Issue123

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Contents

Contents

  1. UWN Translations
  2. In This Issue
  3. General Community News
    1. Notifications, indicators, and alerts
    2. Making LoCo Teams Rock
    3. Planet Ubuntu and Corporate Blogs
  4. Ubuntu Stats
    1. Bug Stats
    2. Infamous Bugs
    3. Translation Stats Intrepid
    4. 5-a-day bug stats
      1. Top 5 contributors for the past 7 days
      2. Top 5 teams for the past 7 days
  5. LoCo News
    1. Ubuntu Live on TV
    2. Ubuntu Berlin review of 2008
    3. Tunisian Team Events in December
  6. New in Intrepid Ibex
  7. Launchpad News
    1. 12 Days of Launchpad
  8. Ubuntu Forums News
  9. In The Press
  10. In The Blogosphere
  11. In Other News
    1. Full Circle Magazine: Issue 20
  12. Meeting Summaries
    1. Community Council
    2. MOTU Council
    3. Mobile Team
    4. Xubuntu
      1. Artwork
      2. Bug Triage
      3. Community
      4. Documentation
      5. Marketing
      6. Packaging, Development, & Testing
    5. IRC Council
    6. LoCo Teams
      1. German Team(Berlin)
      2. Japanese Team
      3. Tunisian Team
    7. Chicago Team
      1. Georgia Team
      2. New York Team
      3. Pennsylvania Team
      4. Arizona Team
  13. Upcoming Meetings and Events
    1. Monday, January 5, 2009
      1. EMEA Membership Meeting
    2. Tuesday, January 6, 2009
      1. Server Team Meeting
      2. Desktop Team Meeting
      3. Kernel Team Meeting
      4. Community Council Meeting
    3. Wednesday, January 7, 2009
      1. America's Council Meeting
      2. Ubuntu-us-pa LoCo Team Meeting
      3. Foundation Team Meeting
      4. QA Team Meeting
      5. Edubuntu Meeting
    4. Thursday, January 8, 2009
      1. Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting
      2. Desktop Team Meeting
      3. Ubuntu Java Meeting
  14. Community Spotlight
  15. Updates and Security for 6.06, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10
    1. Security Updates
    2. Ubuntu 6.06 Updates
    3. Ubuntu 7.10 Updates
    4. Ubuntu 8.04 Updates
    5. Ubuntu 8.10 Updates
  16. UWN #: A sneak peek
  17. Archives and RSS Feed
  18. Additional Ubuntu News
  19. Conclusion
  20. Credits
  21. Glossary of Terms
  22. Ubuntu - Get Involved
  23. Feedback

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WORK IN PROGRESS

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #123 for the week December 21st - January 3rd, 2008. In this issue we cover ...

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

Notifications, indicators, and alerts

In a recent blog article from Mark Shuttleworth(here be dragons) we get an insight into the work being considered for notifications, indicators, and alerts. These are the bubble desktop items that draw our attention to various indicators that need our attention. Notifications are interesting, subtle and complex, with a lot of different approaches on many different platforms. The proposed changes are to simplify and eliminate complexity, while still making it possible to meet the use cases known today. The key proposals we are making are that:

  • There should be no actions on notifications.
  • Notifications should not be displayed synchronously, but may be queued. Our implementation of the notification display daemon will display only one notification at a time, others may do it differently.

This work will show up as a new notification display agent, not as a fork or patch to the existing GNOME notification daemon. It isn't felt that the client API - libnotify - needs to be changed for this experiment, though it may not display notifications sent through that API that use capabilities that are thought to be deprecated.

The most controversial part of the proposal is the idea that notifications should not have actions associated with them. In other words, no buttons, sliders, links, or even a dismissal [x]. When a notification pops up, you won’t be able to click on it, you won’t be able to make it go away, you won’t be able to follow it to another window, or to a web page. The core of the idea is to lessen the responsibility of the user by relieving them of having to respond to a notification, but still giving them the information they need.

You can read the whole article, see a short video showing how the new notification might look, and find out what Mark's three pronged attack strategy will be at the link. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253

Making LoCo Teams Rock

Jono Bacon has a few things he'd like to see done, to help new teams achieve approved status and help existing teams to be more productive.

  • Database the list of LoCo teams - This would improve data mining, help keep a current perspective on the LoCo community, and make it easier for new members to find the nearest team to join.

  • Education - His suggestion is to hold an Open Week style event to improve how great teams can better educate new teams by passing on best practices and great experience.

  • Contacts and messaging - The ability to share stories, experiences, and tips through blogs, articles, YouTube and anywhere else that would attract attention to the LoCo Teams and their work.

Read more at: http://www.jonobacon.org/2008/12/30/making-loco-teams-rock/

Planet Ubuntu and Corporate Blogs

A proposal is being raised to include Corporate blogs on Planet Ubuntu. Of course there would be guidelines, such as no advertising, Community Council oversight, and an employee with Ubuntu membership as the responsible person for the blog entry. Other guidelines also exist. See them all at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlanetUbuntu/CorporateBlogs

Ubuntu Stats

Bug Stats

  • Open (47766)+326 over last week
  • Critical (23)+4 over last week
  • Unconfirmed (18785)+349 over last week
  • Unassigned (40405)+1100 over last week
  • All bugs ever reported (239941)+2135 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 Intrepid

  • Spanish (15871)-1315 over last week
  • French (61915)+/-0 over last week
  • Swedish (72541)+/-0 over last week
  • Brazilian Protuguese (77812)-2954 over last week
  • English (UK) (81460)+/-0 over last week

Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex," see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/

5-a-day bug stats

Top 5 contributors for the past 7 days

  • crimsun (179)
  • vorian (44)
  • chrisccoulson (33)
  • andres-mujica (29)
  • blueyed (26)

Top 5 teams for the past 7 days

  • dcteam (179)
  • ubuntu-us-ohio (58)
  • ubuntu-co (29)
  • ubuntu-chicago (24)
  • ubuntu-oklahoma (21)

5-A-Day stats provided by Daniel Holbach. See http://daniel.holba.ch/5-a-day-stats/

LoCo News

Ubuntu Live on TV

Milo Casagrande has posted that there would be an interview with Fabio Marzocca on the local Rome TV channel, RomaUno. The interview, in Italian, is about Ubuntu and the Italian community.[1]

http://milocasagrande.wordpress.com/2008/12/19/ubuntu-live-on-tv-uds-and/

Ubuntu Berlin review of 2008

Ubuntu Berlin looks back on some of the achievements of 2008, including things like meetings, Bug Jams, release parties, and much more. In addition, they include a list of goals for 2009, which include focusing on Ubuntu related topics, release parties, workshops, and Bug Jams. The entire list can be seen at: http://www.screenage.de/blog/2008/12/17/ubuntu-berlin-review-of-2008/

Tunisian Team Events in December

The Tunisian Ubuntu team was invited by the Tunisian Ministry of Communication Technologies to participate in an open source seminar titled "Free Software: A Strong Involvement of IT". During the course of the presentations they offered testimonies on the use of open source software in companies. They also gave a lecture on Ubuntu, their LoCo, and what activities they participate in. Ali Ben Brahim also talked about the Ubuntu philosophy in business, and the advantages of using Ubuntu in business settings.

In December, they completed the first of 2 phases of migrating the National Engineering School of Sfax (ENIS) to Ubuntu. This first phase included presentations to students, teachers and technical staff of ENIS[1].

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TunisianTeam/TeamReporting#ENIS%20Event%208.12

New in Intrepid Ibex

Launchpad News

12 Days of Launchpad

Look for more of the 12 days of Launchpad here: http://news.launchpad.net/

Ubuntu Forums News

In The Press

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-9-04-Alpha-2-Screenshot-Tour-100524.shtml

http://www.e-linux.it/news_detail.php?id=7366

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/65704.html

In The Blogosphere

  • Best Ubuntu Innovations of 2008 - Blogger Christopher Tozzi or WorksWithU gives us his list of the best Ubuntu innovations of 2008. First on Tozzi's list is better wireless drivers. Thanks to the new wireless stack Ubuntu has better support for Broadcom cards and iwl3945/iwl4965 for Intel chips in Ubuntu 8.04, and for Atheros users, vast improvements to madwifi, especially on 64-bit systems in Ubunt 8.10. The Network Manager compliments the improvements to the wireless drivers with easier configuration of WPA-enterprise access as well as VPN connections. Tozzi lists additional features he feels were the best innovations of 2008, but also notes that many of these features come from upstream developers. While they may not be Ubuntu specific, these contributions have helped refine the Linux desktop experience considerably. http://www.workswithu.com/2009/01/01/best-ubuntu-innovations-of-2008/

  • Ubuntu Year in Review 2008 - UWN's own Nick Ali compiles a Ubuntu Year in Review for 2008. Nick starts off with noting the hard work LoCos continued to perform in promoting and supporting users in their area. Many held release parties for Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10. The French Team's 8.10 release party was attended by over 4,000 people! Ubuntu membership applications from community participants continued to grow, and the Community Council created regional boards for EMEA, Asia and Oceania, and the Americas to distribute the applications. The forums continue to grow with over 700,000 registered users, 6 million posts, and almost 1 million threads. Nick continues his review with highlights such as Open Weeks, Brainstorm, Free Culture Showcase, Developer Weeks, Global Bug Jam, and more. http://boredandblogging.com/2008/12/31/ubuntu-year-in-review-2008/

  • Ubuntu Enrolls At Cornell College - WorksWithU's Joe Panettieri tells us that Cornell College of Mount Vernon, Iowa is the latest institute of higher education to embrace Ubuntu Server Edition. Cornell College began using Ubuntu in May 2007, when Web Developer/Programmer Brian Steere was hired as a full-time employee. “We realized that many of our Web applications were created and designed for Linux and ill-suited for running on a Windows/IIS [Internet Information Server] stack,” wrote Steere in an email to WorksWithU. Fast forward to December 2008, and Ubuntu currently hosts Cornell College’s Wordpress-Mu install, News center, Master calendar, and Moodle installation. Cornell College is considering migrating their MySQL installation to Ubuntu next as the institution continues to grow its Ubuntu Server deployment. http://www.workswithu.com/2008/12/22/ubuntu-enrolls-at-cornell-college/

  • The Win, Fail and Meh of Open Source in 2008 - Dj Walker-Morgan reports that heise-online-UK considers Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to be a clear win for open source software for 2008. Reasons for their opinion include the fact that the LTS offers support for longer than 18 months, and that such support is not tied to service contracts or subscriptions. In addition, they feel that Ubuntu has done more to popularize Linux in 2008 than any other distribution, as demonstrated by the enthusiastic community. http://www.heise-online.co.uk/open/The-Win-Fail-and-Meh-of-Open-Source-in-2008--/features/112305

  • The beauty of Ubuntu or the adaptability of kids - jbunbury rebuilt a computer and gave it to his sister, her son and daughter. Not wanting to spend a lot of money on it, he installed Ubuntu as the operating system. After some initial trepidation on their part, and a couple of weeks between visits, he found that they had taken to Ubuntu quite readily. Next, they're going to get hooked up with a local ISP and get out on the internet. http://jbunbury.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/the-beauty-of-ubuntu-or-the-adaptability-of-kids/

  • RE: Back to Windows - The author of the comment on this site has been caught in a bind. He switched from Windows to Ubuntu because he loves open source. But then he found that he couldn't access a number of devices, such as cell phones, mp3 players, and a camera. Some of the devices he finally managed to access as an external drive, but with nothing of the full functionality that he needed. He states, "ubuntu is a superior operating system imo, but i’m just not willing to live without full, simple device support." http://www.omninerd.com/comments/21356

In Other News

Full Circle Magazine: Issue 20

  • Command and Conquer - The Daunting Terminal.

  • How-To : Program in C - Part 4, Web Development - Part 1, Backup & Sync Your Music.

  • My Story - Making Money With FOSS
  • Book Review - Ubuntu Kung Fu
  • My Opinion - Italy Speaks OSS
  • MOTU Interview - Andrea Colangelo
  • Top 5 - Backup Solutions

Don’t forget to take the FCM reader survey at: http://url.fullcirclemagazine.org/e78bdf

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-20/

Meeting Summaries

Community Council

  • Meeting 2008-12-16:

    • PlanetUbuntu/CorporateBlogs was agreed on and the request for the addition of the Oxford Archaeology blog granted. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlanetUbuntu/CorporateBlogs

    • Mark will ask Nigel Pugh about interest in a Google Calendar <-> IRC gateway. Daniel will mail Nick Ali about trying to get people involved in finding a solution.

    • The decision on a Canonical/Ubuntu participation in a Tunisian FOSS conference was unfortunately too late.

    • The three nominees for the IRC Council were appointed, the IRC Council will be asked for their OK with changing their charter to read "... at least 5 members ..." instead. The possibility of a future "IRC Contributors" team was discussed and the new IRC Council will look into finalising this. The ownership of the ~ubuntu-irc-council team was transferred to the CC.

MOTU Council

  • We're pleased to announce that Stefan Ebner joined the MOTU team.
  • We're very happy to announce that David Futcher just joined the MOTU team. He did great work in the last weeks and lives in Scotland.
  • Stéphane Graber joined the MOTU team. Having put a lot of effort into LTSP and friends, we were only too happy to welcome him on board.
  • Nathan Handler just joined the MOTU team. He has done fantastic work and we're very happy he's on board now.

Mobile Team

  • Some of the team on holiday and UDS so a quiet month
  • Work on armel build failures and depwaits including filing bugs #308834 and bug #308465
  • Fixed xine-lib FTBFS (4 issues combined).
  • xulrunner-1.9 ubuntu-mobile hardy ppa upload; seems to be trivial to follow the hardy xulrunner-1.9 branch.
  • Sent pkg-config cleanups and testsuite fixes upstream.
  • Sent acpid patches upstream.

Xubuntu

Artwork

  • Pasi (knome) has been working on drafting Xubuntu artwork guidelines.

Bug Triage

  • Bug triage proceeding at a steady pace. Many bugs were triaged this month.
  • A high number of bugs were reported upstream.

Community

  • Cody, Jannis, Michael, and Pasi all attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View, California
  • Cody and Pasi attended FOSSCamp in Mountain View, California.
  • Substantial amount of work has been done on drafting the Jaunty "Growing the Xubuntu Community" specification.

Documentation

  • Jim, Pasi, and Jannis are brainstorming an idea to work closely with upstream and other distributions to rewrite the upstream documentation.
  • Jim has run some scripts to start converting Ubuntu docs to Xubuntu docs. Docs require some cleanup, but it is a good start.

Marketing

  • New website parallel to Intrepid release.
  • Substantial amount of work has been done on drafting the Jaunty "Growing the Xubuntu Community" specification.

Packaging, Development, & Testing

  • Alpha 2 released.
  • Updated xubuntu-meta package to fix armel build failure (Thanks to Sarah Hobbs).
  • Add libxine1-ffmpeg to recommends for xfmedia.
  • Michael (NCommander) has begun backport of Xfce 4.4.3 to Intrepid.
  • Corrected an internationalization issue in en_IN local for Orage where the start/end buttons show the date number, but not the day of the week properly.
  • Charlie Kravetz (charlie-tca) appointed to Xubuntu QA lead.
  • Charlie (charlie-tca) has been working on improving the testing wiki pages including the Xubuntu test cases.
  • Cody Somerville (cody-somerville) packaged Sion, a gio/vfs mount manager, from the Xfce4 goodies.
  • Lionel (mr_pouit) packaged a new upstream release of xfce4-dict (0.5.2) and xfburn (0.4.0).

IRC Council

LoCo Teams

German Team(Berlin)

  • 2008-12-03: ubuntu-berlin user meeting (Stammtischtreffen)

  • 2008-12-09: our regular BugJam at the c-base

  • 2008-12-10: Talk "Einführung in LaTeX unter GNU/Linux" (Introduction to LaTeX - the full story in german language: http://www.ubuntu-berlin.de/node/98)

  • 2008-12-11: Tux Origami Workshop

Japanese Team

Tunisian Team

Chicago Team

  • Made initial plans for participation in the February 2009 Global Bug Jam
    • Additional planning meeting set for Saturday, January 17th.
  • Set tentative 6-month plan for Ubuntu-Chicago Loco activities. Activities to include:
    • Bug Jam - February
    • Ubuntu and Free Software advocacy activity day - March

    • Ubuntu-Chicago at "Flourish" FLOSS conference - April (Presenters & Ubuntu-Chicago representation)

    • Jaunty Release Party & Install Fest - Early May

    • Packaging Jam - June

Georgia Team

  • Preparing plans and schedules for 2009.

New York Team

  • Completed a redesign on the entire team wiki page including the creation of several additional sub-areas and pages.

  • Held elections for new officers: PrivateVoid was elected Vice President, the-stace was elected treasurer and NewJack was elected to the at-large position for the down state region.

  • The Newsletter team held two meetings (IRC and SIP) and is on its way to producing the teams first newsletter. The team is being headed by DaraAdib.

  • A meetup was held at the Barnes & Noble @ RIT in Rochester, NY on December 4th.

  • A meetup was held at Potato Republic in New City, NY on December 6th.
  • Plans are being finalized for events from January through May including an Open Street Map event and participation in the Global Bug Jam.

Pennsylvania Team

Arizona Team

  • Working on installfests to be held at the two major Arizona college campuses. On at U of A in Tucson, and one at ASU in Phoenix.
  • Starting work on our second open source state conference(ABLEconf) to be held in 2009.

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Monday, January 5, 2009

EMEA Membership Meeting

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Server Team Meeting

Desktop Team Meeting

Kernel Team Meeting

  • Start: 17:00 UTC
  • End: 18:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: Not listed as of publication

Community Council Meeting

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

America's Council Meeting

Ubuntu-us-pa LoCo Team Meeting

  • Start: 12:30 UTC
  • End: 13:30 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-us-pa
  • Agenda: None as of publication

Foundation Team Meeting

  • Start: 16:00 UTC
  • End: 17:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

QA Team Meeting

Edubuntu Meeting

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Ubuntu Mobile Team Meeting

  • Start: 12:00 UTC
  • End: 13:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

Desktop Team Meeting

Ubuntu Java Meeting

  • Start: 14:00 UTC
  • End: 15:00 UTC
  • Location: IRC channel #ubuntu-meeting
  • Agenda: None listed as of publication

Community Spotlight

Updates and Security for 6.06, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 6.06 Updates

  • None Reported

Ubuntu 7.10 Updates

  • None Reported

Ubuntu 8.04 Updates

Ubuntu 8.10 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
  • Craig A. Eddy

  • Kenny McHenry

  • Dave Bush
  • Your Name Here
  • And many others

Glossary of Terms

Ubuntu - Get Involved

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It's your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate

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.

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