Ubuntu 9.10 Byobu and OpenWeek Session

I thought I would provide a brief set of highlights about Byobu accomplishments during the Karmic development cycle, now that we have released Ubuntu 9.10.

Also, I'd like to promote my Ubuntu Open Week Presentation on Byobu, which is scheduled for 18:00 UTC, tomorrow, Tuesday November 3, 2009. It will included a live demonstration, in Amazon EC2. Be prepared to join us in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net, and SSH into a guest session and participate in the presentation and discussion!

Statistics

• Renamed the project, from screen-profiles to byobu
• Uploaded about 43 times
  
• Fixed approximately 74 bugs
  
• Contributions from 9 different people

Features

Performance

• Tremendous performance improvements across the board -- all status scripts
• Better timings for status script run frequency reducing overall load on system
• Cache files in /var/run/screen ramdisk for better performance
  
• Check updates immediately, and only when package lists are updated

Usability

• Dynamically reload profiles on byobu-config changes
• Interpret ESC as "cancel" in the byobu-config menu
• Dynamic keybinding updating on changed escape sequence
• Support dynamic enabling and disabling of keybinding sets
• Better default window handling
• Show the MOTD on first launch
• Update ssh authentication socket on re-connection to an existing session

Appearance

• Design improvements, per review with the Ubuntu Design Team
• Enable 256 color support
• Color coding, vim folding, and formatting the detailed status output
• Improve colors of status notifications, use bold for numbers, non-bold for units
• New distro logos
• Set the window title appropriately

Compatibility

• Improved support for non-bourne shells, busybox environments, non-x86 architectures, and non-Ubuntu operating systems
  
• RPM packaging spec file

Accessibility

• Comprehensive documentation
• Internationalization
• Use UTF8 where possible

Manageability

• Make status monitoring more configurable (ie, watch a different ethernet interface or disk partition)
• New status scripts (ip address, disk availability, cpu temperature, cpu fan speed, mail, reload required)
• Dropped nasty /usr/bin/screen diversion
• Created a byobu-janitor utility that collects all migration hacks to a single place, and runs on a profile refresh

Hope to hear from you tomorrow during the Open Week session!

:-Dustin