In this screen cast I am going to show you how to "commit" a change to your local branch of the Ubuntu Desktop Course. Although I am using a specific Ubuntu Desktop Course file, this screen cast applies to anyone that needs to "commit" changes to a local Bazaar project branch.

A commit is sort of like a meta "save" for your project. It allows you to make notes about what you've done since the last save, and gives you the ability to "UNDO" any number of previous saves. I can reverse the changes to one previously saved version of a file, or all the way back to the beginning of my edits on the entire project.

The great thing about this set-up, I think, is that you can "save" (or "commit") as many times as you want on your own machine before sharing it with the rest of the project. When you are ready to share your changes back with the main project you will "push" (did you hear my air quotes there?) "push" your changes to Launchpad for review by the Ubuntu Desktop Course team. Once reviewed they will hopefully be accepted and your changes will be merged into the main project.

If you need to download the working files for the Ubuntu Desktop Course, please visit the project Wiki page for more information. It's at: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Training. I assume you have Bazaar installed, the course files downloaded and you are ready to "commit" your first batch of changes to the project files.

For this screen cast I wanted to make a realistic edit to the course files. I first visited the Upgrade Tasks page on the project Wiki. I scrolled down to Chapter 2 to look for changes that needed to be made in my "assigned" Chapter. I pick an easy change to make: update the version number from 7.10 to 8.04 in the Compiz section.

I am working in Vim for these edits, although you could use any text editor that was capable of handling DocBook XML files. This includes version 3 of OpenOffice.org!

So here I am at the command line and I am going to change directories into Chapter 2. And from here I want to edit the DocBoo