Issue2

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue #2

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue #2 for the week of June 4, 2006 - June 10, 2006

You can always find this and other Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issues at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter

Translations: (Polish, Spanish, Romanian)

In This Issue

  • Ubuntu Documentation on Paper
  • Screenshot Tours of Edubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu (Ubuntu was covered last week in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue1)

  • Edgy Development Officially Started
  • Bug Fixes and Security Updates
  • Mark Shuttleworth Interviewed on LugRadio

  • Buy a Computer with Ubuntu Preinstalled
  • Feature Of The Week - Tomboy
  • and much more

General Community News

Contribute to UWN

Since our inaugural issue last week we received a flurry of great ideas and suggestions about how to improve the UWN and increase its usefulness for our readers. One of the suggestions we received is to write feature of the week articles (either for dapper or edgy) in order to introduce readers to features of Ubuntu they may not be aware of or to learn a trick or two about apps they may already use and love. It would rock if the feature of the week content could be driven by community contributions. We would absolutely love to hear about how you use Ubuntu each day and what you love about it. Other people may not know about the features that you know about and use everyday. Spread some Ubuntu love around by writing a small paragraph about a neat Ubuntu feature. Drop it on:

and we will get it into a future issue.

If you have any other ideas of things you would like to see in UWN stop by:

and let us know what you have in mind. We would love to hear about what you would like to read about each week.

Edgy Development Has Commenced

On June 7th Ubuntu developers started uploading new software into the new edgy repository. Kicking off the uploads were Jeff Bailey, Scott James Remnant, Matthias Klose and Adam Conrad who have begun moving edgy to the new toolchain (gcc 4.1, etc...). The Edgy development cycle is going to be *very* exciting so stay tuned for the low down on all the great things that will be happening very quickly.

The new kernel for edgy will be 2.6.17 which is already packaged and will be uploaded by Ben Collins soon.

NOTE: Since the toolchain is being upgraded it is likely things will get broken so don't upgrade to edgy just yet.

Initial Timeline For Edgy Development

Matt Zimmerman gives us a look at the initial timeline for edgy. The edgy repository is open, specs are being written and the Paris Developer Summit is quickly approaching.

Maintaining Packages in bzr for edgy

Edgy is all about new and exciting things and there will be lots of new development work going on. So now is the time to begin maintaining packages in bzr! See this announcement made by Scott James Remnant for more information on how to get started:

Regular Language Pack Updates

"In the future, we will update the language packs of all stable Ubuntu releases on the first Monday of every month. This predictable schedule should ease coordination for translators. As a special exception, there will be an additional update for the recently released Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on June, 14th, since a lot of last-minute updates did not make it into the final release." - Martin Pitt

Mark Shuttleworth on LugRadio

Mark Shuttleworth interviewed on latest LugRadio Podcast. Mark talks about why Ubuntu on SPARC is a good idea and more:

Printed Ubuntu Documentation via Lulu

The Ubuntu documentation that is available on your computer and online is now also available in printed book form. The Ubuntu Documentation Team does not make any money when you buy a copy so you only pay the cost of printing the book and any shipping and handling charges, which for each book is about $6 US. It's a great deal if you like to have a paper reference to keep by your side.

Check out the announcement at:

If you would like to buy a copy go to:

This story even made /.

Buy a Computer with Ubuntu Preinstalled

"The real competition between free and non-free software will come the day that normal people will be able to buy a computer with a free operative system inside as easily as it is to buy a computer with a non-free operative system. Any competition starting with a manual installation on a hard drive controlled by an automatically pre-installed system is unfair.

Carrefour has started offering in Spain a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed for 929€ (VAT and transport included) which is between 100€ and 200€ cheaper compared to similar laptops offered in Carrefour."

Dapper Point Release Updates

"At the time of this writing a week after the release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, several installer issues have already arisen which are known to affect many users and which generate enormous numbers of bug reports. (This is not too surprising since we released a completely new installer frontend.) Part of long-term support for this release should include a means to correct installer bugs, which involves re-rolling CD images." - Colin Watson

Proposed Archives

A new set of package archives has been added to archive.ubuntu.com to allow proposed updates and fixes to be uploaded and tested (by those with the archive enabled) before the packages are officially released. This process will allow for the proposed updates to see wider testing helping improve the quality of the updates. Every release in the archive now has a -proposed directory which looks like:

  • edgy-proposed
  • dapper-proposed
  • etc...

Although these do not contain any packages at the moment, if you help test Ubuntu, you will want to keep an eye on these.

Security Updates

Security vulnerabilities found in the following packages have been fixed in all affected Ubuntu releases:

Ubuntu

OSVids has a video tour of Dapper in action:

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) Updates

  • kickseed 0.35.1 - Fix passwd/root-login preseeding (closes: Malone #48038)

  • pcmcia-cs 3.2.8-5.2ubuntu7 - Correct the direction of the test for an upgrade from breezy so that pcmcia-cs is only restarted if we're _not_ upgrading that far.
  • preseed 1.12ubuntu1 - Backport from trunk (closes: Malone #47767)

New Apps In Edgy

Edgy development is ramping up. There are many new features planned for edgy already. Here is a list of a few of the new features already making their way into edgy (these are highlights and is not a list of every package upload):

  • libselinux 1.30-1 and libsepol 1.12-1 - Collin Watson has started the effort to bring SELinux into edgy.
  • gcc-4.1 4.1.1-2ubuntu1 - The new gcc 4.1 compiler collection was among the first package uploads to edgy.
  • ocfs2-tools 1.2.1-1ubuntu1 - tools for managing OCFS2 cluster filesystems

Kubuntu

OSDir has a full screenshot tour of Kubuntu 6.06:

and OSVids even has a video tour:

Kubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) Updates

  • kde-guidance 0.6.7-0ubuntu5 - Add kubuntu_03_passwordwarning.diff from branch, userconfig would throw error if the password warning field in /etc/shadow was empty (closes: Malone #47317)

What Still Needs a Console

Midmark started collecting notes on when he still needs to resort to a command line. Please add to the list and we'll try and find answers in Edgy.

Edgy planning

Planning for edgy has begun, please review the specs at:

Edubuntu

OSDir has a full screenshot tour of Edubuntu 6.06:

Edgy Ideas

The Edubuntu team has started to flesh out ideas for the next version of Edubuntu which you can check out at:

Edubuntu Tips & Tricks

Xubuntu

OSDir has a full screenshot tour of Xubuntu 6.06:

In The Press

NewsForge

Lunapark6

TMCnet

tectonic

Feature Of The Week - Tomboy

We all have lots of things to do, ideas that float through our minds everyday and random other stuff that we need to jot down so that we don't forget. There have been various apps around like sticky notes and others that can do the job but they are not always very feature full and are a bit out-dated. Tomboy is an excellent little app that can sit on your GNOME panel that allows you to take notes just like sticky notes but it can do a lot more as well.

Tomboy uses a wiki style of managing notes allowing you to link to other notes creating a web of interrelations between all of your various notes and ideas. Tomboy keeps a table of contents of all of your notes, allows you to search through your notes, performs spell checking, and if you use Beagle for searching your desktop Beagle can search through your notes as well. There are also plugins available for Tomboy to extend its functionality. There are a few default plugins already installed that allow you to print your notes or export them to HTML. Tomboy even allows you to format your notes in a variety of ways such as font sizes, colors and more. This is a big step up from those plain old sticky notes.

If you would like to try out Tomboy go ahead and install the package "tomboy". You can launch it from Applications -> Accessories -> Tomboy Notes. If you would like Tomboy to live on your GNOME panel permanently you can right click on your panel, select "Add To Panel...", select "Tomboy Notes" and click "Add". Tomboy is very easy to use and can really help you organize your tasks and ideas.

If you would like to learn more about Tomboy check out:

Additional News Resources

As always you can find more news and announcements at:

Conclusion

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

Credits

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Matt Galvin
  • Jerome Gotangco
  • Jonathan Riddell
  • Jeff Schering
  • And many others

Feedback

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Documentation Team. Please feel free to contact us regarding any concerns or suggestions by either sending an email to ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com or by using any of the other methods on the Ubuntu Documentation Team Contact Information Page.

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue2 (last edited 2008-08-06 16:28:02 by localhost)