Issue25

Contents

  1. In This Issue
  2. General Community News
    1. Feisty Herd 1 released
    2. New High Contrast GDM Theme
    3. Kubuntu Community Council Meeting
    4. Ubuntu-devel mailing list split
    5. Ubuntu on the PS3
    6. This Week's Trivia Quiz
    7. Kurdish Ubuntu Saga Continues
  3. LoCo News
    1. Ubuntu Canada holds first meeting
    2. Ubuntu Nebraska Team holds first IRC meeting
    3. Ubuntu-UK Raises £300 for Children In Need
    4. Kubuntu at the "Rentrée du libre" in Strasbourg (France)
    5. First IRC meeting for Ubuntu-Za
  4. Changes In Feisty
    1. GNOME
    2. XFCE
    3. KDE
    4. Desktop
    5. Server
    6. Call for installer developers
  5. In the Press
    1. Ubuntu: King of Distros for 2006
    2. Ubuntu Cookies
    3. Art production and the open source paradigm
    4. Mark Shuttleworth's letter to openSUSE
      1. Press
      2. Blog Posts
      3. Mailing list posts
  6. Upcoming Meetings & Events
  7. Community spotlight
  8. Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10
    1. Security Updates for 6.06 LTS and 6.10
    2. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates
    3. Ubuntu 6.10 Updates
  9. Bug Stats
  10. UWN 26: A sneak peek
  11. Archives and RSS Feed
  12. Additional Ubuntu News
  13. Conclusion
  14. Credits
  15. Feedback

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #25 for the week of Dec 4th - 11th, 2006. In this issue we cover upcoming meetings, the Kubuntu Community Council Meeting, improvements to gdm accessibility, the Ubuntu bug squad, updates to Feisty, Mark's letter to OpenSUSE, Ubuntu Canada's first meeting, and much more.

In This Issue

  • New High Contrast GDM Theme
  • Kubuntu Community Council Meeting
  • Mark's Letter to OpenSUSE
  • Ubuntu Canada's First Meeting
  • Ubuntu on the PS3
  • This Week's Quiz
  • Kurdish Ubuntu Saga Continues

  • LoCo News

  • Updates to Feisty
  • In the Press
  • Ubuntu Crowned "King Distro for 2006"
  • Upcoming Meetings and Events
  • Community Spotlight
  • Updates and Security Fixes
  • Bug Stats

General Community News

Feisty Herd 1 released

The Feisty Fawn Herd 1 release went public December 6th. This is the first release of the scheduled six Herd releases. As with every first pre-release in Ubuntu, a massive amount of merges occurred between Debian Unstable and the Ubuntu development branch (Feisty Fawn). Some of the more notable differences right now between Feisty and Edgy are the kernel, which is now 2.6.19, and GNOME 2.17. Please review https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-December/000225.html for more information concerning the Herd 1 release. Herd 2 is scheduled for release on January 11, 2007. More information concerning the schedule of the Feisty Fawn, pleas read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeistyReleaseSchedule

New High Contrast GDM Theme

Henrick Omma wrote:

  • "We had a request on the Ubuntu accessibility mailing list about a high contrast theme for GDM. As it turns out there is no such thing, among the hundreds of available themes on artgnome.org and gnome-look.org."

Henrik Omma and Stéphane Marguet have worked together to develop a high contrast GDM Theme. Though work on it continues, it looks like it is turning out very nicely.

Screenshot:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~henrik/images/blog/Ubuntu-HC-I-small.png

Grab a copy and see more screenshots at http://people.ubuntu.com/~henrik/gdm/ and read the full blog post at http://blog.omma.net/?p=20

Kubuntu Community Council Meeting

A meeting was held of the Kubuntu Council. Notes are at:

https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Meetings/Minutes/2006-12-07

We voted Martin Bohm into membership on the strength of his translation and community work in the Czech community and his spec for a Grub setup tool which he is currently working on. Congratulations to Martin.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MartinBöhm

Ubuntu-devel mailing list split

One of the plans that emerged out of the last developer summits was a plan to split the devel mailing list into two parts, -devel, to which posting would be reserved for the core developers and the MOTU and -devel-discuss, which would allow free posting by the community. The entire plan can be read as part of the https://blueprints.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/devel-list specification. This spec has now been implemented, as indicated by an email by Matt Zimmerman on a email to the developer announce list. You can read the full email at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-December/000227.html.

Ubuntu on the PS3

Sony has been very active in supporting Linux on the PS3, which uses the Cell processor, a derivative of the PowerPC and which used to found in Apple computers. Hiroyuki Machida of Sony recently emailed Mark Shuttleworth and they held a conversation about PowerPC support on Ubuntu, as it currently being reviewed (you can read the full spec for the review at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCReview). Hiroyuki also translated a set of instructions for getting Ubuntu running on the PS3, which have been moved to the Ubuntu Help wiki at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/PS3

This Week's Trivia Quiz

Thanks to Alexander Vassalotti (who has, by the way, recently become an Ubuntu Member), we had another exciting quiz this week. The prize, an Ubuntu poster, was donated by last week's winner, Robert Stoffers. Lasse Havelund, though victorious, has decided to give up his prize in favor of another quiz, thus becoming its generous sponsor. Next week, the prize is Free as in Freedom by Richard M. Stallman (it's a book, before you ask).

Quizmaster : Alexander Vassaloti Champion : Lasse Havelund Sponsor : Robert Stoffers

Prize: Ubuntu Poster

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

To participate in the quiz, join #ubuntu-trivia on irc.freenode.net on Friday and Saturday UTC nights - the topic will usually tell you when the next quiz is scheduled.

To give a quiz, contact AlexanderVassaloti (theCore on IRC) - we will probably find you a spot.

To donate a prize, please contact JendaVancura (jenda on IRC) - your generosity is appreciated.

To win the quiz... well... be 1337. The quiz usually has a theme, and the quizmaster will sometimes tell you what the theme of the quiz will be. If not, you can always bribe them. By winning the quiz and not accepting the prize, you donate it for the next quiz in line.

Kurdish Ubuntu Saga Continues

Last week we told of the public reception of Kurdish Ubuntu in Turkey and the prosecution of the Kurdish Mayor of Sur. Unfortunately, contrary to what was published last week, the case against the Mayor of Sur still continues. We at the UWN apologise for this misinformation. The worldwide Ubuntu community and Mark Shuttleworth has offered support to those affected.

LoCo News

Ubuntu Canada holds first meeting

The Ubuntu Canada group had their first meeting on Saturday, December 9th which was very successful. Topics discussed included Getting Ubuntu Membership (how the locoteam can help), existing subgroups and projects, new projects, and partnerships with existing Linux/FLOSS organizations.

You can review the meeting minutes at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-ca/2006-December/001534.html

Ubuntu Nebraska Team holds first IRC meeting

DaveThacker wrote:

  • " The Ubuntu Nebraska LoCo team held their first IRC meeting on Thursday, December 8. We discussed our first three projects, "Ubuntu Off the Shelf", "Ubuntu in the Non-Profit Office" and assisting the Omaha Linux Users Group in their January Installfest. Our next meeting will be January 4th. Our meeting info is posted at

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NebraskaTeam/Meetings "

Ubuntu-UK Raises £300 for Children In Need

The Ubuntu-UK Team Contact, Nik Butler, wrote to us this week to inform us of result of the Children In need auction, mentioned previously in UWN 22.

  • " Following the successful attendance at the Linux World Expo, the UKTeam ( pictured here with Jono Bacon https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/Gallery ) held a charity auction for Children In Need which raised £300 . The auction included a White "Ubuntu : Linux for Human Beings" T Shirt signed by the Team, Canonical staff including Mark Shuttleworth and rather unexpectedly, but no less welcome, by Jon Maddog Hall himself who commented " What use is fame if you can't put it to good use". Jono Bacon added a signed copy of an Ubuntu Book. Details on the auction can be found here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/CharityWork/ChildrenInNeedTShirt.

Kubuntu at the "Rentrée du libre" in Strasbourg (France)

On October 28th, the first "Rentrée du libre" - an event for Free and Open Source Software, organised by the local LUG - took place in Strasbourg (France), and Kubuntu was present with a booth. A lot of visitors came to see and try out Kubuntu, get answers to their questions and to chat about the distribution, Linux and Free Software in general. Frequent questions concerned the difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu (both, the technical side and the difference between the two projects), how the project works and what Kubuntu provides in terms of accessibility.

Photos:

First IRC meeting for Ubuntu-Za

The 7th of December will go down in the Ubuntu-ZA history books as the day the Ubuntu South African Team held their first IRC meeting. 22 people attended this inaugural meeting and stuck with it for 2 hours to find out more about what a loco team is, how the team communicates and how they could contribute. The meeting summary at http://www.ubuntu-za.org/Wiki/LoCoMeetings/Summary7Dec contains further information.

Changes In Feisty

GNOME

gThumb 2.8.1 is an image viewer and browser utility for the GNOME environment. This small version increment has fixed some performance and UI bugs.

Guifications is a Gaim plugin that displays msn style "toaster" popups in a user defined corner of the screen. It's highly configurable, easy to use, and has theme support. Changes in this version, 2.13~beta4-1, are mainly focused at making it work with Gaim Beta4.

With the GNOMish iTunes-like Banshee 0.11.3 comes a variety of new features, performance improvements and bug fixes. Two pod-related fixes are in the podcasting support - where the podcast plugin would crash - and the iPod detection and syncing, which should solve all the problems that users had before. Performance has been increased: import time drastically reduced to a quarter of what it originally was, and time is now saved when switching sources. Sorting and searching have been improved, with settings now at source level so that searches and sorts can be applied to each source individually, not only globally. There is now a preference for the library structure, so that people can have opinions; and an option to close that is not quit, but minimizes to the tray. The final big change is the new, but experimental - don't say we didn't warn you - support for Rio Karma devices. Have fun!

We also saw the uploading of ipod-sharp 0.6.2-1, a sub-project of Banshee, that helped support numerous improvements in Banshee listed above. ipod-sharp provies support for high level features of Apple's iPod, like support for audio content, including reading and writing of the iTunes/iPod database, and syncing music.

The Gnome Control Center 2.17.3 allows you to configure various parts of your system. The main changes in this release have been some major translations (es, et, fr, ja, nb, sv), a complete new shell and quite a few bugs fixed related with themes.

Metacity 2.17.3 is a light-weight (compositing) window manager used by default in the GNOME desktop environment. The most outstanding bug fix was a problem about windows flickering in and out of maximized state when dragging between xineramas.

In this latest version of F-Spot, there have been a number of improvements. Firstly, there have been massive view mode improvements and new multiresolution icons, which you could always have a look at if you don't have any photos. There is a new user guide, and amongst the 50 bug fixes are fixes for the Picasa web interface.

Seahorse 0.9.8 is a GNOME application for managing encryption keys. It also integrates with nautilus, gedit and other places for encryption/decryption operations. Seahorse Daemon has been revamped to start properly, the GUI has been cleaned up and is more consistent, and a general effort has been made for the interface to be much more user friendly.

The latest versions of evolution (2.9.3) and evolution-exchange (2.8.2) were uploaded this week. They both have a large number of bug fixes, not so many features, but it's all on the way to the 2.10 stable release.

Gnumeric, the GNOME desktop spreadsheet, is now at version 1.7.5, which the project dubbed, "Testing, testing, 1-2-3, testing". This seems rather fitting for upload to the testing distribution, but as a result means that more fixes than features have been added. It is also called this, as they have now finished their automatic release testing suite, to "prevent further brown-bad releases".

Gnome-System-Tools 2.17.3 is a collection of tools to simplify configuring your Gnome desktop. The most noticeable change would be ZeroConf support and some additional minor bug fixes.

Epiphany(-browser) is the GNOME web browser, the default for the GNOME desktop environment. Version 2.17.3 was uploaded, and this fixed a number of bugs, improving compatibility (and usability between this and) other browsers, and also performance issues.

Contact-Lookup-Applet 0.15-1 is an applet to quickly search your Evolution address book from the GNOME panel. Changes to these packages where mainly adding the Portuguese and Macedonian translations.

gnome-btdownload is the GNOME BitTorrent client. 0.0.25-1 includes a number of bug fixes as well as Dutch and Swedish translations.

gnome-games is the official package of games for the GNOME desktop. As with most of the updates to GNOME packages, this is also now at version 2.17.3. This release contains updates and bug fixes to the new games in the set: glChess and GNOME Sudoku, which are for release with the rest of the GNOME desktop in 2.18 - the stable release that is to be in Feisty.

XFCE

xfce4-xkb-plugin 0.4.2 is a plugin for the XFCE 4 desktop, it displays the current keyboard layout, and refreshes when layout changes. Updated include fixed bugs for the greek layout and various translation updates.

Xarchiver 0.4.6 is a GTK+ 2 front-end for manipulating arj, 7z, zip, rar, tar, bzip2, gzip, and RPM files. It allows you to create archives and add, extract, and delete files from them. The most significant change in this version has been renaming png icons to make them freedesktop.org compliant.

KDE

KOffice 1.6 was intended, as the release notes say, mainly as a feature release for the two fastest developed components: Krita (the image editor) and Kexi (the desktop database), and it also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, the project planning application. Krita has now got support for handling perspective, magnetic selection and layer masks, PDFs and there are more new filters: random noise, random pick, lens corrections, amongst others. Kexi has had many all round improvements: database connectivity, table designer, query designer and macro support, whilst KSpread has also added scripting. KFormula is now more connected, with support for OpenDocument and MathML, with OpenDocument being default.

Ktorrent 2.1 beta1 is a KDEish bittorent client. This new release has had a lot of significant updates like adding support for trackerless torrents with DHT nodes, a Web-based GUI, it automatically saves peer information so you can get back on your feet much faster when restarting and switched to IDEAL style GUI (like KDevelop). There has also been an extensive work done in fixing GUI bugs and corrupt data handeling.

digikamimage, the digiKam Image Editor and the respective plugins package, digikamimageplugins, were this week updated to the version 0.9.0~rc2. This version is mainly a bug-fix release, and has fixes for a number of annoying bugs, which you can see at http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/200 .

Kerry is a KDE front-end for Beagle, the file indexer. It has a number of bug fixes for the release of 0.2.1, including fixes to stop resource hogging and better translations.

Keep is a KDE automatic backup program that allows users to set the parameters of the backup, including the frequency and the number of backups. Version 0.4.0 includes features such as the possibility to use an inclusion/exclusion list when setting up backup source; the possibility to control rdiff-backup process priority; the display of the last backup date in the restore backup wizard; and a fix for the backup every hour bug.

K-3D is designed from-the-ground-up to generate motion-picture-quality animation with RenderMan-compliant render engines. The main changes in this release (0.6.0.0.ds1-1) are update dependencies to new X.Org packages and update to new python policy.

QComicBook 0.3.4 is a viewer for rar, zip, cbr, and cbz format comic book archives containing JPEG or PNG images. The changes for this version where Drawing/scaling/rotation bugs in two-pages mode when the 1st page is smaller than the 2nd page were fixed, a problem with opening files with non-ASCII characters in the filename via command line was fixed and BMP file pattern was added to the list of supported formats. And as a bonus, the application icon was changed.

Desktop

Enigma is a puzzle game similar to Oxyd on the Atari ST or Rock'n'Roll on the Amiga and good old Marble Madness, in which you control a ball with the mouse. It is, apparently, addictive, and requires a large amount of dexterity and wit - which is probably why Toby Smithe has never tried it. Anyway, this updated version is the beta for version 1.00, and includes over 100 new levels, which are now sorted and grouped in levelpacks, screenshot viewer, hundreds of other new features; translations into Swedish, Russian, Hungarian, German and French, and a 100 page reference manual. Give it a shot! Or a roll...

The newest verison of irda-util (0.9.18-5) was upload by Sivian Greenberg. The overall goal of this project is to make an implementation of the IrDATM standards specifications for the Linux kernel. This project aims to implement open source supplement for IrDATM (Infrared Data Association) which is an industry standard for infrared wireless communication.

Version 3 of Last Exit the Last.fm radio player was uploaded as well.

This week saw the upload of democracyplayer 0.9.2.1. Democracy Player is an internet TV client, a video player and a BitTorrent client, built on the foundation of VLC and XULRunner which are pretty good frameworks themselves. The new version claims increased speed and as much as 75% less RAM usage.

Up next, some statistics as we look at the new Mono 1.2.2.1! There have been 496 newly implemented methods and 65 and 212 removed NotImplementExceptions and bogus TODOs. What this means is that Mono has more features, and any closed source applications will surely benefit from this, as will any open source ones looking for a feature that hasn't been written. There have been many fixes to the Visual Basic run-time, and the improvements to GDI+ and Windows.Forms, as well as ASP.NET, as always.

GPixPod, the iPod photo organiser, has now reached version 0.6.2, and with it it brings a new right-click context menu, menu clean-ups and fixes for single folder selection and the iPod Nano.

The Sun Java Platform Standard Edition Runtime Environment (JRE) sun-java5 1.5.0-10 contains the Java virtual machine, runtime class libraries, and Java application launcher that are necessary to run programs written in the Java progamming language. Main changes in this release include a number security bugs fixed, adds iceweasel as a browser alternative, and updates the german translation.

Version 0.4.0 of convertall, the unit converter, brings a port to QT4 and as a result an almost complete rewrite of the code.

Gnat GPS 4.0.1-3 is a cutting-edge Free Software IDE that streamlines the interaction between developers and their software. This release fixes some minor bugs in the Help context menu and a memory corruption bug.

poEdit 1.3.5 is cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor. Main changes in this release have been an initial port for MacOSX, adherence towards the freedesktop.org standards, changes in icons to Tango and Silk icons and added new translations (Macedonian, Arabic, Thai and Malay)

Contacts is a small, lightweight addressbook that features advanced vCard field type handling and is designed for use on hand-held devices, such as the Nokia 770 or the Sharp Zaurus series of PDAs. Changes in the 0.2-1 where mainly fixing compiler warnings and implementing multiple import and delete.

The newest verison of irda-util (0.9.18-5) was upload by Sivian Greenberg. The overall goal of this project is to make an implementation of the IrDATM standards specifications for the Linux kernel. This project aims to implement open source supplement for IrDATM (Infrared Data Association) which is an industry standard for infrared wireless communication.

Uploaded to Feisty this week were new versions of many Telepathy packages. The Telepathy project aims to provide a unified framework for all forms of real time conversations, including instant messaging, IRC, voice calls and video calls. It uses the DBus messaging system to provide a simple interface for client applications, allowing them to quickly benefit from Telepathy's functionality. Included in this update was gossip-telepathy, which is now at version 0.21. Gossip was originally purely a Jabber client, but has taken on being the current main telepathy client. The Jabber-only version is now at 0.20. There have also been updates to the framework itself, to telepathy-idle (the IRC connection manager, 0.0.3), telepathy-gabble (the Jabber client, at 0.5.0), and to telepathy-stream-engine, which handles streams and is now at version 0.3.16. The new features included are supported for the latest FreeDesktop specification, and - in the gossip-telepathy client - a more recent CVS check-out.

Endeavour Mark II is a complete file management suite that comes with a File Browser, Image Browser, Archiver, Recycled Objects system, and a set of file & disk management utility programs. This point release included several bug fixes and improvements to the popup list box.

WavPack is a completely open audio compression format providing lossless, high-quality lossy, and a unique hybrid compression mode. One of the features of Wavpack is that unlike MP3 or WMA encoding not a single bit of the original information is lost, so there's no chance of quality loss. This makes Wavpack ideal for audio storage or situations where audio quality is essential. Some of the new features for 4.40.0 include allowing for new modes which will decodes significantly faster, improved compression of mono material in stereo files, more robust handling of corrupt files, and a reorganization to create a more standard library that should more easily integrate into other applications.

Quarry is a multi-purpose GUI for several board games, at present Go, Amazons and Reversi (a.k.a. Othello.) It allows users to play against computer players (third-party programs, e.g. GNU Go or GRhino) or other humans, view and edit game records. This new version of 0.2.0 contains many bug fixes, a better, bigger and altogether more helpful manual and updated translations for en_GB, fr, pl, and ru.

Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic (SLASH'EM) is a role-playing game where you control a single character. The interface and gameplay are similar in style to Rogue, ADOM, Angband and, of course, Nethack. You control the actions through the keyboard and view the world from an overhead perspective. The changes in 0.0.7E7F2-3 version where adding experimental GNU autoconf support and splitting GTK interface into a separate package.

Eclipse 3.2.1 is an Open Source programming compiler that is vendor neutral and aims to be completely open. One popular use of Eclipse is to program in Java. Some of the changes include adding eclipse-gcj to depend on eclipse, reenabling 64bit build patches, and a installed patch thanks to the people at Fedora Core.

"Tux, of Math Command" ("TuxMath," for short) is an educational arcade game starring Tux, the Linux mascot! Based on the classic arcade game "Missile Command," Tux must defend his cities. In this case, though, he must do it by solving math problems. Updates in the 1.0.1-1 version are two simple bugfixes, documentation updates and freedesktop.org standarization.

GNUMail is a clone of NeXT/Apple's excellent Mail.app application. It uses the GNUstep development framework (or Apple Cocoa, which is based on the OpenStep specification provided by NeXT, Inc.). Changes in the 1.2.0~2-1 version include: Performance of the maildir code has been greatly improved, network I/O code has been optimized on GNUstep and examples of POP3 and SMTP have been updated.

Linux on Screen Reader was updated to verison lsr 0.3.2-0ubuntu1. Linux on Screen Reader or LSR is an open source effort to offer accessibility options for the GNOME desktop. This release is almost exclusively to make public the change of license for LSR. The new license is the BSD license to make the project GPL compliant. Some users have reported problems installing lsr, please see https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/lsr/+bug/75865 and attempt to confirm if you have some time.

Server

Samba 3.0.23 provides file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. In this release of samba is mainly focused on cleaning up Group and User functions (only unmapped user and group accounts are affected). This release no longer accepts multiple passdb backends in a chained configuration. Also be aware that the SQL and XML based passdb modules have been removed.

PHP is a very well known, widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. This is a pretty exciting jump in new features which include JSON extension was added and enabled by default, ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files and New memory manager for the Zend Engine. Overall there were more then 200 bug fixes and some overflows in various functions. A more complete report can be found at: http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_0.php

Bazaar 0.13 is a distributed version control system. There priorities are to be safe, friendly, free and fast, and to support Windows, Linux, UNIX and the Mac OS. This release fixes a number of bugs. Some highlights include ongoing effort on the smart server, improvements to dealing with branches via http (more robust range handling, keepalive) and extending the help system to be able to deal with topics that aren't commands.

spamassassin 3.1.7 is a widely used spam filter developed by the Apache Foundation. This release is a "quick-fix" release; it contains only a fix for one bug, "5119: if admins had set rule scores in the site configuration in/etc, sa-update would fail. Back out this change."

The infamous no-ip client, which allows you to update the ip for your doamins provided by no-ip.com automatically (useful for servers that have dynamic ip address), was brought up to the latest version, 2.1.3, by Raphael Pinson. This release includes a few bug fixs.

Apache Tomcat 5.5.20-2 is the servlet container that is used in the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. This upgrade is mainly focused on minor bugs and security enhancements.

Call for installer developers

Colin Watson has been maintaining the Ubuntu installer (d-i and later also ubiquity) for a couple of years now, largely solo although with help in places from Fabio, Tollef, Jonathan, and others. It's getting to the point where it's not going to be sustainable for him to keep on doing all of this by himself. So this is a call for anyone interested in helping out in the project. The good thing is that you don't have to have a grasp of the whole of the Ubuntu installer as it stands at the moment; it's fairly modular, so it should be possible to dive into a specific area without worrying too much about the rest of it. You will need to know POSIX shell scripting and C to some level, and if you want to work on Ubiquity you'll need to know Python.

More information can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InstallerDevelopment and https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-December/023037.html

See https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-installer/ to join the mailing list.

In the Press

Ubuntu: King of Distros for 2006

Ubuntu has been crowned "King Distro for 2006" by Google Trends and Distrowatch:

  • "According to Google Trends, but also according to Distrowatch, our own statistics here at OSNews and overall sense of the industry during 2006, Ubuntu has a big leap in mind share ahead of its competition (please note that we don't dare to say "market share", although we are pretty confident that it's the most used Linux desktop out there today)."

Read the full article at http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16681/Ubuntu-King-of-Distros-for-2006/

Ubuntu Cookies

A bit late, but tasty none the less!

  • "It doesn't really surprise me that the best Linux distribution also has the logo that translates into the best sugar cookie. Let’s face it: Ubuntu is one sweet distro. I apologize now to Canonical Ltd. for unauthorized use of their logo. Let’s hope that in the spirit of Ubuntu, they will be as awesome in their forgiveness as they are in their flavor of Linux."

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/files/2006/12/ubcookies.jpg

Get the recipe at http://blog.josephhall.com/2006/11/sugar-cookies.html

Art production and the open source paradigm

Jozsef Mak is a graphic designer who lives in the Montreal area. He has been involved with the Xubuntu/Ubuntu art projects since the release of Dapper, and is currently coordinating the Xubuntu artwork efforts. Mak, in an article on NewsForge, shares with us his opinion on Art production and the open source paradigm.

  • "Art production in an open source environment is more of a challenge than most people think. I know this from my experience in the Ubuntu interface design project in past few years. It has become clear to me that it is impossible to produce high quality visual content in an environment that is lacking coordination. That insight prompted me to investigate other models that could be adopted and used in the open source context. I found the commercial agency to be one of the most efficient and productive models that I can recommend for adaptation, thanks to one single factor -- art direction. Art direction assures the unity and consistency that are the main characteristics of professional artwork."

Read the full article at: http://software.newsforge.com/software/06/12/06/1739233.shtml?tid=132

Mark Shuttleworth's letter to openSUSE

On Friday 24 Nov 2006, Mark Shuttleworth (SABDFL), the founder of Ubuntu, wrote an open letter to the developers of the OpenSUSE linux distribution calling on developers that are concerned about the long term effects of Novell's recent pact with Microsoft to come join the Ubuntu Linux project. This caused quite a stir not only in the OpenSUSE community but resulted in a storm of news articles, blog posts, mailing list posts, and satirical copy-cat letters.

Here are some links to press coverage and blog posts about Mark's OpenSUSE email:

Press

Blog Posts

Mailing list posts

Upcoming Meetings & Events

Community spotlight

This week we will be looking at the ubuntu-bugs team. The people in the Ubuntu Bug Squad team work tirelessly to make Ubuntu a better place by keeping track of all the bugs in the Ubuntu Distribution and making sure that major bugs don't go unnoticed by the developers.

The Ubuntu Bug Squad:

  • triage bugs;
  • works with users;
  • works with developers;
  • works with upstream;
  • improves the wiki to reflect best information for debugging; and
  • spreads the very contagious huggy, cheery atmosphere.

Simon Law (sfllaw), leader of the BugSquad and Ubuntu Quality Assurance teams, had the following to say:

  • "The Ubuntu BugSquad are a group of volunteers who work tirelessly to manage and track the hundreds of bug reports submitted every day. Ubuntu is a big project with a lot of users, so the BugSquad's efforts are vital to our success. Think of them as the first-response team for quality assurance. They're the people who process the new reports and work with users to categorize and sort them. Preparing high-quality bug reports is essential work, so that software developers can fix the most important bugs first, and fix them quickly.

    As the head of Quality Assurance for Ubuntu, my responsibility is to foster and grow the BugSquad. I pitch in to triage bugs every day. But I also lead classes, guide people in triaging, and write tutorials and documentation."

Interested in helping out? Joining in is easy! There are in fact no requirements for joining the team. You don't need to be an expert on packaging or programming - just a love for Ubuntu. Working with the Bug Squad on bug triage is an excellent way to help contribute back to Ubuntu!

  • "The best way to get involved is to jump right in! The BugSquad web page describes all the requirements for joining: you have to love Ubuntu. Start by creating a Launchpad account and then you can begin doing useful work. Then join the #ubuntu-bugs IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. There are always people who are willing to answer questions and offer friendly advice. We'd love to see you there."

    "One way to get started is by participating in an UbuntuHugDay (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuHugDay). That's when the BugSquad gets together to hunt down certain classes of bugs. The IRC channel becomes abuzz with activity and it's the perfect time to chip in. Plus, if you triage a bug, we're more than happy to give you a virtual hug."

Read more about the Ubuntu Bugsquad and how to get involved at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

  • "Helping in the Ubuntu community is an easy way to give back to your favorite distribution. The BugSquad is one place where anyone of any experience can help out! Whether you've just started with Ubuntu or you're an expert with some free time, there's something to do. Don't be shy! We're a friendly bunch."

Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10

Security Updates for 6.06 LTS and 6.10

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 6.10 Updates

Bug Stats

  • Open (20534) +211 over last week
  • Critical (20) +0 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (10762) +28 over last week
  • Unassigned (15457) +21 over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (67656) +758 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/

UWN 26: A sneak peek

Looking forward to next week, you can expect the following in the next edition of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter:

  • Coverage of the Ubuntu Community Council meeting;
  • Ubuntu Marketing Team - What is it, Who is it, and how do you join; and
  • much more!

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:

  • Cody Somerville
  • Jenda Vančura
  • Corey Burger
  • Toby Smithe
  • Martin Albisetti
  • Freddy Martinez
  • Melissa Draper
  • 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 Ubuntu Marketing Team Contact Information Page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam).

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue25 (last edited 2008-08-06 16:59:47 by localhost)