Issue17

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 17 for the week of Oct 1 - 7, 2006. In this issue we cover the end of the Ubuntu Video contest, the new Bluetooth team, Ubuntu in Indiana schools and much more.

You can find older Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter issues at:: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter

General Community News

The winner of the $100 USD Ubuntu Video contest has been announced. Mous, the creator of multiple Linux gaming videos, was selected because his videos presented an image of Ubuntu that challenges the assumptions people have about Linux gaming. His work was widely circulated and appeared in multiple gaming forums, receiving very positive feedback. You can see the full announcement and his videos at http://www.ubuntuvideo.com/and_the_winner_is

Kubuntu/Debian KDE Extras

Achim Bohnet made a page describing how Kubuntu packagers can make sure their packages get into Debian too, through the Debian KDE Extras team.

https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KubuntuKDEExtras

Rosetta and Upstream Collaboration

The Rosetta developers responded to comments from the KDE translators with some notes that are valid for all upstream projects that Rosetta includes.

https://wiki.kubuntu.org/RosettaAndUpstreamCollaboration

http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDERosettaCollaboration

New Bluetooth Team

Daniel Holbach announced the formation of the Bluetooth Team for Ubuntu. As Edgy is but a few weeks away, the main goal is to look towards Edgy+1 to "make it nice and sweet" in the words of Daniel. You can read more at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bluetooth and https://launchpad.net/people/bluetooth

Changes in Edgy

This week was fairly quiet in Edgy, as we approach the final release.

Users of Xen will be pleased to see that xen-3.0 3.0.3~rc1 came out this week, thanks to the hard work of Andrew Mitchell and Chuck Short. Later in the week Andrew updated to the rc2 release.

Fabio M Di Nitto uploaded a number of cluster packages this week, including the new Openais 0.80.1 and redhat-cluster-suite 2.20061002. The latter includes changes from a bugsquishing party held upstream.

The printing world got a little saner this week, with Till Kamppeter uploading foomatic-db-engine 3.0.2-20060925, which merges all of Ubuntu and Debian's patches upstream. Till also uploaded foomatic-db-hpijs 20060925 while Martin Pitt merged cupsys 1.2.4 from Debian, including a great many bug fixes. Finally cups-pdf 2.4.2 was synced from Debian.

A few of the gnustep packages were also synced from Debian this week. They include gnustep-base 1.13.0, gnustep-gui 0.11.0 and gnustep-make 1.13.0.

In the Java world, libjcommon-java 1.0.6 arrived this week, which allowed the package to move to universe, now that it builds with Free Java. Likewise libjfreechart-java 1.0.2 was uploaded by Mattias Klose and moved to universe. Also uploaded was ecj-bootstrap 3.2.1, synced from Debian.

Bazaar, the distributed revision control tool, was updated to 0.11 by Etienne Goyer. The new release brings speed improvements and other changes. You can read more at https://lists.canonical.com/archives/bazaar-ng/2006q4/017779.html

If you feel the need to mix your Python and .NET, the 1.0 release of Ironpython was uploaded by Matthias Klose. You can read the 1.0 release notes at http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=IronPython&title=v1.0%20Release%20Notes

Ubuntu

Andrew Mitchell uploaded the new 0.2.1 release of F-spot, the photo management application. Aside a huge number of bug fixes, this version brings support for scaling images when they are being emailed, exporting them in the correct rotation and Picasa export support.

In the artwork world, there were a number of new packages this week. Frank Schoep uploaded edgy-community-wallpapers 0.2-0 and later in the week Daniel Holbach uploaded 0.3 of the same package. Daniel also uploaded human-icon-theme 0.4, which adds new emblems from the Art Team. Finally, Daniel uploaded edgy-gdm-themes 0.4 and ubuntu-sounds 0.5. The new ubuntu-sounds package might solve https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/61530, where it was discovered that the Teardown spec had shortened the shutdown procedure so much that the shutdown sound was being silenced too early.

The Telepathy team was very quiet this week, with only telepathy-butterfly 0.1.1 being uploaded by Samuel Maftoul.

A few other pieces of the Ubuntu desktop got updated this week, including the new poppler 0.5.4 and rhythmbox 0.9.6. Both uploaded by Sebastian Bacher, the new Rhythmbox includes some DAAP fixes, ID3 tag writing issues, UI and i18n improvements and more. You can read more at http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/news.html. Also uploaded this week was ubuntu-meta 1.26 and 1.27, the former of which added onboard, libgl1-mesa-glx, linuxprinting.org-ppds, util-linux-locales while moving gnome-games to recommends. 1.27 also added avahi-daemon to the default install.

One of the most interesting new apps in Edgy this week is backstep 0.3, a tool to draw icons of minimized apps on the desktop. You can read more about Backstep at http://backstep.sourceforge.net/

Kubuntu

The kubuntu-meta packages saw two updates this week, both by Anthony Mercatante, 1.15 and 1.16. The former added digikam and removed kmplayer-konq-plugins from kubuntu-desktop and the latter reverted the previous change to read the plugins back in.

Xubuntu

The week started with the Xubuntu people finishing the split up of the XFFM file manager package. As such, Gauvain Pocentek and David Valot uploaded xffm-samba 4.5.0, xffm-filemanager 4.5.0, xffm-gui 4.5.0, xffm-fstab 4.5.0, xffm-recent 4.5.0, xffm-icons 4.5.0, xffm-trash 4.5.0, xffm-proc 4.5.0. A few days later Gauvain uploaded the xffm4 4.5.0, which is the new modular metapackage.

Xffm was not the only piece of Xubuntu that saw changes this week. Jani Monoses uploaded the new xubuntu-system-tools 2.15.5, which is a branch of the gnome-system-tools. Jani also uploaded xfce4-dict-plugin 0.2.0, xfce4-mailwatch-plugin 1.0.1, and xfwm4 4.3.99.1svn+r23289. Gauvain Pocentek uploaded the first release of xfce4-cpu-freq-plugin, 0.0.1. Two changes to the xubuntu-meta package came this week, 2.14, which added gxine, onboard and xfce4-dict-plugin to the desktop, and one of the last uploads of the week, 2.15, which adds the system-config-printer tool to the desktop.

Ichthux

The Ichthux team continued their work this week. Raphael Pinson uploaded ichthux-meta 1.0ubuntu2, which adds ichthux-artwork-usplash, ichthux-default-settings, and sword-language-pack-nl to the default install. Jordan Mantha also uploaded ichthux-docs 6.10, the initial upload of the documentation for this distro.

In The Press

Benjamin Smedberg of Mozilla raised some concerns about the cathedral-like nature of Ubuntu (and any other distros) archives. He wondered about how Ubuntu can manage new applications and the ability for people to install from the "Bazaar", as he called it. You can read more at http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2006-10-04/is-ubuntu-an-operating-system/

Newsforge reports on Benetech, a charity whose mission is to use technology to improve the world. They use Kubuntu and Ubuntu on their desktops Ball cited Ubuntu's ease of setup and installation as the reason for the switch. "If you have to roll out 10 or 15 machines, Gentoo's [inconvenient]. Most of our machines are Kubuntu, but there are a couple of GNOME people in our organization."

There's more at http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/09/29/1827208.shtml?tid=39&tid=150&tid=132

ZDNet takes a look at Canonical as it gears up and shoots for profitability:

Canonical is the 65-employee start-up behind a popular version of Linux called "Ubuntu". The company is betting that it can win a place in the market using a strategy that dominant Linux seller Red Hat has dropped.

Red Hat offers two versions of Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora Core is free, but relatively untested and unsupported by Red Hat, while RHEL is supported and certified, but must be purchased. With Canonical's Ubuntu, however, the free and supported versions are identical--the approach Red Hat abandoned in 2003.

"We believe that Ubuntu should be free to everyone--not just a trial version, but our very best version," said Christopher Kenyon, Canonical's business development manager. The South African company even ships free CDs anywhere in the world. Using that strategy, it expects profitability within 24 months, he added.

Visit http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6123249.html?tag=st.num for the rest of the article.

eSchool News reports of Indiana and the 269 Ubuntu machines across 9 classrooms

Visit http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2006/10/001568.php to read the rest of the article.

Meetings and other similar events

October 4th was a Hug Day, where Ubuntu users and developers get together and focus on getting our expanding bug count under check. You can read more about Hug Days at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay

The Development Team held their weekly meeting on October 5 this week. You can read the developer updates at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelTeamMeeting20061005

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Fabio D Nitto uploaded cpio 2.6-10ubuntu0.2 to dapper-updates this week.

There were a few backports this week. They included:

  • ktorrent 2.0.2-0ubuntu2~dapper1
  • phpgroupware 0.9.16.011-1~dapper1
  • gnomebaker 0.6.0-0ubuntu1~dapper1
  • altermime 0.3.7-2~dapper1
  • acidrip 0.14-0.2ubuntu2~dapper1
  • debootstrap 0.3.3.0ubuntu5~dapper1
  • sg3-utils 1.21-1ubuntu1~dapper1
  • readahead-list 1:0.20050517.0220-0ubuntu5~dapper1

Bug Stats

  • Open (16144) (+460 over last week)
  • Critical (16)
  • Unconfirmed (8206)
  • Unassigned (11556)
  • All bugs ever reported (58793)

Daniel Holbach has posted a list of Bug Tasks for people looking for things to do. You can read more at [WWW] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2006-September/000908.html

As always, the Bug Squad needs more help. If you want to get started, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpingWithBugs

Check out the bug statistics: http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~carthik/bugstats/

New features in Apport

Apport is a new tool in Edgy to allow users to collect backtraces, amongst other things. There were two major announcments about it this week. The first relates to duplicate bugs. Often a single bug will be duplicated many times. Rather than have lots of duplicates filed, it is better to redirect that person to a common bug. As such, Martin Pitt, the developer of Apport, has announced Bug Patterns. You can read more at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-October/021502.html

The 2nd piece of news involves the retrace tool, which is used for developers to process backtraces after the fact. This allows the direct downloading of the ddebs (debs containing the debug symbols) and then rerun the stack trace to get better debugging symbols. You can read more at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-October/021500.html

Additional Ubuntu News

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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
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  • Jenda Vencura
  • Jonathan Riddell
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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 Ubuntu Marketing Team Contact Information Page.

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue17 (last edited 2008-08-06 17:00:53 by localhost)