Contents

  1. In This Issue
  2. General Community News
    1. Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Freeze
    2. Ubuntu Classroom
    3. Ubuntustats.com Returns
  3. LoCo News
    1. Ubuntu Jordan LoCo: FLOSS Introduction - The Jordanian Way
    2. Ubuntu New Mexico LoCo: Endorphin Power Company Ubuntu Install and Support
  4. New in Hardy Heron
    1. Technical Board decisions
  5. Ubuntu Forums News
    1. Ubuntu Forums Interviews
    2. Tutorial of the Week
  6. In The Press
  7. In The Blogosphere
  8. In Other News
    1. First episode of Ubuntu UK Podcast: A Little Less Conversation
    2. kubuntu-de.org interview: Tobias König about the development of Akonadi
    3. Ubuntu Studio at Sheffield University
  9. Upcoming Meetings and Events
    1. Wednesday, March 19, 2008
      1. Server Team Meeting
    2. Thursday, March 20, 2008
      1. Ubuntu Chicago Meeting
  10. Updates and Security for 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10
    1. Security Updates
    2. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates
    3. Ubuntu 6.10 Updates
    4. Ubuntu 7.04 Updates
    5. Ubuntu 7.10 Updates
  11. Bug Stats
  12. Translation Stats Hardy
  13. Archives and RSS Feed
  14. Additional Ubuntu News
  15. Conclusion
  16. Credits
  17. Glossary of Terms
  18. Feedback

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 82 for the weeks March 9th - March 15th, 2008. In this issue we cover the Ubuntu 8.04 beta freeze, Ubuntu Classroom team, the return of Ubuntustats.com, LoCo projects from the Jordanian, New Mexico, and UK teams, Ubuntu Studio at Sheffield University, and, as always, much, much more!

UWN Translations

In This Issue

General Community News

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Freeze

Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS is now only one week away from beta release, and has entered beta freeze. During the freeze, all uploads to main must be approved by a member of the release team [1], so if you have fixes which are important to get in, please do get in touch as soon as possible. Uploads to universe require a manual push through the queue, but are not subject to release management approval.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-release

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-March/000403.html

Ubuntu Classroom

What is Ubuntu Classroom? It's a place for users to learn how to give back to the community. The idea is to show the millions of users of Ubuntu how they can personally make Ubuntu better. The goal is to help show users how easy it is to contribute to Ubuntu, and then follow that up to make sure those same users continue to contribute.

How can you help? We need presenters, bloggers and people to be available in IRC to help answer questions. Help get this team on track by volunteering some of you time, you'll be glad you did!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Classroom

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Classroom/Submissions

http://tinyurl.com/2epthg (Ubuntu Classroom planning schedule and events)

Ubuntustats.com Returns

After a lengthy downtime due to excessive traffic and load to the server, Felipe Lerena finally managed to put some spare time into migrating everything to a new server, provided by Mitch Mahan, and launched UbuntuStats back into the intrawebs. The plan is continue building, to expand the statistics gathered, and start showing trends in different areas. Also of importance will be cleaning up the code to allow other people to contribute code into the project and provide public snapshots of the database. http://beuno.com.ar/archives/61

LoCo News

Ubuntu Jordan LoCo: FLOSS Introduction - The Jordanian Way

As part of Ubuntu Jordan LoCo Team continuous efforts to spread awareness about GNU/Linux, the team organized a public event at The University of Jordan. A lecture Introducing FLOSS in the Jordanian way, as well as a brief background of FLOSS history, was given by Khamis Seksik. The lecture also included Mr. Seksik explaining some reasons to use FLOSS, as well as information on the selling VS software, and comparing backward compatibility issues between FLOSS and other software. It is worth mentioning that next week the Ubuntu Jordan LoCo Team is scheduled to start giving Ubuntu Desktop Courses in cooperation with the Jordan University IEEE Student Branch, who was an important part of this event. Visit the link for pictures of the event. http://syntux.net/blog/2008/03/13/ubuntu-jordan-loco-floss-introduction-the-jordanian-way/

Ubuntu New Mexico LoCo: Endorphin Power Company Ubuntu Install and Support

In September of 2007, Dave Thomas and Eric Krieger were sitting at the New Mexico Software Freedom Day event when they began tossing around various thoughts and ideas about open source software. The discussion eventually landed on the topic of the Philosophy of Ubuntu -- "I am what I am because of who we all are." A question arose: "How could we, as a group, give back to our community?" Eric approached his boss at Charter Bank and asked if they could donate some PCs to a local non-profit organization. Charter Bank generously agreed to donate twenty-five PCs, several switches, and a server. It was determined, after some discussion on the teams email list, that a deserving organization would be Endorphin Power Company (EPC). EPC is a local shelter with special focus on the substance-dependent and homeless. The ultimate goal is to bring a highly functional computer network to EPC by using Ubuntu and Open Source Software with emphasis on documentation and training.

To date, the team's EPC project is progressing nicely. They just finished setting up and installing the EPC computer lab this past Saturday. It was a proud day for our Ubuntu community, but this is only the beginning! The successful installation of the computer lab has given the team a solid foundation upon which to build. Future projects include the networking and installation of all of the computers in the residents' dormitory rooms, the launching of an EPC intranet (and associated server applications), and the creation of internet kiosks within a planned cafe. Additionally, the team will be holding regular meetings at EPC, and will be giving tutorials by using the Ubuntu Desktop Course in a series of classes at the new computer lab. New projects continue to be discussed and will be more fully developed as our involvement grows.

Project wiki page with pictures here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Endorphin_Power_Company_Ubuntu_Install_and_Support_

Another summary and more pictures can be found on Dave Thomas's blog: http://dthomasdigital.wordpress.com/2008/03/15/new-mexico-locos-computer-lab-project-takes-off/

Contact information

NM LoCo Team contact: mrimbert@ubuntu.com

EPC Project Lead: grammatoncleric@ubuntu.com

NM LoCo IRC channel #ubuntu-us-nm

New in Hardy Heron

Technical Board decisions

At Tuesday's meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board, two technical decisions were taken with regard to the Ubuntu 8.04 release:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-March/000400.html

Ubuntu Forums News

Ubuntu Forums Interviews

Tutorial of the Week

This week's tutorial might not be one you need right away, but keep it in mind for the future: OldPink's "HowTo: Transfer your bootable Ubuntu installation between hard drives." http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=599599

Aside from being exceptionally useful, this is another tutorial that's well-designed and easy to follow. Be sure to thank OldPink if it comes in handy, in the future.

In The Press

In The Blogosphere

In Other News

First episode of Ubuntu UK Podcast: A Little Less Conversation

Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Dave Walker and Tony Whitmore present the first episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. Available in OGG or MP3 formats, this first episode includes:

http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2008/03/11/13/

kubuntu-de.org interview: Tobias König about the development of Akonadi

Tobias König is a Computer Science student and one of the core developers of Akonadi, one of the innovative technologies that will be implemented in KDE4. Akonadi is not a groupware server. Akonadi is an intermediate storage and abstraction layer for PIM data. This is similar to Phonon, for multimedia or Solid for hardware. Akonadi abstracts the access and maintenance of data for the rest of the system (i.e. the address book or the calendar). This is achieved by offering a common interface for all the data. In turn there are several improvements in comparison to KDE3: (1) PIM data must only be held once in the memory; (2) there is a central instance which monitors any change of the data and hence informs all other components about it; (3) the whole Akonadi framework follows an asynchronous communication design. This means blocking of the user interface or for the loading or storing of data cannot occur anymore. The user will benefit because data that is changed, say in their address book, will automatically change in their birthday data too. Integration, with less memory usage. Read the whole interview by following the link. http://www.kubuntu-de.org/english/interview-tobias-k-nig-about-development-akonadi

Ubuntu Studio at Sheffield University

Adapting to change: Working with digital sound using open source software in a teaching and learning environment - The music department at Sheffield University is in the process of installing Ubuntu Studio (dual boot) on all of their studio computers. This is being lead by the head of the studios Adrian Moore and one of the department's technicians the Dave Moore. They have written a rather objective study on the feasibility of the switch along with a case study of creating a composition on Ubuntu Studio. Read the study at http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/14/88/adapting-to-changer1.pdf

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Server Team Meeting

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Ubuntu Chicago Meeting

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

As always, the Bug Squad needs more help. If you want to get started, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

Translation Stats Hardy

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

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:

Glossary of Terms

  1. FLOSS - Free Libre Open Source Software
  2. LTS - Long Term Support
  3. PIM - Personal Information Manager
  4. SPARC - Scalable Processor Architecture, from Sun Microsystems

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.

UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue82 (last edited 2008-08-06 17:00:00 by localhost)