Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 (Oneiric Ocelot) Released.

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-09-22

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2.

Codenamed “Oneiric Ocelot”, 11.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle fixing bugs and introducing a couple of new features as we polish up for the release.

Ubuntu Changes since Beta 1

Some of the new features now available are:

A new set of community supported ARM architecture images will be available between now and the release. The armel+ac100 for the Toshiba ac100 netbook is available for download now, and armel+mx5 targeted at the Freescale i.MX53 Quick Start development board will be available in one of the upcoming dailies.

GNOME got updated to current unstable version (3.1.92) on its way to GNOME 3.2

OneConf has now been integrated into the Ubuntu Software Center to help keep your installed applications in sync between computers.

And we continue to improve the underlying infrastructure:

Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 improves support for installing 32-bit library and application packages on 64-bit systems

Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 has a new kernel based on v3.0.4.

Ubuntu Server

Beta 2 includes Orchestra which is a collection of the best free software services for provisioning, deploying, hosting, managing, and orchestrating enterprise data center infrastructure services, by, with, and for the Ubuntu Server.

Juju (formerly codenamed Ensemble) is now available as a part of Ubuntu Server to handle service deployment and orchestration for both cloud and bare metal. Juju has many Charms available, including OpenStack deployment.

Xen hypervisor has been re-introduced to Ubuntu Server.

Kubuntu

Kubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 has the latest KDE software including KDE 4.7.1 Plasma Workspaces and Applications.

Along with KDE 4.7.1, the new KDE Personal Information Management (KDEPIM) suite 4.7 is included, which includes the new Kmail 2.

The Muon Suite 1.2 which includes Muon Software Center and Muon Package manager is now available.

Please see https://wiki.kubuntu.org/OneiricOcelot/Beta2/Kubuntu for details.

Edubuntu

Edubuntu’s Oneiric Ocelot Beta 2 has updates to gobby-0.5 and gbrainy version 2.

For more details on what has changed in Edubuntu 11.10, please refer to http://www.edubuntu.org.

Mythbuntu

Mythbuntu Oneiric Ocelot Beta 2 has adapted Chromium to replace Firefox by default. It now ships with Ubuntu Software Center.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ for further details.

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate.

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions really help us to improve this and future releases of Ubuntu. Instructions can be found at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs.

To Get Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2

To upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 from Ubuntu 11.04, follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OneiricUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 images from a location near you:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/download (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server)

In addition, they can be found at the following links:

The final version of Ubuntu 11.10 is expected to be released on October 13 2011.

More Information

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this beta release on our website, IRC channel and wiki.

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

Originally sent to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list by Kate Stewart on Thu Sep 22 22:50:21 UTC 2011

Call for Testing – Ubuntu Friendly

By akgraner | Published: 2011-09-22 
Hello all,

As weeks go by, we are getting closer and closer to Ubuntu 11.10 release
and, therefore, to Ubuntu Friendly beta release. An alpha version of the
site is now public for testing:

http://bit.ly/UbuntuFriendly

Have a look to the wiki page of the project [1] if you want to know more.

Right now all systems have only 1 star. This is the minimum rate a
system can get (we give 1 start because, at least, it was able to
install Ubuntu on it and submit results).

A bug in Checkbox prevented submissions to get more than 1 star. This is
now fixed in our PPA and it is now ready to be used in Oneiric. If you
run Oneiric it will be really helpful if you could install Checkbox from
our PPA and run the full Ubuntu Friendly suite (this is the suite that
runs by default).

If you are running Oneiric, we would really appreciate if you could:

1. Add this PPA to your Software Sources:

https://launchpad.net/~checkbox-dev/+archive/ppa

2. Install the latest version of Checkbox
3. Run it on your system(s) and submit to Launchpad

This will help us on two sides:

First, you will run the latest code in trunk. We are planning to release
version 0.12.8 to Oneiric in a week, so this is the last time to fix
critical issues. Should you find any issues during your testing, please,
file a bug against Checkbox project. [2]

On the server side of things, having a lot of data will help us
testing the website to make sure it works fine when 11.10 gets released.
Should you find any issues on the website, please, file a bug against
the Ubuntu Friendly project. [3]

Thanks!
Ara.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFriendly
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/checkbox/+filebug
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-friendly/+filebug

Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel mailing list by Ara Pulido on Wed Sep 21 12:57:34 UTC 2011

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 233

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-09-20

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #233 for the week September 12 – 18, 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
  • Daniel Bo
  • James Gifford
  • Neil Oosthuizen
  • Amber Graner
  • and many others

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

Community Council: Nominations

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-09-15

Community Council member terms expire next month, we are going to have an election in a few weeks. All Ubuntu Members are eligible to vote.

We will announce the details of the election soon. What we want from you now is nominations.

If you know somebody in the Ubuntu community, who

  • has been an Ubuntu member for a while
  • is dedicated to the project
  • is well-respected and known for balanced views and good leadership
  • has a good overview over various aspects of the project
  • is organised and has some organisation talent

(or you know that this all applies to you), please send an email to the Community Council (community-council at lists.ubuntu.com) with the subject “[CC Nomination]” through Thursday, September 29th, 16:00 UTC. If you are nominating someone else, please confirm that the person is willing to stand for election and make note of this in the nomination email.

Originally sent to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list by Elizabeth Krumbach on Thu Sep 15 16:10:12 UTC 2011

Ubuntu 11.10 Development update

By dholbach | Published: 2011-09-15

Ubuntu Development Update

We are racing towards the release of 11.10, and it’s only four weeks until we’re there. If you like partying, start organising your local release party!

This is the busiest time for Ubuntu developers and everybody’s trying to fix all the remaining bugs they run in. Some spend 24/7 trying to get packages to build again, bugs ironed out, bugs triaged, packages translated and documentation updated. It’s crazy, but it’s also good fun.

So there’s four weeks left, what’s going to happen in those weeks? Kate reminded us that Beta 2 freeze will happen today and with that the kernel and the documentation text will be frozen. Next week we’ll have a brand-new Beta 2 to get our hands on. So if you haven’t tried Oneiric yet: test Oneiric and file bugs. This is an excellent way to help out and make sure that 11.10 is in tip-top shape.

Colin Watson sent out a request for help to get the list of packages that fail to build from source under control. The good news is: in less than 72 hours we managed to get the number of failures from 661 to 401, but the bad news is, there’s still 401 packages to fix. The remaining build failures are harder to sort out, so if you have dealt with lots of compilation/linker/etc. errors, read Colin’s mail and see if you can help out.

There’s still a number of bugs on the radar for Beta 2, but most of them are assigned already, so we’re well on track. If you’re interested in any other aspect of Ubuntu Oneiric, I’d refer you to the oneiric-changes mailing list and the big picture specification status overview instead.

Events

Ubuntu App Developer Week

We covered it last week already, so here’s the complete summaries and links to logs of the best event for Ubuntu App Developers: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5. Thanks a lot for putting this together!

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. Why don’t have a release party? Here’s how to organise it and here’s how to register it. There’s 16 events listed right now, these cities are participating:

  • Asia: Bangkok (Thailand), Khon Kaen (Thailand)
  • Africa: Capetown (South Africa)
  • Australia/Oceania: Sydney (Australia)
  • Europe: Hradec Králové (Czech Republic), Dublin (Ireland), Belgrade (Serbia), Lloret de Mar (Spain), London (UK), Blackpool (UK)
  • North America: Kitchener (Canada), Toronto (Canada), Mexico (Mexico), SeaTac (USA), Lakeland (USA), Melbourne/Viera (USA)

Things that still need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

First timers!

It seems like the release hectic attracts loads of new people. That’s awesome! Thanks everyone for helping out and making the world a better place! Here’s the list of folks who got involved last week: Roman Yepishev and Michael van der Kolff. Also special thanks to Christoph Schmidt-Hieber, Thomas Preud’homme and Florian Schlichting who helped getting their fixes from Debian into Ubuntu. Well done everyone!

New Contributor

I had a chat with Ben Tucker from the USA.

Ben TuckerDoing the bug fix was really thrilling, even though it was a very minor “bug”, really all I did was update a package’s description to put the contained URL as a link instead of plain text. I’ve been using Ubuntu as my only OS for around 2 years now, and finally giving back to the project and making it better was an awesome feeling.

The documentation on bug fixing was very concise on what to do, reducing it to an easy step-by-step process. Once I did push the change to Launchpad, the reviewer was very helpful and patient even though I was still very new with the whole process.
The whole experience was definitely worth the time it took to read through all the documentation and get the tools installed and running. I am now eager to do another bug fix, and I’m still hunting for a bug at my level. I do program as a hobby, but not in C, so some of the code can be a little intimidating.
As I said, I have been using Ubuntu as my sole OS for the past 2 years. I use it for school work (I’m starting high school this year) and for programming in Haskell, and for both it works great. I am hoping to do more bug fixes, and maybe even something beyond that in the future. Unity, for example, still needs a lot of work and a lot of love put into it, and I’m hoping to help with that to make it great.
One of my favorite things about the free, open source nature of projects such as Ubuntu is that if there’s something you don’t like about the OS or something that you think is missing, then you can fix it now, you don’t have to wait for some big corporation to think of it and then fix it several months later. The project has a much closer, more intimate tie to its user base and what they want from it. Getting started in Ubuntu development/bug fixing is the first step towards helping make it an even better OS than it is now.

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.