Issue114
WORK IN PROGRESS
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #114 for the week October 19th - October 25th, 2008. In this issue we cover ...
UWN Translations
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In This Issue
General Community News
Ubuntu 8.10 RC released
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop and Server. Codenamed "Intrepid Ibex", 8.10 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team considers this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user. The Ubuntu 8.10 family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio, and Mythbuntu, have also reach RC status.
Before installing or upgrading please read: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810
The purpose of the Release Candidate is to solicit one last round of testing before the final release. Here are ways that you can help:
- Upgrade from Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Edubuntu 8.04 to the Release Candidate by following the instructions in the release notes referenced above.
Participate in installation testing using the Release Candidate CD images, by following the testing and reporting instructions at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/ISO
The final release of Ubuntu 8.10 is scheduled for 30 October 2008 and will be supported for 18 months on both desktops and servers. Users requiring a longer support lifetime may choose to continue using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which provides security support until 2011 on the desktop and 2013 on the server. For more details, and links to the mirrors, please refer to the link.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2008-October/000115.html
Intrepid bug fixes
Right now, this is the list of release-critical bugs (that *must* be fixed or deferred before release): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+bugs?field.milestone=1326
The team is also paying a good deal of attention to the list that includes targets of opportunity as well: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+bugs
As the release approaches, care is especially important when managing these lists. Developers can help by making sure that they contain all the relevant bugs, and *only* the relevant bugs. Visit the link for some general guidelines for release-relevant bug management.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-October/000508.html
Pre-order Intrepid CDs
Shipit is now taking pre-orders for the newest Ubuntu release, Intrepid Ibex 8.10. Anyone can now put in their pre-order for an Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 CD. Keep in mind that you are pre-ordering, and no CDs will be shipped until after the release. Ubuntu is available free of charge, and they will send you a CD of the latest version (8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)) at no extra cost. Delivery may take up to ten weeks, so you should consider downloading the CD image if you have a fast Internet connection. https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
Spread Ubuntu alpa 0.1
What is SpreadUbuntu? Basically, it's an introductory site about Ubuntu, a Do-It-Yourself marketing material repository, and a marketing place for enthusiasts. The goal is to be a vital part of the global Ubuntu community serving the marketing interest of all LoCo teams in all languages. The next milestone is the rc0.1 and the 0.1 release one day later, synchronized with the release of Intrepid.
Project page: https://launchpad.net/spreadubuntu
Launchpad page: https://launchpad.net/~spreadubuntu
Wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam/Projects/SpreadUbuntu
Announcement: https://launchpad.net/spreadubuntu/+milestone/alpha0.1
The alpha 0.1, and later releases are geared to announce simultaniously in different languages the appropriate, alpha, RC, or final release of new Ubuntu versions. In this case Intrepid Ibex 8.10. You can help by visiting the above links and getting involved in "SpreadUbuntu"
http://huayra.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/announcement-spreadubuntu-alpha01/
MOTU
New MOTU
The MOTU team is pleased to announce the Guillaume Martres has joined the ranks of MOTU. This announcement comes after lots of great work in the KDE community by Guillaume. Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~smarter Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GuillaumeMartres
New Core Developer
Lots of folks within Dell are committed to Linux initiatives. Ubuntu is a good example. Now, Dell's own Mario Limonciello has been named to the Ubuntu Core Development Team. Core-Dev members have the ability to update packages in the Ubuntu 'main' and 'restricted' repos. Mario joins this elite team of developers based on the strength of his long-standing contributions as as Master of the Universe (MOTU), development of the Mythbuntu distribution, and the excellent work ensuring Ubuntu on Dell desktops and notebooks "just works". Because 'main' packages are on every install CD, his work will benefit all Ubuntu users, not just Dell owners.
http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2008/10/23/mario-joins-ubuntu-core-dev-team.aspx
Club-Ubuntu
Club Ubuntu is a social/advocacy IRC channel. Since its start, it has grown to over 100 members, and now has a very active IRC channel, #club-ubuntu. It is also doing a bang up job acting as a bridge for people outside of our Ubuntu community. They come to see what the hype is all about and end up joining in on the fun.
Launchpad: http://launchpad.net/~club-ubuntu
The team has been very active considering the short amount of time it's been in existence. They were the #1 team, among all teams, that participated in Global Bug Jam 2008. Additionally, they have also developed an IRC bot that interfaces with the Ubuntu man page project at: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/ The bot accepts two very simple commands: @man and @manurl followed by your request of man page. i.e. @man apt-get which would return the man page of apt-get.
If you haven't visited the #club-ubuntu channel, be sure to drop in and say hello. You'll be glad you did.
Ubuntu Stats
Bug Stats
- Open (#) +/- # over last week
- Critical (#) +/- # over last week
- Unconfirmed (#) +/- # over last week
- Unassigned (#) +/- # over last week
- All bugs ever reported (#) +/- # over last week
As always, the Bug Squad needs more help. If you want to get started, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad
Translation Stats Hardy
- Language (#) +/- # over last week
- Language (#) +/- # over last week
- Language (#) +/- # over last week
- Language (#) +/- # over last week
- Language (#) +/- # over last week
Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron," see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/
LoCo News
German UbuCon 2008
http://ubucon.juliux.de/main.php
Ubuntu Maryland: New team Website
Up until recently the Ubuntu Maryland Loco Team has been using the Ubuntu Wiki for our home page. Craig Younkins took some time to design the new pages at Goggle Sites. Now when you visit http://www.ubuntu-maryland.org you’ll see his handywork. The team will still maintian information on the Wiki, but the new site definitely has more to look at, and a more attractive interface. http://www.chuckfrain.net/2008/10/21/new-website-for-ubuntu-maryland-team
BugJam Berlin
http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/?p=266
Interview with Dustin Kirkland
> - Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do for a living?
Hi Nick. My name is Dustin Kirkland, I live in Austin, Texas, and I am a developer on Canonical's Ubuntu Server Team. You can get an idea of some of the past, present, and future things I work on at:
> - Where did you work before Canonical? How did you get into Linux?
Before Canonical, I worked at IBM, in several roles, including Tivoli (Software Group), Global Technical Services (Services Group), and the Linux Technology Center (HW/Systems Group).
I started using Linux as a server when I was a sophomore in college, in 1998. I bought my first block of web hosting, which included a shell account and used Red Hat 5.2. About that same time, I bought a programming book (PHP maybe?) that included a Red Hat CD in the back flap and I installed it on a local system to learn a bit more. When I started an internship with IBM Tivoli in the Summer of 2000, my team leader provided me a development box with Red Hat 6.2 installed, and he thought he had thrown me a curveball 
He was quite pleasantly surprised to learn that I was already a Linux user.
I dumped Windows entirely in the Summer of 2001 and never looked back.
- I jumped on the first opportunity to move from IBM's Tivoli group to
IBM's Linux Technology Center, in March of 2003, and worked several years on Linux security. This was a key shift for me--from being a Linux user to being a Linux developer. I worked quite a bit on both RHEL and SLES, while running Fedora.
I spent most of 2005 as an IBM employee on-site at Red Hat, in Westford, Massachusetts, helping with some IBM POWER issues on RHEL and learning the Fedora development process. This was a really incredible assignment. I met and worked with some outstanding people in the Red Hat community, and discovered my love of working on Linux at the distribution level.
In 2006, my wife got a job as a teacher, and while helping her move into her new classroom, I noticed a pair of disused Mac G3's in the corner. Her school's IT staff had long since given up on them, with the MacOS9 installation being broken, and the paltry 256MB of RAM rendering the systems unusable. I had read about Edubuntu and decided to give it a try. I was really impressed with the interface and the outstanding documentation, and I discovered Launchpad in the process of reporting a fixing a couple of bugs. Her kids loved the games, and with Edubuntu, we were able to make those computers usable again. I instantly became an Ubuntu user, moving each of my development machines and MythTV frontends to Ubuntu.
After a short stint in IBM's Global Technical Services, I decided to pursue my dream and work on Linux again at the distribution level. Fortunately, I got that opportunity with Canonical's Ubuntu Server Team.
> - What are the challenges of a project where everyone works remotely?
Communication. It is so entirely, and critically important to develop personal relationships with the people you work with. Fortunately, Canonical understands this, and we have the opportunity to meet one another in person a couple of times per year, at the Developer Summits and at sprints. I worked with many people around the world at IBM, but unfortunately, I never met most of them face to face. It's so much harder to know when someone is serious or joking when you've never seen and heard them in person. Emoticons have so much more meaning when you can associate them with real facial expressions on the individual who's typing them. "LoL" means so much more when you know what someone's out-loud laugh sounds like.
> - What was the motivation for the Ubuntu manpage repository? Is anyone > extending its use or functionality?
The motivation was really to flesh out the design I had for a comprehensive Ubuntu Developer Documentation Search:
This search is intended to index all of Ubuntu's:
- Official Documentation
- Wiki Documentation
- Man pages
- Launchpad Blueprints
- Launchpad Answers
- Ubuntu Forums
- Ubuntu Mailing Lists
- IRC Logs
- Ubuntu Packages
- Launchpad Bugs
- Open Source Code
- Changelogs
Of that list, an Ubuntu-specific repository of manpages was conspicuously missing. There were similar repositories of Debian and Red Hat manpages, but none for Ubuntu. I thought it was important to create:
A couple of community members have created an IRC bot, which is really cool 
I blogged about it here:
> - One of the big features for Ubuntu 8.10 is the private encrypted > directory? What is it and how does it differ from using something like > TrueCrypt?
Ubuntu supports full disk encryption on LVM volumes. That's really comprehensive, and cool, and I use it on my laptop. However, it has a couple of drawbacks. For one thing, a passphrase is required to decrypt the disk and boot. That's unacceptable for servers in a data center that must boot unattended. Also, you can't really make incremental backups of the encrypted data to remote storage. There can also be a performance and footprint penalty for encrypting absolutely everything in the system (who cares if someone can read your /usr/bin or /lib?). Finally, a single key is used for the entire system.
The idea behind my work with the Encrypted Private Directory is to provide each user with a secure location to store their most sensitive data. In Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, if you choose to setup an encrypted private directory (see: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/intrepid/en/man1/ecryptfs-setup-private.html), you will have two directories... ~/.Private will contain your encrypted data, which is written to disk. And ~/Private is a mountpoint, established when you login to your system. Using your login passphrase, a separate "mount passphrase" is decrypted, and used to mount ~/.Private on top of ~/Private. Once this mount is active, you can read/write data transparently to ~/Private, and the kernel encrypts/decrypts the data written/read to/from disk. When you want to incrementally back up your data, you can simply and safely rsync your ~/.Private directory to untrusted remote storage.
There are a number of alternative implementations of file and filesystem encryption, each with their own merits and challenges. I believe that eCryptfs provides a few advantages in that it's a stacked filesystem within the Linux kernel, using in-kernel encryption algorithms. This can theoretically provide some performance benefits from a context-switching perspective. Also, since the encrypted data is actually stored on the lower filesystem, you don't have to pre-allocate some amount of space for ~/Private--you have as much space available as you do on the lower filesystem.
Upstream eCryptfs is an active project, and there's a few new features coming down the pipe. We're working on filename encryption and integration with Mandatory Access Control systems, like SELinux and AppArmor.
I'm not terribly interested in debating the pros/cons of eCryptfs against other cryptographic filesystem solutions here. However, I will say that other solutions are welcome to model an automatic mount/umount implementation for ~/Private on the work I did for eCryptfs, and I think it would be beneficial for Ubuntu users to be able to choose the crypto filesystem used for ~/Private.
> - What does Ubuntu Server have to do to take the next big step? And > what is the next big step? > - Is there a plan for differentiating Ubuntu Server from all the other > server products out there?
Great questions.
There are some that contend that the Ubuntu Server's command-line-only interface is a barrier to adoption. I can see that point. We have some efforts underway that are developing web-based administration utilities. That might help us attain some of the GUI-server market. But really, what I think we need is some documentation, education, and some meta packages or task selections to help turn your Ubuntu desktop installation into a server. I mean, it's trivial to just install the apache2 package on an Ubuntu desktop, and *boom* you're running a server. Some of the people asking for a graphical Ubuntu server do not realize that.
However, I don't think that's the "big step". I think the "big step" would be for the Ubuntu Server to address other architectures. From my IBM background, I have a soft spot for the "big iron" architectures like POWER and System 390. We will need to support those eventually, I'm afraid.
Those are not really within Ubuntu's market right now. I would like to see us leverage some of the work from Ubuntu Mobile team on micro architectures, like arm and lpia. Rather than scaling the Ubuntu server "up", let's scale it "down" and look at the Ubuntu Server on smaller and lower-power embedded devices. I can think of some pretty cool stuff you could do with an Ubuntu server in your pocket, or an Ubuntu server running on various appliances around your house...
> - Since Ubuntu Server has Canonical and community representation, how > could both sides work better together?
Every Ubuntu development cycle starts with an Ubuntu Developer Summit.
- The Jaunty Jackalope developer summit will be in Mountain View,
California in December of 2008. All of the Canonical Ubuntu Server Team will be there, and we should have healthy representation of the active Server Community sponsored by Canonical in attendance. For those who are not in attendance, we will have webcasts and IRC channels open. Beyond the summit, we absolutely invite participation in the Server team in our IRC channel (#ubuntu-server), on the mailing lists, and through Launchpad. I think the more active participation we have in those various forums, the bigger and better the total community will become. The democratic processes of the Ubuntu community never cease to amaze me.
> - What do you think of Wikipedia's move from Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora to Ubuntu?
I think it's a huge win for us that they've stated it publicly. There are plenty of Ubuntu server deployments out there that do not appear on Canonical's books, and are not publicly announced. It would be really cool if more corporations would "stand up and be counted"
I have it on good authority that Google's Custom Search Appliance runs Ubuntu, although it's not explicitly stated here:
If the Ubuntu Server is good enough for Wikipedia and Google, I think we're doing something right. I hope Canonical's partners and the various Ubuntu proponents out there can use this point in your own organizations when fighting for adoption of Ubuntu on the server.
> - You have blogged about your trek through Scotland. Any other fun > trips planned for the future?
Ah yes, that was a great trip! Scotland is an incredible place.
I'll be in Paris in November, and in Mountain View in December, though both of those trips are bit "urban" for my adventurous nature.
I'm planning another long distance hike between Christmas and New Years. Perhaps the Grand Canyon, which I've hiked before but in July.
- Or Big Bend, Texas, which is really remote and beautiful. I'll make
sure I blog about it in retrospect
New in Hardy Heron
Launchpad News
Ubuntu Forums News
In The Press
http://nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2008/10/22/news0810.htm
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_usb_creator&num=1
http://www.linux.com/feature/150549 (concentrate on Ubuntu testing in the article)
In The Blogosphere
http://education.zdnet.com/?p=1919
http://allforlinux.blogspot.com/2008/10/ubuntu-810-rc-tour.html
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/10/manjoo_on_ubuntu.php
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2788
In Other News
http://www.crn.com/hardware/211300223
http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1356 (include notice on new IRC freenode channel: http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1354)
Meeting Summaries
10/21/08 Server Team Meeting
The server team met on Oct. 21st and the following are the topics that were discussed at the meeting. Details of can be found at the link below:
- python-vm-builder
- iscsi support for interpid
- iso testing
- ubuntu-server-devel channel
- UDS topics
- Replacing Frozen Bubble in Jaunty
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-server/2008-October/002354.html
Upcoming Meetings and Events
Community Spotlight
Updates and Security for 6.06, 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04
Security Updates
Ubuntu 6.06 Updates
Ubuntu 7.10 Updates
Ubuntu 8.04 Updates
Ubuntu 8.10 Updates
UWN #: A sneak peek
Archives and RSS Feed
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Additional Ubuntu News
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Conclusion
Thank you for reading the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.
See you next week!
Credits
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Glossary of Terms
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