Issue33

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #33 for the week March 18th - March 24th, 2007. In this issue we cover Feisty Fawn's beta release, newly approved Ubuntu members, the big effort the "Ubuntu Desktop Effects" team is doing, and all the buzz about Ubuntu going on in the press and the blogosphere.

UWN Translations

In This Issue

  • Feisty Fawn Beta released
  • New Ubuntu Members
  • Interview with Mark Shuttleworth
  • Team of the Week: Desktop Effects

General Community News

7.04 Beta Released

The march to the final release of 7.04 came this week, with the release of Betas for Ubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu and Kubuntu. You can read more about what has changed since 6.10 for Ubuntu at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeistyFawn/Beta and Kubuntu at https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Beta/Kubuntu. The official press release: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/Ubuntu704Beta

kubuntu-de.org interviews Jonathan Riddell about KDE 4

Kubuntu-de.org has interviewed Jonathan Riddell about KDE 4 and Kubuntu's plan for it. The interviewer asked about when end users might see a test version, with Jonathan commenting the libraries for KDE are already in the archives. You can read the whole interview, in German at http://www.kubuntu-de.org/nachrichten/software/kde/kde4-und-kubuntu and in English at http://www.kubuntu-de.org/interview-mit-riddell-zu-kde4-englisch

Google Summer of Code student application deadline is now March 27th

The deadline for student applications to Google's Summer of Code has now been moved to 5:00 PM Pacific time (12:00 AM UTC March 27, 2007). Further information can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2007/Students

Newly Approved Ubuntu Members

The last Community Council meeting approved a whole raft of new Ubuntu members. Read on for a quick bio on each.

  • Gabor Suveg
    • Gabor is the leader of the Hungarian Translation Team and has been involved in organizing and speaking at many OSS conferences like Hungarian Ubuntu Conference 2006. He is organizing the Feisty press release in Budapest. https://launchpad.net/~gsuveg

  • Eric Lake
    • Eric is the co-founder and leader of the Kentucky Local Community Team and an active member of the forums. He plans to start a charity project that will focus on providing PCs to people that can not afford to purchase one. https://launchpad.net/~ericlake

  • Tiago Faria
    • Tiago is the founder and maintainer of Ubuntu Weblogs. Tiago is a member of the Portuguese Ubuntu Translators, provides support on the Ubuntu-PT mailing list, and is translating Dapper Drake. He also maintains the Portuguese translation of the UWN. https://launchpad.net/~gouki

  • Martin Albisetti
    • Martin is the editor of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter and is active on other efforts of the Marketing Team. He founded and currently leads the Argentina Local Community Team, and is an official Spanish Translator. https://launchpad.net/~beuno

  • David Farning
  • Dave Murphy
    • Dave is co-authoring the second edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. He has represented the UK Loco Team at the recent Linux World Expo in London. Dave is a member of Ubuntu English (United Kingdom) translation team and has contributed translations to Dapper and Feisty. https://launchpad.net/~schwuk

  • Morgan Collett
    • Morgan was previously a launchpad developer and is currently working on making the South African Team more active. He is also hosting an Ubuntu Birds of a Feather discussion at the Digital Freedom Exposition in April. https://launchpad.net/~morgan

  • Cory Kontros

Albin Tonnerre joins MOTU

Albin Tonnerre has joined the ranks of MOTUs, primarily to work on Enlightenment packaging and reviewing of non-MOTU packaging. You can read the full announcement at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2007-March/023438.html

Development News

Matt Zimmerman evaluates two months of split development list

It has now been two months since the development mailing list was split into two parts. Matt Zimmerman has sent an email summarising the change as well as asking for advice on how to deal with topics that are posted to both -devel and -devel-discuss. A lively discussion resulted, with no real conclusion. You can read the start of the thread at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2007-March/023335.html.

New Bug tags, including Bite Size

Daniel Holbach has announced some new bug tags in Malone, including "bitesize" for very small tasks. You can read the entire announcement at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-March/000263.html.

Feedback requested on NFS work

Michael Vogt has requested feedback after discovering that users upgrading from 6.10 to 7.04 will have issues mounting NFS drives. He outlines a few different remedies, none of which are optimal. You can read the start of the discussion at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2007-March/023433.html.

Testing requested on the new desktop-effects and restricted-manager

New in Feisty are two different graphical utils, one to manage whether or not you want desktop effects via compiz and the other to tell you which non-free drivers you are using. As it is late in the development cycle, more testing is needed to make certain that they both work as needed. You can read how to help testing at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2007-March/023429.html.

New Kernel Team bug triage policies

Ben Collins, lead of the Kernel Team, has announced new bug triage guidelines for the kernel, in the hopes that workflow amongst the kernel team will be better. You can read the full email at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-March/000265.html

Bug traceback for the masses

After an application has crashed, the new apport bug tool grabs what is known as a backtrace. Usually these bug traces are useless on their own and need to "retraced" to get useful information for the developers. As such, bugs traces that need to be retraced can now be tagged as such and the retracing will happen automatically. You can read more about how to take advantage of this at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2007-March/023440.html.

Developing using Bazaar (bzr)

Matt Zimmerman sought feedback on the use of Bazaar, the distributed revision control system, for packaging, specifically regarding specific tools such as bzr-builddeb. You can read more about how to help at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2007-March/023399.html.

Longstanding bug reporting bug fixed

A longstanding bug in Ubuntu, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/7839, was fixed this week with the removal of reportbug, a tool inherited from Debian and the finishing of Apport, a new bug reporting tool in Ubuntu.

In The Press

OS News has a glowing review of Feisty. The article states Ubuntu has a found a good middle ground between hard core Linux users and new users coming from Windows and OS X. Read the full article: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17505/Ubuntu-Feisty-Fawn-Desktop-Linux-Matured/

India PRWire has an article about how open-source software like Ubuntu and Open Office support many bigger Indian language groups like Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugues. The article states that adding support for languages is not difficult and can be done easily with language packs. Read the full article: http://www.indiaprwire.com/businessnews/20070321/21597.htm

La Verdad, the most popular newspaper in Maracaibo, talks twice in less than two weeks about the use of Ubuntu on the desktop and went as far as showing how to install it. La verdad sources this information from the Spanish newspaper "EL PAIS." During the FMp3 show, The Radio Station "la megaestación", possibly the largest radio station in Venezuela, discusses how Ubuntu is a real alternative in the OS world. How to install linux(flickr) How to install linux 2(flickr) The Ubuntu Desktop(flickr) Fmp3 AUDIO (all Spanish)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation covers Ubuntu and how "adopting Linux can be painless, free". The article talks about how the average user can do e-mail, web surfing, picture editing, listening to music, making spreadsheets and basic word processing easily with Ubuntu. Resurrecting old machines and the usage of Live CDs are discussed. Read the full article: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/linux.html

eWEEK ranks Mark Shuttleworth 33rd in its 2007 list of Top 100 Most Influential People in IT. The four pronged criteria consists of: the person's tangible track record of information technology success, the scope of influence the person has beyond his or her own organization, the ability of the individual to effect changem the level of engagement the person has in developing today's emerging technologies. Read Mark's blurb: http://www.eweek.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=&s=26744&a=203626&po=19,00.asp?p=y

Information Week goes through the Ubuntu installation process on an old computer which was previously used only for web surfing and email. The writer states Ubuntu can be used successfully instead of spending money to upgrade hardware. With the Internet becoming more Web 2.0, users will be able to use free software that is fast enough and secure enough for basic needs. Read article: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198500289

In The Blogoshpere

'Questions please...' is a podcast website that interviews individuals involved in OSS. This week's guest, Mark Shuttleworth, covers topics like GNOME, why he started Ubuntu and his thoughts on space travel. http://questionsplease.org/new/node/12

Rolando Blanco, an Ubuntu members, posts that a Venuzuelan government related institution has decided to deploy 850 Ubuntu/Kubuntu deskop machines. 30 Ubuntu virtual servers will be added with Xen. http://blog.blanco.net.ve/2007/03/ubuntu-takes-advantage.html

Tiago Sousa blogs about a new feature in Feisty which searches the repositories for applications when the user types a command to start an application not installed on the system. http://niath.blogspot.com/2007/03/command-not-found.html

"Only Ubuntu Linux" posts two methods for upgrading from Edgy to Feisty. Screenshots are included to help a user through the process. http://onlyubuntu.blogspot.com/2007/03/upgrade-ubuntu-610-edgy-eft-to-ubuntu.html

Ben Gray's thoughts on Feisty, additional eye-candy and restricted driver support. http://openswitch.org/2007/03/20/a-feisty-fawn-indeed/

Bill Beebe covers the Feisty beta and his use of the Disk Usage Analyzer. http://blogbeebe.blogspot.com/2007/03/ubuntu-704-beta-out-and-about.html

Ambuj Varshney writes about various applications that can give new life to older machines under Ubuntu. http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com/2007/03/13-applications-to-install-on-ubuntu.html

Meetings and Events

Ubuntu Hug Day now every Friday!

Ubuntu Bug Squad will be holding the first of what will be weekly Hug Days on Friday, March 23rd. This also follows the Beta release of Feisty Fawn scheduled for the 22nd. So on 23 March 2007, in all timezones, we'll be meeting in #ubuntu-bugs on irc.freenode.net for another Ubuntu Bug Day: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

MOTU Meeting

Technical Board Meeting

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Edubuntu Meeting

Xubuntu Meeting

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Ubuntu Development Team Meeting

  • Start: 21:00
  • End: 23:00
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Ubuntu Conference in Croatia

Community Spotlight

Ubuntu Desktop Effects

The ubuntu-desktop-effects team seeks to bring Compiz and Beryl to the Ubuntu desktop, make it easy to install, and painless to run. Basically they're bringing the *bling* to Ubuntu and making it very easy for us to get it working. Quoting Mark Shuttleworth, "There’s been a furious amount of activity from the MOTU and Beryl upstreams to get these packages ready for Feisty inclusion - cleaning up copyright issues as well as getting the packages themselves into first class order." If you feel you can help them out, join their launchpad team: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop-effects

Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 6.10 Updates

Bug Stats

  • Open (24925) +633 # over last week
  • Critical (18) +1 # over last week
  • Unconfirmed (11683) -213 # over last week
  • Unassigned (17801) -124 # over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (85660) +2490 # 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:

  • Martin Albisetti
  • Corey Burger
  • Nick Ali
  • Freddy Martinez
  • 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.

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue33 (last edited 2008-08-06 17:00:14 by localhost)