Issue13

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WORK IN PROGRESS

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.

Security Updates

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.

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

Edubuntu

Xubuntu

Launchpad News

Warning /!\ 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:

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:

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:

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:

Come help us define what Launchpad should become. Thanks!


Read the full announcement, including a detailed changelog, at:


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:

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

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!

Additional News Resources

As always you can find more news and announcements at:

and

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
  • 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].