, then report on the QA tracker accordingly.
• Now pat yourself on your back. You have done the Kernel team a favour.