Issue27

Contents

  1. In This Issue
  2. General Community News
    1. Kubuntu Developer's Meeting
    2. New CD/DVD Image Testing Forum
    3. Use the Ubuntu IRC Channels Securely
  3. LoCo News
    1. Chicago Team Meeting
    2. Munich User Meeting
    3. German LocoTeam Forum's Post Count: Half a million
  4. This Week's Quiz
  5. Changes In Feisty
  6. In The Press
    1. Ubuntu turns Pro
    2. Google sponsors Edubuntu notebooks for Fijian schools
  7. Meetings and Events
    1. Tuesday, January 9, 2007
      1. LoCo Team Meeting
      2. Forum Council Meeting
      3. Community Council Meeting
    2. Tuesday, January 16th 2007
      1. Technical Board Meeting
    3. Wendsday, January 17th 2007
      1. Edubuntu Meeting
    4. Thursday, January 18th 2007
      1. Ubuntu Development Team Meeting
  8. Community Spotlight
  9. Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10
    1. Security Updates
    2. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates
    3. Ubuntu 6.10 Updates
  10. Bug Stats
  11. UWN 28: A sneak peek
  12. Archives and RSS Feed
  13. Additional Ubuntu News
  14. Conclusion
  15. Credits
  16. Feedback

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 27 for January 1st - 7th, 2007. In this issue we cover the Kubuntu Developer Meeting, Google & Edubuntu, CD/DVD image testing, upcoming meetings, upcoming events, feisty fawn changes, and much more!

Translations: (Portuguese, Spanish,Français)

In This Issue

  • Kubuntu Developer Meeting
  • Google sponsors Edubuntu notebooks for Fijian schools
  • New CD/DVD Image Testing Forum
  • Use the Ubuntu IRC Channels Securely
  • Ubuntu turns "Pro"
  • Upcoming meetings and events
  • Bug stats

  • Security notices & Updates for Ubuntu 6.10 and 6.06

  • Feisty Fawn Changes
  • Ubuntu Trivia Quiz Update

  • German LocoTeam Forum's Post Count: Half a million

  • LoCo Team Meetings

General Community News

Kubuntu Developer's Meeting

The Kubuntu Developers held a meeting on January 9th, 2007 in #ubuntu-meeting to discuss and decide on the future development of Kubuntu 7.04 (The Feisty Fawn), as well as hold an interview for the latest applicants for Kubuntu Membership.

The Kubuntu Teams welcomes three new members to the group:

Discussions covered the possibility of a new Windeco style for Kubuntu 7.04. Martin Böhm expressed his interest in the Polyester Windeco. Further discussion will be required with the Kubuntu Art Team for a final conclusion. Gwenview, the image viewer in Kubuntu, was discussed on its future as the default image viewer in Kubuntu. As it stands Gwenview will remain the default viewer. A central revision control system (RCS) was discussed (i.e., Alioth at svn.debian.org) to host the debian/ directories for Kubuntu related packages. Group opinions were stated that this could possibly make it easier for more people to contribute and cooperate. The "No More Source Packages" specification, if and when implemented, would remove the need for a RCS and make it easier for everyone to contribute. KMilo was also discussed about changing the style of the pop-up received when increasing or decreasing volume on a laptop (or any machine with a multimedia keyboard that has volume buttons). As it stands the team will look into creating one solution, similar to the Amarok OSD, that will pop-up for applications such as Amarok, KMilo, K3b, and more. Overall it was a very productive meeting with a lot of great ideas.

For future Kubuntu Developer Meetings, please review https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Meetings. To read the IRC meeting logs from this meeting, please review http://people.ubuntu.com/~fabbione/irclogs/ubuntu-meeting-2007-01-08.html starting at 11:00 and carrying over to http://people.ubuntu.com/~fabbione/irclogs/ubuntu-meeting-2007-01-09.html.

New CD/DVD Image Testing Forum

Henrik Omma announced a new Feisty Fawn CD/DVD Image Testing Forum located at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=201. Here is a very simple way for you to get involved in the Ubuntu community. When the Herd 2, the next pre-release, image is released on or around January, 11, 2007, all you have to do is download the ISO file, burn it to a CD-ROM, and install it on your computer. Do note however that being a pre-release, there are going to be bugs and possibly some instabilities, so it is not recommended just yet to be run as a stable operating system. There is more information in the Sticky Threads portion of the new forum - please review prior to your testing.

Use the Ubuntu IRC Channels Securely

If you are using IRC to connect to any of the Ubuntu IRC channels, the IRC Operator's Team would like to inform you that to make your connection secure you should use port 8001 when connecting to any of the Freenode servers. There has been a recent surge in people exploiting vulnerable routers of IRC users. Using port 8001 will prevent you from being disconnected from one of these DCC attacks. It is also recommended that you download and install the latest firmware for your router. Do note that all these attacks do is disconnect you from the IRC server. So to avoid being banned from a channel due to join and part flooding, fix your settings now. One other sidenote, when in one of the Ubuntu IRC channels, avoid using the word DCC as well, as it will get you automatically kicked (KLined) from the network.

LoCo News

Chicago Team Meeting

The Ubuntu Chicago Local Community Team will hold a team meeting on Saturday, January 13th. The event will be at the Elmhurst Public Library in Elmhurst, IL. The team will be discussing the future of the LoCo by looking at business and marketing ventures, local support options, structure and more. If you or someone you know is in the Chicago land area and might be interested is encouraged to make an appearance. More information can be located at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ChicagoTeam/Meetings as well as http://chi.ubuntu-us.org.

Munich User Meeting

According to Sebastian Heinlein, the next meeting of Munich’s Ubuntu user group will be on Saturday, the 13th January at the Café Bar Froschkönig in the Nymphenburgerstraße 110. It will start at 5 o’clock. Please see here for more information about the cafe.

German LocoTeam Forum's Post Count: Half a million

At 00:30 on the 8th January 2007, the German Ubuntu LocoTeam forum reached half a million posts. That means an average of around 614 posts a day! Visit http://www.ubuntuusers.de to see all the hustle for yourself.

This Week's Quiz

Thanks to the UbuntuTrivia Team, headed by Alexandre Vassalotti, we had another exciting quiz this week.

Quizmaster : Alexandre Vassalotti (theCore) Champion : Jason Ribeiro (jrib) Sponsor : Jenda Vančura (jenda) Prize : Ubuntu Poster (yep, a poster)

Upcoming for next week:

Sponsor : Jason Ribeiro (jrib) Prize : Ubuntu Poster

And the week after that:

Sponsor : The German Ubuntu Association (thanks to Julius Bloch!) Prize : Ubuntu 6.10(Edgy Eft) x86 Limited DVD Edition

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

To give a quiz, contact Alexandre Vassalotti (theCore) - we will probably find you a spot.

To donate a prize, please contact Jenda Vancura (jenda) - your generosity is appreciated. The generic prize is an Ubuntu Poster ($5 value).

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 him/her. By winning the quiz and foregoing the prize, you donate it for the next quiz. This is especially appreciated if you are a frequent winner.

Changes In Feisty

A new version of Thunderbird, a popular email client by the Mozilla Foundation was uploaded. It was made to sync the latest Thunderbird package with the Ubuntu repositories, and includes improved stability and several security fixes.

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. In 6.5, a screen has been added to control the log file creation, It's now possible from TestDisk file listing to copy files from NTFS partition to a selected directory, NTFS MFT can also be repaired in more cases, A compilation problem has been fixed with old version of libntfs, and documentation has been fixed, it now displays correctly with IE. For more info on TestDisk, see http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

cdrkit is a suite of programs for recording CDs and DVDs, blanking CD-RW media, creating ISO-9660 filesystem images, extracting audio CD data, and more. The programs included in the cdrkit package were originally derived from several sources, most notably mkisofs by Eric Youngdale and others, cdda2wav by Heiko Eissfeldt, and cdrecord by Jörg Schilling. However, cdrkit is not affiliated with any of these authors; it is now an independent project. 1.1.1 has been released, featuring some bugfixes, some functionality extensions and documentation updates.

GNOME System Tools is a set of applications that is working to improve the life of Unix/Linux system administrator. It is useful for managing shares, time and date, runlevels, users / groups and more. GNOME System Tools has been updated to included more translations, better networking support, a number of bug fixes, and more support for several distributions.

Eqonomize! is a personal accounting software, with focus on efficiency and ease of use for the small household economy. Eqonomize! provides a complete solution, with bookkeeping by double entry and support for scheduled recurring transactions, security investments, and budgeting. It gives a clear overview of past and present transactions, and development of incomes and expenses, with descriptive tables and charts, as well as an approximation of future account values. Eqonomize! 0.4 is now available with many bug fixes and several exciting new features: Split transactions; Refunds and repayments; Account ledger; QIF import and export; Enhanced CSV import; Application and mime icons (by Elias Probst); Backup on save, crash recovery, and option to automatically save on exit; Manual; French and German translations; and many bug fixes and minor enhancements.

KeyTouch is a program that lets you easily configure the extra function keys of your keyboard. This means that you can define, for every individual function key, what to do if it is pressed. Instead of having a CD configure these keys for your OS (some CDs may not work on GNU/Linux), the user is the one defines what their keyboard does with KeyTouch. The latest version includes a graphical user interface for easy configuration.

Linux Terminal Server Project 0.129 was uploaded by Oliver Grawert. The new version includes a new printerserver called Jetpipe and several bug fixes.

Azureus implements the BitTorrent protocol using java language and comes bundled with many invaluable features for both beginners and advanced users. Azureus 2.5.0 includes a wizard to simplify sending a link to content to a friend or to embed in a web page (e.g. a blog); a new feature that allows you to control your upload speed based on the latency of your internet connection as gauged by pinging other members of the Distributed Database; OSX: Open .torrent files into Azureus via Finder/Desktop/etc; 'Do not download' files handled more consistently with respect to download completion; Renaming of a download directories; Moving of data files on torrent removal from Azureus; Signed updates and plugins for improved security; Interface improvements - more information: date added, idle times, new info view, file piece view; more per-torrent options; Debug information generator; and much more. Notable bug fixes include: LAN Peer Finder retains peers more effectively; explicit LAN peer identification and reduced CPU usage when connected to large numbers of peers. New plugin: AzSMRC (see:http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_list.php). For the full changelog, see http://azureus.sourceforge.net/changelog.php?version=2.5.0.0

digiKam Image Plugins are a collection of plugins for digiKam Image Editor and ShowFoto. These plugins add new image treatment options like color management, filters, or special effects.

The KDE System Settings has been updated to the SVN build as of January 4th. System Settings is a configuration tool for many KDE settings including time and date, networking, users / groups and much more.

KDE 3.5.5, a small micro release, was uploaded to the repositories. The new version includes numerous bug fixes including several crashers, performance improvements (such as improved loading speed of background images and faster tab switching in Konqueror). INFAMOUS BUG CLOSURE: If icons are dragged outside the desktop area, they are now jerked back in. Fixes the long-hated issue with the desktop becoming scrollable.

KTorrent is BitTorrent client for KDE. The 2.1rc1 release has improved upload and download performance, a new IDEAL style GUI (like KDevelop), new plugins and of course many bug fixes.

PostgreSQL is a highly-scalable, SQL compliant, object-relational database management system. This release adds many functionality and performance improvements that were requested by users, including: query language enhancements, lower memory usage, and better concurrency.

Seahorse is a GNOME application for managing encryption keys. It also integrates with Nautilus, Gedit, as well as other encryption operations. This release adds new functionality, fixes bugs, and adds further documentation.

Pingus is a free clone of the game Lemmings(TM). Pingus 0.6.0 contains one island with 22 playable tutorial levels. This is the first playable release ever of Pingus.

Gossip Telepathy uses the Gossip application which is an instant messaging client for GNOME. It is built on the open protocol Jabber, and provides an clean and easy-to-use interface. Telepathy is a flexible communications framework that uses the quote "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" The goal of the project is to provide a unified framework for all forms of real-time communications.

The Telepathy Stream Engine has also been updated recently to go along with the other Telepathy updates. The engine handles the streams created and used by the Telepathy framework

Gossip is an instant messaging client for GNOME which is layered on top of the open protocol Jabber. It provides a clean and easy-to-use interface, providing users of the GNOME desktop a friendly way to keep in touch with their friends. This latest release is a bug fix release as well as adding functionality such as the ability to join one group chat from within another group chat.

gtk+2.0 2.10.7 was recently uploaded. GtkNotebook: Tab reordering is a less intrusive, Rendering fixes on win32; GtkTreeView: Column resizing works correctly in right-to-left languages, Many scrolling bugs have been fixed; GtkTextView: Improved scrolling during DND; GtkRecentManager is more robust against bad URIs; Print support: The cups backend works with 'BrowseShortNames Off' in the cups configuration, Multi-valued options are properly passed to cups, Fix build with cups 1.3, A few IPP compliance issues have been fixed, Make the lpr backend work on BSD; Input methods: GtkEntryCompletion works with input methods, The Thai input method has been replace by a functional Thai and Lao input method based on libthai; Accessibility support: GtkMessageDialog sets accessible name role explicitly; Theme support: The semantics of the gtk-color-scheme setting has been slightly changed. Values from rc files are still merged together, but the X setting just overrides the prior table; GdkPixbuf: gdk_pixbuf_loader_write() now closes the loader when returning FALSE, as documented, The BMP loader supports more BMP variants, including transparency and 10-bit channels; updated translations; and over 100 bugs fixed. INFAMOUS BUG CLOSURE: Bug #69977 - "Unable to login after gnome-theme-manager crash".

Several patches were applied to VNC this week to fix security vulnerabilities.

XChat is an IRC chat program for both Linux and Windows, and is the default IRC client in Ubuntu. It allows you to join multiple IRC channels (chat rooms) at the same time, talk publicly, private one-on-one conversations etc. Even file transfers are possible. In the 2.8.0 release the biggest addition has been the tray icon (aka Notification Area) various translations where updated, and a brand new channel list window.

TEG is a round-based computer board game. The idea for this Open Source program came from 'Plan Táctico y Estratégico de la Guerra', a game which has it's origin in Argentina, but it differs in many aspects of the rules. Main changes in the 0.11.1 version aretranslations updates for French, Brazilian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Polish, and fixes to the metaserver.

Liferea is an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader, a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports a number of different feed formats including RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML. Liferea is intended to be a fast, easy to use, and easy to install news aggregator for GTK+/GNOME. The version that just got in is 1.2.2 and is generally a bug fix release.

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 2.17.5. Again, 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. Full changes available at: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-games/2.17/gnome-games-2.17.5.news

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.

Klear is a graphical TV viewer with an integrated recording system for Linux. It's designed as a DVB desktop application with all common features. A clear, nifty and feature rich DVB viewer and recorder for your desktop machine. klear 0.6.0 has added the Italian and Catalan translations, fixed some bugs with fullscreen mode and various bug fixes like the crash when pressing ESC in main window.

KMPlayer is a video player plugin for Konqueror and basic MPlayer/Xine/ffmpeg/ffserver/VDR frontend for KDE. The KMPlayer KPart plugin for Konqueror mimics QuickTime, MS Media Player and RealPlayer plugin browser plugins. 0.9.3a was the first maintenance release with a few small fixes at various places. You can check out the changelog for the whole story: http://kmplayer.kde.org/changelog.php

ProFTPD is a secure, highly configurable FTP server software. It's current version 1.3.0, recently added in Feisty with many improvements made to improve stability, many requested configuration directives and general bug fixes.

Gnome System Monitor is a GNOME process viewer and system monitor with an easy-to-use interface. The System Monitor has some nice features, such as a tree view for process dependencies, icons for processes, the ability to hide processes that you don't want to see, graphical time histories of CPU/memory/swap usage, the ability to kill processes needing root access, as well as the standard features that you might expect from a process viewer. The new version is 2.17.5 and it's mainly bug fixes and general speed improvement.

gThumb is the default image viewer and browser on Ubuntu. Latest unstable development version 2.9.1 has been added to Feisty with a long list of changes: Added red-eye removal tool, Added mousewheel navigation, Added new shortcuts, many EXIF enhancements and Fixed image scaling memory leak, and many many more. Get the whole list from: http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/

A new version of GNoise (0.1.15), a GTK+ based wave file editor has been added. The primary design objectives of GNoise are stability, speed, and the ability to handle big files. It supports common editing functions such as cut, copy, paste, fade in/out, reverse, interpolate, normalize and more with unlimited undo. Changes in this version include adding markers and cue points, Alpha 64bit support and changes in the way looping is handled.

A new version of Wine (0.9.28),a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux has hit Feisty. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop. Changes in this version include fixes to OpenGL in child, better mouse support in games, beginnings of new state management in Direct3D, and as always, lots of bug fixes.

In The Press

Ubuntu turns Pro

Infoworld had an interesting article on how key open source projects are maturing into "enterprise ready". It mentions Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) with it's long term 5 years support. Read the article at: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/01/01FEtoysource_1.html

Google sponsors Edubuntu notebooks for Fijian schools

Edubuntu was featured when Google's Open Source Program Office donated via the Imara Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10 Lenovo Thinkpads containing Edubuntu pre-installed on them. ITWire has the whole story: http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/8392/53/

Meetings and Events

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

LoCo Team Meeting

Start: 15:00 UTC End: 16:00 UTC

Forum Council Meeting

Start: 16:00 UTC End: 18:00 UTC

Community Council Meeting

Start: 21:00 UTC End: 23:00 UTC

Tuesday, January 16th 2007

Technical Board Meeting

Start: 20:00 UTC End: 22:00 UTC

Wendsday, January 17th 2007

Edubuntu Meeting

Start: 20:00 End: 22:00

Thursday, January 18th 2007

Ubuntu Development Team Meeting

Start: 08:00 UTC End: 10:00 UTC

  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting

Community Spotlight

Continuing the efforts that are being made by Ubuntu to simplify the desktop experience as much as possible for users, the "ZeroConfNetworking" specification has been implemented for Feisty. Zeroconf Networking is a collection of protocols which try to configure your network automatically, leaving users with minimal intervention and trying to give them clear information to take decisions when conflicts come up. The main advantage behind this new spec is making life easier for users without a local DHCP server for a network, having Ubuntu correctly configuring everything necessary for the network to work properly.

Some use cases for this spec:

  • Claudia and Mary set up an adhoc wireless network between between their laptops. They want to be able to communicate without needing to do anything special with interface address assignments.
  • John's home server was booted and it got a link-local address. He adds a DHCP server to his network, and boots his laptop, which receives a regular DHCP-assigned address. He wants his server and laptop to be able to communicate without fiddling with their interfaces.
  • Ellen uses a name server that makes a .local top-level-domain available. She upgrades her computer from Edgy to Feisty, where link-local addresses are assigned by default. She gets a notification that the unicast .local TLD and the link-local .local domain conflict with each other, along with instructions on how to disable link-local networking.

Changes to implement this spec where limited to making this functionality available without breaking current configurations to avoid problems when users upgrade from 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

As always, for more information on ZeroConfNetworking you can turn to the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZeroConfNetworking

Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 6.10 Updates

Bug Stats

  • Open (20871) +139 over last week
  • Critical (20) -1 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (10631) +92 over last week
  • Unassigned (15810) +185 over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (70500) +606 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 28: A sneak peek

  • New Feature: Community Spotlight - Process of the Week;
  • Community Council Meeting recap;
  • more Feisty changes;
  • 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.

If you'd like to read the UWN in your native language, please check http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter for a list of translations.

See you next week!

Credits

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Cody Somerville
  • Freddy Martinez
  • Martin Albisetti
  • Jenda Vančura
  • Richard Johnson
  • 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).

If you'd like to contribute an article to the next issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, please feel free to the edit the wiki page for the next issue: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue28

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