Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 337

By lyz | Published: 2013-10-07

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #337 for the week September 30 – October 6, 2013, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

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

  • Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph
  • Paul White
  • Tiago Carrondo
  • 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

Welcome new members of the Ubuntu LoCo Council!

By lyz | Published: 2013-10-04

On the behalf of the Community Council I would like to congratulate and welcome our newly appointed members to the LoCo Council:

Thank you to all who their names forward, we always have great applicants, and the decision is never easy and we hope you all consider applying again in the future.

Originally posted to the loco-contacts mailing list by Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, on behalf of the Community Council, on Fri Oct 4 21:50:58 UTC 2013

4 more days to get your Community Council nomination in!

By lyz | Published: 2013-10-04

All 7 elected Community Council member terms expire this month so we are looking to restaff the council with some exceptional community members.

If you know somebody in the Ubuntu community, who

  • has been an Ubuntu member for a while
  • is dedicated to the project
  • is well-respected and known for balanced views and good leadership
  • has a good overview over various aspects of the project
  • is organized and has some organization talent

(or you know that this all applies to you), please send an email to the Community Council (community-council at lists.ubuntu.com) with the subject “[CC Nomination]” by Tuesday, October 8th, 16:00 UTC – just 4 days away! If you are nominating someone else, please confirm that the person is willing to stand for election and make note of this in the nomination email.

Full details about this call for nominations, including FAQ about what the council does and expectations of council members can be found at on the original announcement: Community Council Call for Nominations

Thanks everyone,
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph (on behalf of the Community Council)

Next Online Ubuntu Developer Summit: 19 – 21 Nov 2013

By lyz | Published: 2013-10-03

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is a key event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where our community gather to discuss, debate, and design the future of Ubuntu. The event is completely open, welcome to all, and brings together platform developers, app developers, advocates, designers, partners, carriers, OEMs and more. The event takes place at uds.ubuntu.com.

As with each UDS, we are working to refine and improve each event. For the next UDS we are making some of the following improvements:

  • Simplifying how our community propose new sessions.
  • Simplifying the registration process.
  • Adding a hallway track for impromptu sessions.
  • Getting the schedule in place earlier, so people can better plan their time.
  • Refinements to uds.ubuntu.com to explain how the event works and how to participate.
  • Improvements to the plenary content and running great sessions.

For each event we are now going to put a deadline in place where we ask everyone in our community (Canonical employees included) to get their sessions set up and registered. The deadline for submissions for the next event is Fri 1st Nov 2013.

We have also simplified how to propose sessions for UDS. There are two ways of submitting a session, both of which are explained on http://uds.ubuntu.com/getinvolved/propose-a-session/.

We will be in touch with more updates as we get closer to the next UDS!

As ever, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch. Thanks!

UDS announcement originally posted to the community-announce mailing list on Thu Oct 3 20:10:24 UTC 2013 by Jono Bacon

XMir update for Ubuntu 13.10

By lyz | Published: 2013-10-01

As many of you will know, the Mir team had two core goals for the Ubuntu 13.10 cycle:

  1. Deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 on the desktop for those cards that supported it, and fall back to X for those that don’t.
  2. Deliver a native Mir + Unity 8 running on Ubuntu Touch images and devices.

Unfortunately, due to some outstanding technical difficulties, we can only achieve the latter of these two goals.

While we are on track to successfully deliver Mir for Ubuntu on smartphones, we are unfortunately not going to be able to deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 as the default experience on the desktop.

Mir has made tremendous progress and is currently available on the Ubuntu archive for use, but there are still some outstanding quality issues that we want to resolve before we feel comfortable turning it on by default. Many of these issues live in the XMir part of the stack, which provides the integration between the X server and the underlying Mir system compositor. More specifically, the multi-monitor support in XMir is working, but not to the extend we’d like to see it for all of our users. The core of Mir is working reliable, but with XMir being a key component for our 13.10 goals, we didn’t want to compromise overall Ubuntu quality by shipping it.

Mir & XMir are available from the archive as an optional configuration, but XMir won’t be part of the default configuration.

I know many of you have been curious about the progress of discussions with GPU manufacturers about Mir support, and while those conversations are under NDA, I can assure you they are progressing forward.

We have compiled a Q&A which can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/13.10/NoDefaultQ%26A

If you have any further queries, please feel free to reach out to me or my team, and feel free to discuss this in more detail either here or on mir-devel (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/mir-devel/).

Originally posted to the ubuntu-devel mailing list on Tue Oct 1 22:21:33 UTC 2013 by Oliver Ries