Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #123 -- Part 2

Submitted by k4tz on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 11:16

Launchpad News

12 Days of Launchpad

Look for more of the 12 days of Launchpad here: http://news.launchpad.net/

Ubuntu Forums News

The Ubuntu Forums has now surpassed 1 million threads and still growing. With over 6 million posts, and over 700,000 members the Ubuntu Forums remains a mainstay in the ever expanding Ubuntu Community. The forums play an crucial part in helping to introduce and educate new and existing users to Ubuntu and the community. Congratulations on 1 million threads. http://ubuntuforums.org/

In The Press

  • Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 2 Screenshot Tour - Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 2 (codename Jaunty Jackalope) has been released, and Softpedia has a list of the latest changes in the development. A pleasant surprise is that the developers have prepared a Live CD for this second alpha version, which will allow anyone to give it a try without having to install. As the screenshot tour shows though, most of the changes are to the inner workings of this next version of Ubuntu. GNOME has been updated to the latest development release (2.25.3), the Linux kernel has been updated to the latest release candidate of 2.6.28, and X.Org server is now at version 1.6. Other updated applications include The GIMP 2.6.3, Brasero 0.8.3, Transmission 1.40, and Mozilla Firefox 3.0.5, but there's still no OpenOffice.org 3.0. The development team also implemented a small GUI to change the position and theme of the pop-up notifications. Ubuntu 9.04 will be the tenth release of the Ubuntu operating system. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubunt...r-100524.shtml
  • Ubuntu vs Windows - Authors tasked with writing articles comparing Windows and Ubuntu never seem to actually use Ubuntu. They just install Ubuntu because their manager told them to compare it to Windows. In these reviews Ubuntu usually loses big time, while the author of this article believes that Ubuntu is a more simple system to use. Common misconceptions such as “you need to do everything from the command line and edit config files to make changes in the system” could not be further from the truth. Almost every program has a GUI now, and almost everything can be configured with a mouse. You won’t find an easier way to install software than on Ubuntu. A user just needs to launch the Synaptic package manager, search for a software that interests them, mark it for installation, and the package manager will handle the download and installation. Ubuntu now prompts if there is a missing codecs, and helps the user download them. An average person who uses their computer to surf the internet, create documents or spreadsheets, watch movies, listen to music or any other simple activity will find that Ubuntu is far easier to use than Windows. The public believes that Windows is easier to use because they have used it for such a long time, but once they get past their “windowsism” they can see how cool Ubuntu is. http://www.e-linux.it/news_detail.php?id=7366
  • Sylvania Netbook With Ubuntu: A Good Mix - Sylvania recently introduced the Sylvania G Netbook Meso (US$369.99), which comes in a variety of colors. Nearly an unknown in the growing field of netbook manufacturers, Sylvania built in enough features to set the Meso apart from the crowd of netbook contenders. Sylvania packs an 80 GB hard drive, 1 GB of RAM, an integrated web cam, a 10/100 ethernet port, 802.11b/g wifi, an 8.9 inch display, an external VGA port, three USB ports, a multi-format card reader, headphone and microphone jacks, and a four-cell battery that lasts nearly three and a half hours into its netbook. One of the most appealing features the Sylvania model has is the option to run the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix, an updated version of 8.04 Linux (Hardy Heron). The OS remix includes a new interface that simplifies accessing favorite on-line and off-line applications and display them more appealingly within the restricted screen size. Unlike other Linux distros sandwiched into netbooks, the Ubuntu Remix is not a watered down or crippled version of the OS. It has all the bells and whistles that users enjoy on their desktops. http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/65704.html
  • Why Ubuntu users should care about Debian - Ubuntu attracts a lot of audience these days, but not all Ubuntu users know about Debian, which is Ubuntu's base, and the relationship between these two distributions. Since Ubuntu is not only a fork but depends on Debians ongoing development, its further existence and a healthy relationship between these two distros is quite important. The details can be found at the ars technica link here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ut-debian.html
  • Ted Ts'o: Debian Can Learn from Ubuntu - This provoking statement is meant to let the Debian folks think about a more pragmatic attitude about its distro. Ts'o names the commitment, that "Debian will remain 100% free... We will never make the system require the use of a non-free component" as an example for which he states that 100% free software is good goal, but considerations should also taken into account. http://www.linux-magazine.com/online...rn_from_ubuntu

In The Blogosphere

  • Best Ubuntu Innovations of 2008 - Blogger Christopher Tozzi of WorksWithU gives us his list of the best Ubuntu innovations of 2008. First on Tozzi's list is better wireless drivers. Thanks to the new wireless stack Ubuntu has better support for Broadcom cards and iwl3945/iwl4965 for Intel chips in Ubuntu 8.04. For Atheros users vast improvements to madwifi, especially on 64-bit systems, was implemented in Ubuntu 8.10. The Network Manager compliments the improvements to the wireless drivers with easier configuration of WPA-enterprise access as well as VPN connections. Tozzi lists additional features he feels were the best innovations of 2008, but also notes that many of these features come from upstream developers. While they may not be Ubuntu specific, these contributions have helped refine the Linux desktop experience considerably. http://www.workswithu.com/2009/01/01...tions-of-2008/
  • Ubuntu Year in Review 2008 - UWN's own Nick Ali compiles a Ubuntu Year in Review for 2008. Nick starts off with noting the hard work LoCos continued to perform in promoting and supporting users in their area. Many held release parties for Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10. The French Team's 8.10 release party was attended by over 4,000 people! Ubuntu membership applications from community participants continued to grow, and the Community Council created regional boards for EMEA, Asia and Oceania, and the Americas to distribute the applications. The forums continue to grow with over 700,000 registered users, 6 million posts, and almost 1 million threads. Nick continues his review with highlights such as Open Weeks, Brainstorm, Free Culture Showcase, Developer Weeks, Global Bug Jam, and more. http://boredandblogging.com/2008/12/...n-review-2008/
  • Ubuntu Enrolls At Cornell College - WorksWithU's Joe Panettieri tells us that Cornell College of Mount Vernon, Iowa is the latest institute of higher education to embrace Ubuntu Server Edition. Cornell College began using Ubuntu in May 2007, when Web Developer/Programmer Brian Steere was hired as a full-time employee. “We realized that many of our Web applications were created and designed for Linux and ill-suited for running on a Windows/IIS [Internet Information Server] stack,” wrote Steere in an email to WorksWithU. Fast forward to December 2008, and Ubuntu currently hosts Cornell College’s Wordpress-Mu install, News center, Master calendar, and Moodle installation. Cornell College is considering migrating their MySQL installation to Ubuntu next as the institution continues to grow its Ubuntu Server deployment. http://www.workswithu.com/2008/12/22...rnell-college/
  • The Win, Fail and Meh of Open Source in 2008 - Dj Walker-Morgan reports that heise-online-UK considers Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to be a clear win for open source software for 2008. Reasons for their opinion include the fact that the LTS offers support for longer than 18 months, and that such support is not tied to service contracts or subscriptions. In addition, they feel that Ubuntu has done more to popularize Linux in 2008 than any other distribution, as demonstrated by the enthusiastic community. http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/T...eatures/112305
  • The beauty of Ubuntu or the adaptability of kids - jbunbury rebuilt a computer and gave it to his sister, her son and daughter. Not wanting to spend a lot of money on it, he installed Ubuntu as the operating system. After some initial trepidation on their part, and a couple of weeks between visits, he found that they had taken to Ubuntu quite readily. Next, they're going to get hooked up with a local ISP and get out on the internet. http://jbunbury.wordpress.com/2008/1...ility-of-kids/
  • RE: Back to Windows - The author of the comment on this site has been caught in a bind. He switched from Windows to Ubuntu because he loves open source. But then he found that he couldn't access a number of devices, such as cell phones, mp3 players, and a camera. Some of the devices he finally managed to access as an external drive, but with nothing of the full functionality that he needed. He states, "ubuntu is a superior operating system imo, but i’m just not willing to live without full, simple device support." http://www.omninerd.com/comments/21356

In Other News

Full Circle Magazine: Issue 20

  • Command and Conquer - The Daunting Terminal.
  • How-To : Program in C - Part 4, Web Development - Part 1, Backup & Sync Your Music.
  • My Story - Making Money With FOSS
  • Book Review - Ubuntu Kung Fu
  • My Opinion - Italy Speaks OSS
  • MOTU Interview - Andrea Colangelo
  • Top 5 - Backup Solutions

Don’t forget to take the FCM reader survey at: http://url.fullcirclemagazine.org/e78bdf

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-20/

Meeting Summaries

Community Council

  • Meeting 2008-12-16:
  • PlanetUbuntu/CorporateBlogs was agreed on and the request for the addition of the Oxford Archeology blog granted. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlanetUbuntu/CorporateBlogs
  • Mark will ask Nigel Pugh about interest in a Google Calendar <-> IRC gateway. Daniel will mail Nick Ali about trying to get people involved in finding a solution.
  • The decision on a Canonical/Ubuntu participation in a Tunisian FOSS conference was unfortunately too late.
  • The three nominees for the IRC Council were appointed, the IRC Council will be asked for their OK with changing their charter to read "... at least 5 members ..." instead. The possibility of a future "IRC Contributors" team was discussed and the new IRC Council will look into finalising this. The ownership of the `~ubuntu-irc-council` team was transferred to the CC.

MOTU Council

  • We're pleased to announce that Stefan Ebner joined the MOTU team.
  • We're very happy to announce that David Futcher just joined the MOTU team. He did great work in the last weeks and lives in Scotland.
  • Stéphane Graber joined the MOTU team. Having put a lot of effort into LTSP and friends, we were only too happy to welcome him on board.
  • Nathan Handler just joined the MOTU team. He has done fantastic work and we're very happy he's on board now.

Mobile Team

  • Some of the team on holiday and UDS so a quiet month
  • Work on armel build failures and depwaits including filing bugs #308834 and bug #308465
  • Fixed xine-lib FTBFS (4 issues combined).
  • xulrunner-1.9 ubuntu-mobile hardy ppa upload; seems to be trivial to follow the hardy xulrunner-1.9 branch.
  • Sent pkg-config cleanups and testsuite fixes upstream.
  • Sent acpid patches upstream.

Xubuntu

==== Artwork ====

  • Pasi (knome) has been working on drafting Xubuntu artwork guidelines.

==== Bug Triage ====

  • Bug triage proceeding at a steady pace. Many bugs were triaged this month.
  • A high number of bugs were reported upstream.

==== Community ====

  • Cody, Jannis, Michael, and Pasi all attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View, California
  • Cody and Pasi attended FOSSCamp in Mountain View, California.
  • Substantial amount of work has been done on drafting the Jaunty "Growing the Xubuntu Community" specification.

==== Documentation ====

  • Jim, Pasi, and Jannis are brainstorming an idea to work closely with upstream and other distributions to rewrite the upstream documentation.
  • Jim has run some scripts to start converting Ubuntu docs to Xubuntu docs. Docs require some cleanup, but it is a good start.

==== Marketing ====

  • New website parallel to Intrepid release.
  • Substantial amount of work has been done on drafting the Jaunty "Growing the Xubuntu Community" specification.

==== Packaging, Development, & Testing ====

  • Alpha 2 released.
  • Updated xubuntu-meta package to fix armel build failure (Thanks to Sarah Hobbs).
  • Add libxine1-ffmpeg to recommends for xfmedia.
  • Michael (NCommander) has begun backport of Xfce 4.4.3 to Intrepid.
  • Corrected an internationalization issue in en_IN local for Orage where the start/end buttons show the date number, but not the day of the week properly.
  • Charlie Kravetz (charlie-tca) appointed to Xubuntu QA lead.
  • Charlie (charlie-tca) has been working on improving the testing wiki pages including the Xubuntu test cases.
  • Cody Somerville (cody-somerville) packaged Sion, a gio/vfs mount manager, from the Xfce4 goodies.
  • Lionel (mr_pouit) packaged a new upstream release of xfce4-dict (0.5.2) and xfburn (0.4.0).

IRC Council

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Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1030706