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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 79 for the weeks February 17th - February 23rd, 2008. In this issue we cover...

UWN Translations

• Deutsch - Start one! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/IssueXX/De

• Español - http://doc.ubuntu-es.org/NSU/Edicion_Actual

• Français - http://www.ubuntu-fr.org/lettre/

• Italiano - http://wiki.ubuntu-it.org/NewsletterItaliana

• Português - Start one! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/IssueXX/Pt

In This Issue

General Community News

Interview with Nick Barcet, Ubuntu Server Product Manager

UWN: Who are you? What do you do at Canonical?

I'm Nick Barcet, an almost 40 years old geek that started programming on a TRS-80 quite a long time ago. I joined Canonical in September 2007 to fill the role of Ubuntu Server Product Manager. The role of a product manager is to be the interface between the technical team and the rest of the company. This implies

• gathering the feedback and requests from our other department and their customers or partner,
• putting in common word the technicalities of new implementation so that our sales and marketing team can understand them
• proposing and participating in the definition of the product strategy and many other fun activities.

UWN: How long have you used Linux and what was your first distro? And how long have you been using Ubuntu?

I started with Linux with SuSE in 1998 as a hobby, which became handy when Novell bought SuSE while I was working there. I switched to Ubuntu end of 2005 on my Desktop and with Dapper on my servers (I had left Novell at that time).

UWN: Virtualization is in the news more and more nowadays. The Server Team has been focusing on KVM, and VMware has been in the commercial repository for almost a year, and OpenVZ was just added. How is the relationship with VMware progressing? What has been the reaction to JeOS? Are ISVs putting it to use? Is there any more planned collaboration?

We do have a great relationship with VMWare, which is progressing very well. As you have noticed, we also started working with Parallels (ex SWSoft) and they are providing OpenVZ in Universe, which is another great option to Ubuntu users. As each of these technologies are providing answers to different use cases, I think that we are starting to have a great virtualization story on Ubuntu Server Edition.

JeOS has generated a lot of attention and the number of Virtual Appliances built on it are growing every day. JeOS is updated to work also with KVM in version 8.04, and we've also improved the VMWare ESX support. This will certainly increase the momentum that we are already observing. We're confident that 8.04, will see numerous ISVs certify on it and bringing many more options, both virtualised or not, to Ubuntu users.

UWN: Are there plans to get involved with "cloud" computing, similar to how RHEL is directly available on Amazon's EC2 services?

Ubuntu Server Edition works very well on EC2 already and there are quite a few how-to published on the subject, pre-built images posted by theccommunity [1] and even virtual appliances available, such Paul Dowman's "EC2 on Rails" [2]. As you know, Canonical's business model is to sell Technical Support, not to sell the "maintenance" as other distribution do. We're watching the RH/Amazon tie up and it is definitely an interesting way of delivering the server product to the market. As we only charge for support and not maintenance we would have to deliver it a different way but it is too soon to talk about specifics or any deals.

As a side note, there is currently quite a bit of confusion in what issupport and maintenance. What I refer to as maintenance is the is the commitment Ubuntu has on providing security updates for the packages that are defined in seed whatever dependencies are necessary to make them work. More precisely our commitment is to provide free maintenance for Ubuntu products as follow:

• Ubuntu Desktop, Kubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server: security updates and select bug fixes (18 months)
• Ubuntu Desktop LTS: Security updates and select bug fixes (3 years)
• Ubuntu Server LTS: Hardware compatibility updates (until next LTS), Security updates and select bug fixes (5 years)

As you see, this is quite different from support, where this only covers the activity to provide various types of answers to customer over the phone, web or email which Canonical offers for a fee.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EC2 http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=116

[2] http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/

[MORE TO COME]

LoCo News

New in Hardy Heron

Launchpad News

Ubuntu Forums News

In The Press

In The Blogosphere

http://www.timesdaily.com/article/20080218/NEWS/802180303/-1/COMMUNITIES

In Other News

Meeting Summaries

Ubuntu Studio stuff from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/February2008

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Community Spotlight

Florida Team Rocks the Florida Linux Show

The Florida LoCo team had a booth at the Florida Linux Show. We distributed CDs, did a few installs, signed up some new members, and generally had a great time.

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 (#) +/- # over last week
• Critical (#) +/- # over last week
• Unconfirmed (#) +/- # over last week
• Unassigned (#) +/- # over last week
• All bugs ever reported (#) +/- # 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

'Note: To stats for HARDY, not Gutsy'

1. Language (#) +/- # over last week
2. Language (#) +/- # over last week
3. Language (#) +/- # over last week
4. Language (#) +/- # over last week
5. Language (#) +/- # over last week

Remaining string to translate in Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron", see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/

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:

• http://www.ubuntu.com/news

and

• http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

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
• Your Name Here
• And many others

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.