Ubuntu Magazine naming: vote early, vote often

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-07-27

The poll for your favourite release of K/Ubuntu has been up for nearly as long as the DCC Alliance has been dead. Guess what, a truely whopping 85% of you rated Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) as the ruler of the releases and king of kompetition. Congratuations to the Duck (or was it a Dragon?).

Vidya Ayer suggested on the ubuntu-marketing mailing list that we have a poll to replace the current one. To help her and the rest the magazine team pick the title of the new Ubuntu Magazine, we’ve picked out a few names on the left-hand side. If you’ve got a suggestion, you can add it over at The Ubuntu Forums, or just select which one should be top of the titles!

Anyone interesting in helping the Magazine project get off the ground should check out the Magazine Project Charter which has a bunch of pretty colourful diagrams available showing how they’re expecting everything might in future.

[Post your own Magazine Titles on the Ubuntu Forums]

Xubuntu's Jani Moses interviewed

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-07-27

Xubuntu core developer Jani Monoses (‘janimo’ on IRC) gets the A-list celebrity treatment and joins Ubuntu’s Walk of Fame over at Behind Ubuntu.

Xubuntu is designed for lower-specification or older machines and can install on machines with only 64MB of RAM. It manages this amazing feat by switching out the traditional full-scale KDE and GNOME desktops and replacing them with a slim-line interface based on XFCE. A huge number of packages have had to be tweaking to make Xubuntu possible and Jani’s time and effort to a tribute to what is possible.

What we’re all wondering is: What’s the name of Jani’s mouse in the photo and how did Jani pursuade the mouse to stay still long enough to pose for the Xubuntu logo photo-shoot?

[Discuss Jani’s interview on the Ubuntu Forums]

Register says Ubuntu goes mainstream

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-07-27

Our friends at the UK’s premier third-rate IT blog, The Register, have a new interview up with Benevolent Dictator Mark Shuttleworth branding him a “millionaire cosmonaut and self-funded Linux guru” and talking about taking Ubuntu to the mainstream.

Mark reveals that Canonical is using about $10m/year on building and promoting Ubuntu, all currently coming from Mark’s personal wallet. We thought we’d also take the Google Trends link that measures the number of searches on a particular topic and compare Ubuntu to Red Hat, Suse and even Microsoft’s Vista. We think you’ll enjoy the results!

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS given award by IT Reviews

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-07-26

Dapper has been given a “Recommended” award by IT Reviews:

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is a very complete and usable Linux distribution and one that’s remarkably easy to get to grips with compared to some others. All of which makes it a good starting point for newcomers, but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s cut-down in any way. As well as appealing to the hobbyist, Ubuntu is a full Linux implementation with everything needed for business use, including automatic updates and commercial support should you need it.

Simon Law, Ubuntu's "Bug Czar"

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-07-18

LXER.com has published an interview with Simon Law, head of Quality Assurance for the Ubuntu Project.

Specifically for QA, you can join the Ubuntu BugSquad. We’re a tight-knit group of people who are interested in helping with the neverending flow of bugs that come in. You can start by helping to triage new bugs and testing experimental bits of software. Plus, we give out lots of virtual hugs.

If you’re new, you can join in the “Hug Day” in starting on Wednesday, 19 July, in every timezone. For more information on how to get involved, Jeremie Corbier has a nice summary of everything you need to get started.

[Discuss sfllaw’s “Bug Czar” interview on the Ubuntu Forums]