October2008

October 2008 Team Reports

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Ubuntu Community Council

  • Meeting 2008-10-21:

    • No quorum (only JamesTroup and DanielHolbach)

    • Is there a need to coin a new phrase for an "Ubuntero"? discussion

      • DanielHolbach to ping all CC members to express their opinion on the bug itself.

    • JamesWestby asked how best to deal with problematic people in Launchpad.

      • DanielHolbach asked to mail CC about it first, so we can get in touch with that person. Only talking to the Launchpad Admins will not necessarily help.

    • RafikOuerchefani asked for advice on ideas he has and decided to mail the CC about it out of band.

Ubuntu Technical Board

Meeting 2008-10-07

  • Members present: Matt Zimmerman, Scott James Remnant
  • Ubuntu-core-dev application from Mario Limonciello
  • Ubuntu-core-dev application from Harald Sitter
  • Limited upload rights from Romain Francoise
    • The Technical Board is considering to grant upload privileges to Romain Francoise for emacs-snapshot. The decision wass deferred due to time constraints, and it was agreed to continue this conversation in email or at the next meeting.
  • cdrtools update
    • We are expecting to receive a summary from Eben Moglen regarding his interpretation of the licensing terms for cdrtools, and will take next steps based on that.

Meeting 2008-10-21

  • Members present: Scott James Remnant, Matt Zimmerman
  • Upload rights for pre-MOTUs
    • The technical board has received requests for upload privileges from developers who are not yet MOTUs. On further investigation, the cases were three:
      • One developer was frustrated with sponsorship delays for updates to Hardy, and requested upload privileges in order to work around that. It was agreed that it would be better to improve the sponsorship process for stable maintenance, and Daniel Holbach will work to organize a team of developers who are especially interested in maintaining stable releases (particularly LTS).
      • Another wished to sync their package from Debian, and found this process too slow as well. Daniel agreed to investigate this as well to understand the problem and see how it could be improved
      • Another believed (as did their sponsor) that they would not be accepted for MOTU based on their contributions to a small number of packages in main, and that an upload ACL would be a better solution. This led to a prolonged discussion about how the MOTU council should evaluate applicants with regard to the scope of their packaging work, which it was agreed to continue by email. Matt Zimmerman will start a thread on ubuntu-devel.
  • Reinhard Tartler asked the Technical Board for a statement of policy regarding the use of codecs potentially associated with patents. The Board has neither legal expertise nor the knowledge of the specific patents involved, and has therefore sought third-party legal advice.
  • The cdrtools saga continues, with an active dialog between Eben Moglen of SFLC and Joerg Schilling of cdrtools. The outcome of this dialog is not yet clear, but if the two participants can reach agreement on the legal status of cdrtools, it will be able to be restored to the Ubuntu repositories.

Ubuntu Development Teams

Kubuntu

  • We Released Kubuntu 8.10, the first with a supported KDE 4!
  • We had a meeting [Kubuntu/Meetings/Minutes/2008-10-17] adding two members Andreas Wenning and Roderick Greening

MOTU

Council

  • MC Meeting, 2008-10-01:
    • Open Applications: smarter (motu), asomething (universe-contributors), apachelogger (core-dev).
    • Discussion of the MC application processes.
  • MC Meeting, 2008-10-15:
    • Open Applications: smarter (motu), asomething (universe-contributors).
    • Sharing thoughts about Archive Reorganisation and connected application processes.
    • Discussion of the MC application processes.

  • We're pleased to announce that after lots of great work in the KDE community, Guillaume Martres just joined the ranks of MOTU.

Sugar Team

  • The SugarTeam synced Debian's Sugar packages into Intrepid

  • Lots of bug fixing... If you're interested in Sugar, please help test!

  • The latest upstream stable release is in the SugarTeam PPA for hardy

Wine Team

  • Wine 1.0.1 is in Intrepid, and releasing it for Hardy as an SRU is underway
  • Wine-gecko is in Intrepid; Wine no longer needs to connect to the internet to download the gecko rendering engine once an application needs a fake internet explorer.
  • I (Scott Ritchie) am considering locking the Wine Team on launchpad and removing all members who don't need to upload to the PPA, similar to the move done by the 5-a-day team. From what I can tell, I'm the only active member of the team anyway despite over 60 members on launchpad for over a year.

  • I want to make an instructional Wine YouTube video, demonstrating how much better it is these days. I'm still actively seeking ideas for applications to include, especially ones that don't work on Vista itself (eg 16 bit apps).

  • Wineconf has left me with a large todo list of user interface improvements
  • Wine 1.2 will likely be in Jaunty's timetable provided someone can implement USB support within the next four months. Otherwise, Alexandre won't start the stabilization process for a new release.

Mobile Team

  • A dummy ISO was prepared which allows booting ubuntu-mobile and -mid USB images as hdb in kvm/qemu/etc.. The bochs BIOS CMOS params don't allow to boot of disk 2, so it's convenient to boot from the ISO.
  • Lots of work on xorg, especially around psb like:
    • - Making sure xorg selects vesa on poulsbo ('psb') devices for now (which can be overriden when xorg-psb is installed) - Fixed -psb packaging to have proper ABI provides in hardy ubuntu-mobile ppa - Requested deletion of psb in intrepid; drop from video-all; proper conflict etc. - Move from Driver psb to Driver vesa on upgrades - Pulled new xorg-server and xorg (meta) from Debian - Tweaked video-all, resynced with i386, installable again - Enabled geode and openchrome for lpia; pending Pas
  • Added ACPI and grub to the mobile seeds.
  • lots of testing on install and on the images
  • Initial work towards not hardcoding "ubuntu" as the user
  • A lot os work on touch..primarily with the evtouch driver
  • Bluetooth testing.
  • Resolved the remaining outstanding issue with grub-installer not being included in ubiquity for lpia
  • Initial work towards allowing install with an empty password string
  • Prepared casper branch to force --automatic for -mid installs, pending the previous landing.

Ubuntu LoCo Teams

Danish Team

  • Planning 8.10 Release Party in Copenhagen. Expecting about 100 visitors.
  • Creating and printing flyers and banners for permanent use
  • Attended Open Source Days (Largest OSS conference in Scandinavia) in Copenhagen with a booth
  • Was mentioned in a whole page article about Ubuntu in the largest Danish tabloid paper. Four-doubled the amount of visitors per day.
  • Continued focus on optimizing organizational structure and processes.

German Team

Berlin

Irish Team

Italian Team

Japanese Team

Jordan Team

More than 400 CDs of UBUNTU 8.04 were distributed in the three major universities of North Jordan, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Yarmouk University and Al- Al-Bayt University.

The CDs, provided by Ubuntu Jordan LoCo Team, were distributed primarily by members of JUST Open Source Group.

http://www.just.edu.jo/opensource/article.php?id=36

Swedish Team

  • Planning 8.10 release parties in Gothenburg and Kalmar at least.
  • Celebrated 10.000 members in our web forum, we also noted that our website had got 16.030 independant visitors in a week, even that a record.

  • Team leader Urban Anjar attended 'Open Source Forum 2008' as an invited speaker.

  • Translator Daniel Nylander nominated for 'Nordic Free Software Awards'

Mexican Team

USA

Georgia US Team

  • Atlanta Linux 2009 Planning - We are beginning to form what will become the Atlanta Linux Fest 2009, scheduled for September of next year.
  • Held face to face meeting in Decatur, Georgia.

  • Held planning for InstallFest in early November.

New Mexico Team

Pennsylvania Team

Tamil Team

  • Called for public hosting of Intrepid Ibex launch party was made and preparation in progress for Nov 09 Release event.

  • Payanarin Paarvaiyil - Ubuntu --> Handbook for Ubuntu in Tamil in progress.

Ubuntu Women

Full Circle Magazine

  • #17 was released on Fri. 26th September.
  • #18 will be released on Fri. 31st October.
  • We have received four books (for review) from Apress, two from No Starch Press and one from Pragmatic Programmers. These will be reviewed then used as competition prizes. In future FCM will feature ads for any companies wishing to support FCM with review material(s).

  • Chinese #16 (Traditional & Simplified), Italian #15 and Hungarian #16 translations now online.

  • Edward Hewitt will, from #19, be writing an Ubuntu Games piece for each issue.

TeamReports/October2008 (last edited 2009-01-11 08:25:13 by host-196)