Issue108

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Contents

Contents

  1. UWN Translations
  2. In This Issue
  3. General Community News
    1. Introducing the Jaunty Jackalope
    2. UI Freeze in place, Alpha 6 freeze ahead
    3. Ubuntu 9.04 Developer Summit Sponsorship
    4. Status of Ubuntu Romanian Localization Team
    5. Last push for Intrepid documentation
    6. Ubuntu Developer Week
    7. MOTU
    8. New Ubuntu Members
      1. Asia Oceania Board
      2. America's Board Meeting
    9. New Ubuntu Cyclists Team
  4. Ubuntu Stats
    1. Bug Stats
    2. Infamous Bugs
    3. Translation Stats Hardy
  5. LoCo News
    1. Ohio Linuxfest almost here...
  6. New in Hardy Heron
  7. Launchpad News
  8. Ubuntu Forums News
  9. In The Press
  10. In The Blogosphere
  11. In Other News
    1. Join us at PostgreSQL Conference: West 08, October 10-12 2008
  12. Meeting Summaries
    1. Technical Board Meeting Summary
      1. Status of cdrtools discussion
      2. Gobby co-maintenance with Debian
      3. Revisiting limited upload privileges for kernel and printing packages
      4. Board membership/nominations
  13. Ubuntu Server Team Summary
  14. Upcoming Meetings and Events
  15. Community Spotlight
  16. Updates and Security for 6.06, 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04
    1. Security Updates
    2. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates
    3. Ubuntu 7.04 Updates
    4. Ubuntu 7.10 Updates
    5. Ubuntu 8.04 Updates
  17. UWN #: A sneak peek
  18. Archives and RSS Feed
  19. Additional Ubuntu News
  20. Conclusion
  21. Credits
  22. Glossary of Terms
  23. Feedback

newspaper-icon.jpg 

WORK IN PROGRESS

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #108 for the week September...

UWN Translations

  • Note to translators and our readers: We are trying a new way of linking to our translations pages. Please follow the link below for the information you need.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Translations

In This Issue

General Community News

Introducing the Jaunty Jackalope

Mark Shuttleworth has announced the name for the proposed release 9.04, and added specific goals for the "Warrior Rabbit". Those goals, to be addressed at the Ubuntu Developer's Summit in Mountain View on the 8th - 12th of December, include faster boot time and resume time, blurring the difference between web services and desktop applications, and the move of all of Ubuntu into Bazaar to improve the ability of packagers to make their changes. This is the challenge that Mark has set, to provide customers of the several million devices being shipped with Ubuntu with experiences comparable to Microsoft or Apple. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-September/000481.html

UI Freeze in place, Alpha 6 freeze ahead

The User Interface for Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) is now in effect, and the final alpha testing milestone (Intrepid Alpha 6) will happen on September 18th. Developers are asked to refrain from uploading packages that aren't essential to the release of the Alpha from Tuesday through Thursday. This is so the archive can be set, and the last showstoppers can be fixed. See the link for further information. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-September/000483.html

Ubuntu 9.04 Developer Summit Sponsorship

Jono Bacon reports that the next Ubuntu Developer Summit will be held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California from Monday, December 8 to Friday, December 12. This year, the method of sponsorship has changed. Those sponsored will be expected to choose an idea from the Ubuntu Brainstorm to use as the basis of a presentation. Some of the key topics for Ubuntu 9.04 are:

  • Networking
  • Power Management
  • Desktop Experience
  • Booting
  • Hardware Support
  • Sharing and Backup
  • Desktop Configuration
  • Server Configuration
  • Network Authentication
  • Security
  • Community
  • Mobile
  • QA
  • Other

Instructions for requesting sponsorship can be obtained from Jono's blog: http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1278

Status of Ubuntu Romanian Localization Team

Adi Roiban has issued the first of a series of updates on the localization of Ubuntu to Romanian. Currently, about 27.5% is done, with most of it Launchpad, and 2 major packages done in Narro. The team has almost all GNOME and configuration utilities translated, including the live cd menu, installation program and Ubuntu guides. They plan to translate all the GNOME packages and the GNOME GUI, then start working on the Ubuntu Desktop Course. http://adi.roiban.ro/?p=68

Last push for Intrepid documentation

The User Interface (UI) for Intrepid Ibex is now in a freeze state. This leaves about 3 weeks for errors to be found in the documentation before the string freeze takes place. Here's an opportunity to help make the documentation better. If you have Intrepid installed, please scan the documentation and submit bug reports on any errors, omissions and typos. http://oldsoldiers.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/last-push-for-intrepid-documentation/

Ubuntu Developer Week

Ubuntu Developer Week happened from Sep 1st to Sep 5th in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net. 25 IRC sessions happened with involvement from developers of all sorts of teams. At peak times we had more than 200 participants. Here a quick overview what happened throughout the week.

  • Day 1:

    • "Packaging 101" was packed with people and although we just had one hour to go through the bare-bone structure of the hello-debhelper package, we had a great time and the participants were a very sharp bunch asked very clever questions. Awesome!

    • Jorge Castro’s "Upstream Bug Linkages" also went great. He got lots of questions about the process of linking Ubuntu bugs to Upstream bugs, which helps a lot to bring developers closer together. In addition to the session log, check out Bugs/Upstream for more information.

    • Iulian Udrea had a very busy time in "Introduction to MOTU". Everybody wanted to know more about our Master of the Universe and how to get involved. Iulian covered a lot of ground, talking about processes, meetings and people and gave a good feeling for how the team works.

    • Celso Providelo was up next and talked about Soyuz and all that Jazz". Lots and lots of questions came up and Celso did his best to answer all of them, he even drew a fancy diagram to explain what Soyuz is all about. I’d like to not that the audience of this session likes Rock’n'Roll more than Jazz.

    • Pedro Villavivencio Garrido spent almost an hour talking about tips and tricks working with "Ubuntu and GNOME QA". If you know Pedro you know how enthusiastic he is about spreading the Ubuntu and GNOME love and that’s what he did in the session. He covered using GNOME’s Bugzilla, talked about the GNOME Love project, freedesktop components and lots of other stuff. Awesome!

  • Day 2:

    • "How do I fix an Ubuntu bug?" was a lot of fun. Lots of sharp questions and lots of really good fixes by the end of the session. We used Harvest to find some low-hanging fruit, verified the bug, tested the fix, test-built it and came up with a collection of good debdiffs. Yeeeehaw! Lots of excitement among the crowd!

    • The audience had a good time with David Futcher who was up next with his "Introduction to BZR". David shared a lot of insights into bzr and code hosting on Launchpad and everybody seemed quite pleased.

    • Super Mario Limonciello joined us to take the plunge and experience the joys of "Kernel module packaging with DKMS". His presentation was concise, to the point and demonstrated quite impressively, why DKMS is the way to go.

    • Leonard Richardson (with the help of Barry Warsaw and Francis Lacoste) demonstrated "The Launchpad Web Service API" and got a huge amount of questions. I guess we’re going to see a lot of scripts and applications making use of the Launchpad API soon. Thanks a lot Launchpad Heroes!

    • At the end of day 2, Brian Murray demonstrated his "Launchpad Hacks" and how to make use of Greasemonkey to change bits of the functionality of Launchpad pages, add additional information, etc. With Brian’s background in QA work it was pretty obvious to see how these hacks make working with bugs a lot easier.

  • Day 3:

    • James Westby started off with "BZR for packaging". The atmosphere was great and James demonstrated very very well, why bzr for packaging makes the world a better place and yourself much more productive.

    • Cesare Tirabassi took over and explained "How to update a package properly". There was lots of MOTU participation in the sesion, so lots of questions could easily be answered. Excellent session!

    • Mathias Gug was next and did an "Introduction to the Server Team". A great session: he introduced everybody to the current team members, explained what areas of interested the team works on, where to find easy tasks to get involved and answered loads and loads of questions! ROCK ON Server People!

    • This is the umpteenth time that Celso Providelo gave his rocking "Introduction to PPA" session. You could call him a veteran of Ubuntu Open and Developer Weeks. It was just awesome to see how many questions popped up, how many ideas were discussed, interest in PPAs is definitely very very high.

    • Christophe Sauthier and Didier Roche did a 1h30m-session about "Various ways to patch packages". No matter if it was quilt, CDBS’ simple-patchsys, dpatch or anything else: these two guys from France managed to give everybody the perfect overview. Rock’n'Roll!

  • Day 4:

    • Ara Pulido kicked off the day with "Automated Testing of the Desktop". Ara showed us what amazing stuff she was working on. In examples she showsed how easy it has become nowadays to test the integral parts of our Ubuntu Desktop. The audience asked lots of interesting questions any everybody left the session with a much better idea of what’s happening in #ubuntu-testing.

    • Afterwards Daniel Holbach did another session called "How do I fix an Ubuntu bug". The main aim of these session was to demonstrate how easy it is with Harvest and the Ubuntu development tools to make Ubuntu better today. That you don’t need a degree in rocket science, just a knack for trying to make things work again, some patience and that you’re good at team-play. The session was well-attended and the questions showed that the audience was clearly motivated to shake out bugs of Ubuntu. We even managed to fix two bugs during the session. The shipment of awesome-ness clearly has arrived!

    • Jonathan Riddell delivered the third session that day and showed how to write a "WebKit browser in PyKDE". Everybody was very impressed by how easy it is to use WebKit in PyKDE. Have a look at the examples yourself: this is clearly next-generation awesome stuff.

    • Alexander Sack afterwards gave a great introduction to "Having fun with the Mozilla Team". This is one of the very very busy teams we all expect the best from. Alexander explained all the areas that require work (extensions, bug work, maintenance of all mozilla-related packages, etc.) At the end of the session he demonstrated the ease of packaging Mozilla extension. Rock and Roll!

    • Steve Langasek as one of the Heroes of the Archive Admins delivered a great session on "How to avoid making Archive Admins unhappy". The session was a great opportunity to find out almost everything that’s reviewed with great scrutiny, especially since the session was a relaxed discussion, it invited everybody to join in.

  • Day 5

    • Matt Zimmerman kicked off with "Ask Matt". He answered myriads questions about Ubuntu Development plans, syncing of upstream and distro schedules, distributed development, Canonical partners and ltos of other interesting things. If you read the log you can imagine how fast Matt was typing to answer the questions. Rock On, Matt!

    • Lars Wirzenius talked about "Unit testing Python Code, with code coverage measurement". He did a great job at explaining the bits an pieces needed to write better code and get it tested. The audience was very interested and will hopefully make Lars proud with their next Python projects. Smile :-)

    • The "Introduction to the Installer Team" was up next and Evan Dandrea held a great session about it. It’s worth pointing out how modest Evan was and how he introduced everybody who’s involved in the team. He also gave a quick udpate what’s happening in the team right now and invited everybody to join in on the fun.

    • The "Introduction to the Security Team" session was packed with people who wanted to see Jamie Strandboge, Kees Cook and William Grant talk about their most favourite topic. They started off with a quick introduction to the lifecycle of a security issue, areas in which the team is active, proper testing of security fixes and so on. Lots and lots of good questions.

    • Ben Collins had the last slot of this week, talking about "the Kernel Team". Current plans, DKMS goodness, 2.6.26 vs 2.6.27 and lots of other discussion happened and everybody saw how much fun the Kernel can be.

MOTU

  • You can refer to Fabien Tassin as a MOTU now. His application was just approved; his track record of excellent work on Mozilla related packages spoke for him.

  • The MOTU Council just approved Iulian Udrea's application as a Universe Contributor. He spent quite some time making Ubuntu better and has learned a lot in the last weeks and months.

  • Thierry Carrez (Koon) just joined the Universe Contributors team. He put a lot of good work into several areas in the Server Team and the feedback of his sponsors was great.

New Ubuntu Members

Asia Oceania Board

Ruben Romero from Oslo, Norway has been approved for Ubuntu Membership. Ruben is the contact person of Ubuntu Eucador, LoCo Team as our new member. He has been contributing to various projects, notable among them are Spread Ubuntu and Spanish Documentation for Ubuntu. Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~huayra Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Hubuntu

Rafik Ouerchefani of the Tunisia LoCo Team is a new member. Rafik has the responsibility for Tunisian LoCo Website and its Arabic Forum. He also does some writing about Ubuntu & Free Softwares in magazines. Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~rafik Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Rafik

The Asia Oceania board is happy to welcome these newest Ubuntu Members!

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-news-team/2008-September/000175.html

America's Board Meeting

David Thomas is a core member of the Ubuntu New Mexico LoCo Team has been responsible for many of its core functions since joining in 2007. He spoke about Ubuntu at HDI 2008 Conference,where he handed out over 150 Ubuntu CDs and plans to do more talks in the future, as well as continuing to promote the New Mexico LoCo and getting involved in the Ubuntu Security team. Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~dthomas Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/dthomasdigital

David Giard is the founder of the Quebec LoCo Team and the leader of the Loco-Drupal Development Team. Starting with the translation of the Canadian site into French, his extensive work with the Quebec team has advocates describing him with such phrases as "unstoppable workhorse". Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~swe3tdave Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DavidGiard

The America's Board is very happy to welcome both these new members to the project!

New Ubuntu Cyclists Team

http://blog.grossmeier.net/2008/09/11/announcment-new-launchpad-team-ubuntu-cyclists/

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

Ohio Linuxfest almost here...

The Ohio Linux Fest will be held October 10th and 11th in Columbus, Ohio. The schedule [1] and a list of speakers [2] is available. Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier from openSUSE and Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager are giving the keynote addresses. In addition to those notables, there will be members of the Michigan LoCo, the Kubuntu maniacs from Chicago, and of course vorian, Simon Ruiz from Indiana, and Andrew Conkling and others from Pennsylvania.

[1] http://www.ohiolinux.org/schedule.html [2] http://www.ohiolinux.org/speakers.html

http://stompbox.typepad.com/blog/2008/09/ohio-linuxfest.html

http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/?p=243 (use the ubuntu berlin part to highlight loco team)

http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/?p=243, the part about the team having monthly bug jams.

New in Hardy Heron

Launchpad News

Ubuntu Forums News

In The Press

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/the-jaunty-jackalope-hops-aboard-ubuntus-ark/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080908-ubuntu-9-04-to-be-called-jaunty-jackalope.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080911-canonical-to-fund-upstream-linux-usability-improvements.html

http://luisbg.users.ubuntustudio.org/luisbg/computer_music/, see thread at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-studio-users/2008-September/003114.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10040271-92.html?part=rss&subj=news

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10037554-16.html

In The Blogosphere

http://www.workswithu.com/2008/09/10/ubuntu-saves-compaq-presario-2100-from-death-and-windows/

http://www.workswithu.com/2008/09/08/survey-says-ubuntu-server-gaining-momentum/

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/talkback/0,1000001161,39486074-39001068c-20097151o,00.htm

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39486974,00.htm

In Other News

Join us at PostgreSQL Conference: West 08, October 10-12 2008

The second annual PostgreSQL Conference West will be held in The Native American Student & Community Center at Portland State University. Already on the schedule is the membership drive for PgUS, the new PostgreSQL non profit association. Also hoped for is a debate and potential election of board members. But they would also like papers:

  • If you have a topic you have been dying to talk about
  • If it involves PostgreSQL
  • If it is interesting

Then post a submission [1]. One such possible talk might be about Ubuntu, PostgreSQL and Drupal.

[1] http://www.postgresqlconference.org/west08/talk_submission/

http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

Meeting Summaries

Technical Board Meeting Summary

Board members: Mark Shuttleworth, Matt Zimmerman Apologies: Scott James Remnant (holiday) Attendees: Oliver Grawert, Emmet Hikory

Status of cdrtools discussion

Mark has offered to obtain a legal opinion from the Software Freedom Law Center, on the condition that Joerg Schilling will agree up front to accept their determination.

We are waiting for Joerg to respond to this proposal. Mark suggested that we also involve Sun in the discussion, as they are shipping cdrtools.

Action: Mark to contact Sun legal regarding cdrtools

Gobby co-maintenance with Debian

Philipp Kern, upstream developer and Debian maintainer of gobby, and MOTU, is interested in helping to maintain gobby in Ubuntu main.

We agreed that this is reasonable, and that Phillipp's existing qualifications are sufficient to grant upload privileges.

Action: Matt to arrange upload rights for gobby for pkern

Revisiting limited upload privileges for kernel and printing packages

The Technical Board granted core-dev privileges to two developers (Tim Gardner and Till Kamppeter) interested in working with specific packages in main, with the proviso that they were to follow standard sponsorship processes for other packages.

Now that Launchpad has the capability to implement this type of access control directly, we agreed to transition these developers from ubuntu-core-dev to per-package upload rights.

Action: Matt to follow up with Tim and Till

Board membership/nominations

The Technical Board is in search of new members, and suggestions from the community have been received and reviewed. The next step is to contact the top candidates (most were suggested by third parties) and ask whether they are willing to serve in the position.

Action: Mark to contact the candidates and confirm their interest

Ubuntu Server Team Summary

http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/server-team-20080909-meeting-minutes/

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Community Spotlight

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

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

Ubuntu 7.04 Updates

Ubuntu 7.10 Updates

Ubuntu 8.04 Updates

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
  • Dave Bush
  • Your Name Here
  • And many others

Glossary of Terms

Feedback

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Weekly News Team. If you have a story idea or suggestions for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list at https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-news-team and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Ideas. 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 them to ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com.