Issue256


Contents

  1. In This Issue
  2. General Community News
    1. Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update
    2. Welcome New Members
    3. Ubuntu User Survey 2012
    4. Membership changes to Community and LoCo Councils
  3. Community Acknowledgments and Success Stories
    1. … for human beings
    2. Ubuntu Forums and Ask Ubuntu
  4. Ubuntu Stats
    1. Bug Stats
    2. Translation Stats Oneiric
    3. Ubuntu Brainstorm Top 5 this week
    4. Ask Ubuntu Top 5 Questions this week
  5. LoCo News
    1. Ubuntu-Co Yearly Report – 2011
    2. Global Jam! [Philadelphia]
    3. Bangladesh: We Jammed for the First Time. We Partied Too!
    4. A Couple of Precise Jams
  6. Ubuntu Cloud News
    1. Charm Contest, Week One!
    2. Charm School webinar video available.
  7. The Planet
    1. Canonical Design Team: Notes from the Mobile World Congress 2012
    2. Jono Bacon: Ubuntu One for Application Developers
    3. Michael Hall: Faces of Ubuntu: The non-Developers
    4. Alan Pope: Improved Unity Files Lens Call For Testing
    5. Canonical Design Team: Choosing, moving, wallpapers
    6. Michael Hall: Contributing to Unity for non-developers: Package patching
    7. Mark Shuttleworth: Government use of Ubuntu
    8. Brian Murray: Confirming a bug task in Launchpad
  8. In The Press
    1. Ubuntu for Android is an open-source treat in hands-on video
    2. Ubuntu Linux 12.04 One-Ups Windows and Mac, Shuttleworth Says
    3. How Linux is changing lives in Zambia
  9. In The Blogosphere
    1. Is Ubuntu 12.04 a Linux Game Changer?
    2. Exclusive Interview With Mark Shuttleworth, HUD, Ubuntu For Android And Much More
    3. Shuttleworth on the Ubuntu Linux 12.04 beta
    4. Privacy Settings in Ubuntu 12.04 Gets New Application Usage Dialog
    5. Ubuntu 12.04 .ISO Will Remain CD Sized
    6. Beta 1 reviews
  10. In Other News
    1. Improving Hardware Support in Ubuntu
    2. Full Circle Magazine – Virtualization Series Special Edition
  11. Other Articles of Interest
  12. Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
  13. Upcoming Meetings and Events
  14. Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04 and 11.10
    1. Security Updates
    2. Ubuntu 8.04 Updates
    3. Ubuntu 10.04 Updates
    4. Ubuntu 10.10 Updates
    5. Ubuntu 11.04 Updates
    6. Ubuntu 11.10 Updates
  15. Subscribe
  16. Archives
  17. Additional Ubuntu News
  18. Conclusion
  19. Credits
  20. Glossary of Terms
  21. Ubuntu - Get Involved
  22. Feedback

newspaper-icon41.jpg

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 256 for the week March 5 - 11, 2012.

In This Issue

  • Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update
  • Ubuntu User Survey 2012

  • Membership changes to Community and LoCo Councils

  • Community Acknowledgments and Success Stories
  • Ubuntu Stats

  • LoCo News

  • Charm School webinar video available.
  • Canonical Design Team: Notes from the Mobile World Congress 2012
  • Michael Hall: Faces of Ubuntu: The non-Developers
  • Alan Pope: Improved Unity Files Lens Call For Testing
  • Mark Shuttleworth: Government use of Ubuntu
  • Brian Murray: Confirming a bug task in Launchpad
  • Ubuntu for Android is an open-source treat in hands-on video
  • How Linux is changing lives in Zambia
  • Is Ubuntu 12.04 a Linux Game Changer?
  • Ubuntu 12.04 .ISO Will Remain CD Sized
  • Improving Hardware Support in Ubuntu
  • Other Articles of Interest
  • Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
  • Upcoming Meetings and Events
  • Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04 and 11.10
  • And much more!

General Community News

Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update

In yet another 12.04 development update, the dev news team gives us an upbeat and informative look at the progress being made and some highlights from Ubuntu Developers. This week features links to current projects worked on by developers throughout the project, some upcoming events, an interview with Thomas Hood, and more.

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2012/03/08/ubuntu-12-04-development-update-17/

Welcome New Members

Results for the EMEA Membership Board Meeting March 6, 2012

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-news-team/2012-March/001507.html

Ubuntu User Survey 2012

Ubuntu User Survey 2012 was launched this week. Data from this survey should give a better understanding of where users are from, how they discovered Ubuntu, general demographics, and more. The survey, which is offered in three (3) languages - English, Spanish, Portuguese, will run through all of next week with the possibility of remaining open until the week of the 20th.

Once the survey closes, the results will be made publicly available in their entirety for anyone who wants to read them.

Membership changes to Community and LoCo Councils

Elizabeth Krumbach of the Community Council announces that Amber Graner has submitted her resignation to the Community Council due to other obligations. Charles Profitt has accepted a place on the Community Council and in taking on this new role, has stepped down from his position on the LoCo Council. Christophe Sauthier, a former LoCo Council member who stood for re-appointment, has accepted appointment to fill this role.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-news-team/2012-March/001508.html

Community Acknowledgments and Success Stories

… for human beings

Mark Shuttleworth emphasizes the purpose and audience of Ubuntu and thanks all of those who have helped Ubuntu on its journey. He goes on to say, “For the first time with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, real desktop user experience innovation is available on a full production-ready enterprise-certified free software platform, free of charge, well before it shows up in Windows or MacOS.” Shuttleworth finishes by saying, “Again, thanks to the Ubuntu community, 500 amazing people at Canonical, the contributors to all of the free software that makes it possible, and our users.”

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1027

Ubuntu Forums and Ask Ubuntu

Jono Bacon thanks “both our Ubuntu Forums and Ask Ubuntu communities” saying “Both are excellently managed and governed communities that provide a great on-ramp for our community [to] learn about Ubuntu, meet other Ubuntu fans, and have fun. Both are important parts of the Ubuntu community.”

http://www.jonobacon.org/2012/03/07/ubuntu-forums-and-askubuntu/

Ubuntu Stats

Bug Stats

  • Open (90670) + 465 over last week
  • Critical (110) + 2 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (46982) + 151 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 Oneiric

  1. English - Australia (2) +/- 0 over last week
  2. Spanish (8476) - 20 over last week
  3. English - United Kingdom (29486) - 212 over last week
  4. Bosnian (37545) - 11 over last week
  5. Brazilian Portuguese (42806) - 167 over last week

Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Oncelot", see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/oneiric/ and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations

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 ideas. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

Ask Ubuntu Top 5 Questions this week

Ask (and answer!) your own questions at http://askubuntu.com

LoCo News

Ubuntu-Co Yearly Report – 2011

Sergio Meneses of Ubuntu Colombia (Ubuntu-Co) presents the annual update on the progress of the Ubuntu Community in Colombia, which includes “official community members, Ubuntu Members, followers on social networks, mailing list, web site, project status, events and more.”

http://sergioandresmeneses.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/ubuntu-co-yearly-report-2011/

Global Jam! [Philadelphia]

Jim Fisher of the Pennsylvania LoCo shares the results of the Philadelphia Global Jam at Hive 76, including their work on Bug #1.

http://jedijf.blogspot.com/2012/03/global-jam.html

Bangladesh: We Jammed for the First Time. We Partied Too!

Randall Ross interviews Md Ashickur Rahman, from Ubuntu Bangladesh about their recent Ubuntu Global Jam. Ross asks for Rahman’s thoughts on global jams, what this jam meant for the Bangladesh team, and shares a photo from the event.

http://randall.executiv.es/ugj--precise-bangladesh

A Couple of Precise Jams

Randall Ross shares a couple of his favorite photos from the recent Ubuntu Global Jam in Oregon and Ontario as contenders in his photo contest.

http://randall.executiv.es/ugj-precise-contenders-1

Ubuntu Cloud News

Charm Contest, Week One!

Jorge Castro shares a status update of the first week of the juju Charm contest, including work begun on charms for Firefox Sync Server, PHP Symfony framework and more.

http://cloud.ubuntu.com/2012/03/charm-contest-week-one/

Charm School webinar video available.

On March 8th the Cloud team hosted a webinar version of their juju Charm School which attracted 125 attendees. The video of this webinar is now available.

http://cloud.ubuntu.com/2012/03/charm-school-webinar-video-available/

The Planet

Canonical Design Team: Notes from the Mobile World Congress 2012

The Canonical Design team shares event photos and reports on Canonical’s booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They were showcasing the Ubuntu for Android prototype as well as Ubuntu TV, and new offerings from Ubuntu One.

http://design.canonical.com/2012/03/mwc-2012/

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu One for Application Developers

Jono Bacon shares his experience working with Ubuntu One from a developer perspective. He explained how Ubuntu Accomplishments was designed with Ubuntu One as a core piece to sync, verify and validate accomplishments.

http://www.jonobacon.org/2012/03/06/ubuntu-one-for-application-developers/

Michael Hall: Faces of Ubuntu: The non-Developers

Michael Hall highlighted 3 non-developers who contributed to a variety of Quicklists and patches for Ubuntu 12.04. Hall posted pictures and brief descriptions of the key contributors, offering encouragement for other Ubuntu users to help improve the project.

http://mhall119.com/2012/03/faces-of-ubuntu-the-non-developers/

Alan Pope: Improved Unity Files Lens Call For Testing

Alan Pope issues a call for testing to the Ubuntu community for help to improve the Unity Files Lens. Testing requires installation of the unity-lens-files PPA (personal package archive) which he explains at:

http://popey.com/blog/2012/03/06/improved-unity-files-lens-call-for-testing/

Canonical Design Team: Choosing, moving, wallpapers

The wallpaper contest for the 12.04 cycle was kicked off in January, and has since gained nearly 3,000 submissions. The contest runs until March 15th, when judges will then sort through the candidates to select as many for inclusion in the release as possible.

http://hungfu.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/choosing-moving-wallpapers/

Michael Hall: Contributing to Unity for non-developers: Package patching

Michael Hall continues his series “Contributing to Unity for non-developers” by discussing package patching. He begins by discussing the important distinction between a code change and a package patch. He then uses the patching tool quilt to walk users through the process of turning a code change into a useful package patch.

http://mhall119.com/2012/03/contributing-to-unity-for-non-developers-package-patching/

Mark Shuttleworth: Government use of Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth discusses his interest in hearing from public service officials in order to strike up conversations about how Ubuntu could be used to deliver better software for government use. In this post he covers security certifications, local cultural customization, skills development, and more, closing with an invitation to collaborate: “If this is interesting to you, and you’re in a position to participate in building something that would actually get used in such a context, then please get in touch.”

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1056

Brian Murray: Confirming a bug task in Launchpad

Handling bugs is an important task for the Ubuntu community and they always need more volunteers to assist.

In the first of a series of very short videos, each showing one single aspect of dealing with bugs, Brian Murray explains how to confirm a bug task in Launchpad.

Murray’s blog post here: http://www.murraytwins.com/blog/?p=113

Direct YouTube link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl-cQDAlPFc

In The Press

Ubuntu for Android is an open-source treat in hands-on video

CNET was able to get a hands-on experience with Ubuntu for Android while at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A detailed video shows how Ubuntu for Android works between the two operating systems, as well as how applications can work between the two experiences.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/ubuntu-for-android-is-an-open-source-treat-in-hands-on-video-50007210/

Ubuntu Linux 12.04 One-Ups Windows and Mac, Shuttleworth Says

Katherine Noyes of PCWorld wrote about Mark Shuttleworth's blog post where he asserted that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS represents the first time “real desktop user experience innovation is available on a full production-ready enterprise-certified free software platform, free of charge, well before it shows up in Windows or MacOS."

"Still, I think it's interesting to hear the magnitude of Shuttleworth's assertions this time around. Ubuntu 12.04, apparently, isn't just another release, in Canonical's view--it's the first solid look at what Canonical wants its distro to be in the coming years, and how it plans to advance in a desktop market still dominated by Windows and Macs," Noyes noted.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/251367/ubuntu_linux_1204_oneups_windows_and_mac_shuttleworth_says.html

How Linux is changing lives in Zambia

Adam Oxford of Tech Radar does an in-depth report of work being done by several organizations in Zambia using open source software to increase communication within developing communities. The goal is to achieve this through broader availability of Internet access and computer labs, computer training, and other services. They have an “Ubuntu Campus” for their small technology training college “named in honour of a certain popular distribution and the ideal behind the name.” The article reports that they “also install open source alternatives such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Libre Office, Gimp, Audacity etc. We utilise Ubuntu as our primary distro, though we do keep tabs on other distros.”

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/how-linux-is-changing-lives-in-zambia-1067863

In The Blogosphere

Is Ubuntu 12.04 a Linux Game Changer?

Matt Hartley of Datamation writes about how, despite being critical of Unity, that Unity offers a stable configurable desktop experience. Hartley says, "Thanks to the HUD (heads up display), more Unity-based configuration options, support for Sandy Bridge, and improved power consumption, Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up to be a really solid release."

http://www.datamation.com/open-source/is-ubuntu-12.04-a-linux-game-changer-1.html

Exclusive Interview With Mark Shuttleworth, HUD, Ubuntu For Android And Much More

In this interview with Mark Shuttleworth, Swapnil Bhartiya asks for Shuttleworth’s thoughts regarding how far Ubuntu has come since 2004, the complicated desktop market, the upcoming LTS release, and more. A video of this interview is also included with the post.

http://www.muktware.com/news/3375/exclusive-interview-mark-shuttleworth-hud-ubuntu-android-and-much-more

Shuttleworth on the Ubuntu Linux 12.04 beta

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports on Mark Shuttleworth’s comments in a recent blog post regarding the current status of the Ubuntu 12.04 beta. He mentions the the “push-back” to the new Unity interface and notes that Shuttleworth’s post begins by thanking everyone who “stood by Canonical and me as we set out on this adventure,” and goes to discuss the advantages for developers, as well as innovating to make the desktop better.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/shuttleworth-on-the-ubuntu-linux-1204-beta/10522

Privacy Settings in Ubuntu 12.04 Gets New Application Usage Dialog

Nekhelesh Raman discusses a new application usage dialogue that has landed in the privacy settings in Ubuntu 12.04, which shows users how often different applications are used. Raman also notes that, aside from some small bugs, “the Privacy Manager is otherwise stable, and provides the user with an array of features to respect his/her privacy.”

http://www.muktware.com/articles/3376/privacy-settings-ubuntu-1204-gets-new-application-usage-dialog

Ubuntu 12.04 .ISO Will Remain CD Sized

Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! reports on Stéphane Graber's explanation that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will continue to fit on a standard CD, although the file size will increase to 703MB.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/03/ubuntu-12-04-iso-will-remain-cd-sized/

Beta 1 reviews

The beta1 reviews keep rolling in! The following caught the attention of our editors:

In Other News

Improving Hardware Support in Ubuntu

In this post at the Canonical blog, Anthony Wong, Project Technical Lead at Canonical, shares a “distilled” version of an “improving hardware support in Ubuntu” presentation he gave at the 2011 Hardware Summit in December. Wong covers collaboration with OEMs, which includes tracking and driving code changes from OEMs to make sure they make it upstream, and shares diagrams to help understand how the process fits in to a release cycle.

http://blog.canonical.com/2012/03/07/improving-hardware-support-in-ubuntu/

Full Circle Magazine – Virtualization Series Special Edition

“The single-topic Special Editions continue with Lucas Westerman’s complete series of articles parts 1 through 6.”

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/2012/03/11/virtualisation-series-special-edition/

Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings

Upcoming Meetings and Events

For upcoming meetings and events please visit the calendars at fridge.ubuntu.com: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/calendars/

Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04 and 11.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 8.04 Updates

End of life - April 2013 (Server)

Ubuntu 10.04 Updates

End of Life - April 2013 (Desktop) - April 2015 (Server)

Ubuntu 10.10 Updates

End of Life - April 2012

Ubuntu 11.04 Updates

End of Life - October 2012

Ubuntu 11.10 Updates

End of Life - April 2013

Subscribe

Get your copy of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter delivered each week to you via email at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-news

Archives

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

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:

  • Charles Profitt
  • Emma Marshall
  • Elizabeth Krumbach
  • Nathan Dyer
  • Benjamin Kerensa
  • Matt Rudge
  • And many others

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

Feedback

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.

Except where otherwise noted, this issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License CCL.png

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue256 (last edited 2012-03-12 22:08:42 by lyz)