Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 236

By akgraner | Published: 2011-10-10

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #236 for the week October 3 -9, 2011, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Elizabeth Krumbach
  • Amber Graner
  • Neil Oosthuizen
  • and many, many, more

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Ubuntu 11.10 Development update

By dholbach | Published: 2011-10-07

Ubuntu Development Update

One week left! Are you excited already? The release candidate is going to get out soon and we will have days full of testing the installation on all architectures, in all kinds of installations scenarios. If you want to help out with the testing, it will be much appreciated.

So what’s still happening? It’s interesting to note that still quite a number of fixes is going in. Also has the planning for the 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin“) cycle been started. Matthias Klose sent out an email about the preparation of the P-cycle archive: the wiki page lists a number of significant changes for ‘precise’, like updates to gcc, binutils, swig and other core components and dropping python2.6.

Another great update was Colin Watson’s review of the most popular ideas on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm site. He gave an update on the following ideas:

  • Contact lens in the Unity Dash
  • Displaying Ubuntu version information
  • Volume adjustments for headphone use
  • Making it easier to find software to handle a file
  • Show pop-up alert on low battery

It was great to see that he got feedback from a number of lead developers working on this.

Also lots of people are already thinking about the discussions at UDS, so a few discussion topics already found their way to the summit page.

Events

Ubuntu Release Parties
We’re still looking for people who can organise Ubuntu release parties! The Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 release will get out on 13th October. This is a great reason to celebrate, so why don’t have a release party? Here’s how to organise it and here’s how to register it. There’s 29 events listed right now, these cities are participating:

  • Asia: Bangkok (Thailand), Khon Kaen (Thailand)
  • Africa: Capetown (South Africa)
  • Australia/Oceania: Brisbane (Australia), Sydney (Australia)
  • Europe: Hradec Králové (Czech Republic), Dublin (Ireland), Šiauliai (Lithuania), Vilnius (Lithuania), Podgorica (Montenegro), Belgrade (Serbia), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Lloret de Mar (Spain), Göteborg (Sweden), Blackpool (UK), London (UK), Leeds (UK)
  • North America: Kitchener (Canada), Toronto (Canada), Mexico (Mexico), SeaTac (USA), Lakeland (USA), Melbourne/Viera (USA) and Philadelphia (USA), Tempe (USA), Plymouth (MI, USA), Nashville (USA), Jenison (USA). (Also there’s the Panama team still looking for a venue.)

It’s just amazing to see how distributed the parties are and how excited folks get together to have a great time together and celebrate this great release.

Ubuntu Open Week
Not finalised yet, but it’s clear that we’re going to have Ubuntu Open Week after release, where we’ll have a very broad spectrum of talks and workshops which showcase all the areas in Ubuntu where you could get involved. Watch out for the official announcement. Leave a comment for a session that you’d like to see! Watch out for the development-related sessions. The editor of this post is looking into getting one set up.

Things that still need to get done

It’s late in the release cycle, but if you want to help fixing things in the release and the fix is sufficiently important, here’s how to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

First timers!

You wouldn’t believe it because we’re so late in the release cycle already, but we’ve had a number of people who got their first upload into Ubuntu last week still. Here’s to five great contributors: Jessica McKellar,  Brandon Snider,  Samuel Taylor, Manish Sinha and Pion. Thanks a lot everyone!

Get Involved

  1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
  2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
  3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

  • Be interactive and reach us most immediately: talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net.
  • Follow mailing lists and get involved in the discussions: ubuntu-devel-announce (announce only, low traffic), ubuntu-devel (high-level discussions), ubuntu-devel-discuss (fairly general developer discussions).
  • Stay up to date and follow the ubuntudev account on Facebook, Identi.ca or Twitter.

P is for…

By akgraner | Published: 2011-10-05

It’s a perennial pleasure to pick pertinent and/or pithy placeholder names for Ubuntu releases. At least, I like to think of them as pertinent and/or pithy. I’ve had diverse feedback, shall we say. Nevertheless, it’s now a tradition, and it’s a pressing priority as we approach the release of Oneiric.

So, what will be our mascot for 12.04 LTS?

The letter P is pretty perfect. It’s also plentiful – my inbox has been rather full of suggestions – and we have options ranging from pacific to purposeful, via puckish and prudent. We’ll steer clear of the posh and the poncey, much as some would revel in the Portentious Palomino or the Principled Paca, those aren’t the winning names. Having spent the last six months elucidating the meaning of “oneiric” I think it might also be worth skipping the parenthetical or paralogical options too; so sadly I had to exclude the Perspicacious Panda and Porangi Packhorse (though being an LTS, that Packhorse was a near thing).

Being generally of a cheerful nature, I thought we’d avoid the Predatory Panther and Primeval Possum. Neither sounds like great company for a seven year journey, really. Same goes for the Peccable Peccary, Pawky Python and Perfidious Puku. So many bullets to dodge round here!

We’re looking for something phonetic, something plausible and something peaceful too. We’ll avoid the petulant, the pestilent, the phlegmy (phooey!), the parochial, the palliative and the psychotic. We’re aiming for mildly prophetic, and somewhat potent, without wanting to be all pedantic and particular. Phew.

So, what might work?

There are lots of lovely candidates. I have a fondness for phat. The Phat Platypus has a can-do kind of ring to it, but I don’t think it’ll fly.

I also like punchy and perky (the Perky Penguin is a nice nostalgic option) and persistent (better than permanent, peerless or penultimate) and playful and plucky and poised. Others like prescient and peaceable and pervasive (!) and pivotal. Pukka rings a nice old-world bell, but it’s possibly pejorative.

As you can see, it’s been something of a challenge to get this right.

Let’s ask the question differently – what are we trying to convey? 12.04 is an LTS. So we want it to be tough and long-lasting, reliable, solid as a rock and well defended. It’s also going to be the face of Ubuntu for large deployments for a long time, so we want it to have no loose ends, we want it to be coherent, neat.

We’ve told the story of the cloud in previous releases, and that comes to fruition in 12.04 with the first LTS that supports both the cloud guest, and cloud infrastructure, across ARM and x86 architectures. We’ve also told the story of Unity in previous releases, and that comes to fruition in a fast, lean interface that works well across clients both thick and thin. 12.04 is going to be a lot more than all that, but for the full reveal, you’ll need to wait till UDS! Nevertheless, we can take reliability, precision, and polish as a given.

Balancing all of those options, I think we have just the right mix in our designated mascot for 12.04 LTS. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Precise Pangolin.

Now, I’ve recently spent a few hours tracking a pangolin through the Kalahari. I can vouch for their precision – there wasn’t an ant hill in the valley that he missed. Their scales are a wonder of detail and quite the fashion statement. I can also vouch for their toughness; pangolin’s regularly survive encounters with lions. All in all, a perfect fit. There’s no sassier character, and no more cheerful digger, anywhere in those desert plains. If you want a plucky partner, the pangolin’s your match. Let’s pack light for a wonderful adventure together. See you in Orlando!

 

Originally posted here by Mark Shuttleworth on Wednesday, October 5, 2011.

Technical Board 2011

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-10-05

After the recent poll of Ubuntu developers I’m delighted to introduce the Technical Board 2011-2013. I think it’s worth noting that three of the members of this generation of technical leaders are not Canonical employees, though admittedly they are all former members of that team. I think there’s cause for celebration on both fronts: broader institutional and independent representation in the senior governance structures of Ubuntu is valuable, and the fact that personal interest persists regardless of company affiliation is also indicative of the character of the whole community, both full-time and volunteer. We’re in this together, for mutual interests.

Without further ado, here they are, in an order you are welcome to guess 😉

  • Stéphane Graber
  • Kees Cook
  • Martin Pitt
  • Matt Zimmerman
  • Colin Watson
  • Soren Hansen

Please join me in congratulating each of them, and thanking those who were willing to stand, who were nominated, and those who participated in the poll. From my perspective, it was a very rich field of nominations. We had several candidates with no historic link to Canonical, which was very encouraging in terms of the diversity of engagement in the project. For the first time, I felt we had too many candidates and so I whittled down the final list of nominations – as it happens, all of the non-Canonical nominees made the shortlist, though that was not a criteria for my support.

Originally posted here by Mark Shuttleworth on Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 7:53

Interview with Rubi1200

By ubuntu-news-team | Published: 2011-10-05

Our latest interview is from a new member of the forum staff, Rubi1200.  Hope you enjoy! :)

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

I am father to two wonderful boys and adoptive father to a very sweet street cat. My interests include medieval literature, medieval history, and computing. I was educated in medieval literature, mastering in Middle English romance, and currently work for a company that provides research materials to academic institutions. In my spare time, I like to listen to jazz and Afrobeat, watch sports on television with the kids, and learn about Linux.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

Computers were always something that fascinated me, although I have only owned a computer for about 7 years now. I first became interested in Linux around 2005 and experimented with Ubuntu Dapper Drake in 2006.

3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?

I joined the Ubuntu Forums in 2010 and have tried to post on a daily basis in order to provide support to users in various sub-forums such as General Help, Absolute Beginner Talk, and Installation & Upgrades.

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

Yes, I am an Ubuntu Member (thanks to the Forum Council and all those who supported my application). My main areas of contribution are Wubi installs, booting problems, and anything else I think I can help someone with or at least point them in the right direction. I also try to give support when I see a post has gone unanswered in order to give people the feeling that their problems are not being ignored.

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

I love playing around with different Linux distros, either as a LiveCD, in a virtual environment, or installed to a partition on the disk. Some of my favorites include, but are not limited to, Linux Mint Debian Edition, CrunchBang, Knoppix, and openSUSE.

I don’t really have a least favorite application, although I am not too fond of remote desktop software and uninstall it at the first opportunity.

I have too many favorite applications to really put my finger on anything specific, but I would say that VLC, Htop, and UNetbootin are up there near the top of the list.

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

I’ll start with the last part of the question first; I do not believe I have any. My fondest memory? I think there are too many to really pin this down to anything specific, but I will share one story that I think exemplifies the forums and Ubuntu in general.

I once responded to a post by a user who was having various issues trying to install Ubuntu, including graphics card problems, confusion about the best partitioning scheme and so on. I walked the user through the various steps until Ubuntu was installed successfully in a dual-boot configuration. The user was so grateful that I received messages on the Visitor Message page on my profile, numerous private messages thanking me profusely, and a friendship request (accepted of course).

Additionally, I am always happy when a user responds that the fix I suggested worked for them and that the problem is solved.

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

Unfortunately, none (yet).

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

Personally, I hope to see more people becoming involved with Linux as well as Ubuntu.

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

Help other users if you can and try and uphold the spirit of Ubuntu in all you do whether on the forums or outside of it.

Originally Posted here on 2011-10-05