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The Bongo Bugle, the indirect straight line for all things Bongo bound




1. Welcome to the Bugle
2. News from the Bongoverse
3. Tips and tricks
4. IRC and Mailing list discussions
5. Bookmarks
6. You're Nicked
7. Next Issue

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1. Welcome to the Bugle
The Bongo Bugle is a fluid publication and things will change (hopefully for the better) as feedback is received from you, the benevolent reader.  The aim of this delightful publication is to provide an insight into all that is related to the Bongo Project, hopefully mixing the serious with the humorous - granted the humour may be lost in some spots.  I will endeavour to get some sort of release schedule, but for now it is going to be very much it's released when it's ready

To assist the development of this publication, comments are appreciated.  You have a few options, comment against this article, mail into the Bongo Users mailing list (see the Bookmarks section for details), voice your comment on IRC (again see the Bookmarks section for details) or e-mail me..

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2. News from the Bongoverse
So what is new in the Bongoverse, if you don't know what a "Bongoverse" is have a look at our first issue . 
*Current version in SVN is r54
*Usability test have been carried out on Bongo with a variety of browsers and desktop clients.  For results please see here.
*The bongo-setup utility has been modified to enable you to specify the url you use to access your Bongo server, and therefore end the annoying certificate warnings.  Thanks go to Lance Haig.
*A new tool was created for configuration bongo-config which will replace the above in the near future
*The first signs of the elusive "Hawkeye" Admin interface show up.  Thanks to Alex Hudson for these
*The Bongo community appears to be growing a few old hands from Hula have joined in on the Mailing Lists and IRC..
*Bongo missed out on being accepted into Google's Summer of Code
*New repositories for Bongo packages created using the OBS
*The roadmap has been updated with revised dates
*Jonny Lamb has been busy building .deb packages, these are soon to be released as soon as the final bug has been located and swiftly disposed of with the obligatory sledge hammer
*A BoF request has been sent into Lug Radio Live

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3. Tips and Tricks
Here's a nice easy tip that catches quite a few people out when they first start out with Bongo.

Make sure that your system's default mail service is shutdown and turned off from starting at boot time.  You see I told you it would be easy .  If you are running Red Hat/Fedora the default mail service is sendmail, SUSE and Mandriva based distros it is postfix, and on Debian it is exim.

As with most things Linux, there is more than oneway to do something (apart from mail and calendaring, there can be only one! Bongo ):
To stop the service (run as root): 

/etc/init.d/[

service name] stop
or (distro specific short cuts)
Red Hat/Fedora/Madriva

service [service name] stop

SUSE based distros

rc[service name] stop

Then to stop the service from starting at boot time in almost all distrobutions:

chkconfig [service name] off

You should now be able to start bongo-manager without any major hassle

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4. IRC, Forum and Mailing list discussions 
Calendering has been a hot topic on IRC.
*A lot of discussion on what protocol to use - CalDav vs WCAP.
*In addition to the calendar protocol discussions, OpenID has been discussed further and how possible implementations could take effect with regards to Bongo.
*Another discussion was the possibility of sharing your Bongo calendar via RSS in addition to standard .ics format.
*A couple of people have tried to get Bongo to install on FreeBSD, unfortunately without much joy.  This will hopefully be resolved soon.
*gnutls catches out a new user, if running Bongo on Fedora make sure you have the gnutls-utils package installed in addition to gnutls.  This dependency will hopefully be removed by the M2 release.
*Jonny has been looking at getting polo shirts for the project.  Please either e-mail or let us know on IRC if you do want one or more of these fine items of fashion with what sizes.  If we don't know, you won't get. 
*Attempts are being made to get Bongo to run on OpenSolaris

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5. Bookmarks
As the title may suggest, this section is all about the links.  We will hopefully have one of the most up to date collections of Bongo associated links available.  Don't forget that on any of the three official sites (homepage/forum/planet you can easily browse to another official site from the top left):
*Bongo homepage and wiki
Planet Bongo - An aggregation of Bongo contributors' blogs
*Bongo Forums
*Developer Section - One for all you hackers out there
*Bug Tracker
*Bongo's place on GNA!
*Mailing list - bongo-commits - Commits on the Bongo Project repositories. No direct posts allowed.
*Mailing list - bongo-devel - Discuss development of the Bongo system
Mailing list - bongo-users - General user support and chat
*irc://irc.oftc.net/bongo - #bongo the IRC channel on irc.oftc.net
*IRC Logs - A great way of following the discussions that have been going on
*Bongo Client Compatability List

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6. You're Nicked
In this new section we interrogate one of Bongo's Contributors, and rather fittingly the first one under the spotlight is the project leader:

BB: Your name please?
AH: Alex Hudson

BB: Your web presence please?
AH: http://www.alexhudson.com

BB: If people would like to hurl abuse at you on IRC, what are you known as?
AH: Either so_solid_moo or moo_tang_clan. Cow sounds and rap/garage music, y'see.

BB:  Where does one hail from?
AH: London

BB: Do you use Linux, if so what is your distribution of preference?:
AH: Yep; I actually don't use anything else. I use Fedora on the desktop, and Debian on servers.

BB: How long have you been working on Bongo?
AH: Since it began   Some of the changes we wanted to make were what precipitated the need for Bongo, so that the community had a tree that they could control, so I guess almost before Bongo began is the more accurate answer.

BB: Did you ever hack on Hula?
AH: Yeah, a little bit, but nothing hugely serious.

BB: Are you working on any particular feature?
AH: Not really. Recently, I've been trying to pay some attention to the web management system, hawkeye. The code we inherited used mod_python, which wasn't something we wanted to depend on having around, so a slightly different template system has been put in place, and we now authenticate using the Store rather than directly into an LDAP directory.

But really I try to get all over - before that I did some work on how configuration works in bongo, and simplifying it a lot. A lot of the system isn't terribly well documented, so I also try to write up things as I come across them / write them / alter them, witness recent documentation of the fine-grained permissions system in bongo.

BB: Is there a feature that you like in particular?
AH: Not really. It's more the set of features, both existent and planned, which I like the most.

BB: What feature do you want to see?
AH: A working calendaring server. I'm hoping that's not too far in the distance now.

BB: How well has the community rallied behind Bongo, and was it easy getting a community built?
AH: Well, the community essentially created Bongo, so it's not really been a building exercise. I would love to see the community grow, but I think that will happen naturally as the software nears release.

BB: What stumbling blocks have you encountered, and what hurdles do you feel are still to come?
AH: The situation with MDB - the bongo configuration system - has been a bit of a pain. It's very complex, difficult to work with and introduced some security issues - it's not something I wanted to replace, but it's so inflexible we've been sort of forced into it. So that's been a bit of a blow.
Hurdles to come - I don't really see too many. The main hurdle is getting more coders involved, but that's the same with any software development project. Having few coders works, but I don't think really helps quality - you get too introverted. With larger numbers of people watching, you can't get away with the same odd ideas

BB: Anything else you would like to say to all the readers?
AH: I think the next year is going to be an interesting one for Bongo. Unless we have problems, there will be at least one release in that time, and I think that will be very exciting.

Many thanks to Alex for his time.

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7. Next Issue
This is the bit that comes down to you, tell us what you want.  As it stands now the intention is for nothing.  Oh sorry do you want more?  You should really see a shrink, but ok; the next fine instalment of the Bongo Bugle will most likely contain much of the same as this iaaue(maybe).  More Bongoverse, more tips and tricks, more interviews and hopefully more developers and users

Thanks for your time patience and insanity, this has been a party political broadcast on  behalf of the Bongo Project.  Downloadable copies can be obtained in odt or pdf formats, please "right click" and select "save as".