Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue #8 - July 23 - August 5, 2006

[Rich Johnson]

= Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue #8 =

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - for the weeks of July 23 - August 5, 2006

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

== In This Issue ==
 * Behind Ubuntu: Jani Monoses
 * The Fridge, plugged in again and humming along
 * California sees an Ubuntu billboard
 * Ubuntu wins on security
 * Ubuntu article featured on Wikipedia
 * Educating on Ubuntu: The Ubuntu Classroom launches and The MOTU School 
teaches bugs and patching
 * An update on Google Summer of Code
 * The freshest security upgrades
 * The latest and greatest in packages
 * Project updates: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu
 * In the press: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Recommended"
 * Features of the Week: kDict

== General Community News ==

=== Behind Ubuntu: Jani Monoses ===

Behind Ubuntu interviews Jani Monoses, the founder of Xubuntu.

http://behindubuntu.org/interviews/JaniMonoses/

=== The Fridge, plugged in again and humming along ===

Readers of Ubuntu's premier community-based news may have felt like  
[http://fridge.ubuntu.com/ The Fridge] had been put into ''deep freeze'' 
because of people's commitments being overextended.

Therefore it will be uproariously pleasing that the job of editing The Fridge 
was [http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-marketing/2006-July/000727.html
officially handed over] to Jorge and the 
[http://launchpad.net/people/ubuntu-marketing Ubuntu-Marketing] team, who 
responded with vigor and soon set up the `#ubuntu-fridge` channel on Freenode 
(after a short debate about whether `#fridge` or `#ubuntu-fridge` was easier 
to type)!

With a wiki-based submission method, the news started flowing in, and its 
effectiveness was soon demonstrated:  Within 48 hours of the announcement, 
there were enough submissions to fill the entire front page!

Among the first stories to be posted was, of course, one announcing 
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue7 Issue #7] of the 
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.  We hope to see future issues going up quickly as 
well!

You can submit your own articles simply by tagging them with [FridgeContent].  
They'll be automatically linked to an index of ready material.

=== Did that say Ubuntu? California sees an Ubuntu billboard ===

Ubuntu isn’t just a great way to get more from your computer. Now it’s 
roadside art!

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted blog posts with photos of an exceptionally 
good-looking billboard in the USA. The beige and red, friendly typeface looks 
incredibly familiar!

Find out more on The Fridge - http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/480

=== Ubuntu wins on security ===

A study of the Secunia.com database of Linux security vulnerabilities puts 
Ubuntu at the top of the Linux security league!

[http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1202417,00.html 
Read more on TechTarget]

=== Ubuntu article featured on Wikipedia ===

Ubuntu was the featured article on Wikipedia, appearing on their front page.

[http://kubuntu.org/~jriddell/wikipaedia-ubuntu.png image]

== Educating Ubuntu users and developers ==

The last few weeks have seen a resurgence in education on various parts of 
Ubuntu -- not education as a target market but education of the many users 
and developers of Ubuntu. Both the Ubuntu Classroom, aimed at users, and the 
MOTU School, aimed at package uploaders, held classes this week.

=== The Ubuntu Classroom launches ===
The New User Network offered its first class on Saturday, August 5, 2006, at 
18:00 UTC. The first course helped users with Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The 
text-based irssi and graphical Konversation IRC clients were covered in this 
course, and a follow-up course will be offered on Sunday, August 6, 2006, 
time TBD.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Classroom

=== The MOTU School teaches bug triaging and patching ===
The 'Masters Of The Universe' have been busy offering some amazing classes. 
Martin Pitt recently presented an IRC seminar about "How to patch source 
packages." More information concerning this class as well as the other ones 
they have done so far can be viewed at the following URLs:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/School
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PatchingSources
http://netz.smurf.noris.de/logs/freenode/2006/07/25/%23ubuntu-motu-school.log

== Ubuntu's Google Summer of Code projects reach milestones ==

Two of the Ubuntu Summer of Code (SoC) projects reached major milestones this 
week with their source packages being uploaded to the Edgy repositories. 

'''Willow-ng''' - Travis Watkins's Bayesian content filter (package 
name ''willow-ng''). You can track its progress at 
[http://www.realistanew.com/category/projects/willowng/ Travis's Blog], and 
code can be found in the [http://dev.realistanew.com/willowng willow-ng bzr 
repository]
'''Migration Assistant''' - Evan Dandrea's  (package 
name ''migration-assistant'') - You can track its progress at 
[http://evalicious.com/blog/ Evan's blog], and code can be found 
[http://evalicious.com/projects/migration-assistant/ here]

== Security Updates ==
 * USN-321-1 mysql-dfsg-4.1 vulnerability http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-321-1
 * USN-322-1 kdelibs vulnerability http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-322-1
 * USN-296-2 Firefox vulnerabilities http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-296-2
 * USN-323-1 Mozilla vulnerabilities http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-323-1
 * USN-297-3 Thunderbird vulnerabilities http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-297-3
 * USN-320-2 php4 regression http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-320-2
 * USN-324-1 freetype vulnerability http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-324-1
 * USN-325-1 ruby1.8 vulnerability http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-325-1
 * USN-326-1 heartbeat vulnerability http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-326-1
 * USN-327-1 firefox vulnerabilities http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-327-1
 * USN-328-1 apache2 vulnerability http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-328-1
 * USN-329-1 Thunderbird vulnerabilities http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-329-1
 * USN-327-2 firefox regression http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-327-2

== The latest and greatest in Edgy (and a bit for Dapper, 6.06 LTS) ==

Daniel Holbach (dholbach), one half of the crazy GNOME uploading team, has 
been hard at work getting Galago and Telepathy into Edgy. What are these 
marvelous things, you ask? 

'''Galago''' is a "presence framework" designed to allow easy data access 
about people and their availablity to applications. This includes such 
concepts as when writing an email, you can see if that person is online or 
not, much like GMail does. You can find out more about Galago at its website: 
http://www.galago-project.org/about.php

'''Telepathy''' is a "unified framework for real-time communication". It is 
designed to make writing IRC and IM apps easy by abstracting the actual 
protocol used, be it Jabber, AIM, Yahoo, IRC, etc. You can find out more 
about Telepathy at its website:
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Not to be outdone, the always-busy and sadly-not-working-for-Canonical-anymore 
Jeff Waugh has uploaded Robert Love's latest gift to the 
world, '''beaglefs''' 1.0.3 . This allows you to take a beagle query and make 
it into a filesystem, to be mounted just like a CD or a hard drive partition. 
More information and shiny screenshots can be seen at Robert's blog, 
http://rlove.org/log/20060721

Jonathan Riddel has also updated Edgy to have '''KDE 3.5.4''', the latest 
stable point release. Further information can be found at 
http://kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-354.php and 
http://dot.kde.org/1154521282/

Other Edgy packages of note are:
[[BR]]'''Jokosher''' (''jokosher'')- first package of this new non-linear 
multitrack audio editor, development headed by Jono Bacon. 
[http://www.jokosher.org Jokosher website]
[[BR]]'''XGL''' - (''xserver-xgl'') Updated to latest CVS by Andrew Mitchell
[[BR]]'''Usplash''' (''usplash'') - after much demand, Matthew Garrett has 
made usplash accept higher resolution SVG images
[[BR]]'''Apport''' (''apport'') - Martin Pitt has uploaded intial work on the 
new crash reporting tool. More information at 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CrashReporting
[[BR]]'''Desktopsecure''' (''desktopsecure'', only though Add/Remove)- A new 
addition to the Canonical commercial repository, Desktopsecure is a desktop 
firewall by Panda. More information at 
[http://www.pandasoftware.com/products/DesktopSecure the Desktop Secure 
website]. This software is also available to 6.06 LTS users.

== Ubuntu ==

There is an upcoming Development Team Meeting at 15:00 UTC on Thursday, August 
10, 2006 in #ubuntu-meeting on Freenode.

== Kubuntu ==
There is a scheduled meeting for the Kubuntu development team. This meeting 
will be on Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 2100 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on 
Freenode.

=== Kubuntu at LugRadio Live 2006 ===
Kubuntu was on the KDE stand at Lugradio Live 2006, and Jonathan Riddell gave 
a talk about Kubuntu Dapper and KDE 4.

http://dot.kde.org/1154477463/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jriddell/tags/lugradiolive2006

=== Kubuntu Themed Magazine ===
VNU have published an instant expert guide to Linux. This special edition 
magazine is dedicated to helping the first time Linux user install and learn 
about Kubuntu. It comes complete with a full version of Kubuntu 6.06 LTS and 
includes a guide to Konqueror and all the best applications for your KDE 
desktop. Available on UK newstands as Computer Active and elsewhere in Europe 
under other VNU publication names.

== Edubuntu ==
Canonical has a new "Education Programme Manager." His name is Richard 
Weideman, and he goes by RichEd on Freenode. Richard is the first line 
contact on behalf of Canonical for all Education issues.

Canonical has also employed Rodrigo Novo, aka rodarvus, as the new X 
maintainer and Technical Lead for Edubuntu.

Also, community member AliasVegas has been appointed the new Artist-In-Chief 
for Edubuntu.

Everyone please extend a warm welcome to these fine additions to the 
community. Welcome aboard, and we all look forward to working with you. 
Congratulations!

There is an upcoming Edubuntu meeting at 12:00 UTC on Wednesday, August 9, 
2006 in #ubuntu-meeting on Freenode.

== Xubuntu ==

The Xubuntu team has been hard at work with new art designs and proposals. It 
is looking great so far, but don't take our word for it, take a look yourself 
at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/XubuntuEdgy/Proposals

There has been more work on integrating Xfce 4.4 beta 2 into Edgy. They have 
also added a new svn snapshop of Thunar, Xfce's new file manager, sporting 
Trash support.

== Bug Stats ==
 * Open  (13850)
 * Critical (21)
 * Unconfirmed (7524)
 * Unassigned (9084)
 * All bugs ever reported (49460)

Every Wednesday is a Hug Day. See #ubuntu-bugs on Freenode for more 
information!

== In The Press ==
=== Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Recommended by IT Reviews" ===
IT Reviews has given Ubuntu 6.06 LTS their "Recommended" award. From the 
review:
    ''"Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is a very complete and usable Linux distribution and 
one that's remarkably easy to get to grips with compared to some others. All 
of which makes it a good starting point for newcomers, but don't be fooled 
into thinking it's cut-down in any way. As well as appealing to the hobbyist, 
Ubuntu is a full Linux implementation with everything needed for business 
use, including automatic updates and commercial support should you need 
it."''
http://www.itreviews.co.uk/software/s384.htm

== Feature Of The Week - kdict ==
KDict is a graphical client for the DICT™ protocol. It enables you to search 
dictionary databases for a word or phrase and displays matching definitions. 
KDict tries to ease basic as well as advanced queries. A separate list offers 
a convenient way to deal with the enormous number of matching words that an 
advanced query may return. Kdict is located in the Universe repositories, and 
can be installed by apt/synaptic/adept and others. Command line is quick and 
easy just by typing, 'sudo apt-get install kdict'.
attachment:kdict.png

== Additional News Resources ==

As always you can find more news and announcements at:

 http://www.ubuntu.com/news

and

 http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

== Conclusion ==

Thank you for reading the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. See you next week!

== Credits ==

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

 * Matt Galvin
 * Jerome Gotangco
 * Jonathan Riddell
 * Paul Sladen
 * Matthew Revell
 * Richard Johnson
 * Corey Burger
 * Daniel T. Chen
 * 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 at 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].
-- 
Richard Johnson ~ nixternal at ubuntu.com
ubuntu.com <> kubuntu.com <> edubuntu.com <> xubuntu.com
chi.ubuntu-us.com <> buntudot.org
online everywhere as nixternal
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