We are pleased to announce that this cycle’s Ubuntu Open Week will be held the week after Ubuntu 9.04’s release, from 27 April to 1 May on #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode. The sessions take place from 1500UTC to 2100UTC (With a special session on Monday night after-hours)

Ubuntu Open Week is a week full of IRC tutorial sessions on a range of subjects, designed to help people get involved in the Ubuntu community. It is given by many of the brightest, most capable members of the Ubuntu community, and covers a range of subjects including packaging, bug triage, translations, accessibility, automated testing, loco teams, mentoring, Launchpad, desktop team, training team and much more.

There will also be the always popular “sabdfl Q+A” session (Thu 30 Apr @ 15.00UTC) in which you have two hours to ask Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, your burning questions. Jono and Jorge will also be providing an Introduction and Community Q+A session (Mon 27 Apr @ 15.00UTC) in which you can ask your questions about the community, Ubuntu, Canonical and anything else.

New to this Open Week is nearly an entire day of Documentation team sessions, so now is the time to get involved. The schedule is up, so let’s get started! (A few slots left open, if you want them, holler at Jorge [jcastro])

Today Canonical is announcing that it is contributing a new benefit to Ubuntu Membership: a complimentary subscription to Linux Weekly News. Our friends in Debian have been doing this for a while, and Canonical thought this could be an excellent gesture too.

To enjoy this benefit you need to be a member of the Ubuntu project. You can then switch on your free subscription like this:

• Apply for an account at LWN by clicking here.
• Send an email to Rachael at rachael.tripp (at) canonical dot com (preferably using your ubuntu.com address) asking for a subscription sponsorship. This email MUST contain:
• Your LWN username
• Your Launchpad username.
• Rachael will then go and double check you are a member and not telling porkies.
• You will receive an email when the subscription has been accepted and is ready to roll (or read).

Enjoy!

This is the competition in which creative types can submit their work for inclusion in the Examples/ folder of the next edition of Ubuntu. In this competition we expanded the Audio and Video categories to also include a Graphic/Photo category too. We netted a fantastic range of entries and many great submissions!

Our submissions list was then assessed by our esteemed community judging panel and they made selections from each category. This final set of selections was then voted on by the Ubuntu Community Council to find our winners. We would like to thank everyone for participating and congratulate each of the winners for having their work about to be delivered to millions of Jaunty desktops.

Without further ado, onto the winners!

Audio: Jean Francois Marais

• WINNING ENTRY: Invocation

South African bred and Taiwan based sound jeweler MoShang polishes rough audio diamonds and melds them with traditional Asian instruments and laid-back beats. In addition to his commercial releases, MoShang has made a remix album available for free download (Asian Variations – 2007) and was heavily involved as musician and producer with the free CABACA album by the CC Asia Band (2008). He has won a South African award for his music to the short film Angels in a Cage (2000) and his music has been featured in the HDTV Discovery Channel production Fantastic Festivals Of The World.

About the entry:

“I started the track Invocation early in 2008 with an eye to expanding my usual Chinese-based sonic palette with the addition of traditional Japanese instruments. I kicked it around some, but was only inspired to finish it after my first visit to Japan to attend the 2008 iCommons Summit in Sapporo and released the track on the Stone Bell EP towards the end of 2008. It opens with a tribal feel thanks to hira-daiko and shime-daiko drumming, and also features shakuhachi and male vocals in the Esashi Oiwake style of Hokkaido island”.

Video Category: Robbie Ferguson

• WINNING ENTRY: Spirit Of Ubuntu

Former radio announcer, Robbie Ferguson hosts Category5 Technology TV; a live, weekly TV-style broadcast that answers technology questions for a global audience. With roughly 50,000 viewers per week through their video podcast alone, the show has quickly (albeit unofficially) become a popular resource for both seasoned and rookie Ubuntu users. Robbie is happily married with two young children. He has been a respected professional in the technology field for many years, and is currently a senior web developer at an IT firm, where he spends his professional time coding advanced PHP applications and wooing other employees toward Ubuntu.

About the entry:

“When good friend Alan Pope (Ubuntu UK Podcast) suggested I post an entry in the Free Culture Showcase, I thought it was a great idea. I did wonder what I could possibly give to such a project? After all, my show is a live question-and-answer broadcast with no “production,” and no script. So when it came down to sitting in front of the cameras to put something together, I decided to just “be myself,” and speak candidly on my thoughts about the Ubuntu community; because when it comes down to it, I am really just another Ubuntu user”.

Graphic/Photo: William J McKee Jr

• WINNING ENTRY: Canadian Clouds

William considers himself your typical down to earth guy, fascinated with technology, nature, and how the two can meet sometimes with beautiful results. He has lived most of his life on the east coast, traveled a little, enough to appreciate the beauty we live in. Photography is still just a secondary hobby for him, but has always interested him.

About the shot:

“I snapped this, just over the border into Canada from NY. My wife was driving, and I happened to notice the clouds in one area were about to cut some light off, this usually looks good if you are fortunate enough to be in the right place/time. I took out our Canon Powershot Pro 1, and zoomed in, through the windshield of the car, and snapped a couple off. I got lucky with this one, although some editing of contrast was done, which brought out the color nicely. Even almost ruined shots can look good some of the time!”

Thanks also to Keith Worrell and Endolith for some of the patches and branches involved in the Example Content package.

Feb 14th, was LoCo Docs Day for the Ubuntu LoCo Community, and it was a Rockin’ event. The LoCo Community came together to work on expanding and improving the LoCo Documentation on the Wiki. It was great to see folks from all the different LoCo’s coming together to tweak the already excellent documentation.

Here is a list of the work done:

Daniel Holbach:
* added CategoryLoCoTeams in a bunch of places
* linked Jam information on LoCoTeamKnowledgeBase
* fixed LoCoActivism to redirect to the right page
* fixed a bunch of links on LoCoComputerFairHowto
* added some more content to LoCoTeamJoining
Damokles (a.k.a. “ccm”):
* extended LoCoWorkingWithOtherGroups
* extended LoCoRunningInstallfest
* added comment on calendar apps on LoCoCreatingWebsite
Nathan Handler:
* Added note about Launchpad supporting team maps to LoCoCreatingMap
* Corrected minor grammatical error in LoCoFAQ
Craig A. Eddy:
* Added positives about lugs to LoCoWorkingWithOtherGroups
* Add points to “What LoCo Teams Can Provide” in LoCoWorkingWithOtherGroups
John Crawford:
* added link to LoCoTeamKnowledgeBase on available event speakers LoCoTeamSpeakers
* added link to LoCoTeamKnowledgeBase on working with area LUGs LoCoWorkingWithOtherGroups
* added a sub-header section on getting your team involved with the area LUGs to LoCoTeamHowto
Efrain Valles:
* added Team Reports to the “Running the Team” section of LoCoTeamHowto
* added LoCoRunningReleaseParty (redirect from BuildingCommunity/RunningReleaseParty) to LoCoTeamKnowledgeBase
* added Release Party information and references for other activities in the LoCoTeamKnowledgeBase in LoCoTeamHowto under Advocacy.
JonoBacon:
* added icons to the main menu items.
* updated LoCoTeamContacts
* restructured the front page, added a side bar and logo.
* updated LoCoTeamMeeting with new meeting.
Jorge Castro
* Edited the FAQ
* Syntax fixes on LoCoCreatingPlanet
Elizabeth Krumbach:
* Fix up gender unfriendly language and assumptions on LoCoComputerFairHowto
Nick Ali
* reference LoCoHosting in LoCoCreatingWebsite
* clean up LoCoHosting

Thanks to everyone for getting involved and contributing your time. Of course, today is just one day and we need to continue to work hard to keep our documentation as up to date and authoritative as possible. Jono is planning on organizing more LoCo Doc Days in the future. LoCoDocDay

Jono Bacon has announced the creation of the Ubuntu Hall of Fame. It is an effort to recognize contributors that make the Ubuntu community a success.

With such a large community working on 5-A-Days, LoCos, translations, upstream bug triage, the sponsorship queue, Launchpad, forums, and many other projects, some contributors can be recognized by specific hard numbers, some may contribute in a range of projects that cannot be measured statistically. The Hall of Fame will highlight both types of work.

A number of boxes appear on the Hall of Fame:

Each box contains data for a specific topic, a description detailing what the data shows, ways to find more related data, and a link to a page that outlines how to get involved in that part of the community.

Another part of the Hall Of Fame is the Featured Contributor. Contributors doing excellent work around the community will be highlighted. Here, a little blurb will cover what they have done, their achievements and their personality. To show your appreciation for a contributors work, it is possible to “Thank” them. By clicking on a Thank button, the Hall Of Fame will look up your Launchpad account and add your profile picture to the blurb. This makes it easy to show featured contributors that you appreciate their work!

When thinking about who we would showcase for the first Featured Contributor, one of the first names that sprung to mind was Nick Ali, an excellent contributor and friend to everyone. Go and check out the Featured Contributor article about him.

When: Tuesday October 14, 2008
Where: #ubuntu-bugs
Time: all day and night!

GNOME Power Manager is the package selected for the community to work on.
* 112 New bugs
* 40 Confirmed bugs
* 37 Incomplete bugs

BLOG IT! Especially those on the Planet! There are people who want to help but don’t know how and sit on the sidelines of the blog-o-sphere reading; Help get those eyes from blogs to bugs. Let us combine blog-powers to educate, “Bug work is a fun way to get involved!”
* Publish about the Hug Day Tuesday Oct 14 to get everyone excited.
* Hug some bugs and add yourself to the HugDay’s wiki for your readers!

If you’re new to all this, head to: HelpingWithBugs
Also check out: UbuntuBugDays

Everyone is welcome!

DIGG THIS STORY!

Jono Bacon has announced the very first Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

For a long time now we have been shipping a package called example-content with each release of Ubuntu. This package provides a bunch of different pieces of content including audio, video, PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents and more. The idea is that you can use this content to kickstart your new Ubuntu system and see what it can do. example-content has been really useful, but it has been languishing a little recently, and then we had a rather interesting idea…

Why not use example-content as a great way to show off audio and video from free culture artists? It can give artists a platform of millions of Ubuntu users to show off their work and it really excites me because we are applying the Ubuntu ethos to free culture.

The idea is simple:

• Your submission must be either audio or video (we are not accepting documents/images) and no larger than 1MB for the audio and 3MB for the video. The submissions must be made available in either Ogg Vorbis (audio) or Ogg Theora (video). The submissions must be licensed as Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike.
• Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
• Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
• When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges (Cory Kontros, Luis de Bethencourt, Luke Yelavich, Lydia Pintscher and Tony Whitmore) will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 4th September 2008 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.

This is a great opportunity for artists to get their work seen or heard. Lets make something cool happen. Good luck! :)

In an effort to get the Ubuntu Java team up and running we’re going to
hold a meeting on Thursday 3rd, 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Current agenda items are:

• Development targets for intrepid
• Setting regular meeting times
• OpenJDK in main
• Debian/Ubuntu Java packaging coop
• Packaging Maven2 fixes from Fedora
• Explanation about various meta packages related to java

If you plan to attend, feel free to add your item to the agenda
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JavaTeam/Meeting) and please add your name to it.

To find out more about the plans of the team, check out
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JavaTeam/Meeting - bear in mind that the team is
just forming and it’d be great if you joined in to make Java rock even
harder in Ubuntu.

Also find the team in #ubuntu-java.

DIGG THIS AND SPREAD THE WORD!

From Jono Bacon’s blog:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, I am pleased to announce a brand new initiative in the Ubuntu community that we have been working on for a little while, and one that has been alluded to by some members of our incredible community. It is of course…5-A-Day!!

One of the most incredible things about any community is that when you unite people around a concept - it is incredible what a large collection of individual users can achieve, when they come together as one consistent force. With enough feet marching in the same direction, stunning things can happen, and with this in mind, we have produced a united method of Ubuntu contributors helping to improve and refine Ubuntu - via our bug list. This initiative is called 5-A-Day.

The idea for this came from a recommendation in many countries that to stay healthy and fit, it is recommended that you eat five portions fruit or vegetables *every day*. If you make a conscious effort to do this, your body will thank you for it. It is a simple concept that a variety of manufacturers have supported, and it provides an easy metric for normal people to determine how to contribute to a healthy lifestyle. Many people try to stick to the five portions of fruit or veg a day, and it is simple and easy to get involved, with long-term benefits for people in general. Lets apply the same ethos to Ubuntu…

The idea with 5-A-Day is simple - everyone in the Ubuntu community works to tend to at least five bugs every day. When we say tend to, this naturally depends on the kind of contributor you are.

As such:

• If you are a developer - you could fix five bugs, package fixes etc.
• If you are a user - you can help triage and confirm bugs, contribute your experience to bug reports. Test bugs and share
  your experiences.
• If you are an upstream contributor - you could help forward bugs upstream and help to get these bugs fixed.

To make things ultra-cool, and to spread the word, we have some rather nifty methods of automatic reporting which bugs you have worked on for 5-A-Day and we have a Launchpad Team you can all join. This gives us an idea of how many people are participating in 5-A-Day. People are already starting to contribute their 5-A-Day bugs in their email signatures, and I would love to see the 5-A-Day bugs that people contribute to shown in weblogs, IRC channels and more. If you have a nifty little script to do this, do get in touch.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) for 8.04 (Hardy Heron), currently underway in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has just finished the first day.

Like previous summits, this UDS starts the first day with an intro talk and then breaks into seperate sessions, usually in tracks such as Server, Mobile, Edubuntu, etc. For a look at what was discussed today, see the day’s schedule.

Every subsequent summit gets bigger and bigger, making it harder for people to get to all the sessions they want or need to and also far too many to talk about here, but here are a few highlights from some of the sessions:

Gobuntu
Gobuntu is the completely free derivative of Ubuntu. Announced last this year and first shipped with 7.10, there is still a lot of work to do. Recent commenters have noticed that Gobuntu ships default Firefox, which includes completely non-free icons. For 8.04, this will be replaced by Epiphany. Firmware is another key issue, with both in and out of kernel firmware is considered non-free. For the out of kernel firmware, it needs to moved to the restricted component and for the in-kernel firmware, this is bit more difficult and will require a seperate kernel, something that should be fixed by the time 8.04 releases. Lastly, the issue of certain multimedia packages might need to moved to restricted from main, although this issue requires more discussion. The gobuntu-hardy spec is now in Drafting.

Telling users about LoCo teams and other local resources
One of the key problems new users face is finding existing local resources, such as their LoCo team. The best place to tell users about these resources is shortly after install. As such, the installer Ubiquity will need to be modified to tell users about where to find these resources, as well as possibly modifying Pidgin to open to the default LoCo IRC channel, not #ubuntu. The identifying-users-and-local-groups is still in discussion, although a session has not been scheduled for tomorrow.

Hardy artwork
There were two discussions of the artwork in Hardy today, one covering the theme and the other about the icons. For the theme, a final idea has not yet been laid down, but the discussion steered toward unifying the Mobile and Desktop themes, keeping the orange elements with less gloss. For the icons, the need to keep the Tango guidelines (although not the icon theme) as well as the need for a palette. The relevent specs, hardy-theme and hardy-icon-them are both currently still in discussion although neither has a session scheduled for tomorrow.

NetworkManager for dialup devices
A great many devices still use the dialup technology of PPP these says, including many cel-based modems such as Edge or HSDPA and ASDL modems using PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE). Thankfully, the next version of NetworkManger, 0.7, will support PPP, although it is not clear exactly how many of these devices will be supported, due to the enormous number of configuration options and different devices in existance around the world. It was further stated that Ubuntu already supports as many ISDN and WinModems as is possible. The dial-up-suport spec is now in the Drafting stage.

Interacting better with upstream
It is critical that Ubuntu has good relationships with our upstream application developers, all the way from the larger projects such as GNOME or KDE down to the very smallest of developers. Generating a set of conventions on how to talk with upstream was the major goal here, including such suggestions as praising publicly, criticizing in private, working with both our direct upstream of Debian and the original application author. The modelling-better-upstream-connections is still in discussion, although another session in not scheduled for tomorrow.

Quote of the Day: John (Maddog) Hall

Stop trying to solve social issues with technical solutions, as it is often more expensive and ultimately not useful.

If you are at UDS and did not see your spec covered, feel free to email the author, Corey Burger with a short summary to be included in the day’s writeup.

And of course, if you want to help out with UDS, all the sessions are broadcast via SIP and the notes are edited on Gobby, a collaborative editor. For more information, see the previous Fridge article on participating in UDS. See you tomorrow!