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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #173 for the week December 13th - December 19th, 2009. In this issue we cover ...

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In This Issue

General Community News

Mark Shuttleworth: My new focus at Canonical

From March next year, I’ll focus my Canonical energy on product design, partnerships and customers. Those are the areas that I enjoy most and also the areas where I can best shape the impact we have on open source and the technology market. I’m able to do this because Jane Silber, who has been COO at Canonical virtually from the beginning, will take on the job of CEO.

Since Jane joined the company, she and I have shared the load of coordinating between the leaders of all the key teams that make up Canonical. We’ve been through various permutations as new initiatives needed different kinds of attention; Jane currently leads the Ubuntu One effort, for example.

I’ve become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products. I can’t think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldn’t think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane. We’ve worked together long enough, and closely enough, that I can be confident of continuity in the pieces I most care about and also excited about the ways in which I think Jane will raise the bar for the senior team. As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organizational leadership, which I see as essential for Canonical over the next five years. We are being welcomed as a partner and supplier to ever-larger businesses, and I want to make sure we are a robust answer to their needs.

Many folks in the community will know Jane from Ubuntu Developer Summits, and of course she’s well established as a leader at Canonical. In order to focus on the new role, we’ll be hiring for a COO and a new lead for Ubuntu One (both positions will be advertised publicly as well as within Canonical). There’s no rush, so we plan to coordinate things carefully and I expect I’ll be focused on my new role by March.

Lucid Community Team Plans

Jono Bacon and his horsemen are planning some major community actions for Lucid. They have put together a strategy to help guide and improve some of the community teams for the Lucid cycle. While Jono's team doesn't encompass all the strategic blueprints for Lucid it is a fitting start to the cycle. Blueprints of the different areas that have been highlighted by the team include:

• Upstreams
• Developers
• Governance Support
• Translations

• LoCo Teams

• Governance Changes
• Regular Cycle Activities
• Infrastructure

You can see more detailed information at the link below concerning each of the above listed areas marked for improvement during the Lucid cycle.

http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/12/17/lucid-community-team-plans/

Michal Zajac (quintasan) Interview

Michal is 16 years old and lives in Lubin, Poland. He has been using Linux for about 3 years, and has gone from Ubuntu to Kubuntu to Gentoo and now back to Kubuntu. Michal first got involved with MOTU by translating, but quickly moved on to more serious contributions. You can also find Michal contributing in the #ubuntu-pl IRC channel helping out the Polish LoCo team. For Lucid, he plans to keep working with the Kubuntu Ninjas to help bring everyone a new KDE SC releases. In his spare time, Michal loves to skateboard, learn Japanese, and he has recently started learning C++.

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1958

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Notification

Todays issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter will be the last edition for this year. It has been our pleasure to bring you all the news about Ubuntu in 2009, and we look forward to bringing you our first issue of 2010 which will be published on January 3rd, 2010. Our best wishes of peace and happiness to you and yours from "The News Team" See you in 2010!!!

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

Infamous Bugs

Translation Stats Karmic

1. Spanish (12287) -16 over last week
2. Brazilian Portuguese (45538) +/-0 over last week
3. French (45786) -52 over last week
4. Swedish (66615) +/-0 over last week
5. English (United Kingdom) (71870) -6 over last week

Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala", see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/

Ubuntu Brainstorm Top 5 this week

• Get more developers reading Brainstorm! http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23040/

• Speeding up suspend 2 disk http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22976/

• Different login sound for system AM/PM "Audio candy" http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23034/

• openning a new tabs is mach faster and intuative if you see a little '+' button http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22960/

• Auto-generated Ubuntu Laptop compatibility DB http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22971/

Ubuntu Brainstorm is a community site geared toward letting you add your ideas for Ubuntu. You can submit your own idea, or vote for or against another idea. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

LoCo News

New update for the Ubuntu Israeli website

The ubuntu-il LoCo has decided to do a makeover of their LoCo website. They plan to use more content from the ubuntu.com webpage to help the team promote Ubuntu on a more consistant basis. Since they use RTL language, they can't just do a copy and paste, so rebuilding all the pages will take some time. In the end they will have a complete remake with everything in Hebrew, and possible some site availability for the blind. Sounds like an ambitious undertaking that the Ubuntu community can look forward to seeing.

http://ddorda.useopensource.net/soon-at-ubutnu-il-loco-site

Ubuntu Catalan: What a LoCo November

• November 1st: LoCo meeting. Redistribute Barcelona people car wiki for travel to the release party in Lleida. Decide to make a professional poster paid by two LoCo members.

• November 2nd: fisrt Ubuntu Hour in Barcelona.
• November 7th: release party Kastanyada Kàrmica.
• November 16th: three-member meeting for distribution of T-shirts and CDs.

• November 16th: LoCo meeting. Decided when to choose the placement for next party. Possibly in Castelló. New Convention for dealing with brainstorm ideas. Started a calendar with blueprints for Lucid party.

• November 22nd: meeting with Tormod Volden from Swiss LoCo.

• November 28th: act omelette and free software in Caldes de Montbuï

Great work Ubuntu Catalan!!!

http://blogs.fsfe.org/rcarreras/?p=78

New in Karmic Koala

Launchpad News

James Westby: Ubuntu Distributed Development Overview

• Better patch tracking and more in Launchpad Bugs 3.1.12

Launchpad’s 3.1.12 release has been a big release for the Launchpad Bugs team, despite it only being a two week development cycle compared to the normal four week cycle for Launchpad releases. This meant there was really only a week of development time for the bugs team. We’ve been anxious to really put some development effort to the plans we’ve been articulating at sprints and UDS over the last few weeks prior to the start of the 3.1.12 cycle, so we discussed in our team being very careful with our time during this short cycle so that we could end the year with a hint of the work to come over the next 2-3 months.

One of the things we’ll be working on over the next months is better patch tracking and reporting in Launchpad. The first fruits of this have landed with changes to distinguish patches in comments and to list patches separately on the bug page.

Now when you attach a patch to a Launchpad bug, the patch has a new icon to distinguish it from any other attachment.

http://blog.launchpad.net/bug-tracking/better-patch-tracking-and-more

Ubuntu Forums News

Ubuntuforums: In a month

Ryan Troy tells us: The ubuntuforums have grown to be one of the largest linux forums on the internet today with over 970,000 users. He thought it might be interesting to show some other statistics that were generated between 11/15/2009 and 12/15/2009.

Compare these to the numbers posted in March 2007. http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2007/03/14/ubuntuforumsorg-facts/

• 10,901,893 Visits
• 24,291,004 Pageviews
• 46.18% % New Visits
• 6,138,414 Absolute Unique Visitors
• Returning Visitor 53.77%
• New Visitor 46.23%
• Firefox 69.97%
• Internet Explorer 10.61%
• Chrome 8.33%
• Opera 3.80%
• Safari 3.09%
• Linux 58.11%
• Windows 36.44%
• Macintosh 4.70%

http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/12/16/ubuntuforums-in-a-month/

In The Press

Canonical Continues Ubuntu Server Edition Push

The VAR Guy says that Ubuntu is more than a desktop operating system, and that continues to be the message from Canonical, which is promoting another Ubuntu Server Edition user survey in a bid to better understand how customers are deploying the server operating system. Canonical has spent much of 2009 launching more training programs and ISV efforts for Ubuntu Server Edition. The initiatives have even included cloud training. At the same time, Canonical has been evolving Landscape — its systems management platform for Ubuntu desktops and servers. The VAR Guy senses that Canonical is making progress with Ubuntu Server Edition, but big questions remain: How many customers actually pay Canonical for Ubuntu Server Edition support? How many customers are starting to deploy Ubuntu in public and private clouds? And will Lucid Lynx live up to its server promise? http://www.thevarguy.com/2009/12/15/canonical-continues-ubuntu-server-edition-push/

Mark Shuttleworth To Step Down From CEO Role

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports that Mark Shuttleworth has just announced this morning via a blog post that he will be stepping down as the CEO of Canonical, the formal company behind Ubuntu Linux . Jane Silber, the current COO of Canonical, will be taking over Mark's position as the CEO. Mark Shuttleworth though will not be leaving Canonical, but rather he wishes to focus more of his time on bettering Ubuntu and its products rather than the formal business responsibilities. From his blog post, "I've become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products." Shuttleworth will be formally stepping down as the Chief Executive Officer in March when Jane Silber takes over. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzgxOQ

Ubuntu 10.04 Already Shortens The Boot Time

Michael Larabel of Phoronix states that Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 was released last week and while it did not bring any major features yet for this Long-Term Support release, it began to introduce some underlying changes like the switch to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, X Server 1.7, and the complete removal of HAL. Larabel's early benchmarks of Ubuntu 10.04 show that there are some negative performance regressions right off the bat, but one area that Canonical is focusing upon in particular with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is speeding up the boot process. Also surfacing this month is a new kernel that pulls in more of Intel's Moblin speed patches from their kernel. As most know, Moblin 2 boots extremely fast. Phoronix has tested out this kernel with the Moblin patches on Ubuntu 9.10 and it booted three seconds faster compared to the stock Karmic kernel. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_lucid_short&num=1

Ubuntu 10.04 will bring panel overhaul, social network menu

Ryan Paul of ARS Technica notes that Canonical has lifted the curtains on some ambitious plans to reinvent the GNOME panel. The changes, which could potentially debut in the next major version of Ubuntu, will help simplify the desktop user experience and clean up superfluous panel clutter. Canonical has been working on an incremental panel overhaul under the umbrella of its Ayatana desktop enhancement initiative. The company introduced a number of experimental changes to the GNOME panel in previous versions of Ubuntu, and Ubuntu 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April, will take this tinkering to the next level with a more holistic overhaul. Part of Canonical's grand plan for panel perfection is a concept that the company calls the Me Menu. Based partly on Ubuntu's current presence applet, the new Me Menu will serve as a one-stop shop for configuring messaging status and social networks. Designed by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth himself, the Me Menu is expected to be one of the highlights of Ubuntu 10.04. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/12/ubuntu-1004-will-bring-panel-overhaul-social-network-menu.ars

Ubuntu, Linux, GNOME and Xorg: This Intel-video user is tired

Inside So Cal's Steven Rosenberg tells us that he has been reading one of his favorite FOSS writers, Ryan Paul, and one comment leapt right out at him: "I'm looking forward to this release. 9.10 is mostly stable, I could use a good update that breaks my intel video and wireless chips even though they were fine, plus overhauls the USB method so not much works anymore." Rosenberg says he had a pretty good thing going in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Rosenberg goes on to say that he did the upgrade from 8.04 through 8.10 to 9.04 in a single weekend solely to be ready for 9.10, and he had no idea so many things would break. "All I want are upgrades that don't completely break the OS. That's it. I like new apps, but what happened to this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with Ubuntu 9.10 is not OK." Rosenberg says that come Lucid time in April of next year, the way he feels now he's not going there in any kind of rush. "Maybe three months, maybe more ... maybe not." http://www.insidesocal.com/click/2009/12/ubuntu-linux-gnome-and-xorg-th.html

Ubuntu's Lucid plans

Alastair Otter of My Broadband states that in April the Ubuntu developers will release Lucid Lynx. Also known as Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx will be the third long term support (LTS) release from Ubuntu and is likely to have a strong focus on stability and security and will be geared at appealing to enterprise users and hardware makers. Speaking in September, when he first announced Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth said that the developers would be "taking the large scale, horizontal scalability, volume deployment, heritage of Debian and really try to push that into cloud computing. Making sure that 10.04 is a platform for anybody who is building a large scale infrastructure - for anybody who is trying to build the next Facebook, the next Google, the next eBay. Whether you want to start on (Amazon) EC2 and migrate to the managed cloud, Ubuntu 10.0.4 is going to be the platform." http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/10860.html

In The Blogosphere

Canonical’s Shuttleworth: We’ll Have New CEO In 2010

http://www.workswithu.com/2009/12/18/canonicals-shuttleworth-well-have-new-ceo-in-2010/

First Look at Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2009/12/17/first-look-at-ubuntu-10-04-alpha-1/

So a Man Walks Into a Bar and Asks for an Ubuntu on the Rocks

http://blog.ibeentoubuntu.com/2009/12/so-man-walks-into-bar-and-asks-for.html

Mark Shuttleworth’s Next Ubuntu Move?

http://www.workswithu.com/2009/12/17/mark-shuttleworths-next-ubuntu-move/

My kid will, in fact, do it with Ubuntu (and other 2010 predictions)

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=3448

Pushing Prism on Ubuntu

http://www.workswithu.com/2009/12/15/pushing-prism-on-ubuntu/

Setting up Ubuntu 9.10

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2009/12/16/setting-up-ubuntu-9-10/

Shuttleworth steps down as Ubuntu CEO

http://blogs.computerworld.com/15275/shuttleworth_steps_down_as_ubuntu_ceo

Where does Ubuntu go from here?

http://blogs.computerworld.com/15278/where_does_ubuntu_go_from_here

In Other News

Ubuntu's Jono Bacon: Managing an Open Source Community

Bruce Byfield of Datamation reminds us that for the past three years, Jono Bacon has worked as community manager for Ubuntu, one of the largest and most diverse projects in open source software. Consequently, when he recently published his thoughts on building and managing communities, people listen. More unusually, as Byfield found out in a recent interview, when people like him critique Bacon's book, he listens, too, with a view to improving the second edition. "To me, this is the first part of the story," Bacon says. "The first part's going to have holes in it where it doesn't quite fit the needs of most people, but the second edition will be the part that's really interesting." Whether a second edition is eventually released is still uncertain -- and will be for at least a year, according to Bacon -- but that does not change the importance of the conversations it is beginning to start. Those conversations alone make The Art of Community, faults and all, one of the more significant books about free software that has been released. http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3853331/

Cloud-oriented netbook distro arrives in beta

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Jolicloud-beta/

Meeting Summaries: <MONTH> <YEAR>

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Community Spotlight

Updates and Security for 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10

Security Updates

• USN-875-1: Red Hat Cluster Suite vulnerabilities - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-875-1

• USN-873-1: Firefox 3.0 and Xulrunner 1.9 vulnerabilities - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-873-1

• USN-874-1: Firefox 3.5 and Xulrunner 1.9.1 vulnerabilities - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/USN-874-1

Ubuntu 6.06 Updates

• php-mail 1.1.6-2+etch1build0.6.06.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/dapper-changes/2009-December/012800.html

Ubuntu 8.04 Updates

• mysql-ocaml 1.0.4-4+lenny1build0.8.04.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/hardy-changes/2009-December/012354.html

• php-mail 1.1.6-2+etch1build0.8.04.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/hardy-changes/2009-December/012355.html

Ubuntu 8.10 Updates

• mysql-ocaml 1.0.4-4+lenny1build0.8.10.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/intrepid-changes/2009-December/009799.html

• postgresql-ocaml 1.7.0-3+lenny1build0.8.10.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/intrepid-changes/2009-December/009800.html

• php-mail 1.1.14-1+lenny1build0.8.10.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/intrepid-changes/2009-December/009801.html

• smart 1.1.1~bzr20081010-0ubuntu1.8.10.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/intrepid-changes/2009-December/009802.html

• landscape-client 1.4.0-0ubuntu0.8.10.0 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/intrepid-changes/2009-December/009803.html

Ubuntu 9.04 Updates

• mysql-ocaml 1.0.4-4+lenny1build0.9.04.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/jaunty-changes/2009-December/009954.html

• camlimages 1:2.2.0-4+lenny3build0.9.04.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/jaunty-changes/2009-December/009956.html

• postgresql-ocaml 1.7.0-3+lenny1build0.9.04.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/jaunty-changes/2009-December/009957.html

• php-mail 1.1.14-1+lenny1build0.9.04.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/jaunty-changes/2009-December/009958.html

• landscape-client 1.4.0-0ubuntu0.9.04.0 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/jaunty-changes/2009-December/009959.html

Ubuntu 9.10 Updates

• mythtvfs-fuse 0.6.0-1ubuntu0.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012122.html

• php-mail 1.1.14-1+lenny1build0.9.10.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012123.html

• apparmor 2.3.1+1403-0ubuntu27.3 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012124.html

• mpich2 1.2-1ubuntu1.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012125.html

• nepenthes 0.2.2-3ubuntu1.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012126.html

• rampart 1.3.0-0ubuntu5.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012127.html

• aide 0.13.1-10ubuntu5.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012128.html

• gst-plugins-base0.10 0.10.25-2ubuntu1.2 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012129.html

• avidemux 1:2.5.1+repack-0ubuntu2.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012130.html

• gtk+2.0 2.18.3-1ubuntu2.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012131.html

• gpsdrive 2.10~pre4-6.dfsg-1ubuntu2.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012132.html

• openmpi 1.3.2-3ubuntu1.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012133.html

• linux-mvl-dove 2.6.31-210.20 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012134.html

• ec2-init 0.4.999-0ubuntu7.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012135.html

• linux-fsl-imx51 2.6.31-107.18 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012136.html

• transmission 1.75-0ubuntu2.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012137.html

• gcalctool 5.28.2-0ubuntu1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012138.html

• cryptsetup 2:1.0.6+20090405.svn49-1ubuntu7.1 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012139.html

• landscape-client 1.4.0-0ubuntu0.9.10.0 - https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-December/012140.html

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Conclusion

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See you next week!

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