[ubuntu-arizona] Ubuntu-Arizona Weekly Newsletter, Issue #110

[Craig A. Eddy]

Welcome to the Ubuntu-Arizona Weekly Newsletter, Issue #110 for the week
December 21, December 27.

 * Arizona Loco Newsletter
 * One Hundred Tenth Edition
 * Powered by Ubuntu
 * Wednesday-December 30, 2009
 * Arizona Loco Team Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArizonaTeam

 * Next meeting: Sunday January 3, 2010 9:00 PM
 * Server: Freenode: IRC Channel #ubuntu-us-az

== Newsletter ==

=== Summary of the December 27, 2009 meeting ===

scott_ev called the meeting to order at 9:00 PM

Agenda: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArizonaTeam/Meetings/09December27

scott_ev then gave some announcement:

 * Welcome everyone to the semi-regular Sunday AZ LoCo Team meeting. 
Just so you know, out normal meeting moderator and team leader,
johnc4510, has not been able to make it to the meeting lately and I'm
trying to fill in for him.  He will be returning sometime; don't worry. 
You won't be stuck with me forever.  I'm sorry I couldn't make it last
week and that made me think.  I need someone to volunteer to mod the
meeting if I can't make it.

 * We have set a date for our 10.04 release party.  We will be meeting
at Boulders on Broadway in Tempe on Sat. April 24th after the
Installfest at UAT.  Hans is making reservations for us to have the room
upstairs at Boulders. It's a great space for us to meet and the food is
good, and you can drink if you're old enough! The installfest goes from
10 - 4.
  * Map to UAT: http://tinyurl.com/ycuxehx
  * Map to Boulders: http://tinyurl.com/ye6waet

 * Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will ship in April 2010 and is the culmination of
significant work in Ubuntu, in Debian and across the free software
ecosystem. LTS releases are maintained for five years on the server and
three years on the desktop, so they are designed for those who are
making larger deployments or who otherwise prefer to have a common
platform for an extended period.

 * The Ubuntu Forums have grown to be one of the largest Linux forums on
the internet today with over 970,000 users.

 * Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports that Mark Shuttleworth has just
announced this morning via a blog post that he will be stepping down as
the CEO of Canonical, the formal company behind Ubuntu Linux. Jane
Silber, the current COO of Canonical, will be taking over Mark's
position as the CEO.  Mark Shuttleworth though will not be leaving
Canonical, but rather he wishes to focus more of his time on bettering
Ubuntu and its products rather than the formal business
responsibilities. From his blog post, "I've become very passionate about
design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we
harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful
products."  Shuttleworth will be formally stepping down as the Chief
Executive Officer in March when Jane Silber takes over. 
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzgxOQ

 * Michael Larabel of Phoronix states that Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 was
released last week and while it did not bring any major features yet for
this Long-Term Support release, it began to introduce some underlying
changes like the switch to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, X Server 1.7, and
the complete removal of HAL.  Larabel's early benchmarks of Ubuntu 10.04
show that there are some negative performance regressions right off the
bat, but one area that Canonical is focusing upon in particular with
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is speeding up the boot process.  Also surfacing this
month is a new kernel that pulls in more of Intel's Moblin speed patches
from their kernel. As most know, Moblin 2 boots extremely fast. 
Phoronix has tested out this kernel with the Moblin patches on Ubuntu
9.10 and it booted three seconds faster compared to the stock Karmic kernel.

 * In Mozilla’s words, “Prism is an application that lets users split
Web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their
desktop.” In practical terms, that means you can have individual browser
windows dedicated to specific Web applications–like Gmail, Facebook or
Twitter–without having to worry about them becoming mixed up with your
other Firefox tabs or needing to be restarted if you restart your
browser.  http://www.workswithu.com/2009/12/15/pushing-prism-on-ubuntu/

 * LinuxDevices.com's Eric Brown tells us that Jolicloud released a
public beta of its Ubuntu-based, cloud-oriented Jolicloud Linux
distribution for netbooks. The free, open source distro offers fast
boot-ups, a netbook-optimized interface, and Intel GMA500 graphics
support, while running both web-based and native Linux apps.  The
distribution offers both Firefox 3.5.3 and Prism 1.0b2 browsers, and
supports a wide variety of wireless protocols, as well as audio and
video formats. Jolicloud founder and CEO Tariq Krim, "Traditional
operating systems find their roots in the late seventies and are built
around software. But today, 90 percent of our computing life is on the
Web. Jolicloud was built with Web users in mind." 
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Jolicloud-beta/

 * As always you can find more news and announcements at:
  * http://www.ubuntu.com/news
  * http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

 * I'm still trying to make connections down in Tucson se we can start
preparing for our next installfest down there.  I'm going to be going
down there one day right after the new year to have lunch with johnc4510
and some of the other team members.  If you think you'd like to go, just
let me know.  It will be a week day.

 * Please tell everyone you talk to in channel that meetings are back
on. I'm going to try to make them as interesting and informative as I
can.  It's important that we do stuff as a team to keep our charter with
Ubuntu.  We want to continue to be a recognized LoCo.

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 9:20 PM.

== Credits ==
 * Craig A Eddy
 * scott_ev