Issue91

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WORK IN PROGRESS

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue ## for the week MONTH DAY - DAY, YEAR. In this issue we cover ...

UWN Translations

In This Issue

General Community News

The Art of Release(Mark Shuttleworth)

Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS represented a very significant step forward in our release management thinking. Not only did it prove that we could execute an LTS release in the standard 6-month timeframe, but it showed that we could commit to such an LTS the cycle beforehand. As a result, we can commit that the next LTS release of Ubuntu will be 10.04 LTS, in April 2010. We also committed, for the first time, to a regular set of point releases for 8.04 LTS. These will start three months after the LTS, and be repeated every six months until the next LTS is out. These point releases will include support for new hardware as well as rolling up all the updates published in that series to date.

There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146

loco 5-a-day: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/2008-May/002209.html

Ubuntu Stats

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 Hardy

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

LoCo News

New in Hardy Heron

Launchpad News

Launchpad Logo Contest Winner Announced

You can view his design here: https://help.launchpad.net/logo/winning-entry The center of the design represents how Launchpad makes it easy for people to collaborate and connect with one another, while the surrounding facets represent the different services that Launchpad provides. http://news.launchpad.net/general/launchpad-logo-contest-winner-announced

Ubuntu Forums News

Ubuntu Forums Interview

p_quarles got in the UF Staff team last time we were looking for new moderators. He has a Literature background (completing his PhD.) and like many others who accepted to be interviewed, his journey with computers started with the Commodore 64 when he was a kid. Please read the whole interview here: http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/an-interview-with-p_quarles/

Tutorial of the Week

This week, we highlight a contribution by one of the biggest proponents of 64-bit Ubuntu on the forums: Kilz, who wrote the impressive "Howto Install 32 bit Firefox with Flash w/sound and Java for AMD64."

It's a thread that began almost two years ago, has received updates through four releases and has even been recently adjusted. It's unusual to see a tutorial receive so much attention, but when you read through it, it's clear that this is a labor of love. If you use 64-bit Ubuntu and want to get a fully functional Firefox, Kilz has made it easy for you. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202537

See you in a week!

A reminder: K.Mandla, one of the moderators on ubuntuforums, is the driving force behind the "Tutorial of the Week" project. If you wish to suggest a tutorial, you are welcome to do so here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4941270

In The Press

  • Why we love Ubuntu Linux (or maybe we don't) - With Ubuntu 8.04 now on the streets, it’s time to catch a breather and reflect on just why Ubuntu gets all the hype. Why is Ubuntu the hottest brand in Linuxdom at this time? Why is it the distro most frequently advocated? He posed these questions to readers and LUG members; here’s the feedback from real-life Linux users. http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18160/1141/1/1/

  • Ubuntu Linux 8.10 - While Hardy Heron was designed to be stable enough to be a long-term support release, Intrepid Ibex promises to be packed with more exciting features. Among those changes are likely to be a number of mobility improvements as well as more flexible Internet connectivity. On the desktop there is also likely to be a refreshed desktop theme which has been in the pipeline for the past two releases. http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/3749.html

  • Running a business on desktop Linux - This paper surveys Linux's suitability for use by owners of very small businesses and the self-employed. It was written by Howard Fosdick, a self-employed database consultant who finds Linux fairly well-suited to his needs, and reckons it has saved him thousands of dollars in recent years. http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7506682379.html

  • From newb to 100 with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 - Your friends have been telling you to try out Ubuntu; forget the Microsoft proprietary operating system and liberate your computer. Yet, it's not such smooth sailing. Sure, you can download the Ubuntu CD, or get handed one, but once you're sitting at a login prompt what then? What can you actually do with this thing? http://www.itwire.com/content/view/18227/1141/

  • Ubuntu 8.04 KVM Benchmarks - the Kernel-based Virtual Machine had premiered with the Linux 2.6.20 kernel and it has matured quite a bit over the past year and a half since its christening. With that said, we are in the process of conducting new Linux virtualization benchmarks to see how these various implementations compare today. While the full comparison isn't yet ready, due to much interest surrounding Linux virtualization on desktops and servers, this morning we are publishing some initial benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite when running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the host OS and then running it as the guest operating system with hardware-based acceleration through KVM. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_virt_benchmarks&num=1

  • 'Major' Flash Player beta released - The "first major" Flash Player update since Adobe Systems completed its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia is due to be made available today as a beta. The Flash Player 10 beta features a brand-new Just In Time (JIT) engine to load pixel bytecode into the Flash Player engine. http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/15/flash_player_10_beta/

In The Blogosphere

http://polishlinux.org/linux/ubuntu/ubuntu-804-not-quite-there-yet/

  • Go green: go Ubuntu - Her laptop already gets three hours in Ubuntu Hardy versus two hours in Windows XP doing the same things (mostly Firefox 3). Mostly from ticklessness, I think. Others have noticed that Hardy (kernel 2.6.24) uses notably less power than even Gutsy (2.6.22). http://reddragdiva.livejournal.com/473413.html

  • Linux Distro Smack Down - the Podcast - He brought together the community leaders of three of the top GNU/Linux distros (Zonker Brockmeier, OpenSUSE; Jono Bacon, Ubuntu; Karsten Wade, Fedora), threw in Glynn Foster of OpenSolaris and moderated a no-holds-barred panel. (It took them three hours to clean up the blood afterwards!!) http://blogs.sun.com/barton808/entry/linux_distro_smack_down_the

  • How did Ubuntu end up so popular? - No one has hard numbers, of course, but based on how much it’s talked about on the web, Ubuntu appears to be the most popular Linux distribution for home use (as opposed to for servers). Every tech news article about Linux mentions Ubuntu and will often recommend Ubuntu to new users. Many YouTube videos about how to do something on Linux will feature Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the top distro on DistroWatch (again, just meaning there’s a lot of interest in it—not necessarily that the largest number of Linux users are choosing it over other distros). http://ubuntucat.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/how-did-ubuntu-end-up-so-popular/

In Other News

metalinks, someone mentioned the use of it in wubi at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Ideas. Also, see http://elliotmurphy.com/2008/05/13/metalinks-what-are-those/

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/sunradio/RadioFreeSoftware/2008/05/12/Fedora-Ubuntu-OpenSUSE-and-OpenSolaris-Community-Managers-A-Radio-Free-Software-Interview

http://www.screenage.de/blog/2008/04/24/ubuntu-landed-on-berlin-metro-system/

http://n00.be/archives/697/

Meeting Summaries

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Community Spotlight

Updates and Security for 6.06, 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 Updates

Ubuntu 7.04 Updates

Ubuntu 7.10 Updates

Ubuntu 8.04 Updates

UWN #: A sneak peek

Archives and RSS Feed

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Additional Ubuntu News

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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
  • Isabelle Duchatelle
  • Your Name Here
  • And many others

Glossary of Terms

Feedback

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