news 28 Posted July 28, 2010 Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 203 for the week July 18th - July 24th, 2010. == In This Issue == * Last call for Maverick server papercuts * Ubuntu Maverick open for translation * Native readers: extending the Beta * MOTU Interview: Maia Kozheva (sikon / LucidFox) * An Interview With Silver Fox * Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap * Ubuntu Stats * Approval and Re Approval Process * LoCo Council July Meeting minutes * Delivering the Ubuntu Colombia Contact * Stepping Down from Ubuntu Bangladesh * Dun Laoghaire July Geeknic * Ubuntu-fr at Les Vieilles Charrues * Launchpad News * Ubuntu at Non-Technical Events * More cleansweep. * Discussion request: multilingual posts on Planet Ubuntu or not? * The Official Ubuntu Book – 5th Edition * This week in design – 23 July 2010 * Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04 is now available in Greek! * How to Ask Smart Questions by Martin Owens * Ubuntu One iphone client, source code released * Ubuntu Translation Teams Healthcheck * An invitation to join Ubuntu’s Q&A group on Shapado.com * Akademy 30 second interviews, Eben Moglen, Helsinki, Prague * "Blog about what you're doing" * Bugs vs Blueprints * In The Press * In The Blogosphere * Windows or Ubuntu? * Linux Box To Market Ubuntu * Dell drops Ubuntu PCs from website... for now * Is Linux Too Much for One Mere Mortal to Handle? * Rackspace's Risky Open Cloud Bet * Featured Podcasts * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings * Upcoming Meetings and Events * Updates and Security * and much much more! == General Community News == === Last call for Maverick server papercuts === Thierry Carrez sends out this reminder: The last of our Server papercuts iterations will soon start, so it is now your last chance to nominate that annoyance that hindered your Server experience ! Nominations for the beta iteration will end on August 1st. Remember the steps: 1. If nobody filed a bug about it yet, just file one. 2. Look up the bug you want to nominate as a Server papercut, then click on “Also affects project” 3. Click “Choose another project” and type in “server-papercuts”, click “Continue” 4. Click on “Add to Bug report” Remember the guidelines: * Bug affects a server package * Bug has an obvious and easy fix * Bug makes the life of the sysadmin more miserable * Bug is not a new feature (since we’ll be after Feature Freeze at that point) As of today we only have 3 candidates for 12 open slots. So there is plenty of room for yours ! Thanks for your help in making the Ubuntu Server experience more (fit and) polished. For more information on how you can help with papercuts go to: http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/last-call-papercuts/ === Ubuntu Maverick open for translation === David Planella sends out the call for translations to begin on Maverick in this post: I’m pleased to announce that Ubuntu Maverick is now open for translation: Remember that according to the release schedule translatable messages might be subject to change until the User Interface Freeze on the 26th of August. During the Maverick development cycle, language packs containing the translations are generally released twice per week. This way you can see and test the results of the translations more frequently. That’s it, happy translating! For more information on how you can get involved with translating Maverick got to: http://davidplanella.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/ubuntu-maverick-open-for-translation/ === Native readers: extending the Beta === It is time to extend the Ubuntu Font Beta Testing. We need to make sure that the Ubuntu font is being fully exercised beyond the English language and I do not want to rely on accidental incidents but rather explicitly add people from the translations teams for various languages (and alphabets). Today we have started adding language teams so, if your team gets an email from us, we need your help! For more information on how you can help go to: http://design.canonical.com/?p=6001 === MOTU Interview: Maia Kozheva (sikon / LucidFox) === Take a moment to learn more about MOTU Maia Kozheva aka Lucidfox in this interview by Daniel Holbach. Maia answers the following questions and more: How long have you used Linux and what was your first distro? How long have you been using Ubuntu? When did you get involved with the MOTU team and how? What helped you learn packaging and how Ubuntu teams work? To find out the answers to these questions and more go to: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/2088 === An Interview With Silver Fox === Joe Barker interviews Silver Fox. Here is what Joe had to say in his introduction - So, it is without further ado that I introduce my next victim guest. Silver Fox is generally a quiet member of the Ubuntu Beginners Team, but does good work within said team which goes – largely – unnoticed. I thought it would be appropriate to try and bring these to light for others to see. Joe asks the following questions: * Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc. * When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu? * When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there? * Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one? To find out how Silver Fox answers these questions and more go to: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/2087 === Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap === Did you miss Ubuntu Developer Week? No Problem below is a link and description to the sessions. * Day 1 * 16:00 UTC – 18:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/GetStarted|Getting Started With Development]] (dholbach): This two-hour session was one of the most action-packed sessions I ever ran. So many great questions, so much fun and so much topics covered. Thanks a lot everybody. We managed to set up an initial Ubuntu development environment, talk about Ubuntu development processes and Ubuntu in the bigger picture. In the second part we had a look at a couple of packages that fail to build and succeeded in fixing a few of them. Awesome! * 18:00 UTC – 19:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/Widgets|Widgetcraft]] (apachelogger): Next up was Harald Sitter who did a great job explaining how to write KDE widgets by using the Plasmoid infrastructure. Lots of real-life examples, lots of excitement and slides for your reading pleasure. * 19:00 UTC – 20:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/Desktop|Desktop Team Overview]] (seb128): Sébastien Bacher did a great presentation of what’s going on in the Desktop Team and how you can help out. Maybe we should have an additional “Ask Séb” session, next time. Heaps and heaps of interested Desktop people kept him quite busy. * 20:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/UpstartJobs|Authoring Upstart Jobs]] (slangasek): Last on day 1 was Steve Langasek who dived deep into Upstart’s features and how to make best use of them. I foresee lots and lots of good use made of it. * Day 2 * 16:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/PackageNinja|Packaging Like A Ninja]] (shadeslayer): Rohan Garg brought a lot of fun to UDW by teaching us all how things work in the Kubuntu team. If I counted correctly he even handed out three orange ninja belts. * 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» (dpm): By the looks of it, David Planella managed to resolve the problem of not knowing very very well. He gave an excellent overview over translations and how to work with them and answered what felt like a thousand questions. * 18:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/QtQuickQml|Developing With Qt Quick and QML]] (Riddell): As a seasoned KDE-hacker Jonathan Riddell knows what’s going on in the KDE and Qt world and which technologies get you good results quickly. He gave great insight into making your KDE apps rock very easily. * 19:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/WorkDebian|How To Work With Debian]] (Laney and Rhonda): Wow, what a great session. I’m particularly excited to see people from Debian and Ubuntu collaborate like that and see that much interest in getting the most out of our work for both projects. Great session, lots of info, lots of good questions. * 20:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/Validation|Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard]] (zyga): The last session of the day was held by Zygmunt Krynicki who presented an interesting way to see how low-level changes affect the whole system and measure performance. The questions indicate that there’s a deep interest in solving this problem across the board. * Day 3 * 16:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/CleansweepReview|Operation Cleansweep And Reviewing Patches]] (nigelb and bobbo): Nigel Babu is spearheading an initiative which has the goal that there’s no unreviewed patches left by the end of it. To achieve that we set up a process that’s very easy to follow and involves QA people, Ubuntu developers, Upstream and Debian developers. Nigel and David Futcher did a fantastic job talking about the effort. Make sure you join in on the fun! * 17:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/Upstreaming|Forwarding Bugs And Patches Upstream]] (pedro_ and nigelb): Pedro Villavicencio Garrido is one of the best people to talk about evaluating bug reports and patches and being in touch with loads and loads of upstream developers about them and thus forwarding valuable information to software authors. His session was very informative, up to the point and it seems like there’s going to be even more people hanging out in #ubuntu-bugs soon. * 18:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/DailyBuilds|Daily Builds And You]] (jcastro and dholbach): Jorge Castro and I talked about Daily Builds afterwards. This is a very exciting new technology in Launchpad that is currently in Beta stage. If you want up-to-date software you care about out there and users using and testing it, read the log. I think Jorge and I were sounding something between a comedy duo and an old couple every now and then – I hope you forgive us. * 19:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/AppIndicators|Make Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators]] (tedg): Ted Gould has been working on indicators in the panel for quite a while now and it was great to have him around to explain what’s going on and how to make best use of the technology. If your heart beats for Desktop stuff, you wrote a Desktop application or just want to know what’s going on and how things are evolving, make sure you check out the log. * 20:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/KernelTriage|Kernel Triage]] (JFo): Imagine there’s millions of users using all kinds of different hardware. Imagine there’s failure reports or some kind of hardware not working exactly. How do you deal with the feedback of those users? This is exactly that Jeremy Foshee talked about. As you can imagine there’s a lot of lessons the Kernel team learned already and lots of experience that went into the session. If you like all things hardware and want to give Jeremy a hand, be sure to check out the log. * Day 4 * 16:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/QuicklyApp|Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly]] (didrocks): What a great and action-packed session it was! Didier Roche explained how to create apps without a fuss and how Quickly makes clever decisions for you, so you have to worry less. Seems like he was very happy about the session himself, the audience even forgave him to try to make French the official language of Ubuntu Development. * 17:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/ImproveUbuntu|Improving Ubuntu In An Evening]] (vish): Vishnoo did a great job explaining the Hundred Papercuts project and what it is about. Participation was great and I can already see lots of people getting involved in the project. It indeed is a great way to improve Ubuntu in an evening. * 18:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/ServerPapercuts|Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts]] (ttx): Thierry Carrez was up next and his session about Server Papercuts was a great follow up to the Hundred Papercuts session. If you’re interested in server stuff, like making things work again, read up the session log. He explained quite well who to talk to, how to get in touch with the same and make Ubuntu servers rock even harder. * 19:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/Xubuntu|How To Help With Xubuntu]] (charlie-tca): As Xubuntu project lead, Charlie Kravetz has a lot of insight into Xubuntu and XFCE. Heaps of good questions, lots of interest in Xubuntu made the session fly by quickly. If you’re interested, get in touch with Charlie! * 20:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/MergeProposals|Merge Proposals: Life On The Sunny Side]] (beuno/mhall119): Unfortunately Martin Albisetti got ill and could not give the session, but luckily Michael Hall jumped in to run a Q&A session on merge proposals. We might repeat the session in a few weeks. Stay tuned. * Day 5 * 16:00 – 18:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/Django|Django And You]] (mhall119): First up was Michael Hall, who had booked a double session about Django goodness and brings in quite a bit of experience on the topic. He did a great job explaining the concepts behind Django, how to set up a basic project, lots of tips and tricks and what I liked best: he plugged the LoCo Directory a couple of times. Hope you’ll get interested and see how great Django is and how much fun projects like the Loco Directory are. * 18:00 – 19:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/AdoptUpstrean|Adopt-An-Upstream]] (jcastro): Jorge was the best possible person to talk about one of the most awesome projects we have in the Ubuntu landscape: the essence of Adopt-An-Upstream is to be a tie between the Ubuntu project and others projects: you take on real responsibility by sharing information, by helping others making informed decisions and improve Ubuntu in a very real sense. Great session! * 19:00 – 20:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/Edubuntu|How To Help With Edubuntu]] (highvoltage): I’m glad we had Jonathan Carther with us who talked about Edubuntu, how it’s set up, how the team works and what the plans for the future are. Great! * 20:00 – 21:00 UTC: [[MeetingLogs/devweek1007/QA|Me, myself and QA]] (warp10, gaspa): Last sesion of the day and of whole UDW was about how to help with Quality Assurance in Ubuntu: basically making packages rock harder. Easy tasks, how to find them, what various terms like NBS mean, was all part of the session. Thanks a lot to the Ubuntu Italian Mafia Famiglia (no that name is not my invention ). For more information on Ubuntu Developer Week go to: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperWeek == Ubuntu Stats == === Bug Stats === * Open (77847) +252 over last week * Critical (31) +2 over last week * Unconfirmed (37115) +158 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 Lucid === 1. English (United Kingdom) (0) +/-0 over last week 2. Spanish (8917) -98 over last week 3. Brazilian Portuguese (34603) -37 over last week 4. French (38230) +/-0 over last week 5. German (54272) -21 over last week Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx", see more at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/ === Ubuntu Brainstorm Top 5 this week === * Is difficult to see Ubuntu One sync progress - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25417/ * There is still no user-friendly and solid way to backup your system and MBR - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25425/ * USB Modem installation - using a Wizard - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25406/ * Intelligent input for mail addresses - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25423/ * Outbound traditional marketing Ubuntu the right way - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/25424/ 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 another idea. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ == LoCo News == === Approval and Re Approval Process === Laura Czajkowski of the Ubuntu LoCo Council writes about the approval and re approval process in this blog post. I’ve had some time recently to review a lot of wiki applications for LoCos. It is truly amazing the amount of work some teams do and is a great source of ideas to try for other teams. With that said, I’ve also seen some wiki pages which are less than clear on what the team is doing which makes it very hard to judge. So I thought I’d put down some best practices to make it clearer what is expected. So firstly let’s recap: The LoCo Council has been tasked with identifying Approved LoCo teams which were approved over 2 years ago and thus are due for re-approval. The criteria for re approval is the same as for approval which is outlined on the getting approved instructions and the LoCo Council guidelines can be found at the team approval guidelines. It should be noted that from the day your LoCo is approved, you should continue to document all events and history of your LoCo for this re approval process to make it clear and visible to all. Now it is safe to say some teams do not continue documenting their work so when it comes to re approval time it’s panic stations, all hands on deck! Things you can do to help elevate this are the following * Use the LoCo Directory to log all of your events it will make it easier to write up about them and possibly in the future link to past events * MONTHLY Reports folks, only a handful of teams use them and there are more teams there that SHOULD be writing monthly reports, list your IRC meeting, any real life meet up, projects people are working on in relation to Ubuntu. * Take photos of your events it’ll help in the long run, assign someone at each event to take photos and even create a gallery in one place to link to them When it comes to the creation of the Application be it for Approval or ReApproval it’s the same thing just NAMED DIFFERENTLY. You just need to document it. LOTS OF DETAILS PLEASE! We’d rather have too much then not enough details as the meeting is short and we have a lot of teams to get through. To read more about the LoCo approval and re approval process go to: http://www.lczajkowski.com/?p=793 === LoCo Council July Meeting minutes === The LoCo Council meets on the 3rd Tuesday of the month to re approval and approve LoCo Teams. The meeting is open to everyone, not just teams that are going through the process. We encourage others to come and learn how the process is done but to also ask questions. This months meeting summary: * LoCo Team {re}approvals * Ubuntu-RO – Nobody present for application – Council taking it to Share this post Link to post
