Code of Conduct (7, 8, 'Bad signature')

Asked by Rosemary Hendley

I am trying to sign the code of conduct and have got as far as pasting the .asc file into Launchpad but got an error message (7, 8, 'Bad signature').

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Tom (tom6) said :
#1

Hi :)

I think it is more important to follow the guidelines than to sign the form to promise to follow them. Just show through your work here how well you behave and don't worry ;)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#2

Thanks for your encouragement Tom :)

I was thinking of helping with bug triage but I do not know what I am doing and you need to sign the Code of Conduct to ask for a Mentor

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Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#3

Thanks for your encouragement Tom :)

I was thinking of helping with bug triage but I do not know what I am doing and you need to sign the Code of Conduct to ask for a Mentor. At least, that's what https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad/Mentors tells me.

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zvacet (ivicakolic) said :
#4
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Tom (tom6) said :
#5

Hi :)

If you are really keen to start on something asap then perhaps try translations, or try reading through community documentation to see if you can make it easier to understand or perhaps help out with some of the questions in here. It takes a while to find where you can be of most help and it is good if people have done a tour of different departments before settling down. The main thing is to avoid getting bogged down with something you aren't enjoying and find something you do enjoy helping with instead. There are so many ways to help out with Ubuntu that it should be possible to find something that seems fun to do :)

Good luck and happy hunting
Regards from
Tom :)

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Iowan (iowan) said :
#6
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Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#7

Wow it's amazing to have people coming up to help me.

Following Zvacet's advice, I see that you have to open the .asc file without decrypting it. I'd opened it in OpenWriter. I've tried again to open it with gedit, but that produces something readable as well and when I paste it into Launchpad, I got an error message saying that it wasn't a code of conduct so, I tried deleting a line that said "hash SHA1" if memory serves me right which is unlikely and, I got a "general error" message. Then I deleted the text up to where it said "= Ubuntu Code of Conduct v1.1 =" and that got me back to my (7, 8, 'Bad signature').

Following Lowan's advice seemed to suggest that I should arrange a meeting with a complete stranger and persuade them to sign my OpenPGP key. That's expecting a bit too much enthusiasm for triaging a few bugs.

If someone would tell me how to open the .asc file without decrypting it I'll try that as one last try and if it doesn't work, I'll try Tom's excellent and encouraging advice and try some documentation instead.

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zvacet (ivicakolic) said :
#8
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Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#9

Thanks again Zvacet. It's good of you to keep trying to help me.

In https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnupg/+question/22738 David Martin suggested to Sun_tzu "Try highlighting the PHP MESSAGE part of the email, then right-click and choose FireGPG>Decrypt." It worked for both of them, but they didn't say what that had opened the file with. I've contacted David Martin and if I catch him in a good mood, perhaps he'll let me know. In the meantime, if anyone else knows which program I should open the .asc file with, perhaps they'd be so kind as to let me know.

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sun_tzu (marcoapuleiomiglia) said :
#10

I think I used gedit, but I don't remember very well...
Sorry for not being helpful.
Ciao

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sun_tzu (marcoapuleiomiglia) said :
#11

I think I used gedit, but I don't remember very well...
Sorry for not being helpful.
Ciao

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Tom (tom6) said :
#12

Hi :)

I still haven't signed the thing. I guess it's my deep-rooted dislike of being forced to do a thing i try to do anyway, or perhaps my deep-rooted dislike of anyone trying to claim authority over me & my actions. Some stupid reason anyway. I still think that "actions speak louder than words" although i am probably wrong.

Regards from
Tom :)

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Mahesh N V (mahesh-nv) said :
#13

Hi, I was facing the same issue, without any resolution. Hence, deleted the .asc file created and recreated the file with my openpgp key. Opened the .asc file with gedit and copy pasted the contents in the space provided during Code of conduct sign. It worked !!!

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Tom (tom6) said :
#14

Hi :)

Have you been able to try the new Ubuntu 10.04 before it gets officially released?
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/testing/lucid/beta2
Trying it as a LiveCd or as an extra dual/multi-boot would be ideal. Developers and everyone are keen to try to iron out any problems before 10.04 gets officially released so you might find faster & more effective answers to your bug reports which would make 10.04 work better on your system for you

Thanks and regards from
Tom :)

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Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#15

Tom :)

Sorry to take so long to reply to you, but I got bogged down in a couple of unrelated matters.

The idea of testing looked like an excellent one and I've looked into it. The first one was trying to create a 5th partition on my hard drive to protect my hardware from really adverse bugs. After 5 re-installations of Ubuntu, some of which took me to a command prompt "GRUB restore>" instead of running BIOS, it seemed to me to be too difficult. The second problem is that the wiki page for testing says that you have to sign the Code of Conduct.

I suspect that the problem with my signing of the Code of Conduct is that I'm nervous of the risks of meeting a complete stranger and showing them documents with information that could be used for identity fraud. If this is the problem, then Ubuntu is issuing error messages that are far from user-friendly when it is trying to be an operating system for anyone to use.

A grave cause for concern is that a problem like this deters people from getting involved with the Ubuntu community.

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Tom (tom6) said :
#16

Hi :)

You do NOT need to sign the Code of Conduct or anything else just to use Ubuntu and try it out.

As for joining in with the online community here in Launchpad or elsewhere there are few groups that really demand you sign up to anything. I worked in big-squad and then Translators Team and then settled in Answers Team for about 2 years before finally getting around to signing the Code of Conduct and even then i only signed it to see if i had similar problems as people faced in this Question Thread here.

The linux ethos is very much against signing up for anything you don't feel comfortable with and is very anti-authority as a rule/guideline.

The question about being unable to get an install of Ubuntu working on your machine is a separate question and it would be a good idea to post that separately using this link
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/yelp/+addquestion
or another forum such as
http://www.linuxquestions.org
which is for general linux and covers a wide variety of different distros including Ubuntu but also including many others. There is also
http://www.ubuntuforums.com
which is a kind-of sister site to Launchpad in that it deals with almost exclusively just ubuntu too. Hmm, Launchpad also covers Wolvix a bit and some others and some upstream packages and different things separately but it is mainly focused on Ubuntu.

An install of Ubuntu really needs about 15GB of hard-drive space, preferably an ext3 or ext4 partition rather than ntfs or anything else made by Windows. For Ubuntu the machine really needs over 1GB ram and over 1GHz cpu speed. It can usually be made to work in different configurations for machines with lower-spec in one way or other but a good rule of thumb is
1GHz cpu
1Gb ram
15Gb hard-drive space

Before installing Ubuntu i would always try the Ubuntu Cd as a LiveCd just to have a look and test out Ubuntu on that particular hardware before installing it.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
If it doesn't immediately work (rare) then there may be some clever stuff that can get it working but my usual route is to simply try a different distro as they all work very much the same as Ubuntu with only slight differences. Often Fedora works on the few machines Ubuntu doesn't like but sometimes it might be better to go for Mandriva, openSUSE or something. If Ubuntu doesn't work then i tend to try the tiny SliTaz as a first step because it is only 30MB and makes a nice CD quickly and easily even at slowest burn-speed.
http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/index.html#stable
Often the problem is solved just by re-downloading Ubuntu and burning a new Cd at a slower speed on a cheaper blank Cd. YOu can check the quality of the finished Cd by checking the md5sum, if that is bad then check the md5sum of the download. If the Cd is basd but the download is ok then just burning a new Cd from the same download is usually enough.

Regards from
Tom :)

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Tom (tom6) said :
#17

Hi :)

Ok, that got a bit confusing because i was working backwards. I will try again. To try out Ubuntu the first thing is to try Ubuntu as a LiveCd
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

If you have trouble booting up from Cd then this guide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromCD
should help.

If the Cd boots fine but you can't get to a normal gui desktop using the menu item "Try Ubutnu without making changes" or the pop-up box's option "Try Ubuntu" then it is worth checking the md5sum of the Cd. This guide should help
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM#Check%20the%20CD
This should just help you find out if the Cd is not quite right somehow.

If the md5sum check of the Cd shows the Cd went wonky somehow then check the downloaded iso file
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM#Check%20the%20iso%20file
If this is fine then just make a new Cd usign this guide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto
It is not quite the same as making a data Cd so tehre is a little advice on there that you may not have known about before.

If the md5sum check of the iso file shows the download went wrong then just download again and delete the one that doesn't work properly.

If everything seemed to be fine but just didn't get you to a gui desktop then it is worth trying a LiveCd session of sliTaz as that has much lower requirements
http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/index.html#stable

If SliTaz worked but Ubuntu ddin't and your machine is above the min.spec (for Ubuntu) of
1GHz cpu
1Gb ram
then it might be possible to use an install of sliTaz to get an install of Ubuntu working.

If your machine is below spec for Ubuntu then one of the other big names; Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva or something will probably work. If sliTaz did work then at least we know that 1 gnu&linux does work and so the aim would then be to find one that you like that works and there will probably be more than 1 of the big names that do. Most other distros, not just Ubuntu and sliTaz allow you to test-drive them using their Cd as a LiveCd session without installing anything to your hard-drive.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#18

Tom

It was so good of you to give me all the technical information - and you did it twice! It was wonderful of you, and the instant response was amazing.

I'm sorry my apology misled you. I was only trying to explain why I hadn't followed the suggestion you made on 2010-04-13 "Have you been able to try the new Ubuntu 10.04 before it gets officially released?" I have 4 partitions, one of which is for the current release of Ubuntu. If I try to make a 5th partition for beta versions of Ubuntu, my system goes all wrong and it starts to look as though I'm affecting my GRUB, and it's not safe for me to test beta versions of Ubuntu as you suggested. However I do have the officially really released Ubuntu 10.04 nicely installed and working well.

It's lovely to have Ubuntu free of charge. All they ask in return is a little of my time which, in principle, I am happy to give. However an error message that isn't easy to decode and Community procedures are making it hard. I'm beginning to think it's more trouble than it's worth which raises the question of whether other people have been put off contributing to the community. Earlier today I thought of raising this broader question, but couldn't start a new thread in Ubuntu Forums, so I'll leave that idea and focus on the above error message, especially as you're willing to persist with me :)

I was automatically removed from the Bug Squad because I hadn't triaged any bugs because I wanted a mentor before I tried. The instructions for getting a mentor included signing the Code of Conduct. I contacted Brian Murray of the Bug Squad who said that once I signed the Code of Conduct, he'd be happy to renew my membership.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing under 'How do I get involved?' Item 3 says sign the Code of Conduct.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Organization under General Requirements has "As a prerequisite . . . we ask applicants to have signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct."

I raised this question to see if anyone could decode the error message (if no-one can, then it would be nice of the developers to think about how they word error messages). It appeared when I was using my PGP key.

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said :
#19

Hi :)

5th partitions are were it usually starts to get confusing. The usual partition table only allows 4 primary partitions on a hard-drive. This partitioning table was designed by MicroSoft at a time when most operating systems needed quite a lot of partitions and MicroSoft made Windows so that it needed (and still does) that particular partition table otherwise it couldn't be installed on that hard-drive. There were plenty of other partition tables that already catered to several different requirements and most of them were more stable and more secure and allowed a whole load of primary partitions to be made.

As Windows became so commonly available some people made a fudge that would allow a ms-dos partition table able to hold more partitions. Effectively they made a new partition type that could act like a bucket containing a whole load of "logical" partitions. Eventually MicroSoft accepted the new "Extended Partition" as a new partition type and claimed they had invented it although it is unclear who really did now.

The result nowadays is that when Windows gets told to create a 2nd partition it panics and worries about running out of partitions so it sets up an Extended Partition and puts the new partition in there. Oh, did i mention that at first there was a significant speed slow-down in non-Primary partitions? Also drives with a spinning platter (ie not the new SSDs) read/write data very much faster at the beginning of a drive than at the end. In tests the read-writes nearer the end were about half the speed at the start of the drive. Windows can only really cope with 1 partition and it needs to be large. So anyone trying to install a 2nd OS alongside Windows would usually find that it was running on a slower part of the drive in a partition-type that was slower and typically these people found that the 2nd OS (if it was non-Windows) was very much faster than Windows. A fresh install of Windows is always faster than one that has lots of programs installed and uninstalled again and generally sufferd from all the usual slow-downs built into Windows OS. Things have changed a bit in the last decade or so with logical partitions inside extended partitions being about the same speed as primary partitions.

Anyway, the point is that it is usually good to set the / partitions as primary partitions near the front of the drive. If you have 1GB or less of ram or make heavy use of ram (such as lots of heavy gaming while watching movies and running virtual machines) then its a good idea to put the linux-swap partitions very close to the start of the drive. With SSDs it doesn't matter where you put anything but Sata and IDE use platters (like CDs). The crucial point is to make your 4th partition an "Extended Partition" so that you can have as many partitions as you like in there. Since there is supposedly no speed difference between logical partitions and primary partitions i guess you could make the entire drive and extended partition and then just put everything in logical partitions but i still don't completely trust that. Data partitions such as the /home can be safely at the very end of the drive because data can be queued up and cached so that you wouldn't notice any difference in speed or performance. The programs and logs and swap all make a noticeable difference to the speed of the operating system.

Regards from
Tom :)

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Tom (tom6) said :
#20

Hi again :)

There are many ways of contributing to the linux community and bug-squad is just one of the more obvious ones. However, most of us do not have coding skills which reduces our effectiveness in there. Also many people are not so good at technical trouble-shooting, again further reducing our effectiveness in bug-squad. Even if you are an excellent code-writer/developer in WIndows the linux world is very different and needs to be explored and understood a bit better before jumping straight into coding.

There are many other teams desperate for volunteers though. Through helping in one of the other teams you might help someone in their first steps in linux land and then later find they are some hot-shot whizz-kid at coding or bug-squad triaging. At the moment 2 teams that are doing a lot of heavy work and need volunteers are the Translators Team and the Documentation Team.

I was only any good in bug-squad as long as they kept getting 1 specific question being asked repeatedly in the course of a few days, perhaps a month. When that issue was resolved there was nothing else i could really help with so i moved to translators where i could only translate English american geek into English (UK) and a lot less geeky. But translators teams weren't really happy with someone that refused to join a proper team and offer some level of commitment which i just couldn't offer at that time. So i moved to Answers Team where i was able to get really stuck in to helping people through some very trivial problems which freed up some of the cleverer and/or more knowledgeable people such as Mark Rijckenburg and Marcobra to really allow them to focus in more on the more complex questions. Sometimes i was able to help translate other people's geeky answers into something that the person might understand more easily or translate a messy question into something other Answerers might understand. Eventually i noticed that some of the complex questions always started with links to the same trouble-shooting guides. So i was able to give those links and people were able to directly solve some questions using those guides and thought i knew what they were talking about. Then i found i could look up stuff in documentation more easily and help people get to grips with some odd wording in that and help them translate documentation into precisely what they needed in their circumstances. Eventually i moved into editing Community Documentation but then i got distracted by a game and then i got a lot of extra work in my job. Now i hardly do anything although i have installed Ubuntu on 2 people's machines in the last few weeks and talked about 4 people into accepting the idea of maybe exploring Ubuntu when they get some time. Oh, and 1 girl gave me a Usb-stick to install a LiveUsb version of Ubuntu on. Spreading the word is a great way of helping the linux community.

So really don't think that bug-squad is the only way to help the linux community. Notice that my route mostly avoided PR and marketting but both of those are crucial to Ubuntu too. Find your own path and if one way is too difficult then try another team for a bit. At the end of the day you are contributing to the linux community even if you do nothing active to help. Just using it helps the wider community.

Relax, don't worry, enjoy just using it :)
Many regards from
Tom :)

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said :
#21

HI a third time :)

Sorry i talk too much and looking at them i don';t think either of my 2 last answers really helped. I think this bit is worth noting tho and might help

"So really don't think that bug-squad is the only way to help the linux community. There are many other teams that would appreciate any help. Find your own path and if one way is too difficult then try another team for a bit. At the end of the day you are contributing to the linux community even if you do nothing active to help. Just using it helps the wider community."

Relax, don't worry, enjoy just using it :) One day you will find that you have accidentally fallen into exactly the right area where you can help the most with the least effort and that helping in that area is just fun for you. Use Ubuntu to do what you enjoy doing and you will get there.
Many regards from
Tom :)

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said :
#22

HI a third time :)

Sorry i talk too much and looking at them i don';t think either of my 2 last answers really helped. I think this bit is worth noting tho and might help

"So really don't think that bug-squad is the only way to help the linux community. There are many other teams that would appreciate any help. Find your own path and if one way is too difficult then try another team for a bit. At the end of the day you are contributing to the linux community even if you do nothing active to help. Just using it helps the wider community."

Relax, don't worry, enjoy just using it :) One day you will find that you have accidentally fallen into exactly the right area where you can help the most with the least effort and that helping in that area is just fun for you. Use Ubuntu to do what you enjoy doing and you will get there.
Many regards from
Tom :)

Revision history for this message
Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#23

Tom

You've put a lot of time into helping me. It really is very good of you.

It seems that the people who may be able to decode the error message, aren't available to explain it to me and there isn't the Help documentation to decode numbers in error messages. I'll just accept that I'm not going to sign the Code of Conduct.

Your raised a very encouraging point that letting people know I enjoy using Ubuntu is, in itself, putting something back into the community. I enjoyed the brief history of hard disk partitions.

Thank you.

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said :
#24

Hi :)

Yes, there is plenty to do without signing the "Code of Conduct" although you might be restricted from making serious long-term commitments until you have managed to find a way of signing-up. So, enjoy trying out the various teams in a more light-hearted way and dance around a bit :)

Good luck, thanks and regards from
Tom :)

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said :
#25

Hi again :)

I thought you might enjoy these true stories too, a lot shorter and funnier
http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html
http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Regards from
Tom :)

Revision history for this message
Tom (tom6) said :
#26

Hi again :)

Sorry, i am working through a rather large back-log of emails here. You said something about having to meet people to get an openPGP key signed or something. I have managed to sign up to "The Code of Conduct" reasonably recently and didn't have to meet up with anyone. I think you are talking about the next step up after signing the Conduct agreement and i think you only need to do that at very much more advanced levels such as joining the Ubuntu Committee or something. I'm not completely clear but remember shying away from that step myself too.

Regards again, as always from
Tom :)

Revision history for this message
Rosemary Hendley (catbells) said :
#27

Tom

Thanks, as always, for your encouragement :).

I think you missed the latter part of my comment 2010-08-28 where I described my failed efforts to find ways to help: -
"I was automatically removed from the Bug Squad because I hadn't triaged any bugs because I wanted a mentor before I tried. The instructions for getting a mentor included signing the Code of Conduct. I contacted Brian Murray of the Bug Squad who said that once I signed the Code of Conduct, he'd be happy to renew my membership.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing under 'How do I get involved?' Item 3 says sign the Code of Conduct.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Organization under General Requirements has "As a prerequisite . . . we ask applicants to have signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct." "

It's comforting to know that I don't have to show strangers ID to sign the Code of Conduct and I enjoyed the two stories you linked me to. The only thing is that you might have sorted your openPGP key a while ago and things may have tightened up in the interim.

Kind regards
Rosemary

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