Ubuntu Weekly News #15

[Corey Burger]

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 15 for the week of
September, 17 - 23 2006. This issue is all about Scott James Remnant.
If you see a sentence without his name, report it as a typo. You may
notice the occasional word about someone or something other than Scott
or Upstart, such as the LTSP Hackfest, rest assured that these are
probably known typos, but feel free to report them anyway.

You can always find older Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter issues at::
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter

== General Community News ==

=== Scott James Remnant on LugRadio ===

Earlier this week, Scott announced, along upstart 0.2.7 release, that
he will on LugRadio this Monday: ''"Look out for the next episode of
[http://www.lugradio.org/ LugRadio], it contains an interview about
upstart with yours truly (if Jono remembered to plug my mike in :p);
that should be out on Monday."''

=== Scott James Remnant on Edgy+1 ===

Edgy has even been released yet, but people are already itching for
Edgy+1. Scott has been musing recently and that musing hit his blog,
with a post titled "What I want to see in Edgy+1". The post is
dedicated to looking at technologies that make communication easier,
whether it between users or between hardware. Scott first talks about
Telepathy, the new communications framework, and how it (and galago
and farsight) will change the way users communicate with each other,
as well as make it easy for application developers to include IM
functions into their applications. Continuing on the communications
front, Scott then talks about automatic network config with Avahi and
Zeroconf, as well as easier bluetooth connections and better
synchronization. You can read more at
http://www.netsplit.com/blog/articles/2006/09/22/what-i-want-in-edgy-1

=== LTSP Hackfest ===

Members of the [http://ltsp.org LTSP project], and developers from
several distributions, gathered in Clarkston, Michigan last weekend to
plot the future of LTSP. Ubuntu was there to oversee the beginning of
work related to merging the Ubuntu LTSP into mainline LTSP. Jorge
Castro was there, and wrote about it for
[http://news.linux.com/news/06/09/21/233234.shtml?tid=47 Linux.com].

== New Apps In Edgy ==

The Beta release of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) is almost upon us (it is
scheduled for release on Sept 28th). As such, Matt Zimmerman has
announced a freeze of "main" until that release. The current
priorities for the beta release mostly revolve around bug fixing. You
can read more about the Beta freeze at
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-September/000196.html

This week has brought us, amongst others:
 * upstart 0.2.7
 * python 2.5
 * firefox 2.0b2
 * openoffice 2.0.4~rc2

A number of ichthux-* packages rolled into Edgy in the last week.
These are packages for a Kubuntu-based project called Ichthux
(http://www.ichthux.com) which is producing a set of default apps and
artwork for the Christian user community. So far ichthux-meta,
ichthux-default-settings, ichthux-emoticons, and
ichthux-konqueror-shortcuts have been uploaded along with several
Sword modules for various languages with more to come before the Edgy
Universe Freeze.  The Ichthux development team is composed of Ubuntu
and Debian developers such as Raphaël Pinson (Kubuntu core dev),
Jordan Mantha (MOTU), and Ben Armstrong (Debian Developer).

Readahead, a tool to speed up boot times by reading files into a
cache, has recently been updated by Scott James Remnant. In order for
readahead to be effective, it must be updated regularly. On a
development release, this can be somewhat tricky, due to the number of
changes made. Futher, several communities members playing with
readahead discovered it ran better in the foreground during boot,
rather than the background. Both of these changes, amongst others, can
be found in readahead-list_0.20050517.0220. You can read more about
the specific changes, including boot times, at
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-September/020967.html

Martin Pitt has announced the general availability of packages with
debug symbols, as part of the apt-get-debug symbols spec
(https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/apt-get-debug-symbols).
Currently the packages are only available through Martin's
people.ubuntu.com archive, but work is preceding apace on getting them
into the Ubuntu archives. Further, work is also being done to pull in
the debug packages automatically, via the new crash collection tool,
apport. You can read more about Martin's work at
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-September/000195.html

A common question users ask is why Ubuntu does not install
NetworkManager, a new tool to control wireless and other networks, by
default. NetworkManager was evaluated in the 6.06 development cycle
and found lacking, although a fully comprehensive answer has never
really been available. In a recent thread on ubuntu-devel asking this
very question, Scott James Remnant laid out the various issues. You
can read Scott's answer at
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-September/020886.html

Daniel Holbach, between uploading new telepathy packages, found time
to update the various PDA utilities.
pilot-link (0.12.1), gnome-pilot and gnome-pilot-conduits (both
2.0.14) have landed in Edgy. Daniel has also asked for testers of this
new code, over at the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PDATesters/Hardware wiki
page. You can read more about it at
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-September/020880.html

The Telepathy team continued feel steam ahead this week.
Telepathy-inspector was updated to 0.3.4. Riccardo Setti also joined
the team, uploading telepathy-gabble 0.3.6. Finally, the ever busy
Scott James Remnant wrote a blog post about what he would like to see
in Edgy+1. Featured prominently in the blog post was Telepathy. You
can read Scott's post at
http://www.netsplit.com/blog/articles/2006/09/22/what-i-want-in-edgy-1

The world of Edgy, was, as always, busy these week. These are only a
small fraction of the changes that happened in the Edgy world. If you
don't see something you think should have been covered (maybe
something else Scott did?), we are always looking for new editors.

== In The Press ==

Enterprise Storage Forum takes a look at The Wayback Machine
(http://www.archive.org) and find Ubuntu under the hood:

''As for the software running the system, it's almost all open source.
"Primarily now we're using the Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) release of
Debian (www.debian.org) for our OS," says Berry. "It's very easy to
manage and install. We also use Linux, which we've used for many years
in different flavors. And we use Apache and things like Perl and
PHP."''

''For the Archive, the decision to go with open source software was
based on cost savings as well as experience.''

''"Obviously you don't pay the big licensing fees," says Berry. "But
it also gives us a lot of openness and freedom, and the Archive is
usually pushing some technical edge. So it's nice to have that
flexibility, which we wouldn't necessarily have had with vendor
software." ''

More tech details about the archive can be found at http://tinyurl.co.uk/rho1

CNET's Tom Merritt has recorded a video introduction to Ubuntu. You
can watch it http://tinyurl.co.uk/gi50

Userful Corporation and Canonical are working together to deliver even
more value to organizations that deploy Ubuntu:

''"Our virtualized X-server enables a single Ubuntu PC equipped with
extra video cards to support up to 10 monitors, USB keyboards, and
users simultaneously," says Tim Griffin, President of Userful. "Ubuntu
with Userful's 'Multiplier' offers dramatic hardware and software
savings, literally offering organizations ten Linux workstations for
what they would otherwise spend on just a single Windows computer with
commercial office and graphics software."''

''Userful's Multiplier software is ideally suited for organizations
that wish to deploy large numbers of workstations for users without
deploying a large number of computers. By sharing the processing power
and resources of modern, often overpowered PCs with up to nine
additional users, Userful and Ubuntu can reduce IT management,
electrical and cooling costs by more than fifty percent per
workstation.''

''"By making Userful's Multiplier available on Ubuntu, we are adding
significantly to the potential savings to be made by our customers,"
commented Malcolm Yates, ISV and Partner Manager at Canonical. "This
unique solution is suitable for schools, small businesses and
developing markets, where computing resources tend to be scarce."''

There's more at http://opensource.sys-con.com/read/274522.htm

(Full Disclosure: Ubuntu Weekly New's Chief Editor, Corey Burger,
works for Userful and fought to exclude this story due to conflict of
interest. He was overruled.)

ITWeek.co.uk and WhatPC.co.uk reporter Barry Shilliday has discussed
two alternative methods of installing extra software on Ubuntu, and
also discussed the Kubuntu desktop alternative.

''In this article, we expand on a previous article that examined the
update of a fresh Ubuntu Dapper Drake installation to make it more
desktop and multimedia-friendly, by looking at the automated
options.''

''In addition, we take a closer look at Ubuntu's KDE offspring, Kubuntu.''

While we appreciate the discussion, we would like to advise that use
of EasyUbuntu and Automatix are generally discouraged.

You can read the article at
http://www.itweek.co.uk/personal-computer-world/features/2164751/making-ubuntu-easier

== Meetings and other similar events ==

IRC Meetings in #ubuntu-meeting on irc.freenode.net this coming week include:

 * Technical Board Meeting on Tues, Sept. 26, 20:00 UTC
 * Edubuntu Meeting, on Wed, Sept. 27, 20:00 UTC
 * Ubuntu Development Team Meeting on Thu, Sept. 28, 23:00 UTC
 * Ubuntu Desktop Effects Team Meeting on Fri, Sept. 29, 16:00 UTC

== Upcoming Events ==

Its that time again, Hug day. Sept 26 is Hug day, and we want YOU for
bug closing. How you ask? simply login to Launchpad's bug manager
[https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs Malone] and start
triaging. For more detailed information:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay

== Feature Of The Week ==

For many end users simply unplugging a usb thumbdrive is the norm.
What many, however, do not know is that this can be damaging to the
data. Edgy now has a small unobtrusive warning popup that informs the
user if the data did not sync before unplugging usb. This will prevent
many usb related data losses.

attachment:usbremovalerror.png

== Security Updates ==

 * USN-351-1: Firefox vulnerabilities
 * USN-350-1: Thunderbird vulnerabilities
 * USN-349-1: gzip vulnerabilities
 * USN-348-1: GnuTLS vulnerability

== Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates ==

=== Documentation for Stable Release updates ===

Matt Zimmerman has produced a document outlining the steps necessary
to get a non-security related update into a stable release of Ubuntu.
You can read more about the Why, When and How of these types of
updates at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

== Bug Stats ==

 * Open (15560) (+242 over the last week)
 * Unconfirmed (8265)
 * Unassigned (10826)
 * All bugs ever reported (55517)

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

Check out the bug statistics: http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~carthik/bugstats/

== Additional News Resources ==

You can subscribe to the Ubuntu Weekly News via RSS at:
http://fridge.ubuntu.com/uwn/feed

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:

 * Corey Burger
 * Alexandre Vassalotti
 * Michael Vogt
 * John Little
 * Eldo Varghese
 * Paul O'Malley
 * Melissa Draper
 * And many others

== Feedback ==

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