Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 314

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #314 for the week April 22 – 28, 213, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

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

  • Amber Graner
  • Jose Antonio Rey
  • 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

New members of the Ubuntu LoCo Council Announced

On the behalf of the Community Council I would like to 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 ubuntu-news-team mailing list on Fri Apr 26 11:52:58 UTC 2013 by Laura Czajkowski

The Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Scorpionfish. Not.

Congratulations and thanks to the entire extended Ubuntu community for today’s release of Ubuntu 13.04, the Raring Ringtail. Feedback over the past few months on raring has been fantastic – pretty much universal recognition of the performance and quality initiatives Rick’s team have lead and which have been embraced across the platform and the community.

In the work to underpin a rolling release, we made huge strides in automated quality assessment and performance testing. From here on our, I’m going to treat the cutting edge of Ubuntu as a rolling release, because the team have done such an amazing job of making daily quality a reality. That’s a value that we have all adopted, and the project is much better off for it.

Slipping the phrase ‘ring ring’ into the codename of 13.04 was, frankly, a triumph of linguistic engineering. And I thought I might quit on a high… For a while, there was the distinct possibility that Rick’s Rolling Release Rodeo would absolve me of the twice-annual rite of composition that goes into the naming of a new release. That, together with the extent of my travels these past few months, have left me a little short in the research department. I usually spend a few weekend afternoons doodling with a dictionary (it’s actually quite a blast, and I recently had the pleasure of actually knowing what some ponce was talking about when they described something as ‘rugose’).

So today I find myself somewhat short in the naming department, which is to say, I have a name, but not the soliloquy that usually goes with it!

Which is why, upon not very deep reflection, I would like to introduce you to our mascot for the next six months, the saucy salamander.

The salamander is one of nature’s most magical creatures; they are a strong indicator of a pristine environment, which is a fitting way to describe the new world emerging around Ubuntu Touch – new applications, a new SDK, a gorgeous clean interface. You’ll find salamanders swimming in clear, clean upstreams – which is exactly what’s forming around Ubuntu’s mobile ecosystem. It’s a way of saying ‘thank you’ to the tremendous community that has joined the effort to create a single unified experience from phone to PC, with tons of crisp and stylish core apps made by people from all over the world who want to build something fast, fresh and free. And we’re saucy too – life’s to short to be stodgy or stilted. Our work is our play – we make amazing things for a huge audience, we find space for pretty much every flavour of interface and do it with style.

Happy release day everyone! Here’s to a super saucy cycle.

Originally posted here by Mark Shuttleworth on Thursday, April 25th, 2013

Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Released

The Ubuntu team is very pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 13.04 for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.

Codenamed “Raring Ringtail”, 13.04 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. This release cycle has seen a significant push toward daily quality, which has allowed most developers and users to participate more actively throughout the cycle, and we feel this also shows in the final quality of this release.

Along with performance improvements to Unity, updates to common desktop packages, and updated core and toolchain components, Ubuntu 13.04 also includes the new Friends service, to consolidate all social networking accounts via Ubuntu Online Accounts. Also included is a tech preview of Upstart’s new user session feature.

Ubuntu Server 13.04 includes the Grizzy release of OpenStack, alongside deployment and management tools that save devops teams time when deploying distributed applications – whether on private clouds, public clouds, x86 or ARM servers, or on developer laptops. Several key server technologies, from MAAS to Ceph, have been updated to new upstream versions with a variety of new features, and a preview of the new Go rewrite of Juju is available in the backports repository.

Read more about the new features of Ubuntu 13.04 in the following press releases:

Maintenance updates will be provided for Ubuntu 13.04 for 9 months, through January 2014.

Thanks to the efforts of the global translation community, Ubuntu is now available in 42 languages. For a list of available languages and detailed translation statistics for these and other languages, see:

The newest Kubuntu 13.04, Edubuntu 13.04, Xubuntu 13.04, Lubuntu 13.04 and Ubuntu Studio 13.04 are also being released today. More details can be found in their announcements:

This release cycle, we welcome two new flavours to the Ubuntu archive, Ubuntu GNOME and UbuntuKylin. For more information about each, see their wiki pages, and welcome them to the family:

To get Ubuntu 13.04

In order to download Ubuntu 13.04, visit:

Users of Ubuntu 12.10 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 13.04 via Update Manager. For further information about upgrading, see:

As always, upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge.

We recommend that all users read the release notes, which document caveats, workarounds for known issues, as well as more in-depth notes on the release itself. They are available at:

Find out what’s new in this release with a graphical overview:

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but aren’t sure, you can try asking in any of the following places:

Help Shape Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at:

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers, 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 services including support are available from Canonical and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit:

More Information

You can learn more about Ubuntu and about this release on our website listed below:

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

Originally posted to the ubuntu-announce mailing list by Adam Conrad on Thu Apr 25 12:07:30 UTC 2013

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 313

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #313 for the week April 15 – 21, 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
  • Howard Chan
  • The Alpaca Herder
  • 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