Issue13

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= Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue # 13 =

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue # for the week of Sept 3 - 10 2006

You can always find this and other Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issues at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter

== In This Issue ==

== General Community News ==

=== Upstart goes live ===

Scott James Remnant threw the switch early this week and made upstart the default init for Edgy. Users of edgy will notice the following new packages:
 * '''startup-tasks''' definitions of essential tasks to run on startup
 * '''system-services''' - definitions of essential system services
  * these two packages are the upstart equivalent of "initscripts"
 * '''upstart''' - event-based init daemon
 * '''upstart-compat-sysv''' - compatibility for System-V-like init
 
== Security Updates ==

After a pair of quiet weeks, there were 4 security updates this week:

 * USN-341-1: X.org vulnerability - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-341-1
 * USN-340-1: imagemagick vulnerabilities - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-340-1
 * USN-339-1: OpenSSL vulnerability - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-339-1
 * USN-338-1: MySQL vulnerabilities - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-338-1

== Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates ==

== New Apps In Edgy ==

Edgy sees GNOME 2.16 this week, uploads of which started on the 3rd and continued all the way through the formal release of GNOME 2.16 on the 7th. GNOME uploading team Sebastian Holbach were reportedly up very early some mornings, eager to beat each to packaging more of GNOME.

It used to be that when you popped an Ubuntu cd in, it would ask you if you wanted to upgrade, even if you had put a 4.10 cd in your 5.10 computer. Michael Vogt has finally fixed this and thus renabled support for this feature in '''update-notifier 0.43.1'''.

Over the past several weeks the KDE Guidance team has been working on usability of the tools, which has resulted in several straight-from-SVN uploads by various Kubuntu developers, including Anthony Mercatante.

The final pieces of work on LTSP came together this week. Oliver Grawert uploaded '''ltsp 0.99''', which turned on session and login selection in LDM, the login manager for thin clients. In addition, code for the sole essential spec for Edgy, ltsp-dhcp-autogeneration, landed in '''ltsp 0.100'''.

Pete Savage was being doing a great deal of work with the student control panel, a tool for teachers to be able to see and control their students desktops. With '''student-control-panel 0.4.1''', his work of providing lockdown (via the GNOME lockdown tool, Pessulus), killing processes, sending messages and start applications on the students machines arrives.

Another Summer of Code project hit the archives this week, this time it was Chris Jones' '''onBoard 0.81''' (previously known as SOK or Simple Onscreen Keyboard), an onscreen keyboard. Also uploaded was a helper library, virtkey 0.41, which emulates the key presses onboard sends out.

Other new releases include:
mono 1.1.17.1
dbh 4.5.0
fspot 0.2.0 (bug fixes and beginnings of new development work)

== Ubuntu ==

== Kubuntu ==

=== KDE 4 Packages ===

Packages of the first KDE 4 developers release are now available for Edgy from kubuntu.org and will soon be appearing in the Ubuntu archive. These are very much for developers and testers only, good luck with them.

http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde4-3.80.1.php

=== Kubuntu Support Team ===

The Kubuntu Support Team is a group of Kubuntu enthusiasts who have taken it upon themselves to ensure that community support for Kubuntu is as good as it is for Ubuntu. They will be working with and within existing teams to ensure wiki pages, IRC support, documentation and forums have correct instructions for Kubuntu throughout.

https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KubuntuSupportTeam

=== Kubuntu Meeting ===

Our community meeting welcomed in a new Kubuntu Memeber in Fathi Boudra, who has been packaging numberous applications in both Kubuntu and Debian. We also discussed critical bugs to be fixed, the possibilities of Strigi and Digikam, feedback and bug reporting with likeback & gdb and the Kubuntu Support Team.

https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Meetings

=== Kubuntu Community Coordinator ===

At the last Community Council Hobbsee was given the title of Kubuntu Community Coordinator, if you want to know how to help out in Kubuntu give Hobbsee a ping on IRC and you will be sent in the right direction.

=== Updates to Guidance and System Settings ===

Sebas has blogged about his work on the new power manager applet

http://vizzzion.org/?blogentry=631

Meanwhile Sime has been busy improving the search feedback in System Settings, and improving the layout of the gamma tool in displayconfig, both now available in Edgy.

=== Willow NG Available for KDE ===

The web filtering tool from Edubuntu, Willow NG, has been ported to KDE thanks to Robert Day as part of the Ichthux project.

Available in Edgy (soon) as willowng-config-kde.

== Edubuntu ==

== Xubuntu ==

== Launchpad News ==

/!\ NO CLUE what I'm doing, edit at will! -- kiko

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Highlights
------------------------------------------------------------------------
        
Welcome to another round of Launchpad updates. This has been an even
busier three weeks, and the list of changes below seems to go on
forever!

=== Bug tracking ===

Let's start out by covering a feature in our bug tracker I would like to
call your attention to. The advanced search page for bugs now provides a
set of interesting options for people managing bugs for a distribution:
filtering based on status of remote bugs and upstream reports linked to
your bug. Launchpad now offers three new filtering options:

    * Bugs that need to be linked upstream
        Ubuntu URL: http://tinyurl.com/oavke

        The first option is very useful for the bug triage team: it
        points out bugs that have been identified as upstream issues but
        for which no remote bug watch has been established yet.

    * Bugs that are closed upstream:
        Ubuntu URL: http://tinyurl.com/kdjx7

        This option is useful for package maintainers: it points out
        bugs that have been marked as resolved (or rejected) upstream.
        These bugs are prime candidates for packaging work, because all
        that's needed to fix the issue is package a new version.

    * Bugs not known to affect upstream:
        Ubuntu URL: http://tinyurl.com/l49be
    
        This option lists bugs which have not been identified as
        upstream issues; this is currently the vast majority of bugs
        open on Ubuntu.

This update also provides us with a number of improvements to bug tags:
creating a new tag now offers a confirmation step, you can do advanced
searches for tags, and the portlet listing bug tags includes counts of
open bugs.

=== Translations ===

On the translations front, we are (finally) proud to announce the
opening of Edgy translations in Rosetta! After a lot of hard work in
getting the initial data setup right, and processing a billion uploaded
templates and translations, Rosetta is now offering translators with a
new distribution release to work on, but without losing the work that
was done in Dapper.

Rosetta now also displays the identity of the person who entered the
latest version of an approved translation for a string. This allows
translation reviewers to assess work done and provide feedback to
translators, tightening the process of getting top quality translations.

=== Support ===

A number of important changes also went live on the support tracker this
week. If you visit the Ubuntu page for tickets at:

    https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+tickets

you'll notice that the display is now formatted using a table, which
provides a much more compact display of tickets. It also allows for
simple searching and ordering through tickets, one of the top requested
features for the support tracker; as an example you can see open tickets
sorted newest first at:

    http://tinyurl.com/hjba2

New support requests now go through a guided process, which first tries
to locate similar reports, avoiding duplicates and helping users get
answers faster. You can test this for yourself on our staging server:

    https://staging.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+addticket

and entering a summary; the next step will list similar tickets, if they
are found.

Also new in the support area is the fact that Karma is properly
attributed to people providing answers and updating tickets; the
listings will soon be updated to include the top contributors in this
area as well.

=== Other news ===

Other noteworthy updates: the official URL for the specification tracker
has been changed to http://features.launchpad.net/ as part of our
branding cleanup. A /very/ serious amount of work went into refactoring
and cleanup of Soyuz, our distribution management system, and we are
currently in the process of running our first smoketest to verify that
the changes were successful (and we caught a performance regression
already). On the branch management front you can now safely change
branch metadata without causing imports to fail; this should make the
feature more robust over time and is one of the first practical benefits
of the bzr transition.

Finally, handling of OpenPGP and SSH keys has been overhauled and
sanitized; if you had trouble registering keys, or signing the Code of
Conduct, now would be a great time to test and provide us with feedback.

Again, I'll close by reminding people of the launchpad-users mailing
list which is shared between developers and users of Launchpad:

    https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/launchpad-users

Come help us define what Launchpad should become. Thanks!

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read the full announcement, including a detailed changelog, at:
  https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/launchpad-users/2006-September/000606.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------

== Bug Stats ==

New Bugs: # [[BR]]
Closed Bugs: #

=== Infamous Bugs ===

== In The Press ==
Media watchers may have noticed that Forbes is paying an unusual amount of attention to Linux and open source software. That positive trend continues with their look at Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu.

''"Ubuntu now has 4 million users, half of which are governments, universities and a smattering of businesses. It adds new ones at a rate of 8% per month. After its public release in October 2004, Ubuntu quickly deposed Red Hat's Fedora as the most popular version of Linux on DistroWatch, a Web site that caters to Linux users. Ubuntu works in 22 languages, and Canonical, the company Shuttleworth set up to distribute his software, will send a free Ubuntu CD anywhere in the world. New users rave about the simple user interface, which has gained recent converts in a couple of well-known bloggers who switched from Apple Computer's OS X."''

There's more at http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/09/05/linux-ubuntu-opensource_cz_mr_0906shuttleworth.html

Tectonic interviews Canonical's education programme manager Richard Weideman in its look at the prospects for open source in education.

''"We are also participating in high level projects and studies, funded by organisations such as the European Union, to build blueprints for the next generation. These collaborations of education experts and learning culture experts, alongside technical organisations like ourselves, take the benefits of an open source future for education as a given," he says.

"Right now, open source is now firmly on the education agenda; it is no longer a fringe element but a cornerstone. This is the year to be on the lookout for large scale deployment and successes."''

Read more at http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1146

== Feature Of The Week - ??? ==

== Upcoming Events ==

=== Hungarian Ubuntu Conference 2006 ===

The [http://www.fsf.hu FSF.hu Foundation] and the [http://ubuntu.hu Hungarian Ubuntu Community] proudly presents the first Hungarian Ubuntu Conference. Many well-known developers have accepted our invitation to present, in English some Ubuntu related projects: Mario Đanić (Edubuntu Developer), Ante Karamatić (Ubuntu Developer, Ubuntu Printing Team), Jani Monoses (Xubuntu Lead Developer), and Raphaël Pinson (Kubuntu Core Developer, Itchtux Lead Developer).

The conference will be held on the 28th October, 2006 (Saturday) in Building 'I' of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary.

We also plan to have the presentations streamed online, so that anybody can watch in real time. Stay tuned for futher info on that!

For more informations, please visit the [http://ubuntu.hu/konf/?q=english homepage] of the conference. The organizers are happy to help you with anything, including travel infomation or cheap accomodation, just use the contact form.

=== Linuxfest Ohio ===

The one-day Linuxfest Ohio has been announced for 30th September 2006 with an impressive list of presenters. Opening the show is an Ubuntu double-bill from Jeff Waugh with "Linux for Human Beings", followed by Jorge "whiprush" Castro:

 * http://ohiolinux.org/speakers.html#talk5

Registration for the event, to be held at the the Greater Columbus Convention Centre is free:

 * http://www.columbusconventions.com/info/parking.asp
 * http://ohiolinux.org/attend.html

If the Ubuntu showing didn't impress you. Jon "maddog" Hall will be there, along with Michael Johnson (of 'rpm' fame) showing off 'rbuilder'. Chris DiBona will be leaking secrets from Google and to top it off, the Columbus Zoo keepers are promising to attend with a pair of Genuine Real Live Penguins(tm). Don't let our feathered friend see Tuxracer!


=== Software Freedom Day ===

September 16th 2006:

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International provides guidance in organizing SFD, but volunteer teams around the world organize their own SFD events to impact their own communities.

To find out how you can do it yourself learn more here:

 * http://softwarefreedomday.org

You can prepare by burning some disks yourself and join the community out there.


== Additional News Resources ==

As always you can find more news and announcements at:

 http://www.ubuntu.com/news

and

 http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

== Conclusion ==

Thank you for reading the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. See you next week!

== Credits ==

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

 * Corey Burger
 * Christian Reis
 * Szilveszter Farkas
 * John Little
 * Paul Sladen
 * Jonathan Riddell
 * anyone else that contributes
 * And many others

== Feedback ==

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Marketing Team. Please feel free to contact us regarding any concerns or suggestions by either sending an email to ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com or by using any of the other methods on the [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam Ubuntu Marketing Team Contact Information Page].
IP: 24.69.71.211
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