Issue5

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WORK IN PROGRESS

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue 5

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue 5 for the week of June 25, 2006 - July 1, 2006

You can always find this and other Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issues at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter

In This Issue

  • Edgy Release Schedule
  • Dapper Backports is Open For Business
  • Ubuntu Marketing Team Gearing Up
  • Pictures From UDS Paris (and personal ramblings)
  • Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CDs Arriving
  • Artist in Chief
  • Bug fixes and security updates
  • Weekly development meeting
  • and much more

General Community News

Edgy Release Schedule

Wondering when The Edgy Eft will be released? No need to keep scratching your head. As expected The Edgy Eft will be released to the world in October of 2006 making it Ubuntu 6.10. The Edgy Eft development cycle is going to be a fast one with only around four months until it's release. Check out the Edgy release schedule at:

Dapper Backports is Open For Business

The Ubuntu Backports Team is now accepting and processing requests for the dapper-backports repository. This allows for one to request that a package from Edgy (which is probably newer) be recompiled for Dapper usage. In practice, this allows Dapper to remain reasonably up-to-date while being stable, until the next version of Ubuntu comes out. Backports is geared towards personal desktop users who would like the latest and greatest software (instead of the versions shipped and no longer updated for 6 months) while not wanting the instability associated with development releases.

Backports is managed through Launchpad in the dapper-backports product, which allows us closer integration with the rest of Ubuntu. To file a backport, simply open up a bug ticket at:

describing what version and what package you want backported.

When newly backported packages are built and available in the repositories, the Backports team will announce them in the UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter, just like how security updates are announced now.

Ubuntu Marketing Team Gearing Up

The Marketing Team has found new life around its first-ever IRC meeting and has resolved organisational issues. Three projects have been launched are a quickly picking up momentum and they are:

  • Spreadubuntu
  • Ubuntu Magazine
  • Media Relations Project

You will be able to read about these projects from their respective wikis and more about the meeting in it's minute, all linked from the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam wikipage.

Pictures From UDS Paris (and personal ramblings)

Where you not able to attend UDS? Never fear, the pictures from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Paris are here along with some person accounts of the Summit. Check out pictures of all the fun:

The following are some articles writen by community members.

Many attendess also blogged about their exprience. Here are their stories:

There are some addition Kubuntu specific accounts below in the Kubuntu section as well.

Artist in Chief

At the Ubuntu Community Council Mark Shuttleworth announced two Artists in Chief, the Kubuntu a-i-c for Edgy will be Ken Wimer who has been the lead KDE artist for KDE 3 and is doing the new Oxygen icon theme.

Weekly Development Meeting

The weekly Dev Team IRC meetings resumed on Thursday after an off-line one was held last week in Paris.

The developers caught up on the status of the specs that were discussed in Paris. A large number are already drafted and approved, ready to be implemented. Some specs are still in the drafting phase, and these need to be completed and approved by next week's meeting if they are to be included in the tracked development pipeline for Edgy Eft.

Work has started on several implementations and the following specs are already implemented: optimized-live-cd-layout-for-faster-boot, ubuntu-meta-from-bzr, dash-as-bin-sh.

Ubuntu Dapper Installfest In Taiwan

We're pleased to inform you that the Ubuntu Taiwan community is having an Ubuntu installfest and release party in Taipei on July 4, 2006. It will be their first major event since the creation of the community web site one year ago.

They're excited and full of energy! The installfest will take place at [http://wiki.tossug.org/MixCoffee%26Tea Mix Coffee & Tea], a cafe with free wireless access.

If you're a newbie on Ubuntu or an Ubuntu power-user in Taiwan, bring your laptop with you and join 93 others who have signed up for the fun!

The event is co-hosted by TOSSUG, the [http://tossug.org/ Taipei Open Source Software User Group] , which provides local support on finding the venue and sponsors.[http://www.openfoundry.org/ OSSF] provides the required server, network and staff on the spot.

For more information, please go to:

Security Updates

Security vulnerabilities found in the following packages have been fixed in all affected Ubuntu releases:

Ubuntu

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CDs Arriving

Kubuntu

KDE 3.5.3 Enters Edgy

KDE 3.5.3 has started to enter Edgy. Initial versions of the Qt package were binary incompatible so make sure you've upgraded to the fixed Qt 3 3.3.6-2ubuntu2 and associated KDE versions.

Qt 4 was also updated to include all the safe patches from KDE's qt-copy.

There are still many KDE packages yet to be updated or merged, if you want to help sign yourself up to packages on

and ping Riddell on IRC to coordinate.

Kubuntu Developer Interviewed on Podcast

UbuntuOS launched their new extended Podcast with an interview with Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell talking about the plans for Kubuntu Edgy. The interview starts 1 hour 10 minutes in.

Paris Summit

Several Kubuntu and KDE developers were at the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Paris. A number of specification were approved and more are being reviewed for approval. If you are interested in helping with more than packaging and bugfixing in Kubuntu take a look at some of the specs and see which you can help with.

Some of the KDE developers blogged about their experiences

Feature Of The Week - gLabels

[http://glabels.sourceforge.net/ gLabels] is a business card & label design program. If you've ever fiddled around in a spreadsheet or a graphics application trying to get labels or cards to exactly match a pre-cut sheet, you know how time-consuming & irritating it can be. gLabels has you covered - it's got hundreds of templates included, sorted mostly by [http://www.avery.com/ Avery's] product numbers, which even non-Avery products often refer to.

To install gLabels in Ubuntu: Applications->Add/Remove... then simply search for "glabel" or look for it under the Office category. gLabels is in the Universe repository, so you'll need to have the "Show unsupported applications" box checked in Add/Remove Applications.

You can do basic drawing & text work directly in gLabels, and import existing images for your labels or cards. gLabels can also do barcodes, should you need those, and it can merge existing data from a variety of other sources - useful for the semi-automated production of mailing address labels, for example.

If the massive list of included templates still doesn't have what you need, gLabels has a very nice template-making wizard included so you can create your own templates very easily. One drawback is that there's no easy way to edit existing templates, although if you're feeling adventurous they're all fairly simple XML files that could be hand-edited in your favourite text editor.

Submitted by Brian Burger ([:Madpilot])

Additional News Resources

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:

  • Matt Galvin
  • Jerome Gotangco
  • Jonathan Riddell
  • anyone else that contributes
  • And many others

Feedback

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Documentation Team. Please feel free to contact us regarding any concerns or suggestions by either sending an email to ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com or by using any of the other methods on the [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Contact Ubuntu Documentation Team Contact Information Page].