Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #120

news · December 7, 2008

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #120 for the week

November 30th - December 6th, 2008. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu Free

Culture Showcase, Jono Bacon on UDS, MOTU, Tamil Team - Intrepid

introduced at Udhagamandalam, Ubuntu Zimbabwe, Launchpod #13, Meet

Henning Eggers, Launchpad hiring bug tracker, Ubuntu Podcast #14,

Vibuntu 1.0, Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins., Ilumina TV

runs on Ubuntu, George Wright responds to backstage questions(Video),

and much, much more!

== UWN Translations ==

* Note to translators and our readers: We are trying a new way of

linking to our translations pages. Please follow the link below for the

information you need.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Translations

== In This Issue ==

* Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase

* Jono Bacon on UDS

* MOTU

* Ubuntu Stats

* LoCo News

* Launchpod #13

* Meet Henning Eggers

* Launchpad hiring bug tracker

* In the Press & Blogosphere

* Ubuntu Podcast #14

* Vibuntu 1.0

* Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins.

* Ilumina TV runs on Ubuntu

* George Wright respons to backstage questions(Video)

* Upcoming Meeting & Events

* Updates & Security

== General Community News ==

=== Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase ===

Would you like to have a chance to have your creative work in front of

millions of people? Here's your chance: the Ubuntu Free Culture

Showcase. Submit your audio, video or photo/graphics for an opportunity

to have them included in the next release of Ubuntu

How it works is simple:

* Your submission must be no larger than 1MB for audio, 2.5MB for

video and 0.5MB for photo/graphic.

* Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free

hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Please do not email

any of the judges with your submissions.

* Add your entry to one of the tables below.

* 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 short-list.

The deadline for submissions is February 6th 2009.

Terms

* All submissions must be in by February 6th 2009.

* All decisions by the judges are final.

* Content that contains nudity, racism, [censored]ism or other offensive

content will be disqualified.

* All submissions must be licensed as Creative Commons Attribution

ShareAlike (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase

=== Jono Bacon on UDS ===

December 8th through the 12th, is the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS)[1].

This event, for 200 of Ubuntu's finest, and others who wish to attend,

is for the purpose of designing, discussing and planning Jaunty

Jackalope, Ubuntu 9.04. Five days of sessions spread across seven

tracks, focusing on different elements of the Ubuntu platform and

community. Also, as a part of UDS, Jono will be heading the Community

Track that will include all sorts of issues, including governance,

process, initiative, collaboration and participation and much, much

more. Another aspect of UDS is community. Along with the hard work is

the time to play - to greet old friends and make new ones, and come down

off the physically draining aspect of the Summit. Jono invites everyone

to attend.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDSJaunty

http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1464

=== MOTU ===

Stefan Ebner has joined the MOTU team. He lives in Austria and has been

using Linux for 2 years now. After trying several other distros, Stefan

settled on Ubuntu. He has worked on merging and syncs for Audacious,

gbrainy, monodevelop, wxwidgets 2.6, and xmoto. Launchpad:

https://launchpad.net/~sebner Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StefanEbner

== Ubuntu Stats ==

=== Bug Stats ===

* Open (48265)-233 over last week

* Critical (16)-2 over last week

* Unconfirmed (18800)-778 over last week

* Unassigned (40149)-197 over last week

* All bugs ever reported (235465)+1343 over last week

As always, the Bug Squad needs more help. If you want to get started,

please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

=== Translation Stats Intrepid ===

* Spanish (17640)-903 over last week

* French (61915)+2 over last week

* Swedish (74404)-1018 over last week

* English (UK) (81460)+1 over last week

* Brazilian Portuguese (81647)-68 over last week

Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex," see more

at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/

=== 5-a-day bug stats ===

==== Top 5 contributors for the past 7 days ====

* crimsun (717)

* jibel (287)

* wolfger (82)

* charlie-tca (80)

* chrisccoulson (54)

==== Top 5 teams for the past 7 days ====

* dcteam (720)

* ubuntu-michigan (82)

* ubuntu-de-locoteam (36)

* ubuntu-berlin (35)

* ubuntu-au (19)

5-A-Day stats provided by Daniel Holbach. See

http://daniel.holba.ch/5-a-day-stats/

=== Ubuntu Brainstorm Top 5 this week ===

* Allow Renaming of USB Drives in Gnome

* Enable the ability to set the order of network connections

* Add a new button "I don't understand this idea"

* Time Machine line Suns "Time Slider+ZFS+Gnome"

* OnBoard Webcam support

Ubuntu Brainstorm is a community site geared toward letting you add your

ideas for Ubuntu. You can submit your own idea, or vote for or against

someone elses. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

== LoCo News ==

=== Tamil Team - Intrepid Introduced at Udhagamandalam ===

Udagamandalam, Nov 28. Computer World of Udagamandalam(1) (a.k.a Ooty),

hosted Intrepid Ibex release event at Lawly Institute. Wide range of

people ranging form School Teachers, Students, Computer Vendors,

Government Officials took part in the event.

Variety of topics starting from different modes of Installing Ubuntu,

Package Management, Administration, Tamil features were discussed &

demonstrated.

Special Thanks to Terrance S Rajesh of Computer World for making

arrangements for event despite heavy rains across the week. Sri Ramadoss

& Padmanathan of Ubuntu Tamil Team conducted the event.

=== Ubuntu Zimbabwe ===

Below is a report submitted from the ICT Director of the Parliament of

Zimbabwe on his presentation given at the e-Parliament Conference in

Brussels. The Parliament of Zimbabwe has chosen to use Ubuntu on their

desktops, and possibly on their servers too. The ICT Director is also a

member of the Ubuntu Zimbabwe LoCo Team.

The Global Centre for ICT in Parliament already knew that the Parliament

of Zimbabwe was advocating Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in

automating its processes. As a result they requested that I do a

presentation outlining the business case for the migration to FOSS. Two

other parliaments have also opted to use FOSS for their operations,

namely Italy and France, and my presentation followed immediately after

that of France.

The final PowerPoint presentation is available on request.

A number of African parliaments showed interests in the presentation

including Ghana, South Africa, Malawi and Tanzania.

The following questions were asked among other issues that were discussed:

1. Challenges in migrating calendars (MS Outlook as well as those

created using other proprietary software). Parliament of Zimbabwe argued

that migrating in general is not a major constraint since there were no

shared calendars in use. Parliament will have to use the calendaring

system built into the FOSS.

2. Challenges importing documents done by very old versions of MS

Word and MS Excel especially those with nested tables and multiple

formulae. Most documents in Parliament are not complex and can be easily

and comfortably migrated.

3. Italy presented that cost cutting should not necessarily be the

biggest motivation for migration because major savings cannot be

realized in the short term but probably in the long term. This raised

the question of it being affordable in that those countries with good

budgets can afford the licensing and purchase of proprietary software

where as those with skinny budgets (such as most African countries) tend

to have other priorities (hunger relief, HIV/AIDS interventions, Health,

etc) and the purchase and licensing of software is usually sidelined.

Parliaments in such countries, therefore, will pirate software. The

Parliament of Zimbabwe weighed the risk of pirating against the few

issues that could be raised against FOSS and decided to go the FOSS route.

4. Challenges relating to training/re-training Officers of

Parliament and Members of Parliament in the use of the FOSS. Parliament

submitted that there is a huge difference in the appearance of Office

2007 and earlier versions of Office in such that Parliaments that opt to

migrate to Office 2007 will certainly have to re-train. By comparison,

the appearance of OpenOffice is not too different from earlier versions

of Office to the extent that it might be easier training for OpenOffice

than for Office 2007. Having said that, Parliament of Zimbabwe has the

added advantage of having just come out of general elections meaning

most of the Members of Parliament are new and will require training.

Their training will, therefore, include ICT training. The Officers will

also be trained along with the Members of Parliament.

In the end, it was realized that FOSS is the way to go for Parliaments

in countries that operate on thin budgets. Given that there is a lot of

community support and certainly a FOSS equivalent for most desktop

applications, most African countries should consider FOSS for their

desktops.

Pictures at: http://amachu.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/udhagmandalam-ubuntu/

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-news-team/2008-December/000303.html

== Launchpad News ==

=== Launchpod #13 ===

Matthew Revell and Graham Binns host the latest episode of Launchpod,

the Launchpad podcast. Included in this episode are:

* 01.00: Some of the Launchpad team will be at the Ubuntu Developer

Summit starting the 8th December. Graham talks a little about what he’ll

be doing.

* 03.42: Announcing the Launchpad bug tracker plugins API! Create

your own plugin to enable the bug tracker of your choice to communicate

directly with Launchpad. Read more.

* 11.48: Welcome to Michael Nelson, who is the latest member of

Launchpad’s Soyuz team. The Soyuz chaps look after PPAs and other

packaging in Launchpad.

http://news.launchpad.net/podcast/launchpod-episode-13-bug-tracker-plugin-api

=== Meet Henning Eggers ===

Launchpad News interviewed Henning Eggers, the most recent addition to

the Launchpad Translation Team. He is a software developer for the

team, involved in the importing and approval of code and, most recently,

the Team's QA contact. His work, so far, has been involved with the

rosetta-experts team (Launchpad Translations (codenamed "Rosetta") is a

platform for open source application translation on the internet). His

office, on the fifth or sixth floor of a building in Pinneberg, Germany,

not too far from the North Sea.

http://news.launchpad.net/meet-the-devs/meet-henning-eggers

=== Launchpad hiring bug tracker ===

Launchpad is looking for developers with Python experience to help with

developing better ways to track bugs. The successful candidate should

live and breath Python, love free software, have strong experience

hacking on bug trackers and have a string of successful projects behind

him or her. A full job description is available[1].

[1] http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/canonical_LBAE/

http://news.launchpad.net/were-hiring/passionate-about-bug-tracking-were-hiring

== In The Press ==

* IBM pushes "Microsoft alternative" desktop - Based on Ubuntu Linux,

virtualization technology from Virtual Bridges and its own Lotus

Applications IBM created a desktop that should become an alternative to

Microsoft. Usage of Virtual Bridge's VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote

Desktop Environment) is said to make this solution more cost-efficient

than Using Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows Desktops.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3460383523.html

* IBM, Ubuntu Unveil Microsoft-Free 'PC' - This is a combination of an

Ubuntu desktop combined with IBM Lotus applications delivered through a

Linux virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) from Virtual Bridges. The

applications, themselves, come from the Open Collaboration Client

Solution (OCCS) software. Rather than purely open source, this is an

open standards solution. It is a paradigm solution, rather than a

direct product to product competition, because IBM is challenging the

perception that a desktop is a machine on your desk running Windows.

http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3788981/IBM+Ubuntu+Unveil+MicrosoftFree+PC.htm

* Ubuntu Remains Best Linux Distribution for Desktops - Jason Brooks

examined Ubuntu 8.10 as a desktop and felt that, even though Red Hat and

Fedora may have more users, Ubuntu is the better desktop due to its

concentration on usability. He defines usability as being Ubuntu's

large selection of ready-to-install software, large community of users

and contributors and its broad support of hardware components. He does

feel, however, that Ubuntu lacks the latest security features in the

server department that are the hallmark of such as Red Hat and Fedora.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Ubuntu-Remains-Best-Linux-Distribution-for-Desktops/

* Microsoft Should Worry Less About Live, More About Linux - It is Ed

Moltzen's opinion that, with it's concentration on search and

advertising space, Microsoft has left the field open for Ubuntu to take

over the desktop. He feels that the improvements to Vista have largely

been surpassed by Ubuntu and, in this economic climate of recession in

the U.S., Ubuntu has been given a chance to make a dent in Microsoft's

desktop OS business. Ubuntu is free to download, easy to install, has

high performance numbers, and is easy enough for kids to use.

http://www.crn.com/software/212201323

* Why Ubuntu Now Beats Vista - ChannelWeb literally looks at both

Vista and Ubuntu with a series of slides and descriptions of critical

comparisons. This comparison clearly points out how Ubuntu has caught

up to or, in many cases, surpassed Vista. Some of the points they

emphasized are wifi connection, the guest session, multimedia support,

lower hardware requirements and cost.

http://www.crn.com/software/212201252;jsessionid=T4YWJV4HS24WSQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN?pgno=1

* StudioDave Does A Hardware Review And Meets Ubuntu 8.10 - Dave

Phillips was faced with the deterioration of his HP Omnibook due to age,

and set out to replace it with a laptop that would be able to handle his

audio needs. This meant getting a machine that could handle his

specific needs, like AVSynthesis, Csound 5.09, Ardour 3, JACK, and the

latest Java SDK. This is not the sort of installation that the ordinary

user would face, but he was satisfied with the results that Ubuntu gave

him. In particular, the apt system that make it easy to update the

system to the real time kernel and the full-featured development

environment.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/studiodave-does-hardware-review-and-meets-ubuntu-810

== In The Blogosphere ==

* IBM launches Ubuntu-based VDI solution - Brian Madden acknowledges,

in this post, that he's not really familiar with or comfortable with

Linux. With that as a basis, and the apparent lack of information on

the virtualization that IBM is using, he sees no point in the offering.

It is his opinion that regardless of the platform, it will still have

to run Windows applications. In his words, "Maybe in another five or

ten years when we're all running Rich Internet Apps in the cloud, but

for now, we live in a Windows world".

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2008/12/05/ibm-launches-ubuntu-based-vdi-solution.aspx

* IBM, Canonical Declare Ubuntu Linux War Against Windows, Office -

Joe Panettieri makes the prediction that "the Windows-Office duopoly

will fall within the next three to five years." This statement is based

on the cooperation of IBM, Virtual Bridges and Canonical in their latest

offering. He quotes the IBM press release with saying, "This solution

runs open standards-based email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified

communication, social networking and other software to any laptop,

browser, or mobile device from a virtual desktop login on a Linux-based

server configuration."

http://www.workswithu.com/2008/12/04/ibm-canonical-declair-ubuntu-war-against-windows-office/

== In Other News ==

=== Ubuntu Podcast #14 ===

Josh Chase and Nick Ali from the Georgia US LoCo released episode #14.

Some topics covered:

* Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase II

* UDS Jaunty

* More Phoronix performance testing

* Flash and Handbrake

* CrunchBang Linux

* Vibuntu, customized Ubuntu for the visually impaired

* Potential games coming to Linux

http://ubuntupodcast.net/2008/12/06/ubuntu-podcast-episode-14/

=== Vibuntu 1.0 ===

Vibuntu is another Ubuntu derivative that is based on Ubuntu 8.10 and

targeted for visually impaired users. Therefore it logs on automatically

and has Orca enabled by default. Applications that are not or rarely

used by blind and otherwise visually impaired people, such as GNOME or

F-Spot, have been removed.

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Adaptive-Technologies/Vibuntu-43337.shtml

=== Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins ===

Ever got your DVD-Rom locked by someone else? Harassed your console? Or

even forgot the root password (Well, maybe not on Ubuntu)? IBM

DeveloperWorks has some tricks for you to deal which such annoyances

next time.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-10sysadtips/index.html

=== Ilumina TV runs on Ubuntu ===

Jerome Gotangco took a look at Ilumina TV, a prototype unveiled by a

local start-up in the Philippines called Inovent Inc. One thing he

noticed is that it's supposed to be running on a stripped down version

of Ubuntu. Other than that, it looks like any other Personal Video

Recorder (PVR), such as MythTV or Elisa, with a different front end. He

hasn't had the ability to actually see the prototype in action, yet,

only some pictures and slides on the company blog site. He hopes to get

a sneak peak in the near future.

http://engage.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/ilumina-tv-runs-on-ubuntu/

=== George Wright responds to backstage questions(Video) ===

Backstage Blog asked George Wright, Portfolio Manager at Research and

Innovaton, some questions about the efforts of the BBC, and Ubuntu 8.10,

to make a range of non-DRM protected content available. Mr. Wright's

answers appear to be somewhat terse, and aimed mainly at individuals,

but they go a long way to explain where the plugin is now

developmentally, and where it is headed. One of the biggest problems

that the BBC has is negotiating the rights to offer content outside the

United Kingdom. Added to with problem is the necessity of

individualizing the release of content per the location in which it is

viewed. He will also be blogging about this and other things they're

working on for the BBC Internet Blog. Video links to the interview are

available at the link.

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2008/11/george_wright_r.html

== Upcoming Meetings and Events ==

=== Tuesday, December 9, 2008 ===

==== Server Team Meeting ====

* Start: 16:00 UTC

* End: 17:00 UTC