“I found that the kids were frustrated because there was no YouTube or Minecraft.”

MW: I have side-ported a number of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s applications, tools and libraries to Ubuntu, and these are now embedded in the various flavours of Ubuntu for Rapberry Pi 2. So, eg, a user who has been working with Sonic Pi can easily carry on their work through Ubuntu. LXF: You are well known for your work on the Ubuntu Mate project: is your goal to have Mate or another flavour be the leading Raspberry Pi distribution? MW: I think that Ubuntu on the Pi will run in parallel to Raspbian, as Raspbian offers a fast, simple and lightweight distribution that gets stuff done especially for teaching. Ubuntu Mate was a continuation of a project that I started on the original Raspberry Pi, where I ported the Mate desktop to the ARM platform via Arch Linux. But the original Raspberry Pi wasn’t powerful enough to offer a desktop environment replacement, so when the new Pi 2 came along that finally gave me the power that I needed to finish the project.

I gave out 24 SD cards running Ubuntu Mate 15.04 at a Raspberry Jam and then went back every couple of months to track their progress and collect feedback. I found that the kids were frustrated because there was no YouTube or Minecraft while the makers had no GPIO development tools and other users were frustrated because it was just a little bit too different to Raspbian. So with the latest version, 15.10 we have addressed these issues and now we have the likes of Minecraft, Sonic Pi and the latest version of Scratch that will work with the GPIO. For the makers, we’ve also included the RPi.GPIO Python library and we use the Raspbian kernel so that we match exactly with the Raspbian kernel. LXF: So Ubuntu on the Pi is not an official project? MW: No, it’s a community build, but I have contacted the Lubuntu team and they will begin official support for the project soon. LXF: Ubuntu Mate looks more like a serious work environment, but with the recent release of Raspbian Jessie we’re seeing a more ‘grown up’ Raspbian with new features such as sudo-less GPIO access. MW: I’ve done something similar with Ubuntu Mate where I have created groups with GPIO, Video and SPI access, it then creates a set of udev rules for those groups. I set a hook for when creating a new user, the new user is added to the correct groups. LXF: By having multiple Raspberry Pi distributions, do you think we are risking a fragmented user base? MW: I think that it’s inevitable. If we think of the 800+ distributions listed on distrowatch.com, then anyone can make a Linux distribution. LXF: For those interested in developing for Mate, what is the best way to get involved? MW: I’d like to see the Ubuntu Pi project movement move forward so any help with packaging and porting from Raspbian to Ubuntu would be great to see. I would love to see Ubuntu Mate and Raspbian become similar but also provide access to the Ubuntu repositories. LXF: So here we are at OggCamp for another year, what has been the most interesting part of the weekend for you? MW: I really enjoyed Stuart Langridge’s talk on publishing podcasts. Being a podcaster myself, and having friends who are podcasters too, this talk generated lots of debate. It was clear, based on those discussions, that a number of audience members are going to look at the scripts that Stuart has created and are looking to create a general-purpose community podcasting tool. I also loved the lightning talks and the exhibitors who really provided lots of information about their particular projects. OggCamp is all about diversity and it is my highlight of the year.