Hug Day!

Daniel Holbach wants to motivate more of you to participate in Ubuntu Hug Day. A “Hug Day” is where volunteers join up in IRC, #ubuntu-bugs, and help sort out bug reports from users. You can work in a nice team, make sure the bug reporters' concerns are heard, gather all the information needed so developers can fix bugs, close useless bugs, find out where the bugs come from, and eventually work together with upstream to make changes happen, and get experience in hacking and fixing bugs.

Time is short, so the team will try to triage as many bugs as possible, but specifically look into the targets outlined at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay for more information. The Hug Day starts this Wednesday, May 3rd, and will run throughout the day and night, so drop on by and get involved!

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Charting the Future of Kubuntu

The sabdfl has announced a special meeting for Kubuntu and KDE developers to help chart the future of Kubuntu:

This is an invitation for the Kubuntu and KDE community to join us at LinuxTag on 6 May in Wiesbaden near Frankfurt to chart the future course of Kubuntu.

The LinuxTag event is a perfect opportunity for us to engage directly with the KDE user and developer communities. Germany is in many ways the heart of the KDE community, so we have been looking for a way to pull together a summit of leaders, users, developers and translators from that country and this event is hopefully going to be just that.

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Meet Jane Silber

Everyone’s asking about Jane — now we have some answers, straight from the source. As the COO of Canonical and head of business development, Jane plays a crucial role in the breathtaking growth of the Ubuntu juggernaut!

In a lengthy interview at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego, Computer World ask about the upcoming Ubuntu 6.06 LTS release and business strategy. Meanwhile, the BehindUbuntu team quiz Jane about Canonical’s inner workings, and what she enjoys most about working on the project.

Bonus Newsflash! BehindUbuntu has teamed up with some of the Ubuntu localisation teams to bring you great interviews in as many languages as possible! If you would like to help with translations please email the team.

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Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Beta Released

Due to the schedule slip, the final release of Dapper didn't ship today, but instead the team has delivered a rock-your-socks-off beta for our testing pleasure… If ever there was a time for keen testers to upgrade, it's now! We strongly encourage you to try it out and report bugs so that the Ubuntu team can make sure 6.06 is the best release EVER.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Beta Release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS – codenamed “Dapper Drake”. The Beta Release introduces the new Desktop CD, which can be used both to try Ubuntu “live” and to install the system.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (long-term support) will be the first Ubuntu release to be supported for three years on the desktop, and five years on the server.

See the release announcement for download locations and a list of tasty treats you'll find in this awesome release!

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Edgy Eft … Edges Closer

sabdfl has declared that the version of Ubuntu past 6.06 will be named “Edgy Eft”. Usually referred to as “Dapper+1”, edgy is expected to be a little more … edgy:

So dream a little about Xen for virtualisation, Xgl/AIGLX and other wonderful wobbly window bits, the goodness of Network Manager, a first flirt with multiarch support for true mixed 32-bit and 64-bit computing on AMD64, the interesting possibilities of the SMART package manager… and other pieces of infrastructure which have appeared tantalisingly on the horizon.

The release is still expected sometime in October in 2006. But don’t throw away those shiny Dapper servers just yet, the work invested so far will be around for a long time to come, so if you are concerned about being stuck in a release treadmill sabdfl goes on to say:

We can afford to take some risks with Dapper+1, because Dapper has turned out so well. We have a great answer for people who need super-solid and super-predictable results: Dapper is still fresh, will continue to work on modern hardware for some time, and has plenty of legs in its support cycle left to run.

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