Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 71 for the weeks December 16th - December 29th, 2007. In this issue: Dell adds DVD playback, Ubuntu Live Conference proposals, Hardy Alpha 2, a community approach to commercial training, Kubuntu 8.04 LTS status, Full Circle Magazine Issue #8, new Kubuntu members, IRSeek, a new Official Ubuntu Book, and much, much more!!

UWN Translations

In This Issue

General Community News

Dell Adds DVD Playback

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 soon. 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. 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 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. To learn more about this exciting conference news. http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1889

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. http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/alpha2

New MOTU

Jamie Strandboge, who has been doing awesome work in the security and the server team now is a MOTU! http://launchpad.net/~jamie-strandboge

Ubuntu Desktop Training Courses

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 style sheets 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 at 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 for training is increasing. A system builder course and a system administrator course are now available from authorized training providers. Using the community approach, the training material is available in an open format (Docbook), content source is available in a public Bazaar repository, and licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/134

Kubuntu (Will 8.04 Be 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:

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

New Kubuntu Members

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 information and the contact email to submit your recipes, see http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1279

Launchpad News

Launchpad 1.1.12 Released

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

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. 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

In The Blogosphere

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

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. The discussions followed the following topics:

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

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

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/

Archives and RSS Feed

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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

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Glossary of Terms

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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