Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 410

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #410 for the week March 23 – 29, 2015, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Paul White
  • Elizabeth K. Joseph
  • Aaron Honeycutt
  • 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

Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) Final Beta released

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu 15.04 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.

Codenamed "Vivid Vervet", 15.04 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, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

This beta release includes images from not only the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, but also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio and Xubuntu flavours. In addition to the usual suspects, we’re also welcoming a new flavour to the family this cycle with Ubuntu MATE.

The beta images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of 15.04 that should be representative of the features intended to ship with the final release expected on April 23rd, 2015.

There are, however, two bugs in this beta serious enough that it’s worth calling them out in the release announcement. Both bugs affect all flavours, are considered high priority, and will be addressed in upcoming daily builds:

  1. After installation is complete, clicking the "reboot now" button will eject your installation medium but then fail to reboot. The simple workaround for this is to manually turn off or reset your computer and then boot into the freshly installed system.
  2. When doing an OEM installation, the OEM user will not be removed at the end of the prepare-to-ship phase. Because of this, it is not recommended that oem-config be used with this beta, except for testing purposes.

Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Cloud Images

Utopic Final Beta includes updated versions of most of our core set of packages, including a current 3.19.2 kernel, the much-anticipated switch to systemd, and much more.

To upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 Final Beta from Ubuntu 14.10, follow these instructions:

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

The Ubuntu 15.04 Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/15.04/ (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server)

Additional images can be found at the following links:

The full release notes for Ubuntu 15.04 Final Beta can be found at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/ReleaseNotes

Kubuntu

Kubuntu is the KDE based flavour of Ubuntu. It uses the Plasma desktop and includes a wide selection of tools from the KDE project.

The Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/15.04/beta-2/

More information on Kubuntu Final Beta can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/Beta2/Kubuntu

Lubuntu

Lubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu that targets to be lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient by using lightweight applications and LXDE, The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, as its default GUI.

The Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/15.04/beta-2/

More information on Lubuntu Final Beta can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/Beta2/Lubuntu

Ubuntu GNOME

Ubuntu GNOME is a flavor of Ubuntu featuring the GNOME desktop environment.

The Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/15.04/beta-2/

More information on Ubuntu GNOME Final Beta can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/Beta2/UbuntuGNOME

UbuntuKylin

UbuntuKylin is a flavor of Ubuntu that is more suitable for Chinese users.

The Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/15.04/beta-2/

More information on UbuntuKylin Final Beta can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/Beta2/UbuntuKylin

Ubuntu MATE

Ubuntu MATE is a flavor of Ubuntu featuring the MATE desktop environment.

The Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/15.04/beta-2/

More information on UbuntuMATE Final Beta can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/Beta2/UbuntuMATE

Ubuntu Studio

Ubuntu Studio is a flavor of Ubuntu that provides a full range of multimedia content creation applications for each key workflows: audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing.

The Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/15.04/beta-2/

Xubuntu

Xubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu that comes with Xfce, which is a stable, light and configurable desktop environment.

The Final Beta images can be downloaded at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/15.04/beta-2/

Regular daily images for Ubuntu can be found at:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for clients, servers and clouds, 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

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 posted to the ubuntu-announce mailing list on Fri Mar 27 01:01:04 UTC 2015 by Adam Conrad, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team,

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 409

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #409 for the week March 16 – 22, 2015, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Paul White
  • Elizabeth K. Joseph
  • 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

Interview with dholbach of the Ubuntu Community Council

The Ubuntu Community Council is the primary community (i.e., non-technical) governance body for the Ubuntu project. In this series of 7 interviews, we go behind the scenes with the community members who were elected in 2013 serve on this council with Mark Shuttleworth.

In this, our fifth interview, we talk with Daniel Holbach who shares some details about his work at Canonical, projects he’s been involved with in the Ubuntu community and some wisdom for newcomers to Ubuntu.

dholbach

What do you do for a career?

I work for Canonical and will celebrate my 10th work anniversary later this year. I still enjoy it a lot. I learned loads, got to know many great people and made many new friends. Back in the early days I worked alongside Sébastien Bacher. The two of us basically were the “Desktop team”. Although I was quite used to working with our developer community beforehand, at some stage Canonical recognised Community work formally as something which deserved its own team. This is where I still am and still what I like a lot.

What was your first computing experience?

At home we always had computers as far as I can remember. I remember several Apple II models both at home or my dad’s work office I “typed” on when I was maybe four or five years old. From thereon I played on computers, or had my dad show me what he was working on. Some time later I learned a bit of programming, when I was maybe ten. Back then most of my programming consisted of changing small bits in games written in Basic or Pascal or copying stuff from “code listings” from computer magazines.

How long have you been involved with Ubuntu? And how long on the Ubuntu Community Council?

I got to know Michael Vogt through a friend we had in common when I was studying in Dortmund. One day in 2004 he said “I’m going to work on this thing based on Debian, do you want to try it?” Because I had a bit of spare time on my hands and was welcoming any distraction (I was working on my thesis back then), I said “Of course”. Hours later I had an invitation from Jeff Waugh in my Inbox. I upgraded my Debian machine to Ubuntu and was immediately hooked. Looking back, I think it was a mixture of both the heavy emphasis on new social standards in the open source world plus the willingness of many good developers to answer my questions which got me involved.

If Launchpad is not lying, I have been part of the CC since May 2007.

What are some of the projects you’ve worked on in Ubuntu over the years?

Many. I’ll just try to quickly mention a few which immediately come up in my mind:

  • A bunch of websites: Harvest, the LoCo Team Portal, the Packaging Guide, lately mostly developer.ubuntu.com and lots of graphs Jono made me do.
  • I was part of the planning of many initiatives like the new software store, some of our development/governance processes.
    Fun things like our 24h Ubuntu Community team marathon.
  • I’ve been privileged to work with many great people in many many teams, be it QA, documentation, our development teams, internal teams in Canonical, customers and many more.

What is your focus in Ubuntu today?

Lately I worked quite a bit on documentation for app developers. This was a very interesting experience. Basically our team was taking the input from the SDK team, the various Unity development teams and worked together with them and many others to come up with a story which app developers could understand and would enjoy to be part of. This resulted in a new developer.ubuntu.com site, which today is translatable and will soon be more closely tied to API docs and a snippets database. I worked with Chinese translators, helped with formatting, contributed some fixes to the site, worked with development teams to get last minute bugs fixed and created some training materials. It’s insanely gratifying to see developers jump in and write apps out of the blue, especially for a phone which is just now being sold online. Nuts! 🙂

Now I just worked on a help app for Ubuntu devices, and soon I hope to look a bit more at snappy, core and Ubuntu things.

Do you contribute to other free/open source projects? Which ones?

Not so much lately. For some time I contributed to xwax, as I was using it to DJ, but right now, there’s nothing to fix in it – it just works great.

If you were to give a newcomer some advice about getting involved with Ubuntu, what would it be?

Find something you’re interested. Something you’d like to help with, extend, change or fix. Don’t be shy, ask around how you can help, which docs you should have a look at. Start with small contributions, ask how to get them deployed/integrated, don’t give up too easily. Sometimes the people you’re asking are working on something differently and might not know the answer or sometimes it just takes a bit longer. Don’t let yourself be discouraged. Ubuntu people are a lot of fun to hang out with. Join a few meetings, chat with your team mates, be proactive, propose a hangout or a skype session to discuss things. Ubuntu is a very social undertaking.

Do you have any other comments else you wish to share with the community?

Ubuntu is in constant change, just like the world we live in. There are always new experiments, new things to be tried out, new challenges. That’s why the focus of people also changes quite a bit. Change never comes lightly and also comes at a cost in communities. Some things didn’t change over time though: Ubuntu is still free, open source, it’s there for everyone, very social and in the center of everything IT: desktop, laptops, servers, cloud, phones, tablets, IoT. I’m very impressed with where we are today.

New to this series? Check out our previous two Community Council interviews:

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) reaches End of Life on April 30 2015

Ubuntu announced its 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release almost 5 years ago, on April 29, 2010. As with the earlier LTS releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 5 years. The support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 10.04 will reach end of life on Thursday, April 30th. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 10.04.

The supported upgrade path from Ubuntu 10.04 is via Ubuntu 12.04. Users are encouraged to evaluate and upgrade to our latest 14.04 LTS release via 12.04. Instructions and caveats for the upgrades may be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PreciseUpgrades and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/TrustyUpgrades. Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 continue to be actively supported with security updates and select high-impact bug fixes. All announcements of official security updates for Ubuntu releases are sent to the ubuntu-security-announce mailing list, information about which may be found at https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-security-announce.

Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users in homes, schools, businesses and governments around the world. Ubuntu is Open Source software, costs nothing to download, and users are free to customise or alter their software in order to meet their needs.

Originally posted to the ubuntu-announce mailing list on Wed Mar 18 12:42:08 UTC 2015 by Adam Conrad, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team