Issue71

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http://www.bitburners.com/articles/the-best-desktop-linux-distribution-of-2007/3894/  * The Best Desktop Linux Distribution of 2007 - ljpp has spent a lot of time trialing and testing Linux distributions during the year 2007. His goal was to find a suitable free operating system for my 2nd hand laptop. In the process he tried just about every popular distribution, but now in late December he feels he has finally found a winner. In order of their finish, in at number one is openSUSE 10.3, second is Ubuntu 7.10, and third is Mandriva One 2008. He found pros and cons to all three, but felt best about SUSE. Visit the link to read the entire summary of the different Linux OS's. http://www.bitburners.com/articles/the-best-desktop-linux-distribution-of-2007/3894/ 

WORK IN PROGRESS

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 71 for the week December 16th - December 22nd, 2007. In this issue...

UWN Translations

In This Issue

General Community News

Dell Adds DVD Playback

Today, Dell is adding Ubuntu 7.10 (a.k.a Gutsy Gibbon) to the Dell Consumer Linux line-up for customers in the United States. It will also be available on the Inspiron 530 in England, France, and Germany later this week. One of the key requests from customers interested in Linux is the ability to watch their favorite DVD movies, so Dell will now now include built-in DVD movie playback with all Ubuntu 7.10 systems.The experience Dell wanted is simple — when you put a movie in, it plays. It is easy enough for a child and an example of the steps we are taking to make Ubuntu as enjoyable as possible. http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/12/18/38935.aspx

Ubuntu Live Conference Call for Proposals Open

Sebastopol, CA, December 18, 2007--The second Ubuntu Live conference, co-presented by Canonical, Ltd and O'Reilly Media is slated to take place July 21-22, 2008 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. This two day event will gather IT professionals, government leaders, business executives, and community leaders to share their Ubuntu based computing experiences and knowledge. Building on the success of the 2007 event, the 2008 event will feature longer sessions and a track devoted to technical enthusiasts and developers. The program committee is now accepting proposals to lead sessions, panel discussions, and demos at the 2008 edition of Ubuntu Live. Please visit the link to learn more about this exciting conference news. http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1889

Ubuntu Live 2008: Call for Proposals

The Call for Participation is now open for the second Ubuntu Live conference, taking place July 21-22 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Learn more about how you can become a speaker and contribute to taking the worldwide Ubuntu community further. Ubuntu Live is a vibrant and important gathering of IT professionals, government and business leaders, educators, community leaders, enterprise and business users. The conference brings together the people who deploy and manage Ubuntu in organizations, companies offering services and solutions based on Ubuntu, customers of those services, users of Ubuntu, and the folks who build Ubuntu and other key open source software. Co-presented by O'Reilly Media and Canonical, Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Live is conveniently co-located with the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) event, thus making Portland, Oregon the place to be during the week of July 21. http://en.oreilly.com/ubuntu2008/public/content/home

Hardy Alpha 2

Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Hardy development cycle. The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Hardy. Pre-releases of Hardy are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs. Please visit the link for the Alpha 2 downloads. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-December/000362.html

MOTU

[http://launchpad.net/~jamie-strandboge Jamie Strandboge], who has been doing awesome work in the security and the server team now is a MOTU! Please give him a warm welcome to the team!

Training

The long awaited Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Course is ready, waiting and all yours for the taking! It has been written in Docbook using xml stylesheets and the bzr revision control, accessed through Launchpad. There are 10 lessons in total with the last lesson covering Partitioning and Booting optional. The course is modular - 2 days if all lessons are covered. There are 2 versions of the course: An Instructor Guide which has instructor notes and answers to the exercise questions together, and a student guide which does not have instructor notes; answers to the exercises are provided separately. There will also be a book version of the courseware which you will be able to purchase online. pdf versions of the student guide and instructor guide can be found by visiting the link. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Training

A Community Approach to Commercial Training Materials: By Mark Shuttleworth

Billy Cina @Canonical has been making steady progress towards the goal of having a full portfolio of training options available for commercial users of Ubuntu. Companies that want to ensure that their staff are rigorously trained, and individuals who want to present their Ubuntu credentials in a formal setting, need to have a certified and trusted framework for skills assurance. These courses are usually sold to companies that have adopted a platform or tool and want to ensure a consistent level of skills across the organization. Many companies are moving to Ubuntu for both desktop and server, so demand is hotting up for this capability. Ubuntu has a system builder course, and a system administrator course are now available from authorized training providers. "But we wanted also to try a different approach, that might be more accessible to the Ubuntu community and might also result in even higher quality materials." http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/134

Kubuntu LTS

The release schedule for KDE 4 is now clear, and it will be released during the development cycle of Kubuntu 8.04. This new major release is already attracting significant interest from users, and is the focus of most KDE developer effort at this point. From time to time, this work reaches a natural rest point resulting in a particularly stable release. For these releases, Canonical makes a commercial commitment to provide support for a longer term and these become known as "LTS" releases. Since KDE 4 is a major change to the platform, it is not currently at one of these natural rest points so would not be suitable for long term support. Instead, due to the very high interest, development efforts will be directed towards KDE 4 and releasing Kubuntu 8.04 with the option of using either KDE 3.5 or KDE 4. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-devel/2007-December/002066.html

Full Circle Magazine Issue #8

Full Circle - The Independent Ubuntu Community Magazine is proud to announce the release of issue eight.

Some Content For This Issue Includes:

  • Mythbuntu - Step-by-step Install
  • How-To : Install Wubi, Get a Christmas Desktop, Multi Boot Linux and Learning Scribus Pt.8.
  • Review of Tom Boy.
  • New Column for Ubuntu Women

  • Letters, Q&A, My Desktop, Top 5 and more!

Get it while it's hot! http://www.fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-8/

New Kubuntu Members

Guillaume Martres - Guillaume is an admin of the French Ubuntu forums and a KDE-lover. His contributions are strong around bug reporting, and he hopes to make patches for Kubuntu/KDE in the future. https://launchpad.net/~smarter Carlos Cabezas - Carlos is the founder and admin of kubuntu-es.org for about two years. For the future, he hopes to represent Kubuntu at Linux events in Spain, work on more translations and bug reports. https://launchpad.net/~rouzic

IRSeek

The IRSeeK ( http://www.irseek.com/ ) service is starting to operate on freenode. The Ubuntu IRC Council has currently authorized their bot, which owns the "IR Seek Bot" nickname, to join and log channels in the #*ubuntu* namespace which have UbuntuIRCCouncil as contact and are already logged by the "ubuntulog" bot (the official Ubuntu logging bot).https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-irc/2007-December/000383.html

Official Ubuntu Book

The next version of the Official Ubuntu Book will be out for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Your contributions will be much appreciated, especially regarding newer Ubuntu derivatives, such as Gobuntu, Mythbuntu etc.

For more informations and the contact email to submit your recipes, please read: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1279

LoCo News

Launchpad News

Launchpad 1.1.12 Released

Welcome to the last Launchpad release of 2007! The highlights of Launchpad 1.1.12 include:

  • Project announcements: get the latest news from a project or
    • distribution directly on its Launchpad overview page. Or subscribe to its Atom feed.
  • Bug feeds: subscribe to an Atom feed of all the bugs related to any
    • distribution, project, team and person in Launchpad. Also subscribe to individual bugs.
  • Higher quality bug reports: if you're a project owner you can now
    • ask Launchpad to display your bug reporting guidelines to people who file bugs against your project.
  • Launchpad is running Bazaar 1.0.0. Congratulations to the Bazaar
    • team on this new release!

Read on to get the full details of what's new in this release. See you next year when we'll be back in January with Launchpad 1.2.1! https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/launchpad-users/2007-December/002872.html

Ubuntu Forum News

Ubuntu Forums Interviews

LaRoza is involved in the Unanswered Post Team and in the Programming Talk section. A self taught programmer, always willing to help other users, LaRoza is one of the respected member of our community. Read the full in interview here: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/an-interview-with-laroza/

A new "Thank You" option

This week, ubuntu-geek implemented a "Thank You" button that can be clicked to thank a user for a helpful post. The button [http://ubuntuforums.org/images/uf/buttons/post_thanks.gif] can be found at the bottom right of each post, close to the [http://ubuntuforums.org/images/uf/buttons/edit.gif] and [http://ubuntuforums.org/images/uf/buttons/quote.gif] ones. A user cannot thank his/her own posts, and can only thank a given post once. Most of all, the forum staff would like to express that the "Thank You" feature is not a reputation system, that just like bean counts or profile images associated to beans, "Thank yous" are not intended to rate or rank members.

The "Thank You" feature will hopefully allow users to more easily spot useful information, and is one answer that UF is providing to help solve the problem of the dangerous commands posted recently by spammers. Full implementation will be available with the upcoming software upgrade. "Thank You" counts will appear in the user profile and will help new and naive users identify members who positively contribute to the forums.

In The Press

  • Dell announces Ubuntu 7.10 PCs with DVD playback (UPDATED) - Dell has told Desktop Linux.com that it will be announcing later today, Dec. 19, that it will be releasing PCs with Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) as part of its Dell Consumer Linux lineup along with the ability to legally play DVDs. According to Dell spokesperson Anne B. Camden, "We are now pre-installing DVD movie playback all Ubuntu 7.10 systems -- a feature we feel will resonate with … Linux enthusiasts as well as the mainstream consumer market. In fact, one of the key requests from customers interested in Linux is the ability to watch their favorite DVD movies." http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7924076658.html

  • Technology in 2008: Three fearless predictions - 1. Surfing will slow: Peering into Tech. view’s crystal ball, the one thing we can predict with at least some certainty is that 2008 will be the year we stop taking access to the internet for granted. The internet is not about to grind to a halt, but as more and more users clamber aboard to download music, video clips and games while communicating incessantly by e-mail, chat and instant messaging, the information superhighway sometimes crawls with bumper-to-bumper traffic. 2. Surfing will detach: Earlier this month, Google bid for the most desirable chunk (known as C-block) of the 700-megahertz wireless spectrum being auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in late January 2008. The frequencies concerned are among the world’s most valuable. They were used for broadcasting UHF television because they suffered little atmospheric absorption, could be beamed for miles, and could then penetrate all the nooks and crannies in buildings. Their relatively short wavelength makes the transmission equipment compact and the antennas small. 3. Surfing—and everything else computer-related—will open: The embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008. Verizon is not the only one to cry uncle and reluctantly accept the inevitable. Even Apple, long a bastion of closed systems, is coming round to the open idea. Its heavily protected iPhone was hacked within days of being launched by owners determined to run third-party software like Skype on it. http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10410912

  • First Impressions of Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Edition - This article is a subjective outline of the steps required to move a vanilla Ubuntu Desktop install towards basic multimedia functionality. It walks through most of the basic first steps to follow. Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Edition is one of the most user-friendly Linux distributions this user has experienced. Though you need to do some tweaking to achieve higher levels of desktop user satisfaction, the default install creates a general-application desktop with Internet access, which is suitable for many users. Desktop systems designed to please everyone historically tend to end up equally uncomfortable for all. Visit the link for much, much more on this author's take on Gutsy. http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/36289/1954?pf=true

  • INQUIRER guide to free operating systems - XP IS GETTING a bit long in the tooth, Vista is a pig and you don't want to buy a Mac and join the Jobs Cult. So, you're thinking of having a look at Linux, but are bamboozled by the hundreds of flavors and don't want to spend a weekend discussing it with disturbingly intense bearded men in socks and sandals. So here is the Inquirer's guide to Linux: quick, clear, opinionated and unfair. This author goes on to critique Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Linspire, Mandriva, Slackware, SUSE, Ubuntu, and Xandros. To summarize, "As for the future - for now, Ubuntu looks unstoppable. Give it a go." http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/24/inq-guide-free-operating

  • CPILive interviews Mark Shuttleworth. "I sold [Thawte] in 1999, right at the top of the Internet bubble. That then gave me the opportunity to sit back and ask myself, what are the things in life that I would like to be a part of? You know, life is short. One thing was to explore space and be a part of that adventure. I went and I did that. And the other thought was to be a part of this experience of free software, which had been beneficial to me — bringing that to a much wider audience. And that’s the genesis of Ubuntu." http://www.cpilive.net/v3/inside.aspx?scr=n&NID=1885

In The Blogosphere

  • IBM To Make Massive Ubuntu Server Play?? - According to author Ashlee Vance, it could be Red Hat's worst nightmare. "Part of the Red Hat discussion included speculation about IBM going whole hog with Ubuntu on the server. Dave and Matt say this will happen sooner than we think. Ashlee Vance is skeptical." Visit the link to listen to the whole radio program and decide for yourself. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/28/open_season_8/

  • Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 vs OSX Leopard: Comparison Part 3 - After installing Ubuntu, the desktop is clean and ready for you to customize. All applications and tools are accessible via the menus or command line. If your used to a GUI windows interface your most likely inclined to start adding shortcuts to the desktop area and even change the way it looks. This is a important distinction to OS X, because Apple has pretty much set the interface and layout of the workspace to a more permanent look and feel (which many have no problem with). In Ubuntu you can change beyond just icons and wallpaper, almost anything can be altered with a little work. The remainder of the article goes on to teach users how to tweak their Ubuntu OS. http://pcwizkid.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/ubuntu-gutsy-gibbon-710-vs-osx-leopard-comparison-part-3/

  • Tweaking Ubuntu - As a virtual novice in the Linux world, Tan Kit Hoong decided to download and try out the latest version of the popular Ubuntu, now in version 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. A reader wrote in to ask him to feature more stories on Linux and he made an observation that though there were little or no games for the platform, that the “OS is the game” – well, if so, it certainly wasn’t a very enjoyable game as he had to learn all kinds of arcane terminal commands just to get Ubuntu to do simple things he’d taken for granted with Windows. That’s not to say that the operating system is bad, mind you, it’s just that it still has certain issues that hold it back from being a truly problem-free operating system to install and run. http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/12/11/prodit/19702110&sec=prodit

  • St. Anthony / Tech Connect help homeless in San Francisco - A nice You Tube video on people helping the homeless of San Francisco to get their computers up and running. Ubuntu seems to be the OS of choice, and it draws very favorable comments. It's a short clip that is worth watching and possibly a new idea for our Loco teams. Check it out!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awrK28aV-Rc

  • Top Five Open Source Stories Of 2007 - It's been a landmark year for open source, and in so many different ways that even a casual survey of the year's events will range far and wide. Here's a quick rundown of what to me were the top five open source events of the year -- not an exhaustive list, of course, but the things that best reflected how important and widely entrenched open source software (especially Linux) has become. 1. Microsoft gives the Samba Team protocol information. 2. The OLPC, the Eee PC, and the gPC, three personal computers running on Linux. 3. Dell shipping Ubuntu on select machines. 4. The GPLv3, the most widely used Open Source software licensing around got a third revision. 5. And finally, Busy Box brings suit against Verizon for not offering the source code as required by licensing agreements. http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/top_five_openso.html

  • Ubuntu Linux Review - Ubuntu, from Benjamin's point of view, is really easy to use. Most of his problems with Ubuntu are pretty much related to Firefox taking up his CPU resources. He also thinks it's wise to install your graphic card driver manually as the pre-detected driver wouldn’t be as good as the one you downloaded from the manufacturer’s site. To summarize what Benjamin thinks about Ubuntu, "I would say it’s a pretty good distro to start out with if you are switching from Windows to Linux, and so far I love it, and plan to keep on using it." http://benjaminlim.net/blog/?p=11

  • Top Tech of 2007: Ubuntu Linux - Here’s your tech event of the year, kids. It’s a story with several chapters, each still unfolding at this moment. It began in April with the release of Ubuntu 7.04, the Feisty Fawn, and continued with Dell’s decision to start selling Ubuntu Linux-based machines. The momentum from this continued throughout the summer, with Dell extending its Ubuntu program to Europe. Then, in October, the real tipping point arrived with the release of 7.10, the Gutsy Gibbon. This release brought Linux and Ubuntu into the big leagues of operating systems. The final piece of the puzzle was for Dell to bundle 7.10 into its Ubuntu machines, and that happened about two weeks ago. 2008 is now set to become the Year of the Penguin in the world of technology, thanks to the advances and achievements of 2007. Therefore, Ubuntu gets this bloggers 2007 top-tech nod for its transformation of the PC operating system into a platform that is about community, freedom of use, safety, reliability, and the speed and smoothness of its upgrade path. http://dailyrevolution.net/?p=977

  • There's more to Linux than Ubuntu - Blogger Alex fears that if the trend goes on, (and at the moment he don't see why would it stop), then the Ubuntification of Linux is unstoppable, just as Windows became a follow up to the "PC" term. He's afraid, that Ubuntu can overshadow Linux. He knows that technologically literate people will not confuse the two, but for general public, there will be no Linux - just Ubuntu. Just like there is just Windows. It scares him that he has no power to change the state of affairs. It scares him because competition between distribution benefits them all, perfecting the tools, causing applications to be developed, economies and companies created, communities united. http://www.thetechandcents.com/2007/12/theres-more-to-linux-than-ubuntu.html

  • The Best Desktop Linux Distribution of 2007 - ljpp has spent a lot of time trialing and testing Linux distributions during the year 2007. His goal was to find a suitable free operating system for my 2nd hand laptop. In the process he tried just about every popular distribution, but now in late December he feels he has finally found a winner. In order of their finish, in at number one is openSUSE 10.3, second is Ubuntu 7.10, and third is Mandriva One 2008. He found pros and cons to all three, but felt best about SUSE. Visit the link to read the entire summary of the different Linux OS's. http://www.bitburners.com/articles/the-best-desktop-linux-distribution-of-2007/3894/

In Other News

Kubuntu Tutorials Day

Jonathan Davies has rewritten the Tutorials Day logs on packaging into an easier to read PDF file. http://people.ubuntuwire.com/~jpatrick/tutorials/ He is going to work on more of the logs to be published at a later date. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-users/2007-December/023943.html

Meetings and Events

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Edubuntu meeting

  • Start: 12:00 UTC
  • End: 14:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: No agenda listed as of the publication

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Xubuntu Meeting

Community Spotlight

Serbia Loco Organized Ubuntu Presentation

On December 15th, the Serbia Loco gave an Ubuntu presentation at the Centar of Culture Magacin. Due to last minute changes by the Centar, they were moved to a different location there. All went off well though, and the discussions followed the following topics.

  • Free Software, GNU/Linux, Ubuntu - presented by dootzky
  • Activities of Loco Serbia - petrovicivan
  • GNOME, KDE, XFCE - Githzerai
  • Graphics and Video - Rainmaker
  • Audio and Office - bojce
  • Wine - vlajkoral
  • Compiz Fusion - olujicz
  • Games - dootzky

There were about 50 visitors, and special thanks to List Solution, a local retailer and Ubuntu Partner who provided 3 preinstalled Ubuntu computers.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/2007-December/001882.html

Updates and security for 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 6.10 Updates

Ubuntu 7.04 Updates

Ubuntu 7.10 Updates

Bug Stats

  • Open (38652) +606 # over last week
  • Critical (19) -1 # over last week
  • Unconfirmed (19779) +386 # over last week
  • Unassigned (28984) +551 # over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (142360) +2114 # over last week

As always, the Bug Squad needs more help. If you want to get started, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

Infamous Bugs

Translation Stats

  1. Spanish (13369) -14476 # over last week
  2. French (37728) -3116 # over last week
  3. Swedish (49257) -6048 # over last week
  4. English-UK (39079) -7830 # over last week
  5. German (66656) -742 # over last week

Remaining string to translate in Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon", see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/

UWN #: A sneak peek

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
  • John Crawford
  • Craig A. Eddy
  • Isabelle Duchatelle
  • Your Name Here
  • And many others

Glossary of Terms

  • Thawte - Certificate Authority (CA) for X.509 certificates. Thawte, (pronounced like "thought"), was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa. In 1999 Verisign acquired Thawte in a stock purchase from Shuttleworth for 575 million US dollars. The sale enabled Shuttleworth to become the second space tourist, and to found the Ubuntu project.

Feedback

If you would like to submit an idea or story you think is worth appearing on the UWN, please send them to ubuntu-marketing-submissions@lists.ubuntu.com. 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.

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