Ubuntu News

Got a working digital camera? Join Ubuntu crowds in a photo competition. Separate contests are held for individuals (picture with yourself, *buntu logo... and something behind you :) ) and groups (recreating *buntu logo). Have fun! If you've got great ideas, you can win cash, CDs signed by Mark Shuttleworth, t-shirts and books.

7.04 has been released 3 times... according to digg. While there's been no official sign of this (it's enough to take a look at topics of Ubuntu IRC channels - "NOT" can't be capitalized any further), hordes of confused madmen are plundering every mirror server, looking for a fix of feisty. The mass halucination forced a worried user to submit the following bug:

The bug title pretty much sums it up. We need medication and probably group counseling.
Remember, admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery...

Officially, no statement has been made, other than fact that status of the bug was changed to "confirmed".
Ubuntunews' medical department says that bug's symptoms occur every six months and only for several hours (days in some cases). Microsoft tried to release a cure, but it only made things worse.

Update (22:30 UTC). The status has been changed to rejected by Paul Williams. Reason: "it's not a bug, it's a feature" :)

LOL... 10 minutes ago I wrote Things To Do While 7.04 Hasn't Been Released. Now it's semi-out. No announcement has been made, but the download page is up. Please use torrents!

Update (14:27 UTC). Now it's official.

It's great that so many people are excited... but come on, it just hasn't been released yet. Two different stories hit digg's front page, both inaccurate. While the first one was pretty innocent (few days ago and nobody believed it... well, apart from those couple hundreds people who dugg it :P), the other - the one posted around midnight today (UTC time) - was a bit worse - it pointed people to mirrors that obviously didn't contain final images. People are downloading older images and that's just not a good thing. So here are few things you can do while the final version hasn't been out yet:

• If you want to get it as early as possible, use jigdo. First, get the latest daily image of your choice (links are here - please use torrents). Then, when final version comes out, read Jigdo Download Howto to get just the differences between dailies and the final. There won't be many differences, if any.
• If you're on Edgy and want to upgrade, use update-manager -d, it will nicely upgrade your system to 7.04. Waiting for final won't make any difference, apart from the thing that thousands of other entusiasts will be downloading/upgrading, using the same servers.
• Learn to juggle.
• Play xmoto. It's harder than juggling, but once you learn, you'll love it. It's in Ubuntu repositories (sudo apt-get install xmoto). I started playing this game a year ago or so and can't stop :)
• while($ubuntu704released==false) count_to(10);
• Do anything (that doesn't stressess ubuntu servers - ubuntu.com has been crawling for at least the past 11 hours). Feeling really bored? Look at the comments form below and tell me what are your favorite kinds of cheese.

Update (10 minutes later :) ). It's out. Well, kind of - just the download page, no announcement has been made.

Corporate pages with biographies of Dell's seem boring, right? Until you check out the list of computers Michael Dell uses. Surprise? Listed at the very top in his home Precision box, running Ubuntu 7.04! Could it be that he's doing some research to see the current state of Linux on the desktop laptop?

Austrian website derstandard.at has a long interview with Mark Shuttleworth. SADBFL is asked about many things, including:

• attractiveness of Ubuntu vs. offerings from Novell and Red Hat (cutting-edge technologies and enterprise utilities)
• free flavor of Gutsy
• Ubuntu in non-geeky environments
• perspectives of Ubuntu being offered by OEMs and in stores
• relationship with Sun
• Canonical's current situation and perspectives
• Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu "market share"
• debian having released Etch
• Vista
• One Laptop Per Child
• reasons behind not open-sourcing Launchpad

As you can see, there's a lot to read. I really liked the way this interview was conducted - interviewer didn't just hand out the list of questions, without relating to what the interviewee replied. It's pretty rare nowdays, especially in IT world.
One thing makes me wonder - ever since Dell announced it's thinking seriously about offering Linux-powered systems, Shuttleworth has kept repeating how hard and dangerous it is for OEMs to do so ("margins are very low", "it would mislead customers and create support problems"). In general, it seems he sounds like his discouraging OEMs from doing it. What do you think is a reason behind it?

Linux users tend to tweak stuff more often then others. Some compile the kernel every other weekend, others play with Beryl all the time. 3 Steps to Creating Ringtones with Ubuntu lets you do... what the title says :). Ubuntu sounds (login, logout, etc.) are in /usr/share/sounds . Wouldn't it be funny if some stranger recognized it on a street?

Henrik Nilsen Omma asked the community on ubuntu-devel-announce to test Final Candidates of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu images.

First, download your favorite flavor Ubuntu (or choose some less-popular option):

• Ubuntu: 20070415 desktop CDs, 20070415 alternate CDs and 20070416 DVDs
• Kubuntu: 20070417 desktop CDs, 20070417 alternate CDs and 20070417 DVDs
• Edubuntu: 20070415 desktop CDs, 20070415 classroom server CDs and 20070416 DVDs.
• Ubuntu-Server: 20070415 CDs
• Xubuntu (not officially supported, thus not mentioned in the announcement): 20070415 desktop CDs and 20070415 alternate CDs.

After you download a chosen image, check the md5 sum (it ensures that your copy is exactly the same as the original). Simply type md5sum filename in the terminal. Windows and Mac instructions are here.

Then, read the testing instructions and report your results on the iso testing site (I haven't seen it before... very clean interface :) ).

Testing is coordinated in #ubuntu-iso on freenode (irc.freenode.net).

Uff. Despite the earlier report that the Release Candidate is delayed and issues which made it happen may also push final version's release date (April 19th) a few days forward, it looks like 7.04 will arrive on time after all. Canonical issued four different press releases - a generic one, focused on desktop enchancements, server edition and the one about different yummy flavors of Ubuntu. I have yet to understand the magic of Public Relations. All of them say Feisty will be released on April 19th and were made 3 days before that date, so unless there are some big issues with communications at Canonical, we'll start our torrent clients in less than 72 hours.

Thanks everyone for your comments to the previous article. I was kinda surprised to see that 90% of the people are not mad about a possible delay and are happy to wait a bit to enjoy a stable OS. Also, it was our first article that hit the front page of Digg... not bad for a site that was 3 days old at the time, eh? :P

A few days ago, we wrote about various Ubuntu-related Goodle Summer of Code projects. One of the projects that sparked my interest was Søren Hansen's easy business server. Today Søren asked the community to find a name for it.