Issue181

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Contents

Contents

  1. UWN Translations
  2. In This Issue
  3. General Community News
  4. Ubuntu Stats
    1. Bug Stats
    2. Infamous Bugs
    3. Translation Stats Karmic
    4. Ubuntu Brainstorm Top 5 this week
  5. LoCo News
  6. New in Karmic Koala
  7. Launchpad News
    1. Meet Jelmer Vernooij
    2. Sikuli — scripting your use of GUIs
  8. The Planet
    1. Daniel Holbach: Ubuntu Global Jam – preparations
    2. Dustin Kirkland: Have you taken Lucid for a test drive yet?
    3. Jono Bacon: Some Opportunistic Developer Updates
    4. Alan Pope: Ubuntu One Music Store Sneak Peek
    5. David Siegel: One Hundred Paper Cuts for Lucid, Round 10
    6. Robert Collins: Yay Dell-with-Ubuntu down under
  9. Ubuntu Forums News
  10. In The Press
    1. Ubuntu 10.04's Nouveau Stack Gets Ready
    2. EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs Ubuntu Netbook Benchmarks
    3. Ubuntu One Music Store Pushed In Rhythmbox
    4. The Linux Box to Market Ubuntu OS in the U.S.
    5. Ubuntu Optimizes its OS for ARM CPUs
  11. In The Blogosphere
    1. Are smartbooks and Linux meant for each other?
    2. Five Best Netbook Operating Systems
    3. 5 New Things about Windows 8 and Ubuntu 10.04
    4. Canonical Launches Ubuntu Single Sign On
    5. Lubuntu: Not Just for Lusers
  12. In Other News
    1. Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 gets ported onto Sony Ericsson's Xperia X1
    2. Ubuntu torrents are now IPv6 enabled
  13. Meeting Summaries: <MONTH> <YEAR>
  14. Upcoming Meetings and Events
    1. Monday, February 22, 2010
      1. PyCon
      2. Security Team Catch-up
    2. Tuesday, February 23, 2010
      1. PyCon
      2. Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting
      3. Technical Board Meeting
      4. Desktop Team Meeting
      5. Kernel Team Meeting
      6. Global Jam Meeting
    3. Wednesday, February 24, 2010
      1. PyCon
      2. Server Team Meeting
      3. Foundation Team Meeting
      4. QA Team Meeting
      5. Edubuntu Meeting
    4. Thursday, February 25, 2010
      1. PyCon
      2. Ubuntu Java Meeting
      3. MC Meeting
      4. Regional Membership Board - Americas
    5. Friday, February 26, 2010
      1. Lucid Weekly Release Meeting
      2. How to Run a Jam
    6. Saturday, February 27, 2010
      1. BugJam
      2. DC Loco IRC meeting
    7. Sunday, February 28, 2010
      1. Ubuntu IRC Council Meeting
      2. Ubuntu Gaming Team Meeting
  15. Community Spotlight
  16. Updates and Security for 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10
    1. Security Updates
    2. Ubuntu 6.06 Updates
    3. Ubuntu 8.04 Updates
    4. Ubuntu 8.10 Updates
    5. Ubuntu 9.04 Updates
    6. Ubuntu 9.10 Updates
  17. UWN #: A sneak peek
  18. Subscribe
  19. Archives and RSS Feed
  20. Additional Ubuntu News
  21. Conclusion
  22. Credits
  23. Glossary of Terms
  24. Ubuntu - Get Involved
  25. Feedback

newspaper-icon3.jpg 

WORK IN PROGRESS

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #181 for the week February 14th - February 20th, 2010. In this issue we cover ...

UWN Translations

  • Note to translators and our readers: We are trying a new way of linking to our translations pages. Please follow the link below for the information you need.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Translations

In This Issue

General Community News

Ubuntu Stats

Bug Stats

  • Open (76691) +39 # over last week
  • Critical (26) +11 # over last week
  • Unconfirmed (39002) −74 # 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 (10614) −95 # over last week
  2. English (United Kingdom) (20053) −12032 # over last week
  3. French (40290) −144 # over last week
  4. Brazilian Portuguese (41688) −1235 # over last week
  5. Swedish (66185) −7 # 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

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 in Karmic Koala

Launchpad News

Meet Jelmer Vernooij

Jelmer Vernooij recently joined the Launchpad team at Canonical, and Matthew Revell caught up with him to give him the usual Meet the developers interview. Matthew asked Jelmer what he will be doing with the Launchpad team, where he works, how he got into free software, and more. Follow this link to read the following interview between Matthew and Jelmer: http://blog.launchpad.net/meet-the-devs/meet-jelmer-vernooij

Sikuli — scripting your use of GUIs

The Sikuli project recently switched to using Launchpad, and Matthew Revell asked Tsung-Hsiang Chang to tell us more about the project. From the interview we learn that the current release of Sikuli is called Sikuli Script, which focuses on only automation using screenshots of GUI widgets. We have another project called Sikuli Search, which queries a search engine using screenshots instead of keywords. Although Sikuli Script is supposed to be able to “search” buttons or text on the screen, it isn’t good at scraping or analyzing information from screenshots yet. Follow this link to learn more about Sikuli: http://blog.launchpad.net/projects/sikuli

The Planet

Daniel Holbach: Ubuntu Global Jam – preparations

I’m very excited about Ubuntu Global Jam this time around because for many people around the globe it will probably be the first time they get their hands dirty with doing actual work on Ubuntu and actually make Ubuntu itself better. In addition to that Lucid is going to be an LTS, so this time it’s personal! Definitely Going!

Definitely Going!

The great thing is we have a number of sessions lined up to share tips and advice about holding jams. We will meet on IRC in #ubuntu-locoteams and try to answer questions and think of creative ways to get more people together, have more fun and make Ubuntu even better. Stay tuned for more!

http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/?p=610

Dustin Kirkland: Have you taken Lucid for a test drive yet?

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is in Feature Freeze, and Alpha3 is right around the corner, releasing next week. If you're running Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, or 10.04, it's trivial to testdrive Lucid in a virtual machine, without modifying your current installation! http://launchpad.net/testdrive

If you're already running Lucid, congrats! All you need to do is add the testdrive ppa, and install testdrive, and either kvm or virtualbox-ose.

Just pop open a terminal and run:

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:testdrive/ppa && \

  • sudo apt-get update && \

  • sudo apt-get install testdrive

Then you can either run testdrive from the command line, or use the menu, Applications -> System Tools -> Testdrive. A menu will pop up, with a listing of the Lucid daily images. If you have previously downloaded any of these, you should see a timestamp of the cached file. If you run testdrive everyday, your cache will stay up-to-date, and the incremental download will be much faster! Select one of the offered ISOs, or enter a URL to another one of your choosing, and you should be off and running. Help us make Lucid Lynx the best Ubuntu to date! Screenshots at the link below.

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2010/02/have-you-taken-lucid-for-testrive-yet.html

Jono Bacon: Some Opportunistic Developer Updates

A few awesome opportunistic developer updates:

  • Firstly, I have been adding some parties every day during Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week. These include a couple of hacking parties in which you should come and join us and hack on your new apps and be around folks to ask for help, answer questions and share progress.
  • Secondly, given the interest brewing around opportunistic developers on Ubuntu, I have created a new IRC channel called #ubuntu-app-devel where you can go to hang out with others writing apps, you can ask questions there, share progress and talk about how we can make Ubuntu a rocking system for harnessing the creative inclinations of opportunistic developers.

Rock and roll, my friends. Smile :-)

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/02/15/some-opportunistic-developer-updates/

Alan Pope: Ubuntu One Music Store Sneak Peek

It looks like 7digital are providing the back-end for the Ubuntu One Music Store which is due to land in Ubuntu Lucid at Alpha 3 – very soon now. I've included some screen shots that originate from my browser. Before too long, the store can be reached from the Rhythmbox application. The landing page clearly has the Ubuntu One branding. As you’d expect you can easily search for music....to find your favourite artist or album, or download tracks. The store supports Credit/Debit cards, Click&Buy and Paypal..You can also track your existing downloads. Of course this isn’t ready yet, so we can’t see it in Rhythmbox on Ubuntu yet, but it’s clearly getting there. There are screen shots at the link below to give you a better idea of how this new feature will look.

http://popey.com/blog/2010/02/19/ubuntu-one-music-store-sneak-peek/

  • Update: After the post I made about the Ubuntu One Music Store, I’ve noticed a couple of things which might indicate what’s coming. First, as we know Rhythmbox is the music player of choice in Ubuntu, and we can already see the placeholder for the music store in the app. I noticed something new today though, the “Music” category has a little [+] expander, and when we open that up we can see two options “Music” and “musicstore”. A new Rhythmbox plugin added called “umusicstore” is now showing. More screenshots of this feature are at the link below along with more detailed information. Get ready to rock on with the Ubuntu One Music Store!

http://popey.com/blog/2010/02/20/u1-music-store-store-music-in-u1/

David Siegel: One Hundred Paper Cuts for Lucid, Round 10

Time flies like an arrow! This week marks the final round of paper cuts for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx.” We’ve done an outstanding job so far but we still have work ahead of us. Here are some paper cuts that need attention this round:

“Create Document” Templates difficult to use

  • Right-clicking on the Desktop and choosing “Create Document” still shows a menu with only “No templates installed” and “Empty File.” Let’s at least put some OpenOffice Document templates in there.

Shutdown/restart dialogs make it unclear whether people should wait

  • Users often mistakenly believe they have to wait through the 60-second countdown on Shut Down and Restart dialogs.

Opening a deleted ‘recent document’ results in a new file.

  • Deleted files shouldn’t be displayed in the Recent Documents menu.

Default setting for remembering password should be remember until logout

  • “When accessing a windows file share (or other network resource) that requires a password, the radiobutton defaults to “Forget password immediately”. While this is understandable for security reasons, it is a usability “paper cut” because one will typically be confronted with the same password prompt again in very short order (without even closing the nautilus window). Just yesterday this got a smirk out of a Windows user looking over my shoulder that I had to enter the password “again.” This has also been an annoyance for me for quite a few years.”

Context menu for an USB pendrive shows “Unmount”, “Eject” and “Safely Remove Drive”

  • Which one do I choose?!

OpenOffice menus still have icons which should be removed

  • ‘nough said.

In the file operation dialog, the file count and the size count change in opposite direction.

  • File count decreases while copy size increases, causing users to go cross-eyed.

In Help, Table of Contents switches from left to right when user selects topic

  • Eww.

Unfriendly message upon typing incorrect password (Policykit-GNOME)

  • “AUTHENTICATION FAILURE” is a severe message to confront users with, especially users who sometimes make mistakes when typing into password fields. When a user makes a mistake while typing his password, we should be understanding, supportive, and encouraging rather than alarming, accusatory, or even perfunctory.

http://davidsiegel.org/100papercuts-lucid-round-10/

Robert Collins: Yay Dell-with-Ubuntu down under

Dell has been offering Ubuntu on selected models for a while. I had however nearly given up hope on being able to buy one, because they hadn’t started doing that in Australia. I am very glad to see this has changed though – check out their notebook page. Not all models yet, but a reasonable number have Ubuntu as an option.

Yay!

http://rbtcollins.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/yay-dell-with-ubuntu-down-under/

Ubuntu Forums News

In The Press

Ubuntu 10.04's Nouveau Stack Gets Ready

Phoronix's Michael Larabel states that one of the slated features for Ubuntu 10.04 early on in its development cycle was support for the Nouveau graphics driver on NVIDIA hardware since it's much better than the xf86-video-nv driver mess and has a much brighter future, which is especially important with 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release. This was prior to Nouveau going mainline with Linux 2.6.33, but Ubuntu Lucid is running with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel so as a result Nouveau's DRM was back-ported. Canonical's Bryce Harrington describes this Nouveau stack as being "nearly ready" for Lucid and is requesting a final test among those interested in the open-source NVIDIA graphics hardware support. If you are interested in testing out Ubuntu 10.04's Nouveau stack you can do so by following this call [1] for testing thread and checking out the Nouveau evaluation Wiki page. [2]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzk3OQ

EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs Ubuntu Netbook Benchmarks

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reminds us that last month he published benchmarks of EXT4 comparing this file-system's performance when it was first marked stable in the mainline kernel and then where it is at now in the Linux kernel while testing every major release in between. This article was followed up by a Btrfs versus EXT4 comparison using the Linux 2.6.33 kernel to see how the two most talked about Linux file-systems are battling it out with the latest kernel. After those Linux file-system benchmarks were published, he received a request from Canonical to look at the EXT3 performance too. With that said, we have done just that and have published EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs benchmarks from Ubuntu 9.10 and a Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot from an Intel Atom netbook. Under Ubuntu 9.10, the Intel Atom N270 netbook did the best with Btrfs and its numbers even improved with Ubuntu 10.04, but the EXT4 file-system had a much stronger boost that led it to a first place finish. The performance between EXT3 and EXT4 was close at unpacking the Linux kernel linux-2.6.32.tar.bz2 file, but Btrfs was a bit slower. More Linux file-system tests are on the way! http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_netbook_fs&num=1

Ubuntu One Music Store Pushed In Rhythmbox

Michael Larabel of Phoronix tells us that one of the features that was talked about and proposed a few months back was a music store for Ubuntu where one could easily purchase music and somewhat fits in with Canonical's plans for the Ubuntu Software Store. Plans were laid out for an Ubuntu One Music Store and the first packages to support this in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS are now available. The Lucid specifications for the Ubuntu One Music Store on the Ubuntu Wiki mention "The Lucid music store project aims to deliver the ability to purchase music from within a desktop music player. Look for more on Canonical's Ubuntu One Music Store as the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release approaches in April. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzk5Ng

The Linux Box to Market Ubuntu OS in the U.S.

eWeek's Darryl K. Taft reports that the Linux Box has announced a partnership with Canonical whereby it will market the Ubuntu Linux operating system in the United States. As a Canonical Silver Solution Provider Partner, The Linux Box will sell, install and support customized Ubuntu-based solutions to organizations running Linux systems. It will also provide businesses with large-scale migration deployment support and training services for cloud computing infrastructures and enterprise desktop alternatives. "Combining forces with The Linux Box enables many more U.S. businesses in every industry to embrace Ubuntu as their end-to-end open-source data center solution," said Steve George, director of corporate services at Canonical, in a statement. "We look forward to Ubuntu being The Linux Box's best-of-breed open-source solution." http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/The-Linux-Box-to-Market-Ubuntu-OS-in-the-US-568799/?kc=rss&utm_source=fee

Ubuntu Optimizes its OS for ARM CPUs

Ryan Whitwam of Maximum PC believes that an ARM-based netbook running Ubuntu could be in your future with the newest version of Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Much like Windows, the popular Linux distro did not previously have support for ARM processors. With the anticipated flood of ARM packing “smartbooks” expected to materialize, the Ubuntu devs got to work rewriting Ubuntu. According to Ubuntu’s Jamie Bennet, the problem was that Ubuntu Netbook Edition required 3D graphics drivers that didn’t exist for ARM chips. They got around this by employing 2D Enlightenment Foundation Libraries to fake a 3D interface. We’re hearing that you won’t be able to tell the difference in the interface. That’s a big win for smartbooks and Ubuntu. This may be the space that Ubuntu specifically, and Linux in general, can succeed in. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/ubuntu_optimizes_its_os_arm_cpus

In The Blogosphere

Are smartbooks and Linux meant for each other?

http://soltesza.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/are-smartbooks-and-linux-meant-for-each-other/

Five Best Netbook Operating Systems

http://lifehacker.com/5471394/five-best-netbook-operating-systems?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+lifehacker/full+(Lifehacker)

5 New Things about Windows 8 and Ubuntu 10.04

http://linuxtree.blogspot.com/2010/02/5-new-things-about-windows-8-and-ubuntu.html

Canonical Launches Ubuntu Single Sign On

http://www.workswithu.com/2010/02/18/canonical-launches-ubuntu-single-sign-on/

Lubuntu: Not Just for Lusers

http://www.workswithu.com/2010/02/16/lubuntu-not-just-for-lusers/

In Other News

Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 gets ported onto Sony Ericsson's Xperia X1

Engadget's Darren Murph comments that not even a fortnight after we saw Android 2.0.1 slapped onto Sony Ericsson's all-but-forgotten Xperia X1, along comes a port that makes the other look like child's play. A dedicated coder over at XDA Developers has managed to stuff Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 onto an X1, and while the functionality is limited, the amount of fun to be had is restrained only by your imagination. Go on and peek that source link[1] to join the discussion.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/17/ubuntu-hardy-heron-8-04-gets-ported-onto-sony-ericssons-xperia/

Ubuntu torrents are now IPv6 enabled

Since february third, the official Ubuntu torrents found on releases.ubuntu.com include an IPv6-enabled tracker in the announce list. This means that we are one step further in getting Ubuntu downloadable over IPv6.

Clients connected only via IPv6 (which are unfortunatly rare, but still) can download the torrent from the IPv6 enabled releases.ubuntu.com and start downloading the iso via IPv6. There are a few (fast connected) IPv6 enabled seeders around, so downloading should work great.

Stats over the last two weeks show reasonable usage, although we expect more and more users switching to IPv6.

All we need now, is an IPv6 address for www.ubuntu.com. Smile :)

For more information about IPv6, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6

Meeting Summaries: <MONTH> <YEAR>

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Monday, February 22, 2010

PyCon

  • Location: Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  • Agenda: Main annual conference of the Python programming community.

Security Team Catch-up

  • Start: 18:00 UTC
  • End: 18:30 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: nothing formal, just a weekly catch-up.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

PyCon

  • Location: Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  • Agenda: Main annual conference of the Python programming community.

Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting

Technical Board Meeting

  • Start: 15:00 UTC
  • End: 16:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

Desktop Team Meeting

Kernel Team Meeting

  • Start: 17:00 UTC
  • End: 18:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: Not listed as of publication

Global Jam Meeting

  • Start: 20:00 UTC
  • End: 21:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: Not listed as of publication

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

PyCon

  • Location: Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  • Agenda: Main annual conference of the Python programming community.

Server Team Meeting

Foundation Team Meeting

  • Start: 16:00 UTC
  • End: 17:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

QA Team Meeting

Edubuntu Meeting

Thursday, February 25, 2010

PyCon

  • Location: Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
  • Agenda: Main annual conference of the Python programming community.

Ubuntu Java Meeting

  • Start: 14:00 UTC
  • End: 15:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

MC Meeting

  • Start: 17:00 UTC
  • End: 18:00 UTC
  • Location: None listed as of publication
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

Regional Membership Board - Americas

Friday, February 26, 2010

Lucid Weekly Release Meeting

How to Run a Jam

Saturday, February 27, 2010

BugJam

  • Start: 21:00 UTC
  • End: 23:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-us-dc and IRC channel #ubuntu-bugs
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

DC Loco IRC meeting

  • Start: 23:00 UTC
  • End: 24:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-us-dc
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Ubuntu IRC Council Meeting

Ubuntu Gaming Team Meeting

  • Start: 20:00 UTC
  • End: 22:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

Community Spotlight

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

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 Updates

Ubuntu 8.04 Updates

Ubuntu 8.10 Updates

Ubuntu 9.04 Updates

Ubuntu 9.10 Updates

UWN #: A sneak peek

Subscribe

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Archives and RSS Feed

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

You can subscribe to the Ubuntu Weekly News via RSS at: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/uwn/feed

Additional Ubuntu News

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:

  • John Crawford
  • Craig A. Eddy
  • Dave Bush
  • Your Name Here
  • And many others

Glossary of Terms

  1. BTRFS - B-Tree File System
  2. DRM - Direct Rendering Manager
  3. LTS - Long Term Support. - Said of a release that will receive support for 3-years/5-years rather than the typical 18 months
  4. OS - Operating System

Other acronyms can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/glossary

Ubuntu - Get Involved

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It's your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate

Feedback

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Weekly News Team. If you have a story idea or suggestions for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list at https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-news-team and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Ideas. If you'd like to contribute to a future issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, please feel free to edit the appropriate wiki page. If you have any technical support questions, please send them to ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com.

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