[News]

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #171 for the week
November 29th - December 5th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Renewed call
for nominees - IRC Council, 2009 Ubuntu Server Edition user survey, UDS
Lucid - Kernel Summary, An interview with Daniel Holbach, Jono Bacon:
Lernid, A selection of easy merges from the Ubuntu Server Team,
Finksburg, Maryland Tour, Ubuntu Party Toulouse 2009, Getting the most
from bug mail, The Planet: Daniel Holbach, Matthew Helmke, Ara Pulido, &
Jonathan Riddell, Forensic Cop Journal: Ubuntu Forensic, Ubuntu CE 6.0
Beta Brings Dansguardian Fix, Meeting Summaries: November 2009, 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 ==

* Renewed call for nominees - IRC Council
* 2009 Ubuntu Server Edition user survey
* UDS Lucid - Kernel Summary
* An interview with Daniel Holbach
* Jono Bacon: Lernid
* A selection of easy merges from the Ubuntu Server Team
* Ubuntu Stats
* Finksburg, Maryland Tour
* Ubuntu Party Toulouse 2009
* Getting the most from bug mail
* The Planet: Daniel Holbach, Matthew Helmke, Ara Pulido, & Jonathan Riddell
* In the Press & Blogosphere
* Forensic Cop Journal: Ubuntu Forensic
* Ubuntu CE 6.0 Beta Brings Dansguardian Fix
* Meeting Summaries: November 2009
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Upcoming Meetings & Events
* Updates & Security

== General Community News ==

=== Renewed call for nominees - IRC Council ===

Matthew East, in his email the the Ubuntu -irc list
(https://lists.ubuntu...ber/000717.html)
is renewing the call to the Ubuntu Community for nominations to the IRC
Council.

As Matthew writes in his email: "The Community Council would like to
renew the call for nominations for the staffing of the IRC Council. The
IRC Council consists of five members and three seats are currently
vacant. The Community Council will be working closely with the IRC
Council over the coming 6-12 months and it is an exciting time for the
IRC community. We would really like to see some more nominees come
forward with a passion for improving governance and user experience in
our IRC channels, which are essential resources in the Ubuntu community
as a whole."

As the email posting on The Fridge notes, Matthew's email contains all
the information you need to know about the IRC Council, how to nominate
yourself, or encourage someone else, and their governance expectations.

Please read The Fridge Article or Matthew's email, and if you or someone
you know would be the perfect candidate for the IRCC, then encourage
them to follow the instructions listed and go for it. Remember
nominations are only open until Friday December 11, 2009.

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1945

=== 2009 Ubuntu Server Edition user survey ===

The Ubuntu Server Team wants to know how you use Ubuntu Server Edition
in day-to-day operations to help the team prioritize the support and
development of the product. This is the second edition of this
initiative which was first introduced in 2008.

In an effort to better understand, support and further the Ubuntu Server
Edition we would like to ask you to take this survey which should take
between 15 to 30 minutes to complete. The information provided will help
us determine where we can improve support, where to add additional
resources and to generate a better understanding of the community which
we work within.

Please note that this survey is being conducted by the Ubuntu Server
Team community together with the Canonical Product Management.
Information about the team is available at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/

To take the survey, please go to http://survey.ubuntu.com/

http://blog.canonical.com/?p=302

=== UDS Lucid - Kernel Summary ===

UDS Lucid was a busy time for the Kernel Team. They chose a new kernel
for the Lucid Lynx release, they reviewed their policies for Stable
Updates, reviewed their kernel delta and configuration, and much more.
Here is a very brief overview of their decisions for those who are
interested.

The primary decision for the kernel team at UDS is to choose the base
kernel version for the release. For Lucid this will be 2.6.32. This
version has just released providing the maximum stabalization time, it
also is expected to be the kernel of choice for long term releases from
other distributions. The kernel team will also keep ext4 as their
primary filesystem.

They also reviewed their Stable Release Update policy, moving to a more
upstream stable branch oriented policy. The team will be taking upstream
stable updates for longer and preferring those for Lucid.

The team reviewed their Ubuntu delta, the drivers, and patches they are
carrying. They plan to update all of their Ubuntu drivers except for
drbd. drbd is primarily consumed by the server team and they use a dkms
module to get a more up to date version. On the patch side they have
identified a number of redundant patches which have been dropped, and a
number which should be moved upstream.

The team has decided to experiment with backporting newer kernels onto
LTS releases for Lucid. This will involve provision of a kernel from
later cycles into Lucid, supported on certified platforms. The policy
here is being firmed up now.

For graphics, they chose to enable Radeon Kernel Mode Settings by
default and to seriously look at enabling Nouveau for Lucid. This should
bring pretty boot to the majority of users.

For those who crave more detail on these and a couple of other key
initiatives can find more information at the following wiki page, which
they will be keeping up to date with the current state of the union for
the kernel. http://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/UDSLucid

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2009-December/007948.html

=== An Interview With Daniel Holbach ===

Daniel is a 30 years old, male, still enjoy living in Berlin, Germany.
Live together with Murphy, my dog, work for Canonical in Jono Bacon’s
community team. He likes wandering around in the city, reading, all
kinds of music, learning languages, good food and lots of other things.
I DJ'd every now and then, playing Drum & Bass music, but hasn’t for
some months now. He grew up having a computer at home, and he always
liked toying around with it. He wrote his first program in Basic or
Pascal, when he was 11 or 12.

He start with Ubuntu during the Warty release, and like the idea the
distro and community were putting forth and soon became an Ubuntu
Member. When he joined Canonical he helped out in lots of different
areas: he helped Séb with the maintenance of Desktop packages. He also
helped with some of the planning for the MOTU team, and was involved in
setting up Bug days and the Bug Squad, he even packaged Artwork for some
time. He is now more than glad he is part of the Community team, Jono’s
four horsemen.

Daniel uses Ubuntu exclusively, and some of his best Ubuntu memories
include: his first upload to the archive, the first user who thanked him
in a bug report for fixing their bug, and when Mark invited him to UDS.
If there was one thing he could tell all new Ubuntu users, it would be
that it is such a great feeling to realise that you can help out easily
and make a difference, not just for your own good, but also for others.
Read the entire interview at the link.

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1946

=== Jono Bacon: Lernid ===

==== Lernid 0.2 Released ====

You can get Lernid from Jono's PPA by running the following commands:

* sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonobacon
* sudo apt-get update
* sudo apt-get install lernid

This release fixes a bunch of bugs, includes some further layout
improvements, and completes the plumbing on the first-cut of the
Telepathy driven classroom IRC pane. Lernid has been translated into 27
languages, but we currently have a bug in displaying them. This should
be fixed in the next release. Screenshots at the link.

http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/12/01/lernid-0-2-released/

==== Lernid Gets Real Events ====

So far, Lernid has merely provided a streamlined interface to the common
components in Ubuntu Open Week or Ubuntu Developer Week. Jono has just
completed some work which starts bringing unique value to Lernid as a
user interface for these events.

Jono has been wanting to have a means of providing a structural
representation of events, as opposed to just showing a web page with a
HTML table showing the schedule. This seems easy enough: just have a
database, but part of the value of Ubuntu Open Week and Ubuntu Developer
Week is that a wiki means that we can share the burden of scheduling the
event, making corrections and swapping sessions. Wikis are not optimal
though, they don’t give us the structured information he wanted.
Fortunately, he has come up with a better way.

Recently, Jono hacked support into Lernid to read in an iCal calendar
for a given event, separate the events out and store them in a way that
he could parse into Lernid. He then took this data and converted the
times of the events to the local time zone – this solves one of the
biggest problems people have with Ubuntu Open Week – understanding what
the heck UTC is and calculating the time of the event in their local
time zone. Now you can load Lernid and see the list of events with times
that make sense to you. Jono is also planning to build in functionality
to set an alarm for a given event so that Lernid will pop up a
notification bubble then minutes before an event to remind you.

The benefit of using iCal as a backend means that event planners can put
together events using any calendaring application, and you can not only
get awesome event support in Lernid but also provide a standard iCal
feed that people can subscribe to in their calendar apps. When using
Google Calendar, working together on events is really simple.

The code is now in Launchpad. Jono is not going to be generating any
more packages in the PPA until he has another tested and stable version
ready, which will be 0.3. Screenshot at the link.

http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/12/03/lernid-gets-real-events/

==== Lernid Gets Notifications, Browser Updates and Translations ====

Jono has added a bunch of new features this week to Lernid:

* Notifications – events that are shown in the event list will now
appear in the notification area. A notification bubble will pop up 10
minutes before an event begins to remind you it is starting.

* Multiple Browser Pages – the browser view now has a drop-down box
where you can select between different pages. This code is now ready for
Jono to build in support for an URL to trigger a page load in the
browser. This means that when you are watching a session and the session
leader mentions an URL, the browser view will automatically update with
the page. This provides an opportunity for the session leader to deliver
content to that view in near real time: this is a first for these kinds
of online learning sessions.

* Translations – thanks to a patch from the always awesome David
Planella, Lernid now makes use of the growing list of available
translations. Lernid in your language: nice!

The code, bugs, translations and more are available in the Launchpad
project. https://www.launchpad.net/lernid/ Screenshot at the link.

http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/12/06/lernid-gets-notifications-browser-updates-and-translations/\

=== A selection of easy merges from the Ubuntu Server Team ===

Now that UDS has ended one of the tasks Ubuntu developers focus on is
merging packages from Debian. As Lucid will be an LTS release, packages
from testing (instead of unstable) will be pulled in. Here is a
selection of packages from the Ubuntu Server team that look easy to get
you started on merges:

* rabbitmq-server (main) https://merges.ubuntu.com/r/rabbitmq-server/
* procmail (main) https://merges.ubuntu.com/p/procmail/
* libcommons-attributes-java (main)
https://merges.ubuntu.com/libc/libcommons-attributes-java/
* libaopalliance-java (main)
https://merges.ubuntu.com/liba/libaopalliance-java/
* jruby1.2 (main) https://merges.ubuntu.com/j/jruby1.2/
* hsqldb (main) https://merges.ubuntu.com/h/hsqldb/
* facter (main) https://merges.ubuntu.com/f/facter/
* corosync (main) https://merges.ubuntu.com/c/corosync/
* aide (main) https://merges.ubuntu.com/a/aide/
* strongswan (universe) https://merges.ubuntu.com/s/strongswan/
* setools (universe) https://merges.ubuntu.com/s/setools/
* ldapscripts (universe) https://merges.ubuntu.com/l/ldapscripts/
* heimdal (universe) https://merges.ubuntu.com/h/heimdal/
* glassfish (universe) https://merges.ubuntu.com/g/glassfish/
* boinc (universe) https://merges.ubuntu.com/b/boinc/

Some merges may already have been done. Other may turn out to be sync
requests. And if you run out of packages to merge you can just head over
to Merge-O-Matic to get the full list of packages waiting for your
merging skills!

http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/a-selection-of-easy-merges-from-the-ubuntu-server-team/

== Ubuntu Stats ==

=== Bug Stats ===

* Open (76393) +284 over last week
* Critical (33) +/-0 over last week
* Unconfirmed (39490) +59 over last week
* Unassigned (66956) +205 over last week
* All bugs ever reported (354516) +1839 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 Karmic ===

1. Spanish (12876) -281 over last week
2. Brazilian Portuguese (45551) -25 over last week
3. French (45970) -91 over last week
4. Swedish (64247) -913 over last week
5. English (United Kingdom) (71916) -1219 over last week

Remaining strings to translate in Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala", see more
at: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/

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

* Improve the height of the panel - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22822/
* Show logged in users in indicator applet to switch users more
efficiently - http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22827/
* Make the upgrade in the update manager more user friendly -
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22711/
* Time and Date is hard to tell if it is synced to a ntp server -
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22712/
* Add medibuntu repository by default and uncheck the box -
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/22741/

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 ==

=== Finksburg, Maryland Tour ===

The Ubuntu Maryland team went on the road last Saturday and landed at
the Finksburg Library. Events of the day included:

* Demo machines to get a feel and demo of Ubuntu
* Presentation discussing what Ubuntu is and how you can benefit from it
* Free Software CDs to take Ubuntu home with you
* Bring a flash drive with 1Gig of free space and we'll set you up with
a LiveUSB version of Karmic Koala!
* Meeting some new friends!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarylandTeam/Events/MDTour/Finksburg

=== Ubuntu Party Toulouse 2009 ===

* Original article and PDF's in French

The server market is certainly the least known to computer users. Yet
most companies with more than 1,000 employees use, among others, Linux
servers. Over half the websites that we use every day use Linux. This
conference aims to explain how Linux has became, in ten years, one of
the most widely used operating systems on servers, what are the most
common uses, and how free software is now on almost all servers.

The Ubuntu Party in Toulouse had two conferences. Here are the slide
presentations: The use of Linux and Free Software in the server domain:
http://nicolas.barcet.com/drupal/files/Linux%20Serveurs%20-%20UP%20TLS.pdf

Founded in 2004, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution more widespread on the
personal computer and is pushing to become as well known on servers.
This conference aims to:

* Briefly trace the history of Ubuntu

* Explain how the community

* Describe the interaction between the community and Canonical

* Give some ideas on how everyone can contribute to Ubuntu

* Provide some pillars of its future development

Presentation of the Ubuntu project (jointly with Christopher Sauthier,
chairman of Ubuntu-uk and leader goal-free)
http://nicolas.barcet.com/drupal/files/PresUbuntu%20-%20UP%20TLS.pdf

Some pictures are now on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nbarcet/sets/72157622821502927/

http://nicolas.barcet.com/drupal/fr/ubuntu-party-toulouse-2009

== Launchpad News ==

=== Getting the most from bug mail ===

If you’ve reported, commented on or subscribed to a bug in Launchpad,
you’ll have seen Launchpad’s bug mail. It’s probably the easiest way to
stay up to date with the bugs that interest you and there are a few
things you can do to get the most out of it.

If you don’t read anything else…

Probably the best thing you can do to make bug mail useful is to ensure
you only get the bug mail that interests you.

Launchpad makes the reasonable assumption that, if you report, comment
on or subscribe to a bug, you’re interested in that bug. So, it’ll send
you email updates when:

* someone changes the status, importance or targeting of the bug
* someone makes a comment on the bug.

If you find you’re no longer interested in a particular bug, check for
an unsubscribe link in the footer of the bug mail. You can also visit
your own bug page to check which individual bugs you’re subscribed to.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/people/+me

If you don’t see an unsubscribe link, it means that you’re not
subscribed directly. Instead, you’re receiving the bug mail because either:

* you’re a member of a team that’s subscribed to the bug
* you’ve previously subscribed to receive all bug mail associated with a
particular distro, project or part thereof.

So, what do you do?

You’re subscribed to all bugs associated with a distro or project

At the bottom of the bug mail is a link to the bug’s page in Launchpad,
along with a short explanation as to why you’re receiving the bug mail.
If you’re subscribed to all the bugs associated with Launchpad, for
example, it might say: