NewsStaging

News Staging / Buffering / Drafting Area

Items destined for News but that need some work, also, don't want to overflow everything at once.

Over the last two weeks it looks like it should be possible to produce one item of 'news' per day, but I haven't allowed sufficient time to expand/tidy/research each item up. Ideally 500 words/day would be good, but 200-300 is probably a better figure to aim for---or a 2000 words per week. (LWN is producing upwards of 10k words/week of non-automatically scraped content).

It'll be interesting to see whether that average could be sustained between the Preview and final release for 5.10.

Ubuntu-UK at LinuxWorld Expo, London

The Ubuntu-UK Loco team are hoping to show up. Ubuntu don't currently have a stand in the .Org stand, so if space can't be found Ubuntu may end up integrating with the Debian/GNOME stands. At the previous LinuxWorld Expo in the London, Debian+Emdebian+LinuxARM had a huge stand and GNOME+KDE+Xorg+FreeDesktop had another equally-sized combined stand.

Unfortunately I don't think Breezy final will be released by the date. Mark is down to do a keynote or something similar (which day?). The dates are Tuesday 2005-10-05 and Wednesday 2005-10-06 at Kensington Olympia. https://secure.linuxworldexpo.co.uk/wraps/registration/ for free sign-ups.

Debian-UK BBQ in Cambridge, England

Keybuk bought along his dog 'Galen', lots of beer was drunken, lots of things burnt and a few people managed to miss buses, trains and aeroplanes... But where was were Ian Jacksons, Kamions and Elmos? mjg59 had new toys curious of Canonical, including a new Libretto. This new Toshiba gadget is fairly small (larger than the original Libretto's though) and features and motion-sensor used for parking the hard-drive under heavy movement aswell. Much hacking awaited Smile :-)

Kinnison was there and daf popped in briefly too. This was the same weekend as aKademy in Spain.

Debconf DVD featuring the Ubuntu Band

Ben Hutching showed a preview of the DVD with the videos from debconf5 in Helsinki. The second DVD has the infamous videos of mdz, sabdfl et al competing with the birds at 07:00 to sing the best tune---they're hadn't gone to bed!

Can also do a short report about Debconf5, how it brings developers together, especially naked ones in the Suana.

Colony 3

mdz did an announcement; most things work there are only a couple of show-stoppers left; can be used as a suggestion for people to assist with testing, although Colony-4 might be better for building up the momentum.

Can pimp various new features, like usplash.

It also appears that the default desktop has switched from Spatial to Browser, which just looks clunky.

Laptop Top Testing Team

Test/Loan Laptops have started arriving for those lucky enough to be on the team and in return everyone has 18months of testing releases to follow!

Those even luckier to have their own laptops are encouraged to join in aswell. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam

Mako moving from Canonical -> MIT

This is proof that you don't have to be employed by Canonical to be involved with Ubuntu. One of the things that Mako wants to work on is the $100 laptop with the various social ideals around that.

Launch of DCC and OpenSuse

This is perhaps a bit political for news; however the most successful organisations are those comfortable enough to link to their competitors. So it would be interesting to talk about this and state Ubuntu isn't a member.

[Question is how to discuss the general remarks made by the wider community about OpenSuse and Fedora being attempting to match Ubuntu without gloating. Same goes for the DCC, not hilighting it will just let it die gently---however, all GNU/Linux is Good GNU/Linux so alerting people who might want something like this is perhaps fair.]

2005-09-01: Kubuntu/Ubuntu win TUX's favourite distribution

Tux magazine have the results in from their Reader's choice aware winners http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000151. The magazine is fairly KDE oriented so the result is perhaps surprising, Jeff Waugh commented on this with This is pretty impressive, because TUX Magazine has a very strong editorial bias towards KDE, and generally covers KDE topics only.

TUX Magazine has an interesting article on 'su' and 'sudo' and uses it to introduce the modern way of doing administrative tasks used by Knoppix and Kubuntu/Ubuntu. http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000148.

The magazine is specifically aimed at users new to Linux ("newbies") and has PDFs that are downloadable for each issue after a free registration: http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000144

Linux.conf.au in New Zealand

Close of abstracts on September 4th. The most fun part of this conference was the panel-discussion with all the speakers at the end. The is a tradition to ask what distribution/setup each of the speakers runs on their own machines. Virtually ever single person said they were running Ubuntu or that it was going to be on their machine by the time they got off the plane to get home.

This includes heavy-weights like Eben Moglen of the Free Software Associate and Bdale Garbee of HP. (Even Elizabeth "Edale" Garbee made positive comments). For a distribution a "mere" 6 months old I don't think I've ever since such a hat-trick and swath of support.

One of the things that makes LCA different is that they have a full partner program organised to make the whole family feel at home and to ensure that everyone gets a holiday. This has certainly been the case for Linus who loves bringing his family and comes up if it's in a new location.

This year, the event is being held about 3 hours across the sea in southern New Zealand: Dunedin 2006: http://linux.conf.au/ Wednesday 2005-01-26 to Saturday 2005-01-28 with several days of mini-conferences before hand.

[sladen has a picture of the left-hand-most 6 speakers (mostly the interesting ones) and this includes Bdale, Edale, Pia, Eben...]

Jeff Waugh passing the GNOME Release Manager baton on

http://lwn.net/Articles/148013/ Jeff has guided GNOME releases along way and is naturally taking the opportunity to pass the work onto the next person with his drive, who will be Elijah Newren.

Breezy Preview Freeze

http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2005-September/010369.html

Scottish Parliament EDM recgonising Software Freedom Day

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/sch/motion.result?session=2&motionlist=3236

A motion has been lodged in the Scottish Parliament supporting Software Freedom Day by Patrick Harvie MSP (Green; Glasgow region), text below.

S2M-03236 - Software Freedom Day

That the Parliament congratulates the organisers of Software Freedom Day for working to highlight the Free and Open Source Software movement; notes that a Software Freedom Day event will take place in Edinburgh on Saturday 10 September 2005 at which members of the public will be able to try free and open source software such as Ubuntu, OpenOffice and Firefox for themselves; recognises the benefits which could exist for the public sector in making greater use of such products, including those produced by Scottish software developers; further recognises that free and open source software is founded on principles with important political concepts which have the potential for application to other areas of society and the economy, and urges the Scottish Executive to examine the scope for free and open source software throughout the public sector.

HP to ship Ubuntu laptops

newspiece.

Breezy Preview Release

Lots of news.

FUDCon in Linux, same time as LinuxExpo

The FUDCons started after the Ubuntu ones:

Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code reaches completion. Ubuntu was one of the original participates; See:

Edubuntu Preview

VMware experimental support for Ubuntu

Improved support for 32-bit guest operating systems.

32-bit guest operating system support added for Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 3.0, SUSE Linux 9.3, SUSE Linux Pro 9.2, FreeBSD 5.3, Ubuntu 5.04 (experimental)

Interestingly: 

# Some distributions of 64-bit Linux, including Ubuntu, do not perform character set conversions for 32-bit applications such as Workstation.
Typically, this problem merely results in a number of warning messages about the failure to convert the character set. However, on rare occasions this problem has been observed to cause the host machine to crash. To work around this problem, you can run the Workstation application under the C locale or under the UTF8 version of your preferred locale (for example, under en_US.UTF8 instead of en_US).

One way to do this is to set the LC_ALL environment variable before running:
LC_ALL=C vmware
or
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF8 vmware

I'm unclear whether this a bug or a feature!

Ubuntu 6.04: The Dapper Drake

Mark annonced that Breezy+1 will now be The Dapper Drake:

and gave a rousing speech to accompany it.

LTSP Move conference to UBZ

Ubuntu are subverting the educational-based LTSP. Or is it the other way around. Or is it just good cunningness and sense!

NewsStaging (last edited 2008-08-06 16:15:54 by localhost)