Issue23

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 23 for the week of Nov 19 - 25, 2006. In this issue we cover the hot new BehindUbuntu interview with Jono Bacon, the mEDUXa release, the free geek burglery, upcoming Ubuntu open week event, changes in Feisty, the promotion of Kurdish Ubuntu in Turkey, and much more.

In This Issue

  • mEDUXa Released
  • Jono Bacon Interview
  • Free Geek Burgled
  • Free Poster for Quiz Winner
  • LoCo Team News

  • Changes in Feisty
  • In the press
  • Meetings
  • Upcoming Events
  • Specification Spotlight
  • Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10
  • Bug stats
  • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Correction

General Community News

mEDUXa Released

The Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Spanish Canary Island's regional government have released mEDUXa 1.0. mEDUXa is a Free Software GNU/Linux distribution developed for educational purposes based on Kubuntu. It will be deployed on 35,000 computers in 1100 schools, which represents 325,000 possible users (25,000 teachers and 300,000 students) in the Canary Islands state schools. mEDUXa comes with different profiles, configured thanks to KDE's Kiosk mode. One of mEDUXa's major feature is the profile for young pupils (from 4 to 8 years old).

http://www.grupocpd.com/archivos_documentos/info_meduxa/

Jono Bacon interviewed by BehindUbunutu

If you haven't been keeping up with the BehindUbuntu interviews, now is as a good time as ever! Florida, Sausage Dogs and bash.org! Open your mouth wide in shock as he slips in a full two sentences pimping Jokosher! Get it all in the BehindUbuntu’s revealing interview with our very own man of metal, Jono Bacon. http://behindubuntu.org/interviews/JonoBacon/

Free Geek Burgled

Free Geek is a not for profit community organisation that recycles old computer parts and equipment and supplies them to under-privileged people, schools, and non-profit organisations in exchange for community service. They install Ubuntu on all the machines they distribute.

Sadly, the Free Geek organization was recently the victim of burglary. The value of the stolen hardware has been estimated to be worth approximately $4,500. Numerous people and non-profit organisations are feeling the effects of this, most importantly the local school system. For more info about the incident and how you can help, see http://www.freegeek.org/news.php#breakin, also http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/648 provides an excellent summary, and http://www.katu.com/news/4688221.html for a news report.

Free Poster for Quiz Winner

As has been announced before, the Ubuntu Quiz-masters schedule weekly IRC in #ubuntu-trivia. However, next week's quiz is special! Not only will the champion receive fame and glory, the lucky winner will be shipped a free Ubuntu Poster, like the one below, as a bonus! So, come on out on Friday December 1st 22:00 UTC, network with others, and test your trivia knowledge in an attempt to win an amazingly awesome Ubuntu poster.

http://doc.ubuntu.com/~marketing/DIY Material/Batch 1, Posters/HanZo/poster-layout.jpg

Ubuntu 6.06.2?

A common question has been Are there any plans to release Ubuntu 6.06.2? If so, when? and we've finally gotten an answer. Colin Watson, an Ubuntu developer and Canonical Employee, announced on the Ubuntu-devel mailing list that there is no current plans for Ubuntu 6.06.2: "I expect we'll do another point release at *some* point just to aggregate updates, but there's no schedule at the moment, and other things are higher-priority" You can read Watson's entire message at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-November/022542.html

Calling all LoCo Teams!

In our pursuit for newsletter excellence, we are always on the lookout for new material. One area we are sorely missing stories from is all the marvellous LoCo Teams. We would absolutely love it if you guys could pass Ubuntu-related stories from your countries and doing so is easy! Compose an email to ubuntu-marketing at lists.ubuntu.com with an summary of the article, as much relevant linkage as you can find and if the articles are not in English, full English translations would be much appreciated.

To find out more, read Melissa Draper's Calling all Loco Teams! at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/2006-November/000806.html

How good can the UWN get? With your help, the possibilities are endless!

LoCo News

Welcome to the new LoCo Team News Section where we'll feature news, articles, and stories about and from our Ubuntu Loco Teams. If you'd like to contribute an article, please compose an email to ubuntu-marketing at http://lists.ubuntu.com with an summary of the article, as much relevant linkage as you can find. If the articles are not in English, full English translations would be greatly appreciated.

New Tamil LoCo Team Forums

The Tamil LoCo Team is proud to announce the opening of the Tamil LoCo Team Forum which is available at http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=186

New Irish LoCo Team Forums

Similarly, the Irish LoCo Team opened their own subsection of ubuntuforums.org, located at http://ie.ubuntuforums.org .

Changes In Feisty

The week was a little bit quieter than last, with fewer of any of the high volumes than usual (GNOME, Telepathy, KDE or XFCE). None the less, there were some interesting and exciting changes that still landed. This week we also have a new method of showcasing the changes in Feisty. Rather than throw a blizzard of names and number at you, there is a smaller selection, explaining not only what was uploaded but the changes you care about. As with any change to the UWN, we welcome you feedback.

General

RSIBreak 0.80, the RSI prevention tool for KDE has been uploaded. New features in this release include more powerful possibilities when breaks start or end, a cancel button in the relax pop-up, an option to reset timers only when you're idle for a long break and some other bug fixes. You can read more about RSIBreak at http://www.rsibreak.org/index.php/Main_Page

Mono 1.2.1 provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux. 1.2.1 added Thread.Interrupt implementation, numerous bug fixes, web Services now support generic types (List<T>), Web Services updates for the .NET 2.0 API, a partial port to MIPS architecture, many bug fixes to Windows.Forms, support for more type converters, XmlSchema reading and writing, process launching will now support opening special files in addition to launching programs.

cdrkit 5:1.0, a portable command-line CD/DVD recorder software, was synced by Scott Remnant. This is a new package for Ubuntu. See http://cdrkit.org for more information.

OctPlot 0.3.9, uploaded by Jordan Mantha, is free open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). OctPlot is a handle graphics package for Octave, the free alternative to matlab. OctPlot provides quality postscript(TM) and screen graphics. This release includes layer support; Arrowheads supported for lines using arrowhead, arrowlength, arrowwidth etc; New properties for axes: box, xaxislocation etc; Axis accepts on/off/equal arguments; box, quiver, plotyy, stem, barh and pareto added; and new figure handling.

cupsys 1.2.7 was uploaded this week by Martin Pitt. This included documentation updates, postscript improvements and scheduler fixes, amongst other things. For full details, visit http://www.cups.org/articles.php?L428

GNOME

As per usual, there were a number of GNOME 2.17 uploads by Sebastian Bacher, as can be expected. This week be landed nautilius, yelp (the help browser) and gnome-applets. You can read more about GNOME 2.17 at http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen/ReleaseNotes

Bluez-gnome 0.6 was uploaded. This release fixes the status icon appearance and adds an application for changing the Bluetooth settings.

Tomboy 0.5.1 is a simple easy to use desktop note-taking application. .5.1 included new managed dbus interaction, search interface improvements, fixed tray icon and panel resizing, removal of the old tintin image.

Beagle 0.2.13, a search tool that 'ransacks your personal information space' to find whatever you're looking for, sees numerous improvements from Edgy's Beagle 0.2.9 including a drastic reduction of memory usage by beagled and beagled-index-helper at startup; improvements to i18n support; numerous optimizations; numerous new back-ends such as KNotes, KAddressBook, and Labyrinth; new details pane in UI; many bug fixes including a fix for the dreaded focus stealing bug once and for all; and much more.

Daniel Holbach has uploaded nemiver 0.1.0-0ubuntu1, the new gtkmm front end to the GNU debugger, gdb. You can read more about nemiver at http://home.gna.org/nemiver/.

Office

Abiword 2.4.5, the lightweight word processing software was uploaded this week by Michael Vogt. This update includes many feature updates and bug fixes, as well as 10 new or updated translation packs. See http://www.abiword.com/ to find out more about this software.

GnuCash, an open source accounting program, was upgraded from 2.0.1 to 2.0.2. This point release included small improvements to the UI and several bug fixes including one crasher.

Multimedia

Audacity 1.2.6, the well known sound recording and editing software has been uploaded by Daniel T. Chen. This release included a bug fix in font size display problems. Also, this new version enabled the FLAC support that had previously been missing. Read more about Audacity at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Qsynth 0.2.5, is a QT gui interface for FluidSynth. New features in this release are new dial-knob behavior now follows mouse pointer angular position, middle clicking on a dial resets its position to default, bank offset finally gets its due effect, while on the channels and channel preset selection dialogs, new fancy widget, qsynthKnob, with some modifications to replace the actual *ugly* QDial widgets.

Muine is a music player for Gnome featuring a simple, intuitive user interface; Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and MP3 music playback support; Automatic album-cover fetching via MusicBrainz and Amazon; Support for embedded album images in ID3v2 tags; ReplayGain support; Support for multiple artist and performer tags per song; and Plug-in support. Brandon Hale uploaded Muine 0.8.6 which fixes an astounding number of bugs. Full details at http://muine-player.org/wiki/Release_0.8.6

ALSA 1.0.13 packages (alsa-libs and alsa-util) were uploaded by Daniel T Chen. The changelog is fairly technical and can be read at http://www.alsa-project.org/changes/v1-0-12--v1-0-13.txt

Daniel T Chen uploaded flashplugin-nonfree 9.0. This is still at beta 2. This update included many improvements but there are still some issues. More information can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/releasenotes.html

Feisty Release Plan unveiled

Matt Zimmerman, CTO of Canonical and lead distro team member unveiled the new Feisty Release Plan, showcasing the general themes for the next release, general time frame (Feisty will be a standard 6 month release cycle again), support life cycle, changes for developers and more. You can read more at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeistyReleasePlan

In The Press

Kurdish Ubuntu in Turkey

Kurdish Ubuntu has been promoted (http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/news/391178.as link in Turkish) in Diyarbakir, Turkey, with a reception. According to the news agency, Ubuntu was the first linux distribution to implement Kurdish localization. Kurdish localization in Linux is an important milestone for Turkey due to ethnic conflicts (You can read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds_in_turkey ).

Kurdish Ubuntu was prepared by a team of hardworking translators (https://launchpad.net/people/kurdish ) in Rosetta. In his talk at the reception, the mayor of Sur (a town in Diyarbakir) said that "Whatever language it is in, we wanted it "our service" to be accessible multi-lingually because multilingualism is our wealth. Our work is being conducted on Kurdish, English, and Turkish language support. ... If we can integrate multilingualism, multi-identities, and multi-culturalism in this nation, this region will be a place of peace instead of conflicts."

Mehmed Uzun, a Kurdish writer, speaking about the Kurdish language, told the attendees that "Our most important problem is that the language is not standardized. The Kurdish language should be standardized." Ubuntu was later distributed to the reception's attendees. You can find screenshots of the Kurdish Ubuntu at http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Kurdish_Linux_launched_in_Turkey

Ubuntu in the OLPC mix: An Interview at ZDNet

MIT Media Lab guru Nicholas Negroponte has been grabbing the headlines recently with his One Laptop Per Child project. The aim is to create a cheap — about $100 — and robust laptop for use in the developing world. Negroponte is adamant that ownership of the device is key to helping children engage with technology. However, the OLPC project is not the only organisation to have focused on the lack of computing devices and infrastructure in the developing world.

An alternative to both the refurbished PCs and the OLPC approach has been developed by two UK academics. Ndiyo, the Swahili word for "yes", is a project that aims to allow multiple users access to the same PC. The brain-child of Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a former research scientist at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, Ndiyo is based around the untapped ability of the Linux operating system (Ubuntu) to support numerous simultaneous users.

Read the article at http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/features/0,1000002000,39284836-1,00.htm

Meetings

Xubuntu Community Meeting

Xubuntu had a very important meeting (the first meeting in almost 6 months, you can read the agenda at https://wiki.ubuntu.org/Xubuntu/Meetings/Archive/Agenda/2006-11-25) on November 25th which was open to the general community. After 2 and a half hours of discussion, it appears that the Xubuntu Team (http://launchpad.net/people/xubuntu-team ) and interested community members have made great strides in developing goals, strategies, and organization for the Feisty release cycle. Topics included artwork, documentation efforts, website development, community development, and much more. You can review the minutes from the meeting at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Meetings/Archive/Minutes/2006-11-25 and the log at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/Xubuntu_2006-11-25.

Ubuntu Documentation Team Meeting

The Ubuntu Documentation Team was also guilty of taking a long meeting hiatus but that changed on November 24th when the doc team got together to discuss documentation specifications, the kubuntu desktop guide, Ubuntu open week, the use of screencasts, Xubuntu documentation (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Documentation) and consider a move from svn to bzr. You can find a detailed summary at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeamMeeting20061124.

Upcoming Events

In just two years, Ubuntu has become one of the most popular Linux distribution in the world with millions of users and a spot regularly at the top of Distrowatch. Ever wondered what all the fuss is about? How we've achieved such a great feat in such a short space of time? With the upcoming Ubuntu Open Week, you can do just that!

The Ubuntu community and Ubuntu's corporate sponsor Canonical is holding a series of online workshops where you can:

  • learn about the Ubuntu landscape;
  • talk to some of the key developers from the Ubuntu project;
  • find out about the Community and its relationship with Canonical;
  • participate in an open Q&A with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu; and

  • much more...

The week takes place between Mon 27th Nov and Sat 2nd Dec 2006 and more information about the event (including a schedule of the week's events) can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek.

Specification spotlight

Last week we added a new feature called "Specification highlight" and we discussed the very interesting Network Roaming (https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/network-roaming) and Default Network Services (https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/default-network-services) specification. This week will continue with the network theme and take a look at the much desired Winmodem Support (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/winmodem-support) specification which proposes developing out-of-the-box support for winmodems.

As you may know, a winmodem is a software modem designed to work with the Microsoft Windows operating system. A traditional modem uses hardware to perform its tasks, but Winmodems perform their key tasks with software. This makes them smaller and cheaper to produce, but it also means they cannot be easily used on other operating systems because the driver support requires far more effort to produce. This specification proposes including drivers for supported winmodems by default and working with the upstream project (http://linmodems.org) to develop drivers for winmodems that are currently unsupported.

With over 500 individuals strongly supporting this specification (out of 771 respondents) according to an unofficial poll (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=82608) conducted on the ubuntu forums (http://ubuntuforums.org), it seems like support for winmodems could have a positive impact on the ubuntu experience for a lot of users.

Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

The new Flash plugin 9 beta will be backported to 6.06 in the coming week. It requires "DEBIAN_FRONTEND=interactive" in order to install, though, so if you have trouble installing run  DEBIAN_FRONTEND=interactive dpkg --configure -a 

Ubuntu 6.10 Updates

Bug Stats

  • Open (20021) +211 over last week
  • Critical (22) +6 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (10628) +74 over last week
  • Unassigned (15154) +128 over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (65895) +483 over last week

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

Check out the bug statistics: http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~carthik/bugstats/

Infamous Bugs

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

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Correction

The UWN Team would like to correct an error in the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue # 21.

Colin Watson wrote" "

Quoting from https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-news/2006-November/000061.html:

"However, only certain people have the authoirty[sic] to determine which specs are worthy of discussion at a meeting like the Ubuntu DeveloperSummit in Mountain View, and fewer still can approve a spec for official inclusion in Ubuntu."

Actually, this is backwards. Approving specs for meetings is done by the Technical Board (four people at present), while we have been farming the job of approver out to increasing numbers of longer-serving core developers. We had a conference call shortly before the summit with IIRC at least six of us going through the list and figuring out which of us would be best suited to make sure each discussion was going in a sensible direction.

Cheers,

Colin Watson "

The UWN Team would like to apologize for any confusion that this error may have caused and much thanks to Colin Watson for letting us know.

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:

  • Corey Burger
  • "towsonu2003"
  • Jonathon Riddell
  • Cody Somerville
  • Jenda Vancura
  • Eldo Varghese
  • Melissa Draper
  • and the many wonderful people that make Ubuntu what it is

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 Ubuntu Marketing Team Contact Information Page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam).

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue23 (last edited 2008-08-06 16:59:36 by localhost)