Daniel Holbach maintains a daily builds PPA for a project called "Ubuntu Packaging Guide" which aims to provide a set of articles for working with debian packages and Launchpad, uploading your GPG key to Launchpad (required to create a PPA), fixing bugs, getting the code via BZR, working with a PPA and so on.

Launchpad-Getkeys is a script (comes packaged in a .deb) that automatically imports all missing GPG keys, even if you're behind a firewall.

How do you know when you have a missing GPG key? Here's an example: when you run "sudo apt-get update", you'll see some errors like this:

[...]

Fetched 47.0kB in 6s (7,710B/s)

Reading package lists... Done

This post is just a short summary of some updated packages in the WebUpd8 PPAs.

The Launchpad API was updated yesterday, finally bringing PPA statistics. For now, the stats can only be accessed by using a Python script, but they will probably be implemented on the actual website soon, especially since Mark Shuttleworth is also interested in these stats. He actually posted a comment on Launchpad, asking for a "heat" metric for PPAs:

Apple published an Mac OSX Lion sneak peak that includes a launchcer which "gives you instant access to your apps - iPad style". And this launcher is called [drums..... ] Launchpad.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots) which we've covered not so long ago but which at the time of our post didn't work on Linux (but did work on Windows and Mac OS X)

You probably know that to use a Launchpad PPA repository, you must also import the GPG key. This is how it worked until Ubuntu Karmic Koala:

The release of GIMP 2.7.0 is a first step towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release. Please note that this is an unstable development snapshot and read the GIMP 2.7 release notes. Actually, in the following repository, the current version of Gimp is 2.7.1 already. To install it in Ubuntu, just copy & paste the following commands into a terminal to add the Launchpad PPA repository:

An user from the UbuntuForums (blackgr) has made a script that checks your current distribution version (so it works from Hardy to Jaunty and probably Karmic) and them it checks your system for all launchpad sources and will download and install the GPG keys for you.

You can download it from here.

The Leonov Development Team is proud to present to you the very first preview release of "Leonov - The Launchpad Desktop Client".

One of the reasons free operating systems are so great is because of their bug reporting features. Ubuntu is no exception. Like most other GNU/Linux operating systems, Ubuntu allows users to file bug reports using its bug reporting site, Launchpad. In the free software world, each user becomes a potential beta tester and gets the chance to contribute to the community without ever coding or writing documentation. Unfortunately, Launchpad’s bug reporting tool often scares away users who have no idea what a ticket, project, or distribution is.