 So, as it has been earlier mentioned a few times today, one of the best things that end-users of Debian Canada would help the project is to file good reports and to provide constructive feedback to the Debian project and to the Debian developers. As anyone might know, there has been some difficulties dealing with some developers. Some are overly friendly and others are less. The main point is actually mostly an aspect of miscommunication and reaching a common language is the biggest difficulty in how to achieve that and how to provide constructive feedback that will help both Debian and yourself as an end-user is what our next speaker will discuss. Thanks for that introduction and thanks for inviting me to be here. Well, if you might notice or not since I don't have my e-mail address here, I'm not a Debian developer yet myself but something strange, all people think I'm belonging to them so I think I have found myself a way to contribute to Debian without being a developer. I started, I think, four years ago and I'm going to tell you some ways to contribute to Debian without being a developer, without being a really, really cool hacker, perhaps without using Debian itself. Actually, you will find my slides and what I'm telling you not as useful as a real how-to. You can start right away but I'm about to write the paper with more detailed commands and examples you can use. I've seen URL of the paper will later be published hopefully two days from now. I would like to get your feedback. You can contribute. We'll see what it's got. Okay, so let's start. One of the main tasks I'm doing for Debian is going to some strange cities, to some small conferences, exhibitions, finding a Debian news and answering visitors' questions. And often I hear people say, ah, yeah, Debian, that's my favorite operating system. I would like to help but probably I can't program. The funny thing is I can't program either. I'm a terrible bad programmer. I hate it to do that. I always try to delegate scripting things to other people who can do it better. So I don't know why but there are many people out there who think they really need to be the cool hacker living from caffeine, staying awake the whole night, well, and to do the really useful contributor to Debian. That's quite wrong. I think it's a little bit, sorry about that because, but actually those people who are not the really cool hackers could be very useful for us. I will come to that topic a bit later. So probably I'm getting a bit deep and it's the best tip I can give you is, don't be so scared. Sadly it is a fact that technical knowledge experience doesn't go with social capabilities hand in hand. So if you get deep involved you will find that there are a lot of assholes out there. Sorry for the crowd. And they turn off your screen. Tap shift. It'll take a moment to re-figure out how to project the mode. It should come in. What you apparently can't read, but hopefully will read soon, is that there's big, big, big, big letters. Don't be thin-skinned. Yes, I'm trying. I can read. Well, he picks it. Well, there are assholes out there. Don't waste your time. Don't get angry. Don't start growing about that. Just ignore them. Ignore them. Take a look out for other people who might be helpful for you. Try to find the lies. Find some people who had the same problem as you, and you might together convince the maintainer, developer, whatever, that you are indeed in the right position, that the wish list that you just filled to correct the documentation in a way is indeed a bug, and should be fixed. On the other hand, which would be the... No! I can read something. Okay. On the other hand, I said... Well, we were done. Okay. A little bit out of context, try to ignore the assholes, but on the other hand, don't give up too easy. You know it. If you report a wish list bug, telling, please correct the example in the documentation which doesn't work because you... I did nothing! First I should just separate. Ah, yeah. If you reported a bug, and three other people reported a bug, but this asshole just goes and tells you, no, it's not a bug. Read the documentation, I mentioned it somewhere there in foobar, user, hair, local, and you get such a class where you should look, but I don't think you'll have this. Well, take a look at it. Such things are reported often. If they are reported often enough, you might convince the maintainer to hear your voice. So, another nice way to help us is just where we send food. Thank us. That's not a thing. That is a real bug. And so funny thing is, I know the maintainer of that, their name is obviously not here. Okay, that's fine. I know that one of the... And when I prepared the talk, I just knew that there has been such a bug report, and I'm not sure where to find this. As I previously, we are lazy, so I just asked him, hey, you once got the bug report telling you it's starting to slow and something about confidence. Do you know which number it was? Five seconds later, I had the bug number. The interesting fact is that the guy I asked can hardly remember his own phone number. But he knew the number of this bug. So, let's imagine that OpenOffice is a big package with many, many bugs, but he remembered that bug and that number. So I think that motivated him a little bit to continue. So it's quite easy. It must be in that way. I can read just the email telling, thank you for doing that. It's also nice. Another easy way is, well, donate something. One nice example I remember is this guy from Switzerland is very interested in having just get another setup tool from Susie, bought it to Debian. He's not a developer either. So he just thought, well, I have some money, I have some hardware, so if somebody would like to port it, I could give him my hardware, I could give him some money, please do it, get in contact with me. That's a nice way to do the same thing. Well, you may ask him. No, not again. I'm doing something wrong. Okay. That's one way to contribute something. Thanks. Could you please tell us about it so that later on the video tape, I'm not looking like an idiot. Don't worry. Okay. Okay. Don't let it pass. Sorry. Okay. I have something. What? What? Do you want to fool me? Okay. Okay. Okay. Some companies donate servers, mirror space, some companies donate hardware, either will later tell us a bit about HP and say in some servers there too. Very nice story. Of course, we are always with open ears for your ideas, for your feedback how we can improve. Another way is to simply tell your friends about Debian. But perhaps not telling just right now you must use Debian right now. Perhaps try with a step-by-step. If they are using currently the other operating system made by this company in Redminton's name, I forget. We use first Firefox and then OpenOffice and then perhaps Thunderbird and now that they are so far that they are using nearly entirely open source software. Ask them if you want to if you may instance in Debian Debian as well. Perhaps they will develop. Perhaps they will be later the guy who will fix the nasty bug you just stumbling over. Perhaps they will be the future of people who sponsors this conference inviting you to come here, something like that. You never know though. Spread the word. Bring other people to use free software. And of course if they did so be there for them. Just don't give them the DVDs because oh yeah I'm sure you will do it just fine. They will mostly end up in Debian installation not used for years and deleted when they need more space for their mp3s or by just some nice DVDs on their wall whatever. So be for them. Help them help other people. Sometimes well nobody is interested yet. Might be later or we are busy. We have to make a path sometime. Sooner or later it might be added. That's the part where I see a type on my slides. Okay please ignore it. That's the part where I stop asking to help you by begging you. Please. We are just stupid geeks. We are long head. We have good talent to stay up the entire night. We can write really really cool programs but there are things we can't do. We have just a very special point of view to the entire world. But let me explain that with a small example. Recently I bought a new washing machine. It has a manual and somewhere in the manual there was written please fill this washing machine with a maximum capacity of 3kg or something like that. So what I did? 3 months long every time I used it I put in 3kg from 30kg that it broke after 3 months not that long. It was such an expensive washing machine. So I got a technician from the company into my house to take a look at the washing machine and told me well you put too much clothes in that that was what? 3kg I did exactly that. Oh yeah that's 3kg. But that's 3kg wet. Ok I didn't knew that but they found it easy to understand that everyone should know it that if they put in there manual 3kg 3kg wet that's obviously the different point of view than I did. And it's the same with software. We are writing those stuff. We are using it daily. We knew the the options. We knew where to click. We knew how to use the configuration file. We knew it. What we need is people. What we need is people who don't know our software that well. You can discover failures in documentation who find out that it's quite crappy to click 7 times with the mouse for the daily option. All the stuff that we need you normal users not such slunghead geese that me or him or hardly him. We need normal people to take a look at what we have done to tell us what we can do better. The normal way here is to use the tool webbot bug that's something that will be more detailed in the paper I'm about to write. Well that's a nice example of this. Black people. I know it sounds a little bit um I'm missing a word, sorry. It doesn't sound like it's a really useful way to do things with your time like a waste of your precious time. But something works. Just that if you as a user don't start to tell your hardware that you would like to have free drivers for your new graphics cards they will never get the notice they will never realize that there's indeed demand for free drivers for media, ad or whatever cards. So it might be just the mail tool that zero. But if all of you start writing things through the later they will get the message. Okay. Another really simple task which can be done by everyone is to tell us something which is worth to report to other people. We have a weekly newsletter. The length of the newsletter is currently decreasing because nobody reports useful stuff. I can hardly imagine that in the last year nothing happened in Finland which wouldn't have been worth to be noted. So please tell us. Even if you think it's not worth tell us. We decided not to be reported. And where is he? Peter? It's just a small tool. Just one attitude away from innovation which will report to us which packages you install and how often you use them. The important thing is of course it does it anonymously. So we can't see that you are still using the old Apache server with the remote root exploit. Oh, bad example. No. It's anonymously just get noted what the people outside are using. Why is that important? For example, we take a look at the popularity contest data to decide which packages should go on the first disk, on the second disk, which are so unimportant that they can truly be part of the 15th disk. It's also quite important that we do special DVD images, for example for Linux tag which packages should be on the DVDs which are really important which are commonly used. The current problem is that there are quite many people outside who have it installed. But nearly all of them are some kind related in development. So it's not yet a really objective data collection we have now. So we really need normal people like you or your sister or your mother to tell us what the people outside are really using. And sometimes people run out of time maintainers have other things to do so they need to decide should I drop a package is it commonly used should it be kept or whatever. That stuff is quite difficult for us. We need it if you would like to have it. So I think Christian Pepe or whatever you spell it once made some nice statistic about how many languages the current database has. How many people can use that and how many people of the world would be able to install Debian. I think he got depending on the statistic he took for the language data around 2.3 to 80% or something like that. But actually the first thing you think is wow that's quite much. But on the other hand it means that at least 20% are not able to install Debian right now. I think that's something worth to be changed. That's something which can easily be changed in which we can do what other companies don't have the time to pay for it. Or do you any company out there who has enough money to translate KDE to the local dialect spoken in Norway Norway has three dialects three dialects as the big company that was only one, two. But the guys in Norway are like hey we have three dialects we want to have all of them supported so they started to think about it so okay, if they don't do it let's do it ourselves started something called school alias and indeed they very soon all the languages they had went back to Debian and so they made Debian itself usable for more people. Most of the translation stuff is just opening some kind of file some special marks translating everything into your own. You don't even need to know much things about the exact structure of the document you're currently translating you just need to know how to translate it. For example I translated the release notes they are written in SGML something like that the release notes are written in document SGML I don't know anything about it I just knew okay there are some brackets there are some other brackets and I think I need to translate everything in between well it works release notes are available in my language in my native language in German not up to date I'm working on it I promise those German people can read the release notes without me knowing anything about document SGML and even if you are too frightened to use your preferred editor on a text file you can still be of help in proof reading actually I did pretty much of the translation of the release notes at night I couldn't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning and well you could see it some parts of the translation were really really bad but no problem I sent out a note I have here the release notes in SGML because someone explained me how to create the SGML file so other people speaking my language telling me you have a type reser and a type reser and the quotation mark you said there doesn't make any sense and while we are at it this paragraph doesn't make any sense at all good point so I could improve my translations so I could read the English document and telling the author of the document that you might be improved with one or two sections too again you have deeper to become better and another thing is there are pretty much other things we can't do for example we can't do nice artwork that's a really really rare sound not to say it's a gift given to some people who just can't do it I can't so we have in Germany a nice lady who is doing nearly all of our artwork for cover design for banners for posters actually if you walk out there a really nice DEBCOM 5 poster is made by her it's nice looking we couldn't have done that actually we tried and we failed and so she who doesn't even use DBN yet but last idea behind it said ah ok I have some time let's do it and so we have a poster but other than as said before we are a heck of we prevent stuff or we do something else but writing documentation it's not fun at all yeah we will do a both later about that I like it but we all know I'm weird we know you're weird well as said it's a bit complicated because the software you've written you know exactly what to do and then try to document it might be lead to strange things where you have an entire section about something you found important but the user will ask you I never used that feature why does he write an entire book about it where does it end scroll down scroll down we really need you to write documentation to prove it's all documentation or at least tell us what documentation is currently missing I'm pretty sure there is documentation missing and later on if you found and used Debian we'll soon or later find out that something doesn't work at all then you have two possibilities as I think oh well when that doesn't work then I use the other program which seems to be to be doing the same or just ignore it or to report the bug please report it it's quite easy we have a small tool to report bugs to us you will ask some questions about what package you're about you want to report the bug what kind that bug is you can add some information about it other informations which version of the package you're using will be detected automatically so you just need to type a little bit what you should add is on the slide I will have a more detailed example in the paper I'm about to write which will of course also mention how to write with your location that's for you it's just easy if you find something doesn't work install webhawk bug if you have not already for webhawk bug package name and well add information you find useful if the maintainer of the package misses some important information about your bug you will get in contact he won't ask you so don't be afraid even if you can't speak English very well report the bug if the maintainer doesn't understand what you've written you will ask someone who speaks the language would be the first one thing you might want to mention is sometimes if you can't describe the problem send a screenshot or something like that and don't hesitate look at me I'm not a native English speaker I have a pretty good pretty long history of translation errors where people later loved about me because I was looking for a word I was picking up my dictionary I was looking for something I had seven words to choose from and I choose exactly the wrong word which has a completely different meaning so who cares most people you will our bug reports are open for everyone to read but most people will never meet you again so who cares for someone is telling you he must place the rules with getting angry or something like that sorry is it important okay but is that really true all the difference between a bug report written in Chinese with a term that you can't recognize and a spam which arrives into the bug tracking system because the bug report has the pseudo headers package, version, severity maybe it is not a real documentation that if you get as a maintainer of a package bug report you can't understand you it's not a document that you must contact someone of that language adjusting that you could contact it and I think most maintainers will agree with me and I think I remember at least 3 bug reports filled in foreign languages where the maintainer later asked the specific translation smooths yeah people to submit bug reports in a foreign language because if it's an exception then maybe a developer will take trouble to okay this one time I will try to get to ask this but if you're going to get hundreds and hundreds of bug reports in a foreign language then that's not going to work anymore then you need to have a formal infrastructure where maybe bug reports can be submitted to a language list first they can take care of the translation before it's submitted to the BTS that was with the consensus there so I think you should be careful about promoting bug reports in foreign languages you should have told me before I was trying to do this okay maybe right I'm not sure you were right but can understand your opinion I think it would be very good to develop the infrastructure to get okay just stop with the comment if you can write your book in English if not try to be as near as English as you can English isn't quite good enough if you continue to learn to grow to expand your mind sooner or later think that it's useful to when it was a package you're regularly using for bugs you might help with where you can give the specific hint to allow the maintainer to fix it or to just take care of it if they are about to be removed from the distribution because they're from these critical bugs or if they're off-hand by the old maintainer that's quite easy install the package F-squids what we'll tell you if they're if this package is about to be off-hand that's the WNPP alert so as a script we'll tell you if they're release critical bugs to a package you've installed frequently installed quite nice and you might find it useful to subscribe to the developer's list of your specific favorite packages most of them are ASA or at least CDNR just take a look at it there are quite many lists take a look which you would like to subscribe to and well if you find out that you're not yet ready that you don't understand at all what the guys are talking about you can unsubscribe again and at last but least there's something called package tracking system it's you can subscribe to information about your packages so you will get copies of the bug reports special notes the maintainer wants to send to all the subscription of the packages it's quite useful if you're really interested in a specific package in a specific suit or whatever but as said it's not yet that useful to store please read the paper please report the fact to me but sooner or later you might think about becoming yourself adivian developer having not just a spill on your name tag but a bottle having a really really cool adivian odd mailing address that's something nice if you have done all the people steps I already told you and you have to trace the deviant project so that people will really yes this guy is interested in deviant this guy has done many things for deviant but it's quite easy to get into the project and just one slide to show you how to get it first thing is you will need a GBGT to sign your mail, sign your packages and this GBGT must be signed by a deviant developer so that we can really be sure that you are indeed the person you're telling us you are yeah the next part is called PNP you will get asked many many many questions about the deviant project about how it handled some things about the philosophy behind deviant with the software for example take this for licenses and tell us why they are not accounting to our standards all that stuff it's quite boring but you should do it that is in my opinion the next part is more of a fun part where you can actually do some things you need to prove that you are really capable of maintaining your packages that you really know what you are doing you need to prove your skills and after that somebody called D.A.M will check all the stuff you've made and hopefully create your account I'm just talking about that because this whole process of becoming a maintainer is quite good documented and you can read it all out in the web so as that the slides are available 5 minutes from now on the internet maybe the virus is working I'm about to write a paper with more examples which will be changed which hopefully will be translated into other languages all that with more detailed examples so take a look at it so any questions sorry Asa did a quite good job or a really really bad one I would say it is an excellent job thanks that's my email address I'm not filtering that much spam just get in contact with me I'm pretty sure I forgot some really easy tasks how to help D.A.M if you like to get your feedback to get some more hints how to help D.A.M. without having much deeper knowledge thanks