Issue29

Contents

  1. In This Issue
  2. General Community News
    1. Ubuntu Scribes Team formed
    2. Ubuntu Support Team
    3. Ubuntu Wiki Weekend
  3. LoCo News
    1. Newly Approved Teams
    2. Ubuntu-Tamil tackle KDE
    3. US LoCo Consistency
  4. This Week's Quiz
  5. Changes In Feisty
  6. In The Press
    1. Linux Magazine names Canonical Ltd. as one of the top 20 companies to watch in 2007
    2. Kubuntu at World Social Forum
    3. OSDL 2006 Desktop Linux Client Survey
  7. Meetings and Events
    1. Technical Board 2007-01-16
    2. Upcoming Meetings and Events
      1. Thursday, January 25, 2007
        1. Feisty Developer Sprint
      2. Friday, January 26, 2007
        1. Feisty Developer Sprint
      3. Tuesday, January 30, 2007
        1. Technical Board Meeting
      4. Wednesday, January 31, 2007
        1. Edubuntu Meeting
        2. Xubuntu Meeting
      5. Thursday, February 1, 2007
        1. Ubuntu Development Team Meeting
  8. Community Spotlight
    1. Feature of the Week: Gnome Control Center
  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. Archives and RSS Feed
  12. Additional Ubuntu News
  13. Conclusion
  14. Credits
  15. Feedback

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 29 for the week January 15th - 27th. In this issue we cover community news, loco news, weekly quiz news, changes in feisty, osdl survey results, "Linux Magazine names Canonical Ltd as one of the top 20 companies to watch in 2007", Technical Board meeting update, upcoming meetings and events, updates and security notices, bug stats, and much more.

Translations: Español Português Français

In This Issue

  • New Team: Ubuntu Scribes
  • Ubuntu Support Team

  • LoCo News

  • Weekly Quiz Update
  • Changes in Feisty
  • OSDL Survey Says: Ubuntu most popular Linux Distro
  • Canonical named in top 20
  • Technical Board meeting cancellation
  • Upcoming meetings and events

  • 6.06 & 6.10 updates and security notices

  • Bug Stats

General Community News

Ubuntu Scribes Team formed

Jeremy Austin-Bardo (Ausimage) and Chris Oattes (Seeker`) have formed the Ubuntu Scribes Team. This team will work to improve the process of publishing timely and effective summaries of Ubuntu-related meetings. They are planning a meeting for February 5th, 2007, at 8 PM UTC in #ubuntu-meeting. Anyone interested in sharing his/her ideas or helping should drop by.

Ubuntu Support Team

The Support Team focuses on providing free support to Ubuntu users. Ubuntu is gaining users every day, and they will probably need help at some point. Another goal is organizing the support so that users can get quality help fast. The team will work to identify common usability problems in Ubuntu.

To get involved, join the team on Launchpad at http://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-helpteam. See also the mailing list at http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-helpteam.

Ubuntu Wiki Weekend

First initiated by K.Mandla on Ubuntuforums (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=319989), another special Wiki Weekend was held on January 20th and 21st, 2007, to improve the currency of Ubuntu documentation (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WikiTeam/WikiWeekend).

Keep up with what has been going on here: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=341385

The Documentation Team still needs your help on a daily basis. To contribute, please read the WikiGuide, and contact the Documentation Team on IRC (irc.freenode.net) at #ubuntu-doc or on the mailing list at https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc.

LoCo News

Newly Approved Teams

At the Community Council meeting on January 9th, 2007, the Canadian and Iranian teams were accepted as official locoteams. Welcome aboard, guys and gals!

Ubuntu-Tamil tackle KDE

The Ubuntu Tamil Team has undertaken an effort to translate KDE into the Tamil language. Sri Ramadoss M wrote to the LoCo Contacts Mailing List to announce the following: "Glad to share with you all that we have taken the responsibility of KDE translation to Tamil. So as far as KDE is concerned the upstream - downstream problem is now resolved to a greater extent." See https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/2007-January/000994.html for the announcement.

US LoCo Consistency

The US LoCo Teams are currently working towards creating a standard for LoCo Team naming within the United States. Currently team boundaries consist of conglomerates of states, individual states, cities and even suburbs. This current structure can be confusing when it comes to the naming of teams. Suggestions have also been made to rearrange teams into a per-state structure with chapters. More information will follow as discussion continues and decisions are made. You can read up on the discussion so far at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/2007-January/000996.html.

This Week's Quiz

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

Quizmaster

Alexandre Vassalotti

Champion

Travis Watkins

Sponsor

Jason Ribeiro

Prize

Ubuntu Stickers (Substitute Prize)

Upcoming for next week:

Sponsor

Ubuntu Germany (Julius Bloch)

Prize

Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) 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 Vančura (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

Thunar is a modern file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment. Thunar has been designed from the ground up to be fast and easy-to-use. Its user interface is clean and intuitive, fast and responsive with fast startup time and directory load time. A new version has entered Feisty, Thunar 0.5.0, that includes improvements to removable device management, translations and more extensive documentation.

Lybniz is an easy to use mathematical function graph plotter using pyGTK. In version 1.3-1, more documentation, minor bug fixes, under-the-hood changes (many for PEP8 conformance), and internationalization support were added.

BibleTime is a Bible Study application for KDE 3.x and provides a simple to use but powerful user interface. Major improvements have been made to the search capability, and old leftover code that caused problems has been removed. The current version is 1.6.2.

Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems written with security in mind. Dovecot works with standard mbox and Maildir formats, and it's fully compatible with UW-IMAP and Courier IMAP servers' implementations of them as well as with mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly. Dovecot 1.0.rc17 has been added to Feisty with many bug fixes.

The Smart Package Manager project has the ambitious objective of creating smart and portable algorithms for solving adequately the problem of managing software upgrades and installation. This tool works in all major distributions and will bring notable advantages over native tools currently in use (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc.). The Smart 0.50~rc1 release has a load of bug fixes, small improvements, and one huge feature that was being planned for a long time. Smart 0.50~rc1 now integrates changes in the transaction algorithm that make it able to survive massive whole-distribution upgrades with good results and in acceptable timings!

Sonata is a lightweight GTK+ music client for the Music Player Daemon (MPD). It aims to be efficient (no toolbar, main menu, or statusbar), user-friendly, and clean. Sonata 1.9-1 has improved artwork support by checking if it exists on disk before fetching it, has added stream support, now allows specifying search terms for remote album art, and has additional fixes.

ScanErrLog 2.01 is a Python module that allows you to parse Apache error_log files and present their data in decreasing occurrence order of error messages. This is particularly useful if you want to quickly solve the most annoying problems Web visitors encounter on your site. It also includes minor tweaks and bug fixes.

pyNeighborhood is a GUI frontend for samba tools such as smbclient, smbmount, etc. It's written in Python and uses the GTK+ 2 toolkit with pyGTK implementation. It's used as an SMB network browser for Linux and X11. pyNeighborhood 0.4, packaged by Cody A.W. Somerville, introduces GUI improvements, features an improved share-scanning algorithm and group browsing using "msbrowse", and contains other bug fixes.

Pure-FTPd is a free, secure, production-quality and standards-conformant FTP server. It doesn't provide useless bells and whistles but focuses on efficiency and ease of use. It provides simple answers to common needs, plus unique useful features for personal users as well as hosting providers. Pure-FTPd 1.0.2 now has UTF-8 support and client-to-fs charset conversions. Large files are supported by default. OPTS MLST and SITE UTIME commands have been implemented. Pure-FTPd 1.0.21 is probably the release with the best performance ever: Thanks to some network optimizations, there have been huge performance improvements while transferring many small files.

OpenSync is a synchronization framework that is platform- and distribution-independent. It consists of a powerful sync-engine and several plugins that can be used to connect to devices. OpenSync is very flexible and capable of synchronizing any type of data, including contacts, calendars, tasks, notes and files. OpenSync 0.19 now runs each plugin as a separate process, adds a VCalendar converter, improves the ICalendar converter, and adds support for a wide range of applications and devices.

Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented remote mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP and PPP connections). It supports every remote mail protocol in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of IMAP, ETRN, and ODMR. It even supports IPv6 and IPSEC. Fetchmail 6.3.6 fixes two security issues: a password disclosure vulnerability and a denial of service vulnerability.

Doodle is a desktop search engine for Linux. It searches your hard drive for files using pattern matching on metadata. It extracts file format-specific metadata, allowing the index to be searched rapidly. It is similar to locate but can take advantage of information such as ID3 tags. Doodle 0.6.6 fixes a bug on big-endian systems and an error in handling empty metadata entries. It also adds support for pkg-config.

gwhois is a generic whois client (and server) that strives to know the right server to query for each and every top level domain (TLD) and IP address. The gwhois 20070112 release adds a method to make multiple lookups for the same query. This is needed for the .vg TLD, which provides different (complementing) data through whois vs. the Web interfaces.

Roundup is a simple-to-use and -install issue-tracking system with command-line, web and e-mail interfaces. It is based on the winning design from Ka-Ping Yee in the Software Carpentry "Track" design competition. Roundup 1.2.1 is a minor bug fix release.

CapiSuite is an ISDN telecommunication suite providing easy-to-use telecommunication functions that can be controlled from Python scripts. It uses a CAPI-compatible driver for accessing the ISDN-hardware. CapiSuite 0.4.5 fixes some important bugs in the stable 0.4.x branch, whose bugs are now (hopefully) fixed. Some changes were made necessary by new versions of external tools and libraries.

Pathological is an enriched clone of the game "Logical" by Rainbow Arts. To solve a level, fill each wheel with four marbles of matching color. Various board elements such as teleporters, switches, filters, etc., make the game interesting and challenging. The Pathological 1.1.3 release is a small bug fix and polish release.

Duplicity backs up directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space-efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Duplicity 0.4.2 adds a few user-submitted patches to fix a few bugs.

ReleaseForge is an open source utility designed for the administrators and release engineers of SourceForge projects. ReleaseForge allows you to easily create new SourceForge project releases and edit existing releases in a quicker and friendlier manner than the SourceForge web interface. ReleaseForge 1.1 contains a fix for a bug introduced in 1.0 that occurred when creating a new release. Additionally, a "Re-Guess" feature was added to effortlessly reset all file attributes when editing an existing release.

MySQL Query Browser is a visual tool for creating, executing, and optimizing SQL queries for your MySQL Database Server. The MySQL Query Browser gives you a complete set of drag-and-drop tools to visually build, analyze, and manage your queries. MySQL Query Browser 1.2.5beta fixes errors on 64-bit arches when connecting to pre-MySQL 5.x.

PHPSysInfo is a customizable PHP Script that parses /proc and formats information nicely. It will display information about system facts like Uptime, CPU, Memory, PCI devices, SCSI devices, IDE devices, Network adapters, Disk usage, and more. PHPSysInfo 2.5.2 is a bug fix release.

LightTPD is a webserver with focus on security, speed, compliance, and flexibility. It has a small memory footprint compared to other webservers, effective management of the cpu-load, and an advanced feature set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more). LightTPD 1.4.13 solves a few longstanding bugs, and a general polish has been applied.

GNU Radio is a collection of software that, when combined with minimal hardware, allows the construction of radios where the actual waveforms transmitted and received are defined by software. The GNU Radio 3.0.2 release is a minor bug fix release. Automake 1.10 is now supported, and a few missing files were added to the distribution.

soundKonverter is a frontend developed for the KDE desktop to various audio converters. It is extensible via plugins and supports a large range of backends. soundKonverter 0.3 is a major release involving big makeovers like CD ripping, tagging support, basic support for hybrid compression, and general GUI cleanup.

Marble is meant to be a generic geographical map widget. It shows the earth as a sphere but doesn't make use of any hardware acceleration (NO OpenGL). So although it might look similar to professional applications like Google Earth or Nasa World Wind it's rather meant to be a lightweight multipurpose widget for KDE. For more information about Marble, see http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2412.

ClamTk is a GUI front-end for ClamAV using gtk2-perl. It is designed to be an easy-to-use frontend for Linux systems. Version 2.27, uploaded by Daniel Holbach, includes new artwork, minor GUI enhancements, additional translations, the ability to select multiple files with the "scan file" option, improvements to stop functionality, and numerous other tweaks.

Catfish, a new package to Feisty, is a handy file searching tool for Linux and UNIX. Basically, it is a frontend that provides a unified interface for different search engines (daemons). The interface is intentionally lightweight and simple, using only GTK+ 2. You can configure it to your needs by using several command line options. Supported backends are currently find, (s)locate, doodle, tracker and beagle. 0.1, packaged by Cody A.W. Somerville, is the first stable release and includes numerous bug fixes and UI improvements.

SQLite is a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine. Version 3.3.10 includes the following changes: Fix bugs in the implementation of the new sqlite3_prepare_v2() API that can lead to segfaults; Fix 1-second round-off errors in the strftime() function; Enhance the windows OS layer to provide detailed error codes; Work around a win2k problem so that SQLite can use single-character database file names; Correctly set user_version and schema_version pragma column names in the result set; Update documentation.

IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System. The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user's way. IceWM 1.2.30 changes include battery status cleanups, a new option (BatteryPollingPeriod), a bug fix for focus after minimizing all windows, a migration of Themes selection to the Settings menu, an addition of Settings -> Focus menu (config saved to ~/.icewm/focus_mode as FocusMode=1,2 or 0), a bug fix for the startMinimized window option, and the new settings MapInactiveOnTop (default 1) and RequestFocusOnAppRaise (when FocusOnAppRaise=0).

In The Press

Linux Magazine names Canonical Ltd. as one of the top 20 companies to watch in 2007

Canonical Ltd. announced that it has been named one of the 'Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2007' by Linux Magazine. Canonical was selected as one of the companies best positioned in the coming year to spur Linux and Open Source adoption while delivering on the immediate needs of the marketplace.

For more information, see http://www.ubuntu.com/news/CanonicalInLinuxMagsTop20.

Kubuntu at World Social Forum

Kubuntu was on hand at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, according to allAfrica.com. Windows was banned and all the conference's machines were running GNU/Linux. "Participants attending WSF say that this was a gesture done as a way of promoting the free social movement at the same time also as a way of fighting Microsoft's 'imperialistic tendencies.'" The International South Group Network distributed Kubuntu CDs.

OSDL 2006 Desktop Linux Client Survey

Each year the OSDL's (now part of the new Linux Foundation) Desktop Linux Working Group conducts a survey of how and why Linux is and isn't being used on the Desktop in various deployment situations. The purpose of this survey is to identify both technical and social barriers to Linux adoption as well as the key factors and trends driving current adoption. Among the more general findings were that application availability was the leading barrier - but not in terms of a lack of applications generally, moreso the lack of the particular applications people have grown accustomed to, and that factors pushing deployment were cost savings and that drivers for wireless and printing had improved, among other technical points.

Of particular interest for the Ubuntu community is question #6, "Which Linux Distributions is your organization running on the desktop?" In this section Ubuntu was named in 1280 responses - a whopping 49%! Other notable ones on the list were of course OpenSUSE/SLED, Fedora/RHEL, Debian, and Gentoo. So, way to go everybody for making Ubuntu awesome enough for that widespread acceptance, and we look forward to continuing progress and gains for both Ubuntu and Linux in general in next year's survey.

To read the full analysis, see http://developer.osdl.org/dev/dtl/2006survey-analysis.pdf.

Meetings and Events

Technical Board 2007-01-16

This meeting of the Technical Board Meeting could not be held due to a lack of quorum, primarily as a result of linux.conf.au (LCA). An additional meeting may be scheduled during the week of 2007-01-22/26 (watch ubuntu-devel-announce); otherwise it will resume as scheduled on 2007-01-30.

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Feisty Developer Sprint
  • End: 23:59
  • Start: 2007-01-22 09:00
  • End: 2007-01-26 23:59
  • Location: Oslo, Norway

Friday, January 26, 2007

Feisty Developer Sprint
  • End: 23:59
  • Start: 2007-01-22 09:00
  • End: 2007-01-26 23:59
  • Location: Oslo, Norway

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Technical Board Meeting

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Edubuntu Meeting

Xubuntu Meeting

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Ubuntu Development Team Meeting
  • Start: 21:00
  • End: 23:00
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting

Community Spotlight

Feature of the Week: Gnome Control Center

Gnome Control Center (g-c-c) is a centralized interface containing a variety of configuration applets ("capplets") for changing system settings and preferences, similar to KDE's KControl, Mac OS's System Preferences, and the MS Windows Control Panel. It includes such things as accessibility configuration, desktop fonts, keyboard and mouse properties, sound setup, desktop theme and background, user interface properties, and screen resolution, among other things. It is currently maintained in Ubuntu by the Ubuntu Core Development team.

While traditionally GNOME has employed the cascading System > Preferences / Administration, g-c-c provides an intuitive interface to the above settings without cluttering the menus as much. This has advantages and disadvantages, namely that it takes an extra click to launch an applet when opening g-c-c first, but is, for many, more comfortable aesthetically. In the newest version, it also categorizes applets and has a search filter to help locate the one you want.

Gnome Control Center is available on all supported versions of Ubuntu, but in various forms. Here is a glance at what it looks like in Edgy:

http://ubuntuforums.org/gallery/data/500/Screenshot232.png

If you would like to add it to your system, install the gnome-control-center package with your favorite package management application.

Now, g-c-c has also been given a bit of a face-lift in more recent developments. As noted before, the version in Feisty has a slightly different interface layout and some extra features, making it significantly more usable. Currently, Feisty has Gnome Control Center rather than the old menu layout by default. Here's a sneak peak of what things look like as of Herd 2:

http://ubuntuforums.org/gallery/data/500/g-c-c.png

If you're testing Feisty, this could be a fun item to watch, and if not, you're in for a pleasant change if you upgrade in April. Someone (goes by luna6) wrote a review of the version in Herd 2, and notably included a slew of fabulous screenshots, which you can check out at http://lunapark6.com/?p=2728 if you're curious.

Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 6.10 Updates

Bug Stats

  • Open (21098) + 225 over last week
  • Critical (22) + 1 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (10607) - 99 over last week
  • Unassigned (15949) + 139 over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (72617) + 1366 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/

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 A.W. Somerville
  • Isabelle Duchatelle
  • Martin Albisetti
  • Tony Yarusso
  • Daniel T. Chen
  • 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 to a future issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, please feel free to edit the appropriate wiki page.

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