Issue10

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WORK IN PROGRESS

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue 10

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue 10 for the week of August, 13 - 19 2006

You can always find this and other Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issues at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter

In This Issue

General Community News

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates

New Apps In Edgy

Glade 3 - details to follow

Don't forget quick installation notes, enable extra repository, package name, use g-a-i where possible, etc...

Weekly developer meeting

Held on Aug. 17th at 23.00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting. The developers coordinated the list of topics that will be discussed at next weeks Development Sprint in Wiesbaden, Germany. Some further features like the speakup kernel module, boot-message-logging and kubuntu-accessibility were reported as implemented and the Firefox 2.0 beta merge is complete. The desktop team is keeping very busy with bug triaging and fixing (and could use your help!).

Ubuntu

Kubuntu

Edubuntu

Xubuntu

Launchpad News

Warning /!\ I don't know what I'm doing. This might not be the right way to add news items here. This might not be welcome news. Please feel free to cut out, edit, mangle, etc. And please contact me if you want to discuss the subject; I'd be happy to contribute to the newsletter; I just don't know how! -- kiko@async.com.br

This has been a busy pair of weeks for the Launchpad team, and this long report has a lot of news for you. I'd like to start off by calling attention to the fact that we have a staging server running, something that some users may already be familiar with. The staging server is accessible via:

It runs a copy of the production database on the very latest code integrated into our codebase. This database is discarded and a new version is copied in daily, which makes it safe to experiment with. And your Launchpad account already works there!

Bug tracking

My second important announcement is an answer to the question

  • Can I use Launchpad (Malone) to track bugs for my software project?

The answer is yes -- and it always has been! Launchpad does not intend to be a system that just links bug trackers together (though it does allow you to connect your bugs to bugs in remote bug trackers), but a full-fledged bug management system for any open source project. Ubuntu uses it successfully, and a number of other products have taken it up as their main tracker since its first public announcement. You can read more about what makes bug tracking in Launchpad unique at:

On the bug-tracking front, we have a few interesting new features. You may have noticed by now that bug descriptions and comments are now rendered in a monospace font. This is an experiment Matthew Thomas and the Launchpad team are running together to see how much it improves rendering of structured comments (which include source code, diffs and ASCII art).

The tags listed in the bug page are now links to listings of bugs with that tag set. This should make it easier to actually use the tags for grouping. We've seen an explosion of tags for Ubuntu meanwhile, and we are thinking of how to manage the pool of tags for a project this successful; it's likely that more changes will be discussed on the users mailing list over the next weeks.

Bazaar

Last week I wrote of the transition of source code imports to native Bazaar (bzr) format; this was successfully deployed in this period and we are now 100% bzr-native. In our second month of active hosting of Bazaar branches we already have over 600 branches registered on Launchpad and its code hosting system (dubbed the Supermirror). Two recent blog posts talk more about pushing your bzr branches to Launchpad, and managing shared bzr branches using Launchpad teams:

Contextual Karma

A Launchpad-wide change that many people should find interesting is the addition of per-context Karma listings. Each distribution or upstream product now has a listing of its top contributors, both general and per-activity. For instance, the top contributors to Ubuntu are listed at:

and, for PIDA and Gnome Baker, two upstream products that use Launchpad for translations and bugs, respectively:

Note that because we did not use to store the context of your actions, old karma points (allocated before August 1st) do not count towards your scores in distros and upstreams.

Edgy Translations

The Edgy translations opening has surprised us in being a harder task than we expected: our intention is to ensure that Edgy translations included all translations done in Dapper, and that requires configuring translations in the database to also point to Edgy. Unfortunately for us the data volume made this task run into some practical limits: it takes a couple of hours to run, and though our test coverage is good, there have been a few hiccups in the migration. The good news is that the code is written and deployed, and that we are now pending only running the database update script, and doing acceptance testing the results. We are planning on doing the official opening on Monday, barring any problems, and I'll make sure I post any updates to the rosetta-users mailing list.

Other news

Other important changes of note to Launchpad this week include a real improvement to the package publishing process, speeding it up by 30%. Specification workflow changes now record the dates and people involved. We also rolled out changes to the web hosting system, which is required for our next big UI change: the move to per-application domains, and a new page layout (but those are all the hints I can give out right now!) We've improved our Zope form infrastructure in Launchpad, which will allow improvements such as better error display and AJAX based on-the-fly validation.

Finally, if you are interested in staying abreast of Launchpad news, feature discussions and bug reports, consider joining the launchpad-users mailing list:

We'd be honored to have you with us.

Bug Stats

New Bugs: # BR Closed Bugs: #

Infamous Bugs

In The Press

Ubuntu and Other Distros Rolled Out to American Students

  • "Students in Indiana are using new Linux desktops under a state grant program to roll out low-cost workstations to schools.More than 22,000 kids have been Linuxed up under the programme which is being run by the Indiana Department of Education. Mike Huffman, special assistant for technology told CRN that Linux workstations were rolled out for 22,000 students over the last year under the Affordable Classroom Computers for Every Secondary Student (ACCESS) programme. The plan is to expand that even further with Novell SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu installations.Currently, 24 high schools are using Linux and the plan is to increase that to 80."

Read more at http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33756

Feature Of The Week - ???

Additional News Resources

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:

  • Matthew Revell
  • John Little
  • anyone else that contributes
  • And many others

Feedback

This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Documentation Team. Please feel free to contact us regarding any concerns or suggestions by either sending an email to ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com or by using any of the other methods on the [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Contact Ubuntu Documentation Team Contact Information Page].