Issue196

Revision 9 as of 2010-06-06 23:09:39

Clear message

Contents

newspaper-icon3.jpg

WORK IN PROGRESS

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 196 for the week of May 30th - June 5th, 2010. In this issue we cover ...

In This Issue

General Community News

Maverick Alpha 1 released

Pre-releases of Maverick are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Maverick development cycle. The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Maverick. You can download it here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/maverick/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu)

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/maverick/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu Server for UEC and EC2)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/maverick/alpha-1/ (Kubuntu)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/maverick/alpha-1/ (Xubuntu)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/maverick/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu Studio)

See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors for a list of mirrors.

Alpha 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. Please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/alpha1 for information on changes in Ubuntu.

This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. For a list of known bugs (that you don't need to report if you encounter), please see:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/alpha1

If you're interested in following the changes as we further develop Maverick, have a look at the maverick-changes mailing list:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/maverick-changes

We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list if you're interested in following Ubuntu development. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other interesting events.

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce

Bug reports should go to the Ubuntu bug tracker:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

To see the original Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 1 announcement please go to:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2010-June/000721.html

Postponing Ubuntu User Days

With the second Ubuntu User Day being less than a week away, and in going over our final checklist, it has come to our attention it would be a better event, both in attendance and in the choice of session if we were to postpone this event.

While we understand that you may have scheduled time on the June 5th, 2010, to facilitate a session or participate by attending we want the experience of both session leaders and participants to be the best possible.

Keeping in mind we want to present the best possible learning opportunity, we have made the decision to postpone this event until July 10, 2010.

It is our, the User Days Planners, sincere hope that this will not be an inconvenience to you or any helpers with your session.

Thank you so much for you understanding! We are looking forward to another great second Ubuntu User Day (but a few weeks later and with more planning, promotion, participants, and more awesome session leaders like yourselves).

The original announcement can be found at:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-classroom/2010-June/000192.html

Call for Testing: Hardy Firefox Users (or willing to install Hardy in a VM)

Background: Firefox 3.0 and xulrunner 1.9 are now unsupported by Mozilla. Rather than backporting security fixes to these now, we are moving to a support model where we will be introducing major new upstream versions in stable releases. The reason for this is the support periods from Mozilla are gradually becoming shorter, and it will be more and more difficult for us to maintain our current support model in the future.

What we are going to do: We are going to release Firefox 3.6.4 as a minor update to the 3.6 series in Lucid. This will also be rolled out to Hardy, Jaunty and Karmic (along with xulrunner 1.9.2.4). The update for Lucid is quite trivial, but the update in Hardy, Jaunty and Karmic is not quite as simple.

Before releasing these updates to the public, we need testing in Firefox, the extensions in the archive and distributions upgrades after those updates. We have published all these packages in a PPA and we will track test results before moving anything to the archive.

How you can help: We need people running *Hardy* (Jaunty and Karmic will see a similar call for testing in the following days) in bare metal or a virtual machine. If you are willing to help, the instructions can be found at the link below:

http://ubuntutesting.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/call-for-testing-firefox/

Linaro: Accelerating Linux on ARM

At our last UDS in Belgium it was notable how many people were interested in the ARM architecture. There have always been sessions at UDS about lightweight environments for the consumer electronics and embedded community, but this felt tangibly different. I saw questions being asked about ARM in server and cloud tracks, for example, and in desktop tracks. That’s new.

So I’m very excited at today’s announcement of Linaro, an initiative by the ARM partner ecosystem including Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI, to accelerate and unify the field of Linux on ARM. That is going to make it much easier for developers to target ARM generally, and build solutions that can work with the amazing diversity of ARM hardware that exists today.

The ARM platform has historically been superspecialized and hence fragmented – multiple different ARM-based CPU’s from multiple different ARM silicon partners all behaved differently enough that one needed to develop different software for each of them. Boot loaders, toolchains, kernels, drivers and middleware are all fragmented today, and of course there’s additional fragmentation associated with Android vs mainline on ARM, but Linaro will go a long way towards cleaning this up and making it possible to deliver a consistent platform experience across all of the major ARM hardware providers.

Having played with a prototype ARM netbook, I was amazed at how cool it felt. Even though it was just a prototype it was super-thin, and ran completely cool. It felt like a radical leap forward for the state of the art in netbooks. So I’m a fan of fanless computing, and can’t wait to get one off the shelf.

For product developers, the big benefit from Linaro will be reduced time to market and increased choice of hardware. If you can develop your software for “linux on ARM”, rather than a specific CPU, you can choose the right hardware for your project later in the development cycle, and reduce the time required for enablement of that hardware. Consumer electronics product development cycles should drop significantly as a result. That means that all of us get better gadgets, sooner, and great software can spread faster through the ecosystem.

To read the announcement of Linaro and to read Mark Shuttleworth's article in full go to:

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/427

Ubuntu Stats

Bug Stats

  • Open (77015) +184 over last week
  • Critical (31) +1 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (36821) +268 over last week

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

Translation Stats Lucid

  1. English (United Kingdom) (634) -76 over last week
  2. Spanish (10554) -47 over last week
  3. Brazilian Portuguese (35398) -283 over last week
  4. French (39486) +/-0 over last week
  5. German (54716) +/-0 over last week

Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx", see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/

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

Launchpad News

Ubuntu Forums News

The Planet

In The Press

In The Blogosphere

In Other News

TurnKey Hub: a new simplified cloud deployment service

TurnKey Linux just launched a private beta of the TurnKey Hub, a service that makes it easy to launch and manage the open source project's Ubuntu-based virtual appliances in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

To learn more, try the demo and sign up for an invite:

https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/

According to the developers, support for additional cloud platforms, as well as automatic backup and migration functionality is in the works:

"Imagine being able to develop your site on a locally running appliance (e.g., running in VirtualBox or VMWare). Then, when you're ready you can automatically migrate your appliance, with all your customizations to a cloud hosting provider of your choice."

Monthly Team Reports: <MONTH> <YEAR>

REMINDER: Monthly reports are due for this issue.

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Updates and Security for 6.06, 8.04, 9.04, 9.10, and 10.04

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 Updates

Ubuntu 8.04 Updates

Ubuntu 9.04 Updates

Ubuntu 9.10 Updates

Ubuntu 10.04 Updates

UWN Translations

  • Note to translators and our readers please follow the link below for the information you need.

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

Subscribe

Get your copy of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter delivered each week to you via email at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-news

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:

  • Amber Graner
  • Your Name Here
  • Liraz Siri
  • And many others

Glossary of Terms

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.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License CCL.png Creative Commons License 3.0 BY SA