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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 19 for the week of October 20-27, 2006. In this issue we cover Mark Shuttleworth's Edgy+1 announcement and BBC interview, speculations about an Oracle partnership, planning for Edgy release parties, and more!

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

In This Issue

• Mark Shuttleworth's announcement naming Ubuntu 7.04
• A feel-good "Thank You!" for Edubuntu
• Edgy Changes
• Oracle relationship speculation
• Mark's BBC interview
• Finding and scheduling release parties
• The Free Software and Open Source Symposium
• A check-in with 6.06 LTS

General Community News

Ubuntu 7.04 Named

On October 18th, MarkShuttleworth announced the codename for the sixth release of Ubuntu, "The Feisty Fawn". The name is meant to embody the spirit of courage and restless exploration of a young deer as Ubuntu continues to develop better hardware support in all configurations and investigate brand new developments on the desktop. Read more at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-October/000212.html.

Kids Say Thanks

A before/after-school club in England thanks Edubuntu for making it possible for their kids to have access to a computer. See the forums post at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=280193.

Mountain View topics under review

Sunday was the deadline for submission of feature specifications for UbuntuDeveloperSummitMountainView, so those are now being reviewed to see which ones will be included. The list of accepted ones is at https://features.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-mtv if you would like to keep track of their progress.

Changes In Edgy

In The Press

Speculation about an Oracle/Canonical partnership has heated up this week with numerous articles appearing throughout the world's tech press:

In an interview with CNET News, Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Ubuntu Linux developer Canonical, would not comment on the question of whether an Ubuntu Linux partnership with Oracle is in the pipeline.

What is one to make of a "no comment" answer to a direct question?

If Canonical wasn't working with Oracle on some sort of Ubuntu plan, he would have said no. Why would Shuttleworth leave the question open to speculation if nothing was happening?

The obvious conclusion would seem to be that something is happening. Oracle and Canonical are either in discussions or a deal has alreay been struck.

Oracle OpenWorld is this week so the question will likely be answered soon. Read more at http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/6517/983/

Meanwhile, Mark was also recently interviewed by the BBC's Gareth Mitchell for Digital Planet. You can see what they have to say about Mark and Ubuntu and hear the interview at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6080048.stm.

Meetings and other similar events

October 16th through 22th saw the following meetings:

• Community Council

• LoCo

• Edubuntu

October 23rd added:

• Accessibility Team

  All meetings take place in #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net. To check on time and dates for upcoming meetings, please review the calendar at [WWW] http://fridge.ubuntu.com/event

Upcoming Events

Edgy Eft Release this week!

Of course, the big news will be the release of Ubuntu 6.10 "Edgy Eft", due this Thursday, October 26th. To find a release party near you to celebrate with fellow Ubunteros, or to announce a party of your own, head on over to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyReleaseParties - and start burning those new CDs to give to all of your friends!

Additionally, the following meetings are scheduled for the week of October 24th through the 29th:

• Edubuntu
• Magyarországi Ubuntu Konferencia 2006

• Chicago LoCo Meeting

If you are in the Chicago land area (Chicago, Illinois USA), on October 28, 2006, from 11:00am to 8:00pm CST, sign-up and stop by. Information can be found at [WWW] http://chi.ubuntu-us.org. Hope to see you there!

No meetings are currently scheduled for the week of October 30th through November 5th.

Meetings take place in #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net

The Ubuntu Bug Squad will also be hosting another Bug Day this Wednesday, October 25th, all day in all timezones. To find out what this is all about and see how you can help, take a look at UbuntuBugDay and drop by #ubuntu-bugs on freenode.

Sometime later today (the 24th), Firefox 2.0 will reach final release. Keep your eye on http://www.getfirefox.com/ for it around 11:00 PM GMT.

Seneca College's 5th Annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium will take place October 26th and 27th in Toronto. Registration is closed, but they may take a few walk-ins. See http://cs.senecac.on.ca/fsoss/2006/ for more information.

The UbuntuDeveloperSummitMountainView is also growing closer on the horizon, beginning November 5th.

Feature Of The Week - Scribus

Scribus is an open-source, cross-platform desktop publishing application. It has a very user-friendly interface but also includes professional-grade tools like advanced color controls and convenient PDF creation.

If you've been looking for something to use the next time you slap together a newsletter for your campus student group, and need to be able to do complex page formatting and work with people using Windows too you can suggest Scribus. While this is a very simple example and hardly touches on its capabilities, take a look:

attachment:scribusex.jpg

To give it a try: sudo apt-get install scribus

To find out more (and the link to give your Windows and Mac friends): http://www.scribus.net/

Security Updates

USN-368-1: QT vulnerability http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-368-1

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Bug Stats

• Open (16935) - 363 extra open bugs since UWN #18
• Critical (15) - 2 fewer critical bugs since UWN #18
• Unconfirmed (8612) - 211 extra unconfirmed bugs since UWN #18
• Unassigned (12331) - 357 extra unassigned bugs since UWN #18
• All bugs ever reported (60973) - 840 new bugs since UWN #18

How to Help Kill a Bug that Annoys You

There are times when an application does not work as expected. In some cases this is a bug. Report them, this makes your software better. Additionally, you can help out at the UbuntuBugDay on Wednesday.

When to find bugs

The best time to find a bug is early in the programs lifecycle as it is being prepared for the next release, not right at the start but the first snapshot that is taken of the development cycle. You should look at the critical applications in your distro that you use and check they work during the beta cycles. This allows developers iron out the issues before the next release. With the exception of the LTS software we don't expect to see problems resolved after a release is issued, unless it is a security issue. (More information here: [WWW] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases )

How to report them

The report should be done as soon as the program terminates incorrectly.

What you need to report.

Information about what you as the user were doing or trying to do before the error occurred. What the expected behaviour was, what the actual behaviour of the program was. What error messages if any occurred, all of them is a good starting point.

To report bugs on Ubuntu, get an account on [WWW] http://launchpad.net, find the package in the version of ubuntu you have and share the information you have. It is better to report half correctly and let someone else come along and confirm it.

Your first step in this location is to check that the bug has not been reported already. If it has then confirm it for your platform and so on.

Comments can be added after the initial edit, in fact you may be asked for more detail after you report.

Have a look at a few bugs on launchpad to get a feeling for what is usual.

What '''''Not''''' To Do

You should not simply report that "Program X is broken", this is not a fault report, it is in fact a "faulty bug report", which means that it is useless. It lacks the essential ingredient, appropriate information.

Additional Ubuntu News

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

As always you can find more news and announcements at:

• http://www.ubuntu.com/news

and

• http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

Conclusion

Thank you for reading the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. See you next week!

Credits

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• John Little

• TonyYarusso

• 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].