Issue36

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #36 for the week April 8th - April 14th 2007. This is probably the last UWN before Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 gets released into the wild. In this issue we cover Mark's announcement on the next Ubuntu release codename and schedule, Feisty Fawn's release parties and a small delay in the release candidate due to problemas with certain ATA chipsets, although the final release is still expected on Thursday 19th.

UWN Translations

In This Issue

  • Next Ubuntu release: Gutsy Gibbon
  • Feisty Release Parties
  • Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn RC delayed

  • LoCo Teams started in Finland

  • Ubuntuforums Council Meeting summary
  • Apport: Automatic crash reports

General Community News

Feisty Release Party in London

Canonical is sponsoring a Feisty release party in London. It will be held April 20th at Corbet Place, Old Truman Brewery. Mark Shuttleworth will be there among other well known Ubuntu personalities. All are welcome. You can read more at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-uk/2007-April/004032.html To find a Feisty release party near you, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeistyReleaseParties.

Next Ubuntu Release announced: Gutsy Gibbon

Mark Shuttleworth has announced Gutsy Gibbon will be the next engineering mascot succeeding Feisty. The Gibbon beat out the Glossy Gnu in a close race. 7.10 will include a release that has "no firmware, drivers,imagery, sounds, applications, or other content which do not include full source materials and come with full rights of modification, remixing and redistribution." Ubiquity, the Live CD installer, will allow for unattended installation which will make it easy to roll out Ubuntu desktops across an organization. Composite-by-default also has a good chance of making into Gibbon. Gutsy should be open for general upload the day Feisty is released. Gutsy's goals will be decided at UDS-Sevilla, May 5-11 in Andalucia, Spain. Read Marks announcement at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-April/000277.html. Gutsy's release schedule has already been decided. There will be 6 milestone releases, with the beta release on September 27th and final release coming out on October 18th. Read more at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-April/000277.html

Release Candidate Delayed

"The Ubuntu 7.04 release candidate has been delayed due to bugs discovered during validation testing, specifically problems with certain ATA chipsets and with the connection status displayed by the network-manager panel applet." Feisty release is still expected on Thursday 19th. The full announcement at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-April/000279.html

Canonical Website Relaunched

Canonical's website has been given a makeover to follow the ubuntu.com style. More information is given about the commercial services Canonical offers, the partner programme and projects it is involved with. http://www.canonical.com/

April 13th, 2007, Ubuntuforums Council Meeting Notes

  • The Hardware Team will be merged with the Beginners Team. Bodhi_Zazen and Lord Illidan will be Co-Leaders.
  • Guidelines for "sticky" threads were established.
  • Launchpad Profile links have been added as an option to Forum Members profile.
  • When posting a new thread or a reply in the support areas of the forums users can link to a Launchpad bug. (several people were wondering when the launchpad team would reciprocate)

  • The FC approved an application process for 3rd party projects to request a forum: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=393914

  • The FC agreed on an official stance on 3rd party installation scripts: http://ubuntuforums.org/announcement.php?f=13

  • Next Meeting to be held on May 18th @ 20:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net channel #ubuntu-meeting.

You can read the full meeting log here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=408757

Linux Mint Now Available for KDE

Linux Mint is a distribution based on Ubuntu. Linux Mint is concentrating on the desktop and plans to release monthly or every two months. Similar to Ubuntu, some releases will be designated for LTS. A second release candidate for the KDE version of Linux Mint 2.2 has been announced. Read more: http://www.linuxmint.com/20070414.html. For a list of Kubuntu derived distributions, see https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KubuntuDerivedDistros

LoCo News

LoCo Teams started in Finland

Finnish LoCo started its teams this Saturday to gather together people who want to volunteer in spreading Ubuntu in Finland and helping others to use it. The teams were introduced and discussed in an 2 hour IRC-session at #ubuntu-fi-tiimit (-teams). Part of the teams act locally, like in a city or so and others virtually in whole Finland like marketing team, blog team, forum team, support team, documentation team, localization team and bug squad. More information (in Finnish): http://www.ubuntu-fi.org/Wiki/Tiimit Feisty Release party is also being planned for next Saturday in Helsinki, see http://dy.fi/rq

In The Press

Alastair Otter, at Tectonic, is reporting the Ubuntu release slated for October 2007 will be named Gutsy Gibbon. Gibbon will be even easier to install and will include composite-by-default. Alongside Gibbon, Mark Shuttleworth also announced an ultra-free version of Ubuntu. This version will contain "no firmware, drivers, imagery, sounds, applications, or other content which do not include full source materials and come with full rights of modification, remixing and redistribution." Read the full artcile: http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1447 Mark's announcement: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-April/000276.html

Steven Shankland, a staff writer for CNET News.com, covers the release of the beta version of Launchpad and how Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical hope that this will increase collaboration between open source projects, and in turn will allow the open source community to compete more effectively against Microsoft. Read the full article: http://news.com.com/Canonical+wants+open-source+cooperation/2100-7344_3-6174662.html

Distrowatch weekly showcases the new Mandriva 2007.1 Tour, calling it "an Ubuntu-style Wiki page listing detailed information about the new features". You can read the full Tour at http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2007.1/Tour and DistroWatch Weekly at http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070409

Our very own Mark Shuttleworth was interviewed by The Linux Action Show! podcast. Subjects covered are Mark's experiences in space, the new Launchpad version, the upcoming release of Feisty, and much more. Read the full artcle: http://www.linuxactionshow.com/?p=99

Jack Loftus, at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, writes about how Feisty is drawing more attention on servers. Ubuntu's developers have been running it on their servers since Warty. Virtualization tools have been included in Feisty, like KVMs and VMI support. Over the past year, Toshiba, PalmSource, and Harvard Medical School have all started using Ubuntu on servers. Ubuntu is also being noticed for thin clients, since it includes a pre-release of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). Read the full article: http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1251013,00.html

A partnership between Ubuntu and IBM allows for easy installation of the latest version of DB2 on the 6.06 LTS release. "Partnering with IBM enables us to combine the stability and ease of use of Ubuntu with IBM's leading database solution, ensuring that enterprise customers get the fully supported low-cost and robust solution they demand," says Mark Shuttleworth. Read the full article: http://www.crn.com/software/199000232

Steven Shankland, a staff writer for CNET News.com, discusses how Feisty creates crash reports and can automatically send them to developers. One advantage is that developers get to hear about issues users don't bother to report. Second, the crash reports contain more technical details than most users can provide. Mark Shuttleworth is also quoted as saying Feisty+2 (April 2008) will most likely be the next LTS release. Read the full article: http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-6175365.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news

In The Blogosphere

Will Lee, at Internet Marketing Fool, talks about trying out Ubuntu when realizing the cost of upgrading to Vista. He covers the ease of trying out a Live CD, installing and upgrading software, and hardware compatibility. Read more: http://www.internetmarketingfool.com/2007/04/09/ubuntu-who-needs-vista/

Max Limpag's "computing life has improved exponentially with Ubuntu." He says "I haven’t been gushing this profusely since I met my wife." Read more: http://max.limpag.com/2007/04/10/ubuntu-makes-me-work-faster-in-windows-xp/

Phil Bull counts down to the release of Feisty by covering a new feature or improvement every day. So far he has covered session management, the NetworkManager, disk usage analyzer, easy codec installation, restricted drivers manager, and more. Read more: http://philbull.livejournal.com/34930.html

Matt Asay, at InfoWorld, writes about a dinner conversation with Mark Shuttleworth. Matt notes that while Mark has been funding Ubuntu, Mark plans on Ubuntu funding itself. Mark also believes it's better to have multiple forks of a project rather than a single fork and Microsoft can stop stymie the spread of OSS if it manages to place a patent tax. Read more: http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/04/a_conversation.html

Meetings and Events

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Kernel Team Meeting

Community Council Meeting

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Edubuntu Meeting

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Ubuntu 7.04 Release

  • Start: 00:00
  • End: 23:59

Development Team Meeting

Community Spotlight

Apport: Automatic crash reports

Apport is a system which intercepts application crashes, gathers information about the crash, and presents an interface informing the user how to proceed to file a bug in Launchpad. Since it may be difficult for end users to create a bug report that is really useful for developers, apport was created to handle all the data collection. Apport will display a page with a sensible default bug title and web form that the user can fill out and apport will automatically attach the collected information. It has been deactivated by default in Feisty's final release until developers can find a way to handle massive floods of duplicate bugs without disturbing Launchpad's normal operation.

Updates and security for 6.06 and 6.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 6.10 Updates

Bug Stats

  • Open (27504) +584 # over last week
  • Critical (17) -7 # over last week
  • Unconfirmed (13370) +404 # over last week
  • Unassigned (20041) +508 # over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (93592) +2010 # 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:

  • Nick Ali
  • Martin Albisetti
  • Corey Burger
  • Isabelle Duchatelle
  • And many others

RSS

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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. If you have any technical support questions, please send then ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com.

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue36 (last edited 2008-08-06 17:00:14 by localhost)