Ubuntu is the readers’ choice

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-03-08

Linux New Media Award 2011Last Thursday I had the honour of accepting the “Linux New Media Award 2011″ in the category “Reader’s Choice – Favorite Linux” . Linux New Media is an international publisher of Linux magazines and has been giving out these awards for a number of years now. This year included a new category in which the winner was determined by the magazines’ readers voting on their favourite Linux distribution. And the winner is … Ubuntu!

Some strange circumstance put me in the spot of being at the CeBIT show in Hannover and accepting the award on behalf of the Ubuntu community. I realized that I am just a very small piece of that community which includes Canonical employees as much as the hundreds of volunteers that helped it become so popular. I made sure to mention those in my acceptance speech as well as the well-known “shoulders of giants” on which we stand. The award was presented by Kristian Kißling, chief editor of the German “Ubuntu User” magazine.

Linux Media Award 2011 - Ubuntu - Reader's Choice Favorite LinuxSo, if you are working on Ubuntu or any of the open source projects that it builds on, this is YOUR award! Congratulations and thank you very much! Well done! This award shows that we are on the right track and we should take it as an encouragement to continue to make Ubuntu shine even brighter and take it beyond the realm of the Open Source community.
Among the other recipients were our friends from Debian which received two awards, one for “Best Server Distribution” and also the main award titled “Outstanding Contribution to Open Source / Linux / Free Software”. The remaining categories and their winners were:

  • “Best Mobile Linux Application” – Firefox
  • “Hottest Linux Device” – Samsung Galaxy Tablet
  • “Best Open Source Solution for Cloud Computing and Virtualization” – KVM
  • “Most Innovative Open Source Project” – Btrfs – presented by Jon “maddog” Hall

As you can tell, there are still some other categories we could win prices in although only the “Outstanding Contribution” and “Most Innovative Project” ones are awarded every year.
I was thrilled to meet Jon “maddog” Hall, Klaus Knopper and Karsten Gerloff of FSFE. Here is group picture of all recipients and their presenters.

All recipients and their presenters of the Linux New Media Award 2011

© 2011Linux New Media AG

Originally posted here by Henning Eggers on Monday, 7 March 2011

Next after Natty?

By akgraner | Published: 2011-03-07

The naming of cats is a difficult matter

It isn’t just one of your holiday games.

– T S Eliot, The Naming of Cats

For the next cycle, I think we’ll leave the oceanic theme behind. The “oddball octopus”, for example, is a great name but not one we’ll adopt this time around. Perhaps in 13 years time, though!

The objective is to capture the essence of our next six months work in a simple name. Inevitably there’s an obliquity, or offbeat opportunism in the result. And perhaps this next release more than most requires something other than orthodoxy – the skunkworks are in high gear right now. Fortunately I’m assured that if one of Natty’s successors is a skunk, it would at least be a sassy skunk!

So we’re looking for a name that conveys mysterious possibility, with perhaps an ounce of overt oracular content too. Nothing too opaque, ornate, odious or orotund. Something with an orderly ring to it, in celebration of the crisp clean cadence by which we the community bring Ubuntu forth.

There’s something neat in the idea that 11.10 will mark eight years since Ubuntu was conceived (it took a little longer to be born). So “octennial” might suit… but that would be looking backwards, and we should have an eye on the future, not the past. Hmm… an eye on the future, perhaps ocular? Or oculate? We’re certainly making our way up the S-curve of adoption, so perhaps ogee would do the trick?

Alternatively, we could celebrate the visual language of Ubuntu with the “orange okapi”, or the welcoming nature of our community with the “osculant orangutan”. Nothing hugs quite like dholbach, though, and he’s no hairy ape.

What we want is something imaginative, something dreamy. Something sleek and neat, too. Something that has all the precision of T S Eliot’s poetry, matched with the “effable ineffability” of our shared values, friendship and expertise. Something that captures both the competence of ubuntu-devel with the imagination of ayatana.

Which leads us neatly to the Oneiric Ocelot.

Oneiric means “dreamy”, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.

We’ll need to keep up the pace of innovation on all fronts post-Natty. Our desktop has come together beautifully, and in the next release we’ll complete the cycle of making it available to all users, with a 2D experience to complement the OpenGL based Unity for those with the hardware to handle it. The introduction of Qt means we’ll be giving developers even more options for how they can produce interfaces that are both functional and aesthetically delightful.

In the cloud, we’ll have to tighten up and make some firm decisions about the platforms we can support for 12.04 LTS. UDS in Budapest will be full of feisty debate on that front, I’m sure, but I’m equally sure we can reach a pragmatic consensus and start to focus our energies on delivering the platform for widespread cloud computing on free and flexible terms.

Ubuntu is now shipping on millions of systems from multiple providers every year. It makes a real difference in the lives of millions, perhaps tens of millions, of people. As MPT said, “what we do is not only art, it’s performance art”. Every six months the curtains part, and we have to be ready for the performance. I’d like to thank the thousands of people who are actively participating in the production of Natty: take the initiative, take responsibility, take action, and your work will make a difference to all of those users. There are very few places in the world where a personal intellectual contribution can have that kind of impact. And very few places where we have such a strong social fabric around those intellectual challenges, too. We each do what we do for our own reasons, but it’s the global impact of Ubuntu which gives meaning to that action.

Natty is a stretch release: we set out to redefine the look and feel of the free desktop. We’ll need all the feedback we can get, so please test today’s daily, or A3, and file bug reports! Keep up the discipline and focus on the Narwhal, and let’s direct our daydreaming to the Ocelot.

Originally posted by Mark Shuttleworth here on Monday, March 7, 2011.

Developer Membership Board vote results

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-03-06

The vote ended on 2011-02-14 as no official announcement of the vote results was done yet, I want to catch up on it.

The result of the vote is:

  • Emmet Hikory (persia)
  • Michael Bienia (geser)
  • Stéphane Graber (stgraber)
  • Iain Lane (Laney)
  • Makenzie Morgan (maco)
  • Cody Somerville (cody_somerville)

The current Developer Membership Board members are:

  • Benjamin Drung (bdrung)
  • Emmet Hikory (persia)
  • Michael Bienia (geser)
  • Stéphane Graber (stgraber)
  • Iain Lane (Laney)
  • Makenzie Morgan (maco)
  • Cody Somerville (cody_somerville)

Originally posted to ubuntu-devel-announce by Michael Bienia on Tue Mar 1 18:05:50 UTC 2011

Natty Narwhal Alpha 3 Released!

By akgraner | Published: 2011-03-04

Welcome to Natty Narwhal Alpha 3, which will in time become Ubuntu 11.04.

Pre-releases of Natty are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system
or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even
frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and
those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 3 is the third in a series of milestone CD images that will be
released throughout the Natty development cycle.

New packages showing up in this release include:
* LibreOffice 3.3.1
* Unity 3.6.0
* Linux Kernel 2.6.38-rc6.
* Upstart 0.9
* Dpkg 1.16.0-pre + multi-arch snapshot

The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of show stopper CD build
or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Natty.
You can download it here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/natty/alpha-3/ (Ubuntu Desktop and Server)
http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/natty/alpha-3/ (Ubuntu Server for UEC and EC2)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-netbook/ports/releases/natty/alpha-3/ (Ubuntu ARM)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/natty/alpha-3/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/natty/alpha-3/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/natty/alpha-3 (Edubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/natty/alpha-3/ (Ubuntu Studio)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/natty/alpha-3/ (Mythbuntu)

Alpha 3 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider
testing. Please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/natty/alpha3 for
information on changes in Ubuntu.

This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. For a
list of known bugs (that you don’t need to report if you encounter), please
see:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/natty/alpha3

If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop
Natty, have a look at the natty-changes mailing list:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/natty-changes

We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list
if you’re interested in following Ubuntu development. This is a
low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of
approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other
interesting events.

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce

Bug reports should go to the Ubuntu bug tracker:

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

Originally posted by Kate Stewart here on Friday, March 4, 2011.

Interview with Valorie Zimmerman

By pleia2 | Published: 2011-03-01

Elizabeth Krumbach: Please tell us a little about yourself.

Valorie Zimmerman: I’m a writer, wife, mother and grandmother. Besides Free software and Free culture, social justice is important to me. Right now I’m finishing up the Amarok Handbook, which has been a year-long project.
During the recent Google Code-In project, I mentored quite a few teens who helped finish writing and illustrating the manual. That was a great experience! I enjoy music, reading, art, genealogy research, traveling, making new friends, and helping people in IRC.

EK: What inspired you to get involved in the Ubuntu community?

VZ: I’ve been a member of LinuxChix for many years, and there I heard about the Ubuntu-Women project. Since I was using Kubuntu at the time, I was encouraged to hear that Ubuntu as a whole was welcoming and encouraging participation from women and other F/OSS minorities. And when I found out that there was a local group, the Washington State LoCo, I wanted to help out there also. When I volunteered for Amarok documentation, that involved adding Freenode to my list of IRC servers, so I joined the #ubuntu-women channel, and it’s the first one I read every day.

EK: What inspired you to get involved with the Amarok project?

VZ: I had some time, and thought for awhile about how I could contribute to F/OSS and have fun at the same time. Since music brings so much joy to my life, and Amarok is my favorite app *ever* in my almost 30 years of using computers, AND they needed a new handbook, I volunteered. Rather than being ignored, I was welcomed, introduced around, and treated in a very friendly way. Even though my dad broke his hip a month or two later, and that ended putting the Handbook on hold for many months, I never met with impatience, but just helpful attitudes all around. It’s been a grand experience, and that gave me the confidence to ask for Kubuntu membership and volunteer to help on documentation there too.

EK: What are your roles within the Ubuntu community?

VZ: Since I became a Kubuntu member, I attended UDS-N (thanks for sponsoring me, Canonical!), have been continuing my participation in my LoCo, and participate in the #ubuntu-women and #ubuntu-women-project IRC channels. I hope to help with Kubuntu documentation in the next few cycles.

EK: Is there anything you haven’t done yet, but would like to get involved with in the Ubuntu community?

VZ: I thought I would already be learning how to do Kubuntu documentation by now, but still hope to ramp up my contribution there in the future. Once I learn how to do it, I hope to get others involved and trained also, since documentation is so valuable to the project. While my LoCo seems to be in a down phase right now, I hope to stand for leadership as part of a leadership team, following the excellent example of LinuxChix and Ubuntu-Women. I would like to see more Ubuntu activity all over the state of Washington.

EK: What other things are you interested in outside of open source and Ubuntu?

VZ: I love the growth of free culture around the world, where people share their art, music and other creative endeavors freely. I’m active in PFLAG (http://pflag.org) where we work on social justice for gay, lesbian, bi and trans people. One of my kids is gay, so this is very close to my heart.