Ubuntu Traffic #23 -- 2005/01/28

Benj. Mako Hill mako at canonical.com
Mon Feb 28 17:35:54 CST 2005


Greetings,

Ubuntu Traffic is a newsletter summarizing the goings-on in the Ubuntu
community -- focusing on IRC and mailing list activity.

I'm getting close to catching up on Ubuntu Traffic. This traffic
covers the final week of January, 2005.  It is attached to this mail
and online here:

  http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/ubuntu-traffic/u20050128_23.html

Thanks once again to everyone who pointed things out to me. Please
keep it up!

Regards,
Mako


-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako at canonical.com
-------------- next part --------------
                       Ubuntu Traffic #23 For 2005/01/28

                             By Benjamin Mako Hill

Table Of Contents

  ? Standard Format
  ? Text Format
  ? XML Source
  ? Introduction
  ? Threads Covered

    1.  2005/01/17?-?2005/01/24 (26 posts) Testing Language Packs
    2.  2005/01/18?-?2005/01/30 (17 posts) Fedora Plans and Ubuntu
    3.  2005/01/20?-?2005/01/23 (23 posts) Array CD 3
    4.  2005/01/21?-?2005/01/31 (61 posts) GTK2 CD Burning in Hoary
    5.  2005/01/23?-?2005/01/24 (6 posts)  Translating and Rosetta
    6.  2005/01/25              (1 post)   Community Council Meeting
    7.  2005/01/26?-?2005/01/28 (19 posts) Graphical Partition Tool
    8.  2005/01/27              (2 posts)  Announcing Local Community Teams
    9.  2005/01/27              (1 post)   Ubuntu Live CD Milestone Release
    10. 2005/01/27?-?2005/01/28 (6 posts)  CD-Based Distro for Offline Users
    11. 2005/01/28              (1 post)   Kernel Team
    12. 2005/01/22?-?2005/01/28 (23 posts) Ubuntu Documentation Team Happenings
    13. 2005/01/24?-?2004/01/25 (3 posts)  Ubuntu Security Notifications

Introduction

Welcome to the twenty-third edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the
final week of January: January 22 - 28, 2005. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the
most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu GNU/Linux
distribution.

Ubuntu Traffic can be found on the web at http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/
ubuntu-traffic/. You can also receive in text form over email by signing up for
the Ubuntu News mailing list at http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/
ubuntu-news. There is now an RSS feed for traffic available as well! You can
find information on turning that on at the Ubuntu Hompage (http://
people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/ubuntu-traffic/) .

You can sign up for any of the mailing lists summarized here at http://
lists.ubuntu.com. You can also join the IRC discussion summarized here in #
ubuntu and other channels on the Freenode network: irc.freenode.net. Please
join in and maybe you will be featured in the next traffic!

First, the following bits and pieces didn't get a full story but are worth
mentioning:

  ? Jeff Waugh welcomed Oliver Grawert to the team saying, "Congratulations and
    welcome aboard to Oliver Grawert, who uploaded his first package today!
    http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/hoary-changes/2005-January/001796.html"
  ? Kevin Russel answered a question posed in a recent traffic saying that he
    had managed to successfully install Ubuntu PPC 4.10 onto a Mac Mini: "Xfree
    did not detect my monitor, and I don't currently have any sound."
  ? Keywan Najafi Tonekaboni reported from an Ubuntu install party in the Ruhr
    area of Germany. Pictures and information are here: http://
    www.az-muelheim.de/ubuntu-resume.html

?

1. Testing Language Packs
2005/01/17?-?2005/01/24 (26 posts) Subject: "First set of language packs out
for testing"
People: Martin Pitt,?Danilo Segan,? ,?Thtde,?Matt Zimmerman

Martin Pitt sent a message to the development list announcing the first
published sets of language packs for Ubuntu saying:

    I'm happy to announce the first published set of Ubuntu language packs.
    They are now in a releasable state and the infrastructure for generating
    and updating them in a fully automatic way works.

    The package structure is like this: for each language which we have at
    least one po file for, we have three packages:

      ? language-pack-$LANG: Contains the bulk of translation files for the
        given language, usually created/updated at release time.
      ? language-pack-$LANG-update: Contains translation files which were added
        /modified since the last update of language-pack-$LANG; these packages
        are supposed to be very small, and they will be automatically updated
        daily. If these packages become too large, we can release a new base
        package at any time.
      ? language-support-$LANG: Empty metapackage that depends at least on
        language-pack-$LANG and language-pack-$LANG-update, and additionally on
        all Mozilla/FireFox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice.org/myspell/font/whatever
        packages that are appropriate and useful for this particular language.
        This is the package that is supposed to be installed by d-i.

    To have maximum flexibility, every single deb has its own source package.

    The source packages contain the po files as shipped by the application
    source packages. The build system of the source packages will generate the
    necessary mo files and put these into the debs.

    Since Rosetta does not yet have the necessary export support, I cheated,
    though. Later these po files are extracted from source packages on the
    buildds, imported in Rosetta, and exported to langpack-o-matic, but right
    now the source packages only contain a msgunfmt'ed version of all debs in
    Hoary/main.

    For now these packages are on:

    deb     http://people.ubuntu.com/~pitti/langpack/  /
    deb-src http://people.ubuntu.com/~pitti/langpack/  /

    Before uploading them into the main archive, I would like to leave them
    there for a bit of public testing and commenting. So, try it out!

      ? rename your /usr/share/locale directory; after this you will only have
        English program output
      ? sudo apt-get install language-support-<yourlanguage>; after this, all
        hoary/main applications should have <yourlanguage> translations again.
        If you don't want the dependencies (OO.o, Mozilla, etc. locale packs),
        just install language-pack-<yourlanguage>-update instead.

Danilo Segan asked, "Does this integrate translations that go into XML files,
GConf schemas, and .desktop files (and other similar intltool-merged stuff)?" 
Martin Pitt answered saying, "Not right now. In the future it would be nice to
accommodate all kinds of translations into the language packs, but right now
(i. e. for Hoary) this is confined to gettext translations and per-language
dependencies."

The team also discussed the idea of making language packs depend on fonts which
folks in the community and development team thought was a great idea. Thanks in
part to Shlomi Loubaton who was the first one to throw the idea out onto the
list although others have suggested this earlier as well.

Thtde made another great suggestion saying, "I think you should also build
another meta-package like language-support that depends not on language-pack.
That is very useful for people who write articles etc in different languages
and don't need the full language pack. So they can install spell-checker, fonts
etc for a language with one meta-package."

Matt Zimmerman replied to this saying, "This sounds like a pretty good idea
actually, to separate localized applications from support for reading/writing
documents in a particular language. Martin?" Martin replied saying:

    I do not want to introduce yet another package, we already have 246 new
    packages right now. What I could do is to remove the dependency of
    language-support-XX to language-pack-XX-update, so the two can be installed
    independently.

    That would mean that the installer would need to install both the language
    pack and the support package instead of just the support package, but I
    guess that is not a problem.

    If there is a consensus to do it like this, I will update the packages
    soon.

Thtde replied saying he thought this was a good solution.

?

2. Fedora Plans and Ubuntu
2005/01/18?-?2005/01/30 (17 posts) Subject: "Fedora Core 4 Plans"
People: Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh posted a link to a great article on Linux Weekly News that listed
some of the features of Fedora Core 4 which might be a good model from which
Ubuntu can evaluate our own goals:

    http://lwn.net/Articles/119500/

      ? They have similar goals with Xorg, GNOME, KDE (as per the Kubuntu team)
        and OpenOffice.org 2.0 - we still have a maybe on that.
      ? They're going to be doing Xen stuff, much along the same lines as we
        talked about at Matar? -> we probably won't have this for hoary, but we
        should plan to have Xen fully integrated into our kernel packages for
        bendy
      ? Faster boot -> they should hope so, ours is rocking the casbah :-)
      ? "Extras at launch time. Or else." -> it will take a while for them to
        gear up to the scale and usefulness of universe. ;-)

A little bit of friendly competition is healthy for everybody!

?

3. Array CD 3
2005/01/20?-?2005/01/23 (23 posts) Subject: "Array CD 3"
People: Colin Watson

Colin Watson announced the release of the third Array CD -- the CDs we're using
to test Warty:

    Array CD 3 is ready. This is the third in a series of milestone CD images,
    released when they're known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build
    or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Hoary. You
    can download it here:

      ? http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/hoary/array-2/
      ? rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/releases/hoary/array-2/

    See http://www.ubuntu.com/wiki/Archive for access instructions. I recommend
    rsync if possible, as you can then download future images based on this one
    to save bandwidth.

    Pre-release versions of Hoary are not encouraged for anyone needing a
    stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional
    breakage. They are recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to
    help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

    Some notable installer improvements and bug-fixes in this release:

      ? End-to-end secure netboot installation: all our Release files are
        signed using the archive signing key [1] or the CD image key [2], and
        the installer verifies these signatures at each step. (The netboot
        kernel and initrd themselves are contained in the CD images, which are
        accompanied by MD5SUMS and MD5SUMS.gpg files).
      ? Timezone and username/password questions moved to the first stage. The
        question about installing packages from the network remains in the
        second stage for now, but will eventually be moved as well.
      ? Rudimentary rescue mode added: boot with the 'rescue/enable=true'
        parameter to use it. Its UI still needs significant polishing work.
      ? Default debconf priority dropped from critical to high, and several
        questions adjusted; this fixes some automatic installation scenarios,
        makes it easier to merge changes back and forward with Debian, and
        makes it possible to share code between the first and second stages.
      ? Example sources.list lines for security/universe fixed.
      ? Support for Smart Boot Manager should work better now, although I
        haven't tested it personally.
      ? Size requirement for a USB drive used to boot the installer reduced to
        8 megabytes.
      ? Fixed installation on large filesystems with long device names (#4875).
      ? Much improved and more flexible kernel selection logic.
      ? Fixed default hostname when network configuration is skipped in first
        stage (#2844).
      ? Fix part of Array CD 2 erratum: the framebuffer should now reliably be
        loaded.
      ? Several fixes to the ia64 installer; much work remains to be done.

    Known installer issues:

      ? On my AMD64 system, grub enters an infinite loop trying to load stage
        1.5. I've never seen this before, and suspect hardware problems, but if
        it affects other people too I'd like to know about it.

    If you're interested in following changes as we further develop Hoary, have
    a look at the hoary-changes list: http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/
    hoary-changes

?

4. GTK2 CD Burning in Hoary
2005/01/21?-?2005/01/31 (61 posts) Subject: "annoncing gaveman in hoary
universe"
People: Oliver Grawert

Oliver Grawert made an announcement on the -users list telling folks that there
was now a GTK2 CD burning application that is uploaded into Ubuntu and that
will be integrate well into the desktop:

    I'm happy to announce that Ubuntu's universe finally has a GTK2 based
    burning application that is capable of doing common CD burning tasks (audio
    /data/iso/copy).

    If you are on hoary just install graveman form universe. if your writer is
    a IDE device and isn't detected properly see the following lines from /usr/
    share/doc/graveman/README (kernel 2.6 uses no SCSI emulation):

    --------------------- snip ---------------------
    NON SCSI EMULATION:

    If you don't use SCSI emulation, you have to put this configuration at
    the last
    of the file .graveman/graveman.conf :

    [lecteur]
    dev=/dev/hdc # your drive
    name=CD Burner # whatever name you want
    type=15 # 15 for cd writer, 1 for cd reader
    vitesse=16 # max speed of your writer
    -------------------- snap ---------------------


The thread got lost of feedback -- most of it of the positive kind.

?

5. Translating and Rosetta
2005/01/23?-?2005/01/24 (6 posts) Subject: "The Way Of Rosetta"
People: Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski,?Matt Zimmerman

Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski asked the development list a couple of questions about
the way that translations that are made in Ubuntu are integrated into the
distribution and then moved back upstream. Emil said:

    I was delegated by Polish Ubuntu Team to check out two things:

      ? Rosetta: when we work with Rosetta, what happens next, after we reach
        100% of project. Will it be included in Hoary, or it's committed to a
        project, that has been finished?
      ? Polish Gnome: Warty has a Gnome 2.8, witch is, according to Gnome.pl
        translation effort completed in 100%. Yet, when you're using Gnome in
        Ubuntu, some parts of translations are missing. We would like to have
        fully translated Ubuntu for Grumpy release (there's not much of us now,
        so we can't be read for Hoary;-). We could join Gnome.pl effort and get
        access to CVS tree. But I guess they commit it back to Gnome. So, where
        all this went wrong?

Matt Zimmerman replied. He answered the first question saying, "Updated
translations from Rosetta will be added directly to Hoary language packs on a
periodic basis, regardless of whether they have reached 100%. The period has
not been finalized yet, but it should be on the order of days." He answered the
second question saying:

    For Warty, there were some modifications made to UI text, relative to GNOME
    2.8, for which updated translations were not available in time.

    For Hoary, with Rosetta, language packs, and active local teams, we hope to
    be much more able to keep up with these changes.

    If you want to make sure that Ubuntu 5.04 has the most complete
    translations for your language, then Rosetta is the best place to work,
    because the translations from Rosetta will enter Hoary very quickly.

?

6. Community Council Meeting
2005/01/25 (1 post) Subject: "Community Council 2005-01-25"
People: Benjamin Mako Hill

There was another community council this week and Benjamin Mako Hill summarized
the results of the meeting and posted those to the list.

This tackled the very sensitive issue of the reply-to header on the
Ubuntu-users list. You can read the summary linked below to get a sense of
where things went:

    I've written up a summary and have a provided a log for the meeting of the
    Ubuntu Community Council meeting today (January 25, 2005). You can get
    those here:

      ? Summary: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/cc-summary-20050125.html
      ? Full Log: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/
        cc-meeting_log-20050125.html

    The two big issues discussed at the meeting were:

      ? Changes to the processes through which people can become new members or
        new maintainers which I've been working on and which the group spent a
        good deal of time sorting through and debating.
      ? The idea of instituting reply-to headers for the Ubuntu users mailing
        list. The short version is that while the council unhappy about the way
        the way the discussion transpired, we're willing to try switching to
        reply-to for two weeks to try to gauge feelings.

?

7. Graphical Partition Tool
2005/01/26?-?2005/01/28 (19 posts) Subject: "recommendation for graphical
partition tool?"
People: Ben Miller

Ben Miller asked about a graphical partition tool that could be used to
partition machines so that Ubuntu could be installed onto them saying, "Can
anyone recommend good graphical disk partitioning tool?"

Folks offering answers seemed to be saying either "qtparted" or "gparted"
(which would be the GNOME-like tool most familiar to Ubuntu users). Both
programs are in universe. Devin Miller and others suggested the System Rescue
CD which evidently has this software installed: http://www.sysresccd.org/

?

8. Announcing Local Community Teams
2005/01/27 (2 posts) Subject: "Announcing Ubuntu LoCo Teams"
People: Matthias Urlichs

Matthias Urlichs announced the formation of Ubuntu local community teams to
coordinate advocacy, promotion, and localization of Ubuntu around the world.
Here's the the text of the announcement:

    Many people ask for ways that they can give back to the Ubuntu project or
    participate in the community. One great way to do this is through promote
    Ubuntu in your local community!

    To help with this, we are pleased to announce the creation of Local
    Community Teams (LoCo Teams) to promote the use, adoption, and localization
    of Ubuntu.

    Ubuntu's philosophy states that:

        Every computer user should be able to use their software in the
        language of their choice.

    This means that we need advocacy, promotion, documentation, support, and
    (of course) translations of Ubuntu, in individual languages. It also means
    a geographically distributed user community for coordinated promotion. LoCo
    Teams can help tackle all of these problems.

    If you are interested in getting involved in a LoCo Team (or starting your
    own), we can go ahead and learn more at: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/
    LoCoTeams

    We have set up a common set of domain names in the form of ubuntu-CC.org.
    CC stands for "country code" -- the last two letters on country-specific
    URLs. If necessary, we can also create other domains for communities which
    don't easily associate with a country or language. Most of those domains
    are just placeholder domains, waiting for someone to come along and take
    control. That could be you!

    In other cases, there are already folks working on Ubuntu in a location,
    country, area, or language. We will happily point ubuntu-CC.org to those
    web sites and your mailing lists.

    Please don't hesitate to ask me if you have any questions or would like to
    get involved!

?

9. Ubuntu Live CD Milestone Release
2005/01/27 (1 post) Subject: "Announcing Ubuntu Live CD Milestone Release"
People: Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill announced the first milestone of a radically redesigned new
Live CD for the next release of Ubuntu saying:

    The Ubuntu development team have reached their first milestone in the
    production of the Live CD version of the upcoming release of Ubuntu
    codenamed "Hoary Hedgehog." This edition features a completely redesigned
    system for creating Live CDs.

    While some people have tried rough previews, this is the first proper
    milestone for the live CD version. Anyone, especially folks who are using
    our previous release (4.10 "Warty Warthog"), are encouraged to try this
    out.

    The Live CD runs completely off of the CD and will not touch any of the
    data on your hard drive so it is:

      ? A fantastic way to get a preview of new features in the upcoming Ubuntu
        release without upgrading your system.
      ? A chance to use the Ubuntu Live CD on systems which were not supported
        by the Ubuntu 4.10 Live CD. The new edition supports a wider variety of
        hardware, including PowerPC and AMD64 systems.
      ? A great way to help test support for your hardware in the new release
        and give feedback.

    You can get the latest version of the CDs here, via HTTP or BitTorrent: 
    http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/hoary/array-3.5-live/

    Additionally, daily snapshots of the Live CD as it evolves between now and
    our release in April can be found here: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/
    daily-live/current/

    All feedback should be sent to the Ubuntu development list at:
    ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com (mailto:ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com)

?

10. CD-Based Distro for Offline Users
2005/01/27?-?2005/01/28 (6 posts) Subject: "multiple-CD distribution for
Internet-less users"
People: Sridhar Ratna,?Jeff Waugh

At the moment, Ubuntu CDs are only a single CD and they only contain the most
important software necessary for Ubuntu -- and specifically for a desktop
installation. All other packages that are supported in Ubuntu must be pulled
from the network.

Sridhar Ratna asked the development list about plans to make things easier for
people who do not have the bandwidth to download all packages, "1 CD is not
enough for users without Internet access. May be Ubuntu can be shipped in 2 CDs
at least (with the 2nd CD not necessary, but labeled as 'extra')?"

Jeff Waugh replied saying, "DVD images containing all of main are available for
hoary, but not multiple CDs."

?

11. Kernel Team
2005/01/28 (1 post) Subject: "Announcing Ubuntu Kernel Team"
People: Fabio Massimo Di Nitto

Fabio Massimo Di Nitto sent an announcement for a new team devoted to dealing
with the Linux kernel in Ubuntu -- a highly important and difficult to manage
package. Work on the kernel may provide a great way for technical skilled
developers to begin working on Ubuntu and to get involved in the community:

    The Linux kernel in Ubuntu has, up until this point, been primarily
    maintained by a series of different individuals. As Ubuntu takes on more
    architectures and more users, its needs a solid team to help maintain this
    essential piece of infrastructure. Ubuntu will not be able to do this
    without the community's support.

    Through January, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto has been handling the kernel for
    Hoary. Ubuntu needs a group of community members to help fill in for Fabio
    as he is on vacation for the second half of February and on a more
    permanent basis.

    If you have experience with the Linux kernel and would like to get involved
    in Ubuntu development, this is an excellent opportunity to make a
    meaningful contribution. Interested hackers should get in contact with us
    directly by emailing the ubuntu-devel mailing list:
    ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com (mailto:ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com)

    The job of maintaining the kernel is a complex one so help in a number of
    areas is appreciated. Currently the team has broken down the task into the
    following areas:

      ? Tracking Upstream
      ? Security
      ? Bug Tracking
      ? Porting
      ? Maintaining External drivers/specific Subsystems (e.g., ACPI)
      ? Ubuntu Packaging
      ? Working on Kernel Configuration Tools

    Help in these or other areas will be highly appreciated!

    More information on the kernel team is here: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
    community/teams/kernel/

?

12. Ubuntu Documentation Team Happenings
2005/01/22?-?2005/01/28 (23 posts) Subject: "Re: Switching video cards :
"HowTo" ??"
People: Enrico Zini

The documentation team clocked in a slightly less active but still important
week of work.

Enrico Zini, the secretary for the documentation team, announced that he would
be traveling from Taiwan back to Italy during the week and would be difficult
to reach. He also announced that he updated the page on building documentation
(http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocteamBuildingDocumentation) to include
information on build dependencies saying, "I updated
DocteamBuildingDocumentation including build-dependencies (the packages needed
to build the documentation) and the work-around needed at the moment to compile
the docs without having xsltproc download DTDs from the net. A couple of days
ago there's been problem with the lack of this information on the wiki pages:
now it's there!"

Sean Wheller did some work on the build system and Enrico worked on
autocompiling things to have them downloaded from the Internet. Sean moved the
section of the Quick Guide into the queue for review. Sean also added a series
of graphics and screen captures necessary for documentation's review of
graphics applications.

Finally, Kevin Mulligan did a nice writeup on dual boot which he sent to the
list and which was added to the userguide by Sean Wheller.

Thanks guys for the sustained work!

?

13. Ubuntu Security Notifications
2005/01/24?-?2004/01/25 (3 posts) Subject: "[many]"

Martin Pitt postqed another weeks worth of Ubuntu Security Notification to the
list notifying folks of another rash of bugs and pointing to their fixes. These
included the following:

enscript vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-68-1 (CAN-2004-1184 CAN-2004-1185 CAN-2004-1186)

Affected Release: Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)

Affected Packages Are: enscript

Fix: The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version
1.6.4-4ubuntu0.1. In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect
the necessary changes.

More Information: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/
2005-January/000070.html

evolution vulnerability

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-69-1 (CAN-2005-0102)

Affected Release: Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)

Affected Packages Are: evolution

Fix: The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version
2.0.2-0ubuntu2.1. In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect
the necessary changes.

More Information: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/
2005-January/000071.html

libdbi-perl vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-70-1 (CAN-2005-0077)

Affected Release: Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)

Affected Packages Are: libdbi-perl

Fix: The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version
1.42-3ubuntu0.1. In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect
the necessary changes.

More Information: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/
2005-January/000072.html

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