The fourth test release of the upcoming “Dapper Drake” has been announced. This is the debut of the new graphical installer, dubbed Espresso, which adds an icon to the desktop that allows users to permanently install Ubuntu right from the Live CD. A nicer tour of the new features is available on the wiki. You can also follow the progress of Dapper development in Jane Weideman’s latest status update.
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Vincent Untz is back with the second issue of the popular Ubuntu Desktop News, which summarizes all the work done on the desktop these past few months. This update is huge, and includes some real goodies: Gstreamer .10 for multimedia support, the inclusions of avahi for full zeroconf suppport, the addition of ekiga and xchat-gnome, and, to top it all off, a quick interview with MOTU Daniel Holbach.
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Got a spare computer and some free time? Daniel Holbach is looking for volunteers for the new testing program. It’s a short list of things you can check off while installing a test release. There is also a longer, more thorough test is available for those that want to really put the installation process through its paces. Feeback is direct through the wiki pages, and will go a long way to getting good data back to the developers to see what needs to be fixed. Instructions and quick links to CD images are available on the introduction page.
Daniel also wants everyone to know that this upcoming Bug Day will be very special:
But we want this to be a special Bug Day. We’re going to have lists of things to do of different Ubuntu teams, so we can better track the impact we had. Planning is one thing, but we’ll surely stick to our concept of success: the Hug Day. This is a very special Bug Day: on Hug Day, when someone closes a bug, then someone else should hug him/her. Why? This is a very special way for us to tell everyone that we love contributions! And triaging bugs is a really big contribution.
See his announcement for more details on getting involved.
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Jane brings us one last report of the “distro sprint” in London, UK, which concluded this past week. As you can see from her past reports, much work was accomplished by the core team this week. Expect to see a great deal of these improvements in the next development snapshot, which has yet to be announced.
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The core team continues to drive development of Ubuntu forward, as Jane continues to keep us updated on the work being done in London. Summaries for Day 4 and Day 5 have been posted, as well as a video of Scott James Remnant’s presentation on the kernel, titled New World Order. (Yes, that is a mohawk.)
In related development news, Ian Jackson has posted a status report on an automated testing framework for .deb packages and Adam Conrad is looking for volunteers willing to test a new “madwifi-ng” driver. If you’ve got an Atheros card in your laptop and are willing to test, then please send Adam your test feedback directly.
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This week the core team has been working out of the Novotel London Excel Hotel, in London, UK, to crank out feature goals for the next release of Ubuntu, version 6.04, aka “Dapper Drake”. Known as a “sprint”, this meeting is decidedly boring from an outsider perspective; no fancy presentations, meetings, or fanfare, just a bunch of hackers working on Ubuntu.
Our consummate reporter, Jane Wiedeman, brings us the gritty details, with Day 1 and 2 and Day 3 summaries of the work being done on Dapper. Lots of good progress being done, stay tuned throughout the rest of the week as we’ll be bringing you more status reports.
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Hot on the heels of the last Dapper Status report, Jane Weideman brings us the latest status on the next version of Ubuntu, 6.04 (aka The Dapper Drake).
This new report shows how much the developers have gotten done over the past month. The short story is “less red, more green” on the report as people continue to knock out features and fixes for Dapper. This month is especially crucial, as the core team prepared to gather in London, England for a “sprint” in the beginning of February, where they will all meet in person and hack on the goals for the the upcoming release. Development on Dapper will soon be concentrating on bugfixes and stability, as the team gets ready to deliver the first “long lived” Ubuntu release, with three years of support for desktops, and five years of support for servers.
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Vincent Untz, perennial GNOME hacker and a member of the Desktop Team has published the first issue of the Ubuntu Desktop News (UDN). Highlights include gconf and rhythmbox improvements, Michael Vogt’s slick new click-and-install .deb tool, gdebi, and shots of the new logout window prototype.
Vincent caps off the first issue an interview with the GNOME packaging machine, aka Sebastien Bacher, who handles a large part of bringing desktop goodness into the distribution:
Some people call me “sebuild”, I’m kind of a “serial updater” :). Joke aside my main job is to update GNOME packages every time upstream roll a new tarball and to handle bugs we get about the GNOME packages (most of the desktop stuff).
In related Desktop Team news, the minutes from the first desktop meeting are up in case you missed them. If you’re interested in helping out the desktop folks, then Bug Day is a good day to start.
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Flight CD 2 is ready. This is the second in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Dapper development cycle, as images that are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Dapper. You can download it from the following locations. Please use bittorrent!
A list of notable changes in this release across the whole distribution is available, thanks to Matt Galvin. For more information, see the complete announcement.
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