Weekly News #64

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-05

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #64 for the week for the week October 28th – November 3rd, 2007 is now available. In this issue we cover the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Hardy Heron, FOSSCamp, the release of Mythbuntu 7.10, Ubuntu-Illinois codesprint, and, as always, much much more!

  • Ubuntu Developer Summit
  • FOSSCamp
  • Mythbuntu 7.10 Released
  • Ubuntu-Illinois Codesprint
  • Ubuntu Forums News
  • In The Press and In The Blogosphere
  • Meetings and Events
  • Updates and security for 6.06, 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10
  • Translation stats
  • Bug Stats

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News please submit it via email or on the wiki !

UWN is brought to you by the Marketing Team.

Boston 2007 Developer Summit Day 5: Final day and wrapup

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02

Today was the last day of the Developer Summit and as such, it was a much lighter schedule.
After the spec sessions ended, Matt Zimmerman and Jono Bacon led a wrapup. However, a light schedule does not mean nothing was discussed:

Building a community around “enterprise” Ubuntu

Running Ubuntu in a large deployment can be tough, and a team to help reduce the pain is sorely needed. This spec talked about how to build such a team, including ideas like chatting with spec authors to make them aware of the needs of users of such deployments, as well as helping “enterprise-y” users contribute meaningfully to the larger Ubuntu community, including teams such as MOTU.

Banshee information discussion

The Banshee lead dev, Aaron Bockover, came to UDS to run an informal session on Banshee, talking about what it currently does and what development is expected in the future. He showcased how Banshee handles large libraries, iPod and other media device sync, and other features. Although shipping Banshee by default is not likely in the Hardy timeframe, it was strongly suggested that Hardy+1 would be a good time to do this.

Wrapup session

At the end of the conference, Matt Zimmerman led a wrapup session, describing this UDS as the “biggest and best” with the largest scope, encompassing Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and general education, Mobile, Server, and community. He then went on to cover the highlights of each major track:

Community – focusing on workflow between teams with the project, working with LoCo teams as well as building relationships with upstream developers.

Kernel – targeting the 2.6.24 kernel for Hardy, building a schedule, and announcing daily kernel builds during the Hardy cycle

Platform – focusing on robustness is a key target for Hardy, including creating a better testing infrastructure for language packs, bootloader, desktop applications and more.

Server – planning an amibitious schedule including LDAP auth on client/server with AD as an additional target, packaging of web apps, and more.

Mobile – focusing on how to handle software updates, backups, which applications to install by default, and general platform issues.

QA – talking about better measurement of QA during Hardy processes for verifying bugs. Also created a detailed schedule for what the QA team will be doing.

Desktop – discussing a major new theme for Hardy, including better procedures. Also talked about tracking new upstream projects such as PolicyKit.

Matt then turned it over to Jono, who led a a discussion of accolades and gripes about the UDS, with the reward of a donated O'Reilly book for the speakers. Lots of feedback was generated, from the now working phone system, the schedule being rejigged, notice boards and notices in general, where lunch was held, working with the LoCo team to help generate list of eating and cultural place within the host city, and much more.

Thanks for reading all this. There are a few more articles coming out over the next weeks, including talking with the Mobile and Server teams to see what they covered at UDS and those teams' general plans for Hardy.

Group photo of UDS Boston 2007 attendees

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02


Attendees at UDS Boston 2007. They included community members, Canonical staff, upstream projects such as Samba, Banshee, Mono and others as well as reps from many companies including Google and more. Photo taken by Ken Wimer.

Developers do Halloween in Boston

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02

With Halloween falling during the Boston summit, it is only fitting that some of the more crazy Ubuntu people would get dressed up and party it up. Of course, an event like this must be documented:


Daniel Holbach and Jono Bacon wait for the crowd to show up for dinner


Jono enjoys a laugh while Ken Wimer searches for something


Marc Tardif gets his rollers adjusted by Rich Weideman


Rich and Jorge Castro enjoy a smoke


Francesca and Jono at dinner


Jono gets surprised by random strangers on the street


Mirco Müller demonstrates capoeira

Thanks to Ken Wimer for the pictures.

Boston Developer Summit Day 4: Rain with a slight chance of laptops

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-11-02

Greetings from the Developers’ Summit! As was predicted, the good weather didn’t hold up with today’s light rain and clouds. Inside, the ways to make Ubuntu rock more continue across the many areas on the schedule.

Desktop roundtable

This morning’s roundtable started with a discussion of possible new changes, including the merits of a darker theme, reducing the number of icons, and some larger general principles like simplifying the UI.

Windows installer
The Windows Installer, Wubi, was targetted at 7.10, however bugs prevented it from being released. Discussion centred on how to solve specific bugs, such as with UnionFS. The installer-for-windows spec is still New and may have another session.

Better integrated Wine

Making it simple for those users stuck with Windows apps was the target here. Wine won’t be shipped in main and enabled by default due to its fast moving development and beta status. For now, the better option is to make it easy to install Wine when needed, like with the codec installation. This spec allows a lot of advantages, such as double-click to run .exe and .msi files, integration of Wine application uninstallation via the Add/Remove Software tool and autorun of Windows cds. A few technical hurdles were talked about as well, such as building Mono and Gecko for Windows to plug into wine. The better-integrated-wine spec is now in Drafting and will not have another session.

Integrating sync

Being able to sync not only devices to applications but also random bits of data to anywhere is the focus of the Conduit and OpenSync projects. Integrating not only these projects into each other but also in Ubuntu was the primary focus of discussion. Upstream author of Conduit, John Stowers, joined in the discussion and explained how Conduit was working with OpenSync and how OpenSync needed to work with newer desktop technologies like HAL. Also discussed was the division between OpenSync, Conduit, GNOME online desktop and the built-in sync in Tomboy. At the end of the discussion, it was decided to agressively track upstream development during the Hardy cycle, but it is unlikely any of this will be shipped with 8.04. The syncintegration spec is now in Drafting and will not have another session.

Improving Add/Remove Programs

The current Add/Remove Programs tool is a good one, but has some limitations in terms of linking to user reviews, screenshots and more. The idea then is to create a website for a software catalog, working on top of the Apturl work that shipped with 7.10. This site would include the links to the upstream project, Rosetta translations, etc and would also be able to host user reviews, comments, screenshots, screencasts and more. What exact platform was not decided, but things such as the Wine Appdb, an Open Source PHP app, were discussed. The discussion also veered into ways to list apps, whether we should promote Open Source applications over proprietary ones and possible ones that cost money. The add-remove-software-improvements spec is in Drafting and will not have another session.

Shipping screencasts on the CD

The Screencasts team has been creating amazing screencasts to help users with all sorts of problems, across all the varieties of Ubuntu. Getting those screencasts onto the desktop via the Help browser was the primary focus here. It turns out that you can embed a video in Yelp to be played by the Totem media player. Also discussed was the ultimate screencasts creation tool, using PiTiVi, Istanbul and Xephyr. This bit is more for an upstream project and not Ubuntu itself to carry out, however. The screencasts-in-ubuntu spec is in Drafting and will not get another spec.

Easy file sharing

Sharing files between two Ubuntu machines, or from an Ubuntu machine to a non-Ubuntu machine is currently not as easy as it could be. There are two scopes for this project: that of sharing a small group of files in a scratch group, such as at a conference or meeting, and that of sharing out a set of files more or less permanently. The former use case will eventually be covered by Telepathy and Empathy, although that is not something that can be targetted for 8.04. The latter problem, however, can be covered by making Samba easier to install and setup. This will be done by making the Shared Folders capplet install only Samba. Some technical work deeper down to integrate Samba passwords with system passwords via PAM, something that is fairly easy to do with new installs but harder with upgrades. The problem of the user needing to be root to share out a folder was discussed, although there is no easy solution to this. The easy-file-sharing is in New and may have another session.

Ryan Paul of Arstechnica, who was here earlier in the week, has posted three excellent stories, covering an overview of the summit, including pictures, Hardy theme changes and finally how the summit lays out a “strong release”.

Overall, it was yet another productive day at the summit. There was so much discussed it was, as per usual, impossible to talk about everything that was. If you wish to participate and cannot be at here, check out the participate page.