Last Sunday we went to the Poás Volcano to make free maps.

This is the second geek outing of the JaquerEspéis. From the first one we learned that we had to wait until summer because it's not possible to make maps during a storm. And the day was perfect. It wasn't just sunny, but the crater was totally clear and thus we could add a new spot of Costa Rica to the virtual tour.

In addition to that, this time we arrived much better prepared, with multiple phones with mapillary, osmand and OSMTracker, a 360 cam, a Garmin GPS, a drone and even a notebook and two biologists.

Here's how it works. Everybody with the GPS in the phone activated waits until it finds the location. Then, each person uses the application of his preference to collect data: pictures, audio, video, text notes, traces, annotations in the notebook...

Later, in our homes, we upload, publish and share all the collected data. These is useful to improve the free maps of OpenStreetMap. We add from really simple things like the location of a trash bin to really important things like how accessible is the place for a person in a wheelchair, together with the location of all the accesses or the places that have a lack of them. Each person improves the map a little, in the region that he knows or passed by. With more than 3 million users, OpenStreetMap is the best map of the world that exists; and it has a particular importance in regions like ours, without a lot of economic potential for the megacorporations that make and sell closed maps stealing private data from their users.

Because the maps we make are free, what comes next has no limits. There are groups working on the reconstruction of 3D models from the pictures, on the identification and interpretation of signs, on applications to calculate the optimal route to reach any place using any combination of means of transportation, on applications to assist decission making during the design of the future of a city, and many other things. All of this based on shared knowledge and community.

The image above is the virtual tour in Mapillary. As we recorded it with the 360 cam, you can click and drag with the mouse to see all the angles. You can also click above, in the play button to follow the path we took. Or you can click in any of the green dots in the map to follow your own path.

Thank you very much to everybody who joined us, specially to Denisse and Charles for being our guides, and for filling up the trip with interesting information about flora, fauna, geology and historic importance of El Poás.

(More pictures and videos here)

The next MapperSpace will be on march the 12th.

I promised that more interesting things were going to be available soon for testing in Ubuntu. There's plenty coming, but today here is one of the greatest:

$ sudo snap install mysql --channel=8.0/beta

Lars Tangvald and other people at MySQL have been working on this snap for some time, and now they are ready to give it to the community for crowd testing. If you have some minutes, please give them a hand.

We have a testing guide to help you getting started.

Remember that this should run in trusty, xenial, yakkety, zesty and in all flavours of Ubuntu. It would be great to get a diverse pool of platforms and test it everywhere.

In here we are introducing a new concept: tracks. Notice that we are using --channel=8.0/beta, instead of only --beta as we used to do before. That's because mysql has two different major versions currently active. In order to try the other one:

$ sudo snap install mysql --channel=5.7/beta

Please report back your results. Any kind of feedback will be highly appreciated, and if you have doubts or need a hand to get started, I'm hanging around in Rocket Chat.

There is a huge announcement coming: snaps now run in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.

Take a moment to note how big this is. Ubuntu 14.04 is a long-term release that will be supported until 2019. Ubuntu 16.04 is also a long-term release that will be supported until 2021. We have many many many users in both releases, some of which will stay there until we drop the support. Before this snappy new world, all those users were stuck with the versions of all their programs released in 2014 or 2016, getting only updates for security and critical issues. Just try to remember how your favorite program looked 5 years ago; maybe it didn't even exist. We were used to choose between stability and cool new features.

Well, a new world is possible. With snaps you can have a stable base system with frequent updates for every program, without the risk of breaking your machine. And now if you are a Trusty user, you can just start taking advantage of all this. If you are a developer, you have to prepare only one release and it will just work in all the supported Ubuntu releases.

Awesome, right? The Ubuntu devs have been doing a great job. snapd has already landed in the Trusty archive, and we have been running many manual and automated tests on it. So we would like now to invite the community to test it, explore weird paths, try to break it. We will appreciate it very much, but all of those Trusty users out there will love it, when they receive loads of new high quality free software on their oldie machines.

So, how to get started?

If you are already running Trusty, you will just have to install snapd:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install snapd

Reboot your system after that in case you had a kernel update pending, and to get the paths for the new snap binaries set up.

If you are running a different Ubuntu release, you can Install Ubuntu in a virtual machine. Just make sure that you install the http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-14.04.5-desktop-amd64.iso.

Once you have Trusty with snapd ready, try a few commands:

$ snap list
$ sudo snap install hello-world
$ hello-world
$ snap find something

Keep searching for snaps until you find one that's interesting. Install it, try it, and let us know how it goes.

If you find something wrong, please report a bug with the trusty tag. If you are new to the Ubuntu community or get lost on the way, come and join us in Rocket Chat.

And after a good session of testing, sit down, relax, and get ohmygiraffe. With love from popey:

$ sudo snap install ohmygiraffe
$ ohmygiraffe

After a little break, on the first Friday of February we resumed the Ubuntu Testing Days.

This session was pretty interesting, because after setting some of the bases last year we are now ready to dig deep into the most important projects that will define the future of Ubuntu.

We talked about Ubuntu Core, a snap package that is the base of the operating system. Because it is a snap, it gets the same benefits as all the other snaps: automatic updates, rollbacks in case of error during installation, read-only mount of the code, isolation from other snaps, multiple channels on the store for different levels of stability, etc.

The features, philosophy and future of Core were presented by Michael Vogt and Zygmunt Krynicki, and then Federico Giménez did a great demo of how to create an image and test it in QEMU.

Click the image below to watch the full session.

There are plenty of resources in the Ubuntu websites related to Ubuntu Core.

To get started, we recommend to follow this guide to run the operating system in a virtual machine.

After that, and if you are feeling brave and want to help Michael, Zygmund and Federico, you can download the candidate image instead, from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/16/candidate/pending/ubuntu-core-16-amd64.img.xz This is the image that's being currently tested, so if you find something wrong or weird, please report a bug in Launchpad.

Finally, if you want to learn more about the snaps that compose the image and take a peek at the things that we'll cover in the following testing days, you can follow the tutorial to create your own Core image.

On this session we were also accompanied by Robert Wolff who works on 96boards at Linaro. He has an awesome show every Thursday called Open Hours. At 96boards they are building open Linux boards for prototyping and embedded computing. Anybody can jump into the Open Hours to learn more about this cool work.

The great news that Robert brought is that both Open Hours and Ubuntu Testing Days will be focused on Ubuntu Core this month. He will be our guest again next Friday, February 10th, where he will be talking about the DragonBoard 410c. Also my good friend Oliver Grawert will be with us, and he will talk about the work he has been doing to enable Ubuntu in this board.

Great topics ahead, and a full new world of possiblities now that we are mixing free software with open hardware and affordable prototyping tools. Remember, every Friday in http://ubuntuonair.com/, no se lo pierda.

Happy new year Ubunteros and Ubunteras!

If you have been following our testing days, you will know by now that our intention is to get more people contributing to Ubuntu and free software projects, and to help them getting started through testing and related tasks. So, we will be making frequent calls for testing where you can contribute and learn. Educational AND fun ^_^

To start the year, I would like to invite you to test the IPFS candidate snap. IPFS is a really interesting free project for distributed storage. You can read more about it and watch a demo in the IPFS website.

We have pushed a nice snap with their latest stable version to the candidate channel in the store. But before we publish it to the stable channel we would like to get more people testing it.

You can get a clean and safe environment to test following some of the guides you'll find on the summaries of the past testing days.

Or, if you want to use your current system, you can just do:

$ sudo snap install ipfs --candidate

I have written a gist with a simple guide to get started testing it

If you finish that successfully and still have more time, or are curious about ipfs, please continue with an exploratory testing session. The idea here is just to execute random commands, try unusual inputs and just play around.

You can get ideas from the IPFS docs.

When you are done, please send me an email with your results and any comments. And if you get stuck or have any kind of question, please don't hesitate to ask. Remember that we welcome everybody.

Today we had the last Ubuntu Testing Day of the year.

We invited Sergio Schvezov and Joe Talbott, to join Kyle and myself. Together we have been working on Snapcraft the whole year.

Sergio did a great introduction of snapcraft, and showed some of the new features that will land next week in Ubuntu. And because it was the last day of work for everybody (except Kyle), we threw some beers into the hang out and made it our team end of year party.

You can watch the full recording by clicking the image below.

Snapcraft is one of the few projects that have an exception to land new features into released versions of Ubuntu. So every week we are landing new things in Xenial and Yakkety. This means that we need to constantly test that we are not breaking anything for all the people using stable Ubuntu releases; and it means that we would love to have many more hands helping us with those tests.

If you would like to help, all you have to do is set up a virtual machine and enable the proposed pocket in there.

This is the active bug for the Stable Release Update of snapcraft 2.24: bug #1650632

Before I shut down my computer and start my holidays, I would like to thank all the Ubuntu community for one more year, it has been quite a ride. And I would like to thank Sergio, Kyle and Joe in particular. They are the best team a QA Engineer could ask for <3.

See you next year for more testing days.

For the third session of the Ubuntu Testing Days, Kevin Gunn joined us to talk about the Unity8 snap.

This is a thriving project with lots of things to do and bugs to uncover, so it's the perfect candidate for newcomers eager to help Ubuntu.

If you are interested and didn't attend our meeting on Friday, click the image below to watch the recording.

To install Unity 8 in the Ubuntu 16.04 cloned virtual machine that we prepared on the past session, enter the following commands in the terminal:

$ sudo add-apt-repository -u ppa:ci-train-ppa-service/stable-phone-overlay
$ sudo apt install unity8-session-snap
$ unity8-snap-install
$ sudo reboot

After reboot, on the login screen click the Ubuntu icon next to your user name and change the selection to Unity 8.

Kevin and his team have a google doc with the instructions to build and install the snap, and the current status. If you find a bug, you can talk to the developers joining the #ubuntu-touch IRC channel on freenode

While preparing the testing environment on this session we had a crash, and explained how easy it is to send the report to the Ubuntu developers by just clicking the Report problem... button. The reports from all our users are in the error tracker, along with a frequency graph and the links to bug reports where those crashes are being fixed.

We also showed two tricks to make faster and more pleasant the testing session in a virtual machine:

• Set up a cache for deb packages
• Share the clipboard between the host and the guest

Thanks to Julia, Kyle and Kevin for the nice session.

Join us again next Friday at Ubuntu On-Air.

We have survived two testing days, and now we can safely say that it will become a Friday tradition :)

Last Friday our nice guest was Aaron Ogle, from Rocket Chat. He gave us a tour on the Rocket Chat UI and we discussed about how they packaged it as a snap.

If you missed it, click the image below to watch it.

Building from what we saw on the first session, we tested the snap using a virtual machine again. But this time, we cloned it to keep a pristine machine and make following testing sessions faster. If you want to help the Ubuntu and Rocket Chat communities, this is an easy way to prepare your environment:

• Set up a virtual machine
• Install Ubuntu
• Clone the pristine virtual machine

Once you have your clone ready, install the most recent and bleeding edge version of rocket chat with:

$ sudo snap install rocketchat-server --edge

Then you can follow this gist with the initial steps to start testing the Rocket Chat snap

Also you can test a real installation of Rocket Chat, joining our community channel, where we are available all day, every day. If you have a question, just ask. I am elopio in there.

During the session we took a look at the GitHub website, where many free software communities do their development in the open. They have a great guide to start contributing to open source projects. Go on and spread your love for free software in the form of bug reports :)

The gratitude this week goes to our newly acquired staff members Julia and Kyle, and of course to Aaron for letting us have a funny Friday evening. Make sure to take a look at the cool things he and his teammates are doing; and if you have some free time and want to join an exciting, open and nice community, give them a hand. Also try the Jitsi integration for video conference, it's mind-blowing that there are no closed components anywhere.

See you next Friday at Ubuntu On-Air.