Issue203


Contents

  1. In This Issue
  2. General Community News
    1. Last call for Maverick server papercuts
    2. Ubuntu Maverick open for translation
    3. Native readers: extending the Beta
    4. MOTU Interview: Maia Kozheva (sikon / LucidFox)
    5. An Interview With Silver Fox
    6. Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap
  3. Ubuntu Stats
    1. Bug Stats
    2. Translation Stats Lucid
    3. Ubuntu Brainstorm Top 5 this week
  4. LoCo News
    1. Approval and Re Approval Process
    2. LoCo Council July Meeting minutes
    3. Delivering the Ubuntu Colombia Contact
    4. Stepping Down from Ubuntu Bangladesh
    5. Dun Laoghaire July Geeknic
    6. Ubuntu-fr at Les Vieilles Charrues
  5. Launchpad News
    1. Testing new designs on Launchpad users
  6. The Planet
    1. Alan Pope: Ubuntu at Non-Technical Events
    2. Jorge Castro: More cleansweep.
    3. Sense Hofstede: Discussion request: multilingual posts on Planet Ubuntu or not?
    4. Joe Barker: The Official Ubuntu Book – 5th Edition
    5. Canonical Design Team: This week in design – 23 July 2010
    6. Benjamin Humphrey: Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 is now available in Greek!
    7. Elizabeth Krumbach: How to Ask Smart Questions by Martin Owens
    8. Martin Albisetti's blog: Ubuntu One iphone client, source code released
    9. David Planella: Ubuntu Translation Teams Healthcheck
    10. Fabian Rodriguez: An invitation to join Ubuntu’s Q&A group on Shapado.com
    11. Jonathan Riddell: Akademy 30 second interviews, Eben Moglen, Helsinki, Prague
    12. Jorge Castro: "Blog about what you're doing"
    13. Monty Taylor: Bugs vs Blueprints
  7. In The Press
    1. Why NASA uses Open Source
    2. How to get RGBA support in Ubuntu
    3. Canonical, IBM plunk DB2 databases on Ubuntu
  8. In The Blogosphere
    1. 4 Reasons Every Windows User Should Have An Ubuntu Live CD
    2. THE BEST ADVERT FOR UBUNTU YOU PROBABLY NEVER SAW
    3. Seven Ubuntu Derivatives worth Checking Out
    4. Will Canonical-IBM Relationship Attract Oracle to Ubuntu?
    5. Firewall Tools for Ubuntu Security
  9. In Other News
    1. Windows or Ubuntu?
    2. Linux Box To Market Ubuntu
    3. Dell drops Ubuntu PCs from website... for now
    4. Is Linux Too Much for One Mere Mortal to Handle?
    5. Rackspace's Risky Open Cloud Bet
  10. Featured Podcasts
    1. Ubuntu UK Podcast: The Country Fair
  11. Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
  12. Upcoming Meetings and Events
    1. Monday, July 26, 2010
      1. Security Team Catch-up
    2. Tuesday, July 27, 2010
      1. Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting
      2. Technical Board Meeting
      3. Desktop Team Meeting
      4. Kernel Team Meeting
      5. Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting
    3. Wednesday, July 28, 2010
      1. Weekly Ubuntu Foundations team meeting
      2. QA Team Meeting
      3. Jono Bacon @ Home Videocast : Various Topics and Q+A
      4. Installing a LAMP server
      5. Edubuntu Meeting
    4. Thursday, July 29, 2010
      1. Ayatana UX team meeting
    5. Friday, July 30, 2010
      1. Maverick Weekly Release Meeting
    6. Saturday, July 31, 2010
      1. BugJam
    7. Sunday, August 01, 2010
      1. None Listed
  13. Updates and Security for 6.06, 8.04, 9.04, 9.10, and 10.04
    1. Security Updates
    2. Ubuntu 6.06 Updates
    3. Ubuntu 8.04 Updates
    4. Ubuntu 9.04 Updates
    5. Ubuntu 9.10 Updates
    6. Ubuntu 10.04 Updates
  14. UWN Translations
  15. UWN A Sneak Peek
  16. Subscribe
  17. Archives and RSS Feed
  18. Additional Ubuntu News
  19. Conclusion
  20. Credits
  21. Glossary of Terms
  22. Ubuntu - Get Involved
  23. Feedback

newspaper-icon3.jpg

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 203 for the week July 18th - July 24th, 2010.

In This Issue

  • Last call for Maverick server papercuts
  • Ubuntu Maverick open for translation
  • Native readers: extending the Beta
  • MOTU Interview: Maia Kozheva (sikon / LucidFox)

  • An Interview With Silver Fox
  • Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap
  • Ubuntu Stats
  • Approval and Re Approval Process
  • LoCo Council July Meeting minutes

  • Delivering the Ubuntu Colombia Contact
  • Stepping Down from Ubuntu Bangladesh
  • Dun Laoghaire July Geeknic
  • Ubuntu-fr at Les Vieilles Charrues
  • Launchpad News
  • Ubuntu at Non-Technical Events
  • More cleansweep.
  • Discussion request: multilingual posts on Planet Ubuntu or not?
  • The Official Ubuntu Book – 5th Edition
  • This week in design – 23 July 2010
  • Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 is now available in Greek!
  • How to Ask Smart Questions by Martin Owens
  • Ubuntu One iphone client, source code released
  • Ubuntu Translation Teams Healthcheck
  • An invitation to join Ubuntu’s Q&A group on Shapado.com

  • Akademy 30 second interviews, Eben Moglen, Helsinki, Prague
  • "Blog about what you're doing"
  • Bugs vs Blueprints
  • In The Press
  • In The Blogosphere
  • Windows or Ubuntu?
  • Linux Box To Market Ubuntu
  • Dell drops Ubuntu PCs from website... for now
  • Is Linux Too Much for One Mere Mortal to Handle?
  • Rackspace's Risky Open Cloud Bet
  • Featured Podcasts
  • Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
  • Upcoming Meetings and Events
  • Updates and Security
  • and much much more!

General Community News

Last call for Maverick server papercuts

Thierry Carrez sends out this reminder:

The last of our Server papercuts iterations will soon start, so it is now your last chance to nominate that annoyance that hindered your Server experience ! Nominations for the beta iteration will end on August 1st. Remember the steps:

  1. If nobody filed a bug about it yet, just file one.
  2. Look up the bug you want to nominate as a Server papercut, then click on “Also affects project”
  3. Click “Choose another project” and type in “server-papercuts”, click “Continue”
  4. Click on “Add to Bug report”

Remember the guidelines:

  • Bug affects a server package
  • Bug has an obvious and easy fix
  • Bug makes the life of the sysadmin more miserable
  • Bug is not a new feature (since we’ll be after Feature Freeze at that point)

As of today we only have 3 candidates for 12 open slots. So there is plenty of room for yours ! Thanks for your help in making the Ubuntu Server experience more (fit and) polished.

For more information on how you can help with papercuts go to:

http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/last-call-papercuts/

Ubuntu Maverick open for translation

David Planella sends out the call for translations to begin on Maverick in this post:

I’m pleased to announce that Ubuntu Maverick is now open for translation:

Remember that according to the release schedule translatable messages might be subject to change until the User Interface Freeze on the 26th of August.

During the Maverick development cycle, language packs containing the translations are generally released twice per week. This way you can see and test the results of the translations more frequently.

That’s it, happy translating!

For more information on how you can get involved with translating Maverick got to:

http://davidplanella.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/ubuntu-maverick-open-for-translation/

Native readers: extending the Beta

It is time to extend the Ubuntu Font Beta Testing. We need to make sure that the Ubuntu font is being fully exercised beyond the English language and I do not want to rely on accidental incidents but rather explicitly add people from the translations teams for various languages (and alphabets). Today we have started adding language teams so, if your team gets an email from us, we need your help!

For more information on how you can help go to:

http://design.canonical.com/?p=6001

MOTU Interview: Maia Kozheva (sikon / LucidFox)

Take a moment to learn more about MOTU Maia Kozheva aka Lucidfox in this interview by Daniel Holbach. Maia answers the following questions and more:

How long have you used Linux and what was your first distro? How long have you been using Ubuntu? When did you get involved with the MOTU team and how? What helped you learn packaging and how Ubuntu teams work?

To find out the answers to these questions and more go to:

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/2088

An Interview With Silver Fox

Joe Barker interviews Silver Fox. Here is what Joe had to say in his introduction - So, it is without further ado that I introduce my next victim guest. Silver Fox is generally a quiet member of the Ubuntu Beginners Team, but does good work within said team which goes – largely – unnoticed. I thought it would be appropriate to try and bring these to light for others to see.

Joe asks the following questions:

  • Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.
  • When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?
  • When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?
  • Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

To find out how Silver Fox answers these questions and more go to:

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/2087

Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap

Did you miss Ubuntu Developer Week? No Problem below is a link and description to the sessions.

  • Day 1
    • 16:00 UTC – 18:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development (dholbach): This two-hour session was one of the most action-packed sessions I ever ran. So many great questions, so much fun and so much topics covered. Thanks a lot everybody. We managed to set up an initial Ubuntu development environment, talk about Ubuntu development processes and Ubuntu in the bigger picture. In the second part we had a look at a couple of packages that fail to build and succeeded in fixing a few of them. Awesome!

    • 18:00 UTC – 19:00 UTC: Widgetcraft (apachelogger): Next up was Harald Sitter who did a great job explaining how to write KDE widgets by using the Plasmoid infrastructure. Lots of real-life examples, lots of excitement and slides for your reading pleasure.

    • 19:00 UTC – 20:00 UTC: Desktop Team Overview (seb128): Sébastien Bacher did a great presentation of what’s going on in the Desktop Team and how you can help out. Maybe we should have an additional “Ask Séb” session, next time. Heaps and heaps of interested Desktop people kept him quite busy.

    • 20:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC: Authoring Upstart Jobs (slangasek): Last on day 1 was Steve Langasek who dived deep into Upstart’s features and how to make best use of them. I foresee lots and lots of good use made of it.

  • Day 2
    • 16:00 UTC: Packaging Like A Ninja (shadeslayer): Rohan Garg brought a lot of fun to UDW by teaching us all how things work in the Kubuntu team. If I counted correctly he even handed out three orange ninja belts.

    • 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» (dpm): By the looks of it, David Planella managed to resolve the problem of not knowing very very well. He gave an excellent overview over translations and how to work with them and answered what felt like a thousand questions.
    • 18:00 UTC: Developing With Qt Quick and QML (Riddell): As a seasoned KDE-hacker Jonathan Riddell knows what’s going on in the KDE and Qt world and which technologies get you good results quickly. He gave great insight into making your KDE apps rock very easily.

    • 19:00 UTC: How To Work With Debian (Laney and Rhonda): Wow, what a great session. I’m particularly excited to see people from Debian and Ubuntu collaborate like that and see that much interest in getting the most out of our work for both projects. Great session, lots of info, lots of good questions.

    • 20:00 UTC: Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard (zyga): The last session of the day was held by Zygmunt Krynicki who presented an interesting way to see how low-level changes affect the whole system and measure performance. The questions indicate that there’s a deep interest in solving this problem across the board.

  • Day 3
    • 16:00 UTC: Operation Cleansweep And Reviewing Patches (nigelb and bobbo): Nigel Babu is spearheading an initiative which has the goal that there’s no unreviewed patches left by the end of it. To achieve that we set up a process that’s very easy to follow and involves QA people, Ubuntu developers, Upstream and Debian developers. Nigel and David Futcher did a fantastic job talking about the effort. Make sure you join in on the fun!

    • 17:00 UTC: Forwarding Bugs And Patches Upstream (pedro_ and nigelb): Pedro Villavicencio Garrido is one of the best people to talk about evaluating bug reports and patches and being in touch with loads and loads of upstream developers about them and thus forwarding valuable information to software authors. His session was very informative, up to the point and it seems like there’s going to be even more people hanging out in #ubuntu-bugs soon.

    • 18:00 UTC: Daily Builds And You (jcastro and dholbach): Jorge Castro and I talked about Daily Builds afterwards. This is a very exciting new technology in Launchpad that is currently in Beta stage. If you want up-to-date software you care about out there and users using and testing it, read the log. I think Jorge and I were sounding something between a comedy duo and an old couple every now and then – I hope you forgive us.

    • 19:00 UTC: Make Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators (tedg): Ted Gould has been working on indicators in the panel for quite a while now and it was great to have him around to explain what’s going on and how to make best use of the technology. If your heart beats for Desktop stuff, you wrote a Desktop application or just want to know what’s going on and how things are evolving, make sure you check out the log.

    • 20:00 UTC: Kernel Triage (JFo): Imagine there’s millions of users using all kinds of different hardware. Imagine there’s failure reports or some kind of hardware not working exactly. How do you deal with the feedback of those users? This is exactly that Jeremy Foshee talked about. As you can imagine there’s a lot of lessons the Kernel team learned already and lots of experience that went into the session. If you like all things hardware and want to give Jeremy a hand, be sure to check out the log.

  • Day 4
    • 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly (didrocks): What a great and action-packed session it was! Didier Roche explained how to create apps without a fuss and how Quickly makes clever decisions for you, so you have to worry less. Seems like he was very happy about the session himself, the audience even forgave him to try to make French the official language of Ubuntu Development.

    • 17:00 UTC: Improving Ubuntu In An Evening (vish): Vishnoo did a great job explaining the Hundred Papercuts project and what it is about. Participation was great and I can already see lots of people getting involved in the project. It indeed is a great way to improve Ubuntu in an evening.

    • 18:00 UTC: Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts (ttx): Thierry Carrez was up next and his session about Server Papercuts was a great follow up to the Hundred Papercuts session. If you’re interested in server stuff, like making things work again, read up the session log. He explained quite well who to talk to, how to get in touch with the same and make Ubuntu servers rock even harder.

    • 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Xubuntu (charlie-tca): As Xubuntu project lead, Charlie Kravetz has a lot of insight into Xubuntu and XFCE. Heaps of good questions, lots of interest in Xubuntu made the session fly by quickly. If you’re interested, get in touch with Charlie!

    • 20:00 UTC: Merge Proposals: Life On The Sunny Side (beuno/mhall119): Unfortunately Martin Albisetti got ill and could not give the session, but luckily Michael Hall jumped in to run a Q&A session on merge proposals. We might repeat the session in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

  • Day 5
    • 16:00 – 18:00 UTC: Django And You (mhall119): First up was Michael Hall, who had booked a double session about Django goodness and brings in quite a bit of experience on the topic. He did a great job explaining the concepts behind Django, how to set up a basic project, lots of tips and tricks and what I liked best: he plugged the LoCo Directory a couple of times. Hope you’ll get interested and see how great Django is and how much fun projects like the Loco Directory are.

    • 18:00 – 19:00 UTC: Adopt-An-Upstream (jcastro): Jorge was the best possible person to talk about one of the most awesome projects we have in the Ubuntu landscape: the essence of Adopt-An-Upstream is to be a tie between the Ubuntu project and others projects: you take on real responsibility by sharing information, by helping others making informed decisions and improve Ubuntu in a very real sense. Great session!

    • 19:00 – 20:00 UTC: How To Help With Edubuntu (highvoltage): I’m glad we had Jonathan Carther with us who talked about Edubuntu, how it’s set up, how the team works and what the plans for the future are. Great!

    • 20:00 – 21:00 UTC: Me, myself and QA (warp10, gaspa): Last sesion of the day and of whole UDW was about how to help with Quality Assurance in Ubuntu: basically making packages rock harder. Easy tasks, how to find them, what various terms like NBS mean, was all part of the session. Thanks a lot to the Ubuntu Italian Mafia Famiglia (no that name is not my invention ).

For more information on Ubuntu Developer Week go to:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek

Ubuntu Stats

Bug Stats

  • Open (77847) +252 over last week
  • Critical (31) +2 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (37115) +158 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) (0) +/-0 over last week
  2. Spanish (8917) -98 over last week
  3. Brazilian Portuguese (34603) -37 over last week
  4. French (38230) +/-0 over last week
  5. German (54272) -21 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

Approval and Re Approval Process

Laura Czajkowski of the Ubuntu LoCo Council writes about the approval and re approval process in this blog post.

I’ve had some time recently to review a lot of wiki applications for LoCos. It is truly amazing the amount of work some teams do and is a great source of ideas to try for other teams. With that said, I’ve also seen some wiki pages which are less than clear on what the team is doing which makes it very hard to judge. So I thought I’d put down some best practices to make it clearer what is expected. So firstly let’s recap:

The LoCo Council has been tasked with identifying Approved LoCo teams which were approved over 2 years ago and thus are due for re-approval. The criteria for re approval is the same as for approval which is outlined on the getting approved instructions and the LoCo Council guidelines can be found at the team approval guidelines.

It should be noted that from the day your LoCo is approved, you should continue to document all events and history of your LoCo for this re approval process to make it clear and visible to all.

Now it is safe to say some teams do not continue documenting their work so when it comes to re approval time it’s panic stations, all hands on deck! Things you can do to help elevate this are the following

  • Use the LoCo Directory to log all of your events it will make it easier to write up about them and possibly in the future link to past events

  • MONTHLY Reports folks, only a handful of teams use them and there are more teams there that SHOULD be writing monthly reports, list your IRC meeting, any real life meet up, projects people are working on in relation to Ubuntu.
  • Take photos of your events it’ll help in the long run, assign someone at each event to take photos and even create a gallery in one place to link to them

When it comes to the creation of the Application be it for Approval or ReApproval it’s the same thing just NAMED DIFFERENTLY. You just need to document it. LOTS OF DETAILS PLEASE! We’d rather have too much then not enough details as the meeting is short and we have a lot of teams to get through.

To read more about the LoCo approval and re approval process go to:

http://www.lczajkowski.com/?p=793

LoCo Council July Meeting minutes

The LoCo Council meets on the 3rd Tuesday of the month to re approval and approve LoCo Teams. The meeting is open to everyone, not just teams that are going through the process. We encourage others to come and learn how the process is done but to also ask questions. This months meeting summary:

  • LoCo Team {re}approvals

    • Ubuntu-RO – Nobody present for application – Council taking it to mailing list instead
    • Ubuntu-US-MA – Not re-approved
    • Ubuntu-IT – Re-approved
    • Ubuntu-FR - Re-approved
    • Ubuntu-GR – Re-approved
    • Ubuntu-EG – Abstained
    • Ubuntu-NL – Abstained
  • For those LoCo teams that were not re-approved, or for which the LoCo council could not reach agreement, the council agreed to work with the LoCo teams to help them get re-approved.

For more information go to:

http://www.lczajkowski.com/?p=790

Delivering the Ubuntu Colombia Contact

Last Monday (July 19th) at the Ubuntu Colombia Council meeting, i've passed the role of Ubuntu Colombia LoCo Team Contact and Administrator to Andres Mujica. Since February 21st 2008, I was put in charge of Ubuntu Colombia by Fabian Rodríguez when our Community presented itself as Official Comunity at the LoCo Council.

By now, I believe that i fullfilled a complete cycle on my Contact duty for the Ubuntu Colombia community. A lot of goals, plans, proyects and personal objectives were accomplished hand to hand with the Community and now is time for new members of Ubuntu Colombia take the shot for the Contact role, new members with much more time, willingness and dedication to accomplish a lot more things that i could have done until now.

I'm not going away from the Team, I'll be working harder than ever as an active member, supporting all the projects I'm working on within Ubuntu Colombia.

I'm wishing the best of the lucks to Andrés on his new role and a lot of success to become in order to fulfill our LoCo Team goals.

It's important for me to let you all now about our Reapproval wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ColombianTeam/TeamReApproval2010, in this wiki all the activities and grow that our community has experienced are shown. And thanks to Colombian community for their support on this.

For more information and to read the full post by Hollman Enciso go to:

http://www.hollmanenciso.com/en/content/delivering-the-ubuntu-colombia-contact

Stepping Down from Ubuntu Bangladesh

Ubuntu Bangladesh was formed in 28th April 2006, more than 4 years ago with the vision to create a solid platform for Ubuntu users and contributors in Bangladesh. We’re the official local community team in Bangladesh, recognised by Ubuntu Community Council and Ubuntu’s sponsor Canonical Ltd. It’s been a long journey, and I’m really glad that with all of your help, support, and contributions we’ve been able to achieve most of our major goals.

I’ve been working as the team leader of Ubuntu Bangladesh throughout these years, and I’ve decided to step down and hand over the team leadership to two of our very active volunteers, Shahriar Tariq and Shabab Mustafa. They have made a tremendous contribution for our team, for Ubuntu, and for Linux as a whole, and I strongly believe that Ubuntu Bangladesh will prosper even more under their new leadership and vision.

I’ll still be around, will help to administer our Launchpad page, mailing list, IRC channel, and our site.

Thanks to each and everyone who’ve helped me throughout the years, thank you for your never-ending support! Long live Linux, long live Ubuntu!

For more information go to:

http://russelljohn.net/journal/2010/07/stepping-down-from-ubuntu-bangladesh/

Dun Laoghaire July Geeknic

Laura Czajkowski writes about another successful Geeknic.

It went ahead even if it was a miserable wet and windy… Summers day! At least the rain held for the time we all met up and had some lovely food from the farmers market. Well worth going to if you are in the area. 1st Sunday of the month there is a farmers market in people’s park in Dun Laoghaire.

Thanks to those who came along and braved the cold it was nice to meet some new folks as well and exchange some ideas and thoughts on Ubuntu and Open Souce and what people were doing. Big thanks to Jeffrey to organised the Geeknic also!

To find more about the Geeknic as well as see photos from the event go to:

http://www.lczajkowski.com/?p=800

Ubuntu-fr at Les Vieilles Charrues

Les Vieilles Charrues had their festival on the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th of July this year, and invited us to hold a webcafe on Ubuntu. It was a pleasure to take over from olive who had organised everything but couldn't attend this event. We took over in the webcafe with the valued help of kinouchou, Lust, Snip and spineaker, and with the two Eric from Infothema, Didier from Linux MAO, and Julia, Sonny and Kevin from Mozilla. Olive was with us all the time online to monitor the computers and guide us.

This webcafe for the festival-goers was the space where they can check their mails, their facebook account, twit or do everything they want on internet. We haven't put any restrictions, only no saving of the history and the passwords on firefox. For the same reasons, we haven't configured Ubuntu to let people try it. We only made a custom start page for Firefox.

To find out more about Ubuntu-fr at Les Vieilles Charrues and to read the post in full go to:

http://blog.yoboy.fr/post/2010/07/Ubuntu-fr-at-Les-Vieilles-Charrues

Launchpad News

Testing new designs on Launchpad users

Matthew Revell writes about testing new designs on Launchpad users.

Recently, I’ve been working with Charline, from Canonical’s design team, to talk to Launchpad’s users about how Launchpad fits into their work and what they think of new features we’re planning.

You may have seen my requests for participants on identi.ca and Twitter In the past, someone working on a new, or improved, feature would mock-up some ideas and post them to ourdevelopment mailing list. A good discussion would result but often, not always, people who use Launchpad, rather than develop it, wouldn’t see the implementation until it was available in their browsers.

Sometimes, this meant that minor, avoidable, mistakes were made. Other times it meant that somewhat eccentric workflows made it into production and dampened the impact of what was, otherwise, a cool new feature.

To read more about these efforts go to:

http://blog.launchpad.net/?p=1638

The Planet

Alan Pope: Ubuntu at Non-Technical Events

We seem to be quite good at turning up to technical events such as LUG meetings, technical conferences and other self-organised events and telling everyone how great Ubuntu is. However we seem to spend a lot of time preaching to the converted, speaking to people who already run Ubuntu or some other distro, rather than ‘converting’ people who have little or no exposure to Ubuntu.

Amber Graner recently wrote about her experience evangelising and advocating at a local Goat Festival. She was also interviewed about this on the Full Circle Magazine podcast recently.

When I heard about this it made me think that it’s something we should think about. Not specifically Goat festivals, but non-technical events. I wanted to canvass the group to see what events people might want to have a presence at. I’m not (at this point) asking for volunteers, but just ideas of events where people go and we might be able to have a stand where we could talk to people about Ubuntu and how they might want to use it.

To find out more information and how you can present Ubuntu at Non-Technical events go to:

http://popey.com/blog/?p=1114

Jorge Castro: More cleansweep.

Here’s the status for this week, as we continue to grind through patches from contributors. 2 patches that need more work, 12 forwaded upstream, 2 to Debian, and one patch accepted (and one rejected) by an upstream. Wanna help? https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OperationCleansweep

  • Total bugs with patches: 2263 (0)
  • Reviewed patches: 347 (+16)
  • Bugs with ‘patch-needswork’: 88 (+2)
  • Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-upstream’: 145 (+12)
  • Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-debian’: 43 (+2)
  • Bugs with ‘indicator-application’: 44 (0)
  • Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-upstream’: 48 (+1)
  • Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-debian’: 13 (0)
  • Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-upstream’: 16 (+1)
  • Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-debian’: 1 (0)

    http://castrojo.tumblr.com/post/831814104

Sense Hofstede: Discussion request: multilingual posts on Planet Ubuntu or not?

To keep in spirit with the content that has appeared on Planet Ubuntu the last few days I would like to start a discussion about multilingual content on Planet Ubuntu.

I started to wonder about the use and desirableness of non-English posts on Planet Ubuntu after a commentfrom LoCo Council member Laura Czajkowski on my blog post Realise native English speakers are privileged. She said: We have many ubuntu members who do not post on planet.ubuntu.com as they feel it has to be in English which is unfortunate as I’d love to read them – we all can use a web translator.

That is something I personally agree with. I see Planet Ubuntu as a window into the general Ubuntu community, not necessarily just the English speaking part of it. After all, when you want language-specific content your LoCo can always provide their own Planet.

To read the full post go to:

http://sensehofstede.nl/?p=573

Joe Barker: The Official Ubuntu Book – 5th Edition

I received my copy of the new Ubuntu book on Monday. Happy times! I have Matthew Helmke to thank for the copy of the book as well. I guess at this point, I should point out that I was asked to review said book.

From what I read, the book can prove incredibly useful to newcomers, and old-timers alike. I really do think it’s well written, helpful, and I would quite happily recommend it to anybody looking for a book on Ubuntu. Not to mention, the book is compact (much thinner, but equally as full as, some other Ubuntu books I own), and very stylish…that’s my opinion of course…but I think this book would look quite the part sitting on anybody’s bookshelf.

For more information go to:

http://blog.joeb454.com/?p=441

Canonical Design Team: This week in design – 23 July 2010

This week's summaries include:

Benjamin Humphrey: Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 is now available in Greek!

Yes, that’s right - after a couple of months and many, many delays, we can finally release the first translated version of Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 in Greek. Hopefully this will pave way for some more translations to be available in the next few weeks, such as German, Galician and English UK which are almost completed.

For more information and to see who you can get a copy go to:

http://humphreybc.wordpress.com/?p=973

Elizabeth Krumbach: How to Ask Smart Questions by Martin Owens

Elizabeth Krumbach takes a closer look at Martin Owens' "How to Ask Smart Questions."

Here are some of the suggestions Martin has for asking smart(er) questions:

  • Research the Problem
  • Ask the Right People
  • Don't Ask to Ask
  • Ask everyone
  • Don't Ask When Busy
  • Be Clear
  • Include Purpose
  • Be Patient To read more about what Lyz had to say about this guide or to get a link to Martin's PDF go to:

    http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=3248

Martin Albisetti's blog: Ubuntu One iphone client, source code released

We should have released the source for the iphone client right after we did the upload to the appstore, but a bunch of bureaucracy and crazy work deadlines postponed this until now. We’re going to be doing some work for the Ubuntu 10.10 release on the iphone client as well as on a new Android client, both clients are going to be open source, like all our other Ubuntu One clients.

We’ve created the projects on Launchpad, pushed the initial source code for the iphone client, and will start pushing Android as soon as we get out of the exploration stage.

The projects are available at: iphone: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-ios-client android: https://launchpad.net/ubuntuone-android-client

Stay tuned for more on our new mobile services!

http://beuno.com.ar/archives/205

David Planella: Ubuntu Translation Teams Healthcheck

David Planella updates everyone on the health of the Ubuntu translation efforts. Here is some of what David had to say:

Some weeks ago I ran the Ubuntu Translation teams healthcheck survey. The main goal was getting in touch with the teams to have some feedback on how they were doing, if they needed help in any particular area and make sure that they were aware of the latest changes in translation policies. While the results were available on the wiki, I hadn’t had a chance to post a summary.

The summary includes:

  • Language info
  • Translation team policies
  • Translation team workflow David concludes with the following: It would have been interesting to compare results with previous data from a couple of cycles ago, but having been part of it for a long time now, my feeling is that the Ubuntu Translations community is developing in the right direction, and I hope that this survey also serves as a testimonial to show external translation communities how Ubuntu translators work. The points about the importance of a defined workflow, team communication, quality assurance and upstream coordination are most definitely getting across.

Some areas in which we’ll have to concentrate is seeing how we can help those teams that are or have become inactive, better communicate the Ubuntu translation policies and work with the teams who don’t have translation guidelines to start developing some. I will also go back to the teams who explicitly asked for help in particular areas.

This has also offered me an invaluable insight on each team and their current situation and workflow, which will help me working with them in the future.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete it, as the input has been very valuable to know more about the Ubuntu translations community.? You allow millions of users to use Ubuntu in their own language every day, and you truly rock.

To find out more about this translation healthcheck survey go to:

http://davidplanella.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/ubuntu-translation-teams-healthcheck/

Fabian Rodriguez: An invitation to join Ubuntu’s Q&A group on Shapado.com

This is an invitation to anyone interested in joining a multi-lingual, freely-licensed Ubuntu Q&A site to check http://ubuntu.shapado.com.

As a disclaimer I should mention that I work at Canonical as a senior support analyst for Ubuntu support (both desktop and server) and I also train other people to provide Ubuntu support. I am also the admin and creator of the Ubuntu group in Shapado (10 months ago). So I constantly switch my community and professional hats.

I use the Answers system in Launchpad extensively (including its FAQ facility) but it lacks two big features:

  • Non-English language support – also known as “l10n” or “localization“. That would beBug #81419.
  • A reputation / trust system

As you can see that bug report is in an odd deadlock. My interpretation of it is Answers and Launchpad itself were not planned from the beginning to be multilingual. It’s so big now that this can’t be done quickly or easily.

To find out more about more about Fabian's invitation and Shapado.com go to:

http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/2010/07/19/an-invitation-to-try-ubuntus-qa-on-shapado-com/

Jonathan Riddell: Akademy 30 second interviews, Eben Moglen, Helsinki, Prague

Jonathan Riddell posts interviews from Akademy. To watch these videos and to find out more information on this video series go to:

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4284

Jorge Castro: "Blog about what you're doing"

In this post Jorge challenges everyone to blog about what they are doing in the Ubuntu Community to help deliver a great product. Here is what Jorge had to say:

People have been doing awesome work lately:

  • Cody Russell and Neil Patel have been rocking Unity.
  • Paul Hummer and Aaron Bentley have been doing amazing work fixing tons of bugs so that we can offer people an easy way to offer daily builds.
  • Happiness is seeing the LoCo council working with individual teams through reapproval and the level of detailed work going on there.

I’m going to make an effort to stop blogging about “what I am doing” and talk about the people who are enabling me to do stuff because I can’t catch them all, but if we think about our team members more we can collectively tell our story.

Lately I think we’ve gotten in a collective funk of “here’s what I think about this.” followed by “Oh yeah, well here’s what I think of that”, and “Allow me to retort!” and then getting stuck in a rabbit hole of distractions.

So screw that, let’s share some stories Like this. And this. And talk about the people that are inspiring you that enables us to deliver this stuff to people.

To read more about what Jorge is asking folks to do as well as the examples he is pointing to go to:

http://castrojo.tumblr.com/post/848936347

Monty Taylor: Bugs vs Blueprints

In this posting by Monty Taylor he goes over the difference between bugs and blueprints.

Launchpad has two facilities for filing tasks that need to be done in a source tree, Bugs and Blueprints. I've spoken to folks who think the two should be collapsed in to one thing, and folks who think they need to remain separate. I'm in the latter camp, so I thought I'd weigh in real quick with a quick explanation of what I think the difference between the two is. Whether they are fundamentally the same object in the backend object model is irrelevant to me - I'm talking about developer workflow and thought. In my view, it's really simple:

  • A Bug is a record of something that needs to be done - the what
  • A Blueprint is a record of how something will be done - the how

To read the rest of what Monty had to say on the subject of bugs and blueprints go to:

In The Press

Why NASA uses Open Source

Sean Michael Kerner writes about NASA and how they use Open Source. Sean writes:

With Billions of dollars and massive technology needs that are literally out-of-this-world, NASA has a lot of unique computing requirements. As it turns out, some of those requirements can be fulfilled by technology that isn't all that different from what regular enterprises need too.

In order to save the data from distant spacecraft, satellites and other scientific endeavors, NASA is leveraging open source tech (including Ubuntu Linux) and regular enterprise networking components to meet their mission.

I had the privilege of speaking with NASA's CTO for IT Chris Kemp this week around theOpenStack project in which NASA is participating. Kemp told me that NASA's Nebula cloud IT environment was built for science and research and has been optimized for low cost and massive scalability.

He added that NASA is using KVM on Ubuntu's Lucid LTS. Surprisingly to me, he noted that NASA isn't paying Canonical for support either at this point -- NASA is simply using Ubuntu as a freely available operating system (so no money for Shuttleworth and company, yet)

To read the full post go to:

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/07/why-nasa-uses-open-source-and.html

How to get RGBA support in Ubuntu

Jack Wallen, TechRepublic reports on how Ubuntu users can get RGBA support in Ubuntu.

RGBA stands for Red Green Blue Alpha. When applied to the computer desktop it means a whole world more. It means full-blown transparency with the ability to control the transparency like never before.

This feature was supposed to make it into Ubuntu 10.04, but because of some show-stopping issues, it was pulled. It is now slated to make it into 10.10 and, judging from how well it is working now, it will do just that.

To read the article in full and to see how you can enable RGBA in Ubuntu go to:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/how-to-get-rgba-support-in-ubuntu-62201408.htm

Canonical, IBM plunk DB2 databases on Ubuntu

Commercial Linux distributor Canonical has won the buzzword bingo for the week by putting Ubuntu, cloud, and appliance in the same sentence in announcing a partnership with IBM. It's meant to bring the latter company's DB2 databases to the latest Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition Linux.

The deal has two parts. First, Canonical has taken IBM's DB2 Express-C database, which is a lightweight relational database with PureXML integrated XML features like the real DB2 databases, and hardened it for Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition and wrapped it all up in a loving Amazon Machine Image (AMI) format so it can be deployed on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) utility.

For the full story go to:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/21/ibm_canonical_db2_ubuntu/

In The Blogosphere

4 Reasons Every Windows User Should Have An Ubuntu Live CD

Justin Pot at makeuseof.com writes the four reasons why every Windows user ought to have an Ubuntu Live CD:

  • Recover data from unbootable systems
  • Run memtest
  • Find out about your hard drive
  • Edit partitions

For explanations of his reasons and other information see:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-reasons-windows-user-ubuntu-live-cd/

THE BEST ADVERT FOR UBUNTU YOU PROBABLY NEVER SAW

OMG!Ubuntu has a Dell/Ubuntu promotional video that no one ever saw.

For the video see:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/07/best-advert-for-ubuntu-you-probably.html

Seven Ubuntu Derivatives worth Checking Out

Jeff Hoogland writes on his blog about seven Ubuntu derivatives he believes are worth checking out and why.

The list includes:

  • Pinguy OS
  • Linux Mint
  • Zorin
  • Lubuntu
  • Jolicloud
  • Netrunner
  • Moon OS To read more about Jeff's picks or comment on his findings go to:

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2010/07/seven-ubuntu-derivatives-worth-checking.html

Will Canonical-IBM Relationship Attract Oracle to Ubuntu?

Joe Panettieri, WorksWithU, discusses the expanded relationship between Canonical and IBM. Joe writes - The latest move involves a virtual appliance, comprising IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. At first glance the Canonical-IBM relationship is a nice win for Ubuntu. But perhaps there’s a deeper story angle here… involving Canonical’s continued pursuit of Oracle on Ubuntu. Here’s the speculation.

IBM’s DB2 has a solid reputation in the database market. DB2 gained fame on IBM mainframes before carving out a niche for itself on Unix, Linux and Windows servers. But ultimately, DB2 trails Oracle and Microsoft’s SQL Server in the Linux and Windows server markets, respectively.

To read the article in full go to:

http://www.workswithu.com/2010/07/22/will-canonical-ibm-relationship-attract-oracle-to-ubuntu/

Firewall Tools for Ubuntu Security

Christopher Tozzi, WorksWithU explains Ubuntu Firewall tools in this article.

Tozzi notes in this artlcle - “Does Ubuntu have a firewall, and how do I turn it on?” is a popular question among new Ubuntu users. The answer is a bit complicated, but it’s an understandable inquiry for those migrating from the Windows world. WorksWithU addresses that question below by taking a look at Ubuntu’s firewall and some of the tools available for managing it.

To read the article in full and to find out more about the firewall tools go to:

http://www.workswithu.com/2010/07/19/firewall-tools-for-ubuntu/

In Other News

Windows or Ubuntu?

Dell's European site has a very simple list to compare whether you should "Choose Ubuntu or Windows", to see the page visit the link below:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/windows_or_ubuntu?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs

Linux Box To Market Ubuntu

Canonical has now joined forces with The Linux Box, a software consulting firm that customizes open source projects for clients across a variety of sectors, to sell, install and support customized Ubuntu-based solutions to organizations running Linux. For the complete story, read more below:

http://wwj.cbslocal.com/2010/07/21/linux-box-to-market-ubuntu/

Dell drops Ubuntu PCs from website... for now

A search on Dell's UK website will reveal only one Latitude 2100 laptop in it's business section, apparently Dell has made an attempt to "simplify their offerings online" and will only be selling laptop's preloaded with Ubuntu via phone. For the complete story, read below:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/359740/dell-drops-ubuntu-pcs-from-website-for-now

Is Linux Too Much for One Mere Mortal to Handle?

Katherine Noyes,LinuxInsider, asks, "Is Linux Too Much for One Mere Mortal to Handle?"

Is it time for Linus Torvalds to share more of the responsibility for Linux that he's been shouldering? "If Linux wants to keep up with the competition there is much work to do, more than even a man of Linus's skill to accomplish," argued Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. "Don't be fooled that Linus has to scale," countered Robert Pogson. "He has to work hard, but he is the team captain and doorman."

To read more of what Katherine had to say go to:

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/70461.html?wlc=1280248365

Rackspace's Risky Open Cloud Bet

Katherine Noyes, LinuxInsider writes, Rackspace Hosting on Monday announced the launch of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform designed to foster technology standards and cloud interoperability. NASA is collaborating on the project. Rackspace is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to OpenStack, while NASA will provide the technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Through joint technology development, Rackspace and NASA plan to leverage the efforts of open source software developers worldwide.

For more information and to read Katherine's article in full go to:

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/70442.html

Ubuntu UK Podcast: The Country Fair

Laura Cowen, Ciemon Dunville, Tony Whitmore and Alan Pope return with episode 12 of season 3 of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team!

In this week’s show:-

  • We talk about about what we’ve been doing including ebaying computer equipment, using DBAN to wipe disks, posing questions on the HomeCamp Google Group, getting a mention on HomeCamp Podcast as a result, installing Ubuntu on a MacBookPro Laptop after @daviey helped fix a bug in the kernel, going cold turkey on holiday.

  • We interview Jo Shields (@directhex) about his contributions to Ubuntu and Debian, Mono, Silverlight and Chinchillas
  • In the news:-

    • Spotify preview Linux version of their music streaming app
    • Google announces AppInventor Android development app

    • Linux Mint mulling moving to Debian for upstream
    • IBM moves to Firefox as default browser
  • We mention some upcoming events:-
    • ORGCon – 24th July, London
    • Geeknic – 8th August, Hyde Park, London
    • SFD – 18th September, All around the world!
  • We discuss promotion of Ubuntu at non-technical events
  • We mention some Ubuntu related news in the Gerald/bit-about-Ubuntu/ecosphere:-
    • Evan puts the call our for an Ubuntu Stack Exchange site
    • The Free Culture Showcase rolls on
    • Maverick Meerkat shaping up
    • Alfresco Certified for use on Ubuntu
    • Dell tell us Ubuntu is great for programmers
  • Finally we have your feedback.

For more information on the Ubuntu UK Podcast go to:

http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/?p=1342

Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Monday, July 26, 2010

Security Team Catch-up

  • Start: 17:00 UTC
  • End: 17:30 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: nothing formal, just a weekly catch-up. Weekly Ubuntu Security Team catch-up meeting. Anyone is welcome to join if they want to watch, contribute, etc.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting

Technical Board Meeting

  • Start: 14:00 UTC
  • End: 15:00 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

Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting

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

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Weekly Ubuntu Foundations team meeting

QA Team Meeting

Jono Bacon @ Home Videocast : Various Topics and Q+A

Installing a LAMP server

Edubuntu Meeting

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Ayatana UX team meeting

  • Start: 12:00 UTC
  • End: 12:30 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: * Introductions * Review team charter * Organize first UX activity * Brainstorm future UX activities

Friday, July 30, 2010

Maverick Weekly Release Meeting

Saturday, July 31, 2010

BugJam

  • Start: 20:00 UTC
  • End: 22:00 UTC
  • Location: #ubuntu-us-dc , #ubuntu-bugs
  • Agenda: Bugs & Creepie Crawlies

Sunday, August 01, 2010

None Listed

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

UWN A Sneak Peek

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Conclusion

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Credits

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Amber Graner
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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

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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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