Month Of Screencasts 2007

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-08-29

Ubuntu Month of Screencasts is a mad plan concocted by the Screencast Team to produce one full length screencast per day for the whole of one month. That month is September 2007.

The goal is that each video will go into one subject in some depth, to help educate new users about Ubuntu. A wide range of topics will be covered which should answer some questions that new users to Ubuntu often ask. The aim is to go into enough detail to be interesting without being baffling or boring.

Of course the screencasts can not go into infinite detail on every topic, as there are limits to our time and resources. So don’t expect to learn kernel hacking or C programming. However, there should be enough information to get a new user from “zero to hero” in one month. That’s the goal.

Each screencast will be made available through the Ubuntu Screencast site in three sizes and two formats (OGG and Flash). The screencasts are licensed under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, so you’re free to modify, pass on, sell or otherwise distribute them so long as the attribution to us stays intact.

Next version of Ubuntu announced: The Hardy Heron

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-08-29

Announcing the Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04), the next version of Ubuntu that will succeed Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10, due for release in October 2007). Not only will the Ubuntu community continue to do what it does best, produce an easy-to-use, reliable, free software platform, but this release will proudly wear the badge of Long Term Support (LTS) and be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop. We look forward to releasing the Hardy Heron in April 2008.

With the opening of each new release cycle of Ubuntu, we have more and more opportunity at our fingertips. Not only are our friends in the upstream world constantly innovating and extending their applications and software, but the Ubuntu community continues to see incredible growth in its diverse range of areas such as packaging, development, documentation, quality assurance, translations, LoCo teams and more. Each new release gives us all an opportunity to shine, irrespective of which bricks in the project we are laying, and this is at the heart of our belief – working together to produce an Operating System that will empower its users and shape the IT industry, putting free software at the corner-stone of our direction.

Most people only ever see the end-user view of Ubuntu, running it on their desktops, servers and mobile devices around the world. For these users, Ubuntu provides a simple, convenient means to do what they want to do easily, effectively and without unnecessary complexity. For many of us though, we want to open up the hood and understand how the system works and how to extend and grow it. Thousands of us get out of bed every day, united behind Ubuntu, ready to make a difference, working together to make our vision happen.

Importantly, our ethos of collaboration and freedom extends to the development process as well as the end product. As such, the Ubuntu development process is a very open, transparent one, and anyone is welcome to get involved. It works like this:

  • Everyone is welcome to think of and develop ideas for features that could be present in the Hardy Heron release. These ideas are written as specifications (detailed documents outlining how the idea would work and be implemented). You are welcome to add your specifications to https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu.
  • In October 2007, we will hold the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and generate a schedule of sessions to discuss these specifications. The sessions provide a means for interested parties to help scope out the proposed feature and determine methods and plans to implement it. The Ubuntu Developer Summit is a semi-virtual event in which those who cannot attend can dial in with VoIP and use IRC and collaborative editing with Gobby to take part in the summit.

Everyone is welcome to participate, everyone is welcome to get involved, and everyone is welcome to help shape the form of the Hardy Heron. Let’s work together to shake things up, make things happen and make the most compelling Ubuntu release yet. Start your engines…

Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #54

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-08-26

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #54 for the week August 19th – August 25th, 2007 is now available. In this issue we cover Canonical’s new store opening, the announcement of UDS-Boston, Gutsy Gibbon’s latest alpha release, Launchpad’s new features, and much much more.

  • Canonical Store Opened!
  • Ubuntu Developer Summit Boston
  • Ubuntu Certified Professional mailing list goes OFFICIAL!
  • Gutsy Gibbon – Tribe 5 Released
  • Launchpad team releases version 1.1.8
  • In The Press and In the Blogosphere
  • Translation stats
  • Bug Stats

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News please submit it via email or on the wiki !

UWN is brought to you by the Marketing Team.

Ubuntu Developer Summit Boston

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-08-24

Guess what folks, its coming to that time again … you got it – Ubuntu Developer Summit time!!

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is a week long event in which a swathe of Ubuntu contributors get together into the same venue to design, discuss and flesh out the next version of Ubuntu. This includes the entire Ubuntu team that work for Canonical, a number of Ubuntu contributors that we sponsor and a large number of contributors who attend themselves. We also have a number of organizations, vendors, press and interested parties who attend.

It is an excellent way to get involved in how Ubuntu is developed and see the Open Source development process in action. With this comes a caveat though – the UDS is a hardcore development summit. It is not a conference with presentations, talks and user focused content – this is about building Ubuntu from a technical and community governance level.

The next UDS is scheduled for Saturday 27th October to Friday 2nd November 2007 and will be held at The Hilton at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. To find out more, head over to the wiki page. We look forward to seeing you there!

Launchpad 1.1.8 released!

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-08-23

This week the Launchpad team released version 1.1.8 of Launchpad. There’s a lot in this release to excite the Ubuntu community!

  • The Personal Package Archives beta will soon be available to all members of the Launchpad Beta Testers team who have signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.
  • You can now see your individual translation import queue.
  • If you host code branches with Launchpad, you can now specify which branch, if any, you intend to merge the code into.
  • The bug tracker’s email interface now lets you set a bug’s tag.
  • Also in the bug tracker, bug notification email headers now state which milestone the bug is targeted to.
  • Work is underway to enable you to file bugs against packages in Canonical’s commercial repository.

Other highlights include a new “Deactivate your account” option, Trac bug statuses are correctly interpreted and the bug filing page has been overhauled.

One important note: searching in bug comments has been temporarily suspended, as it was causing timeouts. As soon as the problem is fixed, bug comment searching will return!

You can find out more in the Launchpad 1.1.8 in the release notes.