Ubuntu News

Wikimedia Foundation announced the release of the test version of offline Wikipedia. The project is called Wikipedia On DVD. The CD (yes, actually it's not a DVD - the image has 420MB) includes almost 2000 carefully selected articles including... an article about Ubuntu. That's a major surprise! If you had to pick 2000 most important topics from all areas of knowledge, would you choose a 2.5 years old project?

Every time I've seen a tutorial on partitioning, it was full of technical details. I was pretty sure that regular mortals were lost after the first sentence. This tutorial, however, explains what really should be said in the first place. It covers a few basic scenarios - dual-booting with FAT32 or ext3 for shared files, separate /home partitions. That's how it should be done - first let the user understand and make a decision, then explain technical details (the latter is not included).

As we informed previously, Ubuntu Open Week is going on. Tuesday and Wednesday saw - among other meetings - a Q&A session with Mark Shuttleworth. For those of you who don't have a full hour to read the logs, I prepared the most interesting pieces below. Ubuntu Wiki has full logs from all Open Week sessions. Please note that besides skipping most questions, I edited the rest slightly (purely formatting-related edits).

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote an alaysis of Ubuntu's strenghts and weaknesses in the enterprise market. He praises Ubuntu for a flexible licensing model (you don't have to purchase a support for every server you operate), growing support from various software (Sun, IBM, SugarCRM and others) and hardware vendors (rumors of Dell offering Ubuntu laptops in the near future). He notes however, that Canonical still needs to work in some areas, especially administration tools.

Rudd-O has an interview with Scott James Remnant, an Ubuntu developer, the man behind Upstart (an event-based replacement for the init daemon). It's quite short, but if you haven't heard about Upstart before or would like to read a bit about Scott's background in computing/open source/Ubuntu, you'll enjoy those 5 minutes of your time.

Forces of Evil struck again, providing us with Ubuntu Satanic Edition - Fiery Spawn. USE is a set of four moody themes (screenshots) tailored for those grown up kids who like to harm small animals and steal holy water from local churches.

Packages are installed via 3rd party repositories.

Introduction

Ever since I've moved to Linux (around February, 2005), I've been looking for a decent editor for my programming needs. As most people out there, I'm not a professional hacker. My programming is limited to tweaking several PHP sites that I've created over the years and writing drupal modules in case I don't find anything that suits my needs. My requirements are pretty simple - I need an editor to be fairly small (=> fast - I can't wait 20 seconds for it to load), simple (if I don't code often, I'm never going to learn more sophisticated tools) and provide features that make working with the code bearable (code folding, functions browser, syntax highlighting).

Over those two years, I've tried many editors and none of them made me happy. General purpose editors (gedit, kate) are too simple - they're not aware of the syntax (besides syntax highlighting). Quanta expected me to do quite a bit of tweaking before I could move on. Eclipse has a few PHP plugins (for example PHPEclipse), but I can make and drink a coffee before it loads. For the past few months, I used gPHPEdit, but it wasn't perfect either - it had a few small (but visible) bugs, it lacked some features and it's default behavior bothered me a bit. And finally there's allmighty vim - more powerful then anything on the planet and lightning fast... but no honest vim fan will say it's a right tool for everybody. Every time I decided "it's vim time again", I found myself not remembering some crucial, but less common commands the next time I used it. Not to mention configuration - I gave up trying to install/enable PHP syntax highlighting after an hour of reading and trying. Right now I only use it for pretty much only for editing configuration files on a remote server. Recently I found Geany and instantly fell in love with it.

The How-To Geek has a tutorial on upgrading from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04. It's not really something that needs a tutorial, but you can always show it to your friends to prove how easy Linux has become. The only thing that's not obvious is that you need to run update-manager with a "-c" parameter (which means "check if a new distribution release is available"). Other that that, it's as simple as clicking "next" a few times.

Minor things to note:

Ubuntu Open Week is a set of IRC Q&A sessions with prominent members of Ubuntu community. Everyday from today untill Saturday (April 28), seven meetings are held. Each lasts one hour. The first one begins at 15:00 UTC.
Jono Bacon is hosting an introductory meeting (Joining the Ubuntu community) as I'm writing these words. He split this meeting into two parts - at first he gave a presentation of the community in a big pictured - talked a bit about various projects around Ubuntu (such as Ubuntu Women, Ubuntu Marketing), things that are going to happen during the Open Week and his own experiences - problems in LoCo projects at the time he joined the community (lack of documentation, disorganised information, poor membership in some areas of the World and no precise goals) and how they were solved (regular meetings devoted to documentation, USTeams project that was set up to help new US teams, establishing leadership in LoCo teams). In the second part he proceeded to answering that people were asking in #ubuntu-classroom-chat.

I'm definitely going to try to attend at least some of them. The ones I'm the most interested in are:

• Packaging 101 - Jordan Mantha (Monday, 16:00 and Wednesday, 16:00)
• MOTU - Daniel Holbach (Tuesday, 16:00 and Thursday, 16:00)
• Ask Mark - M. Shuttleworth (Tuesday, 17:00 and Friday, 17:00)
• Ubuntu Marketing Team - Jenda Vančura (Wednesday, 18:00 and Saturday, 16:00)

It looks like UOW will be an awesome event. Come and participate! Ubuntu Open Week wiki page contains a detailed schedule. Meetings are held in #ubuntu-classroom (moderated), questions are asked in #ubuntu-classroom-chat. Both are on Freenode IRC servers. It's time to finish - Packaging 101 is starting now :)

Please spread the word! Blog about it and ask your friends to come.

Ubuntu Guide is a huge document containg hundreds of instructions on how to install and configure various services and applications, administer, customize and troubleshoot the system. Feisty version is up.