Ubuntu News

Yesterday, this preview release saw the daylight. Although I don't like reading pdf's and don't quite get the concept of releasing online content this way, I must say I'm impressed - it looks really well! This issue contains a brief history of Ubuntu (with some nostalgic screenshots) and an overview of what's new and improved in Feisty. I'm looking forward to what's next.

Go to Full Circle Magazine homepage or download the issue #0.

Mark Shuttleworth blogs about implications of opening the source (of anything, not just the software) and social mechanisms evolving around world-wide collaboration.

He starts with the basics, describing three key elements of the open methodology in development, which are: freedom-driven licensing, community and revision control. It's not just FOSS that's build this way - Wikipedia grows with the use of the same methods and ideology.

The latter part of Shuttleworth's post is devoted to wondering what would happen if other areas of creativity would adopt our techniques - musicians would release not only "binaries" (ready-to-listen) songs, but also all separated tracks, video artists would make uncut materials available, architects would use open revision control systems and allow for branching of their projects. The most interesting thing is - Bazaar (Canonical's revision control system) is designed in a way that makes it possible to be used in other areas then just software.

Matt Asay shares his thoughts after having a talk with Mark Shuttleworth (warning: site contains flashy ads that made my Firefox's CPU usage go through the roof for some time).

In general, the article seems to be a bit chaotic and lacking proper depth. Some of Asay's conclusions aren't clearly explained. The reader gets the feeling his conclusions are correct but he fails to fully support his thoughts.

Despite these flaws, Asay makes some really interesting points. Apart from the praise for SADBFL, the article touches the following subjects:

• a value of being strictly open source vendor
• a potential of Web 2.0 for FOSS world
• motive's behind Microsoft's "Linux infringes on our patents" campaign
• benefits of having many forks of software projects

Stan Beer wrote a piece at iTWire, bravely titled Ubuntu fanboys on Linux Today arise for wireless input rant. It's a reaction to comments he received after writing his earlier article, in which he described his problems with Ubuntu recognizing his wireless mice and keyboard. In this editorial, I'll try to explain why his second piece is wrong, where he's abusing the facts, why the response he got is his own fault and that the whole deal is a rather cheap shot at getting traffic.

Google revealed a list of over 900 accepted Summer of Code projects. Ubuntu, as one of the mentoring organizations, lists 20 projects. I found a few that could really make a difference - Georgy Berdyshev's firewall configuration, Petter Remen's device & driver manager, Krzysztof Lichota's automatic boot and application start file prefetching, Tomé Vardasca's bootloader manager, Anders Petersson's desktop synchronization, Gerd Kohlberger mouse gesture recognition for the desktop, Soren Hansen's easy business server. Kubuntu users will enjoy Martin Böhm's KDE frontend for gdebi (deb installer written in GTK).

140 open source organizations participate in this year's SoC. I've been reading project descriptions and found quite a few interesting ones. Most of you probably want to check out what Debian, KDE and
Gnome guys are planning. My personal favorite? Tough choice, but I think it would be Maxim Khitrov's implementation of Jabber/XMPP communications interface for Drupal.

Colin Watson announced at ubuntu-devel-announce that Feisty RC will be delayed due to problems with certain ATA chipsets and problems with the connection status displayed by the network-manager panel applet. New release date hasn't been announced, but it should be a matter of days.

Update (14.04.2007, 11:06 UTC):
I asked Colin Watson if these issues could delay the final release. He replied (and kindly allowed me to quote him), saying it might be the case:

Ubuntu Development Manager Scott J. Remnant announced a Gutsy Release Schedule. Here's the quote:

In contrast to previous releases where we've decided the schedule during
UDS, we have planned the schedule for gutsy in advance:
* there are 6 milestone releases; initially spaced three weeks apart, then moving to two weeks apart from FeatureFreeze onwards.
* the developer sprint is a little earlier in the process, this was to accommodate dates of conferences and known developer holidays.
* BetaRelease is one week after the release of GNOME 2.20.0
* FinalRelease is three weeks after Beta, instead of the usual four; this is to allow us to release on October 18th. We will release with as many of the GNOME 2.20.1 fixes as possible.

It's not an exact quote, as Remnant made small typos (GNOME 2.12.0 and 2.12.1), which he corrected in another post.

Eearlier today, Mark Shuttleworth announced the Gutsy Gibbon, a Feisty +1 release. In his quite entertaining post, he disclosed several things concerning Ubuntu 7.10.

• Good news for anyone concerned about proprietary stuff in Ubuntu. Together with people behind gNewSense, Ubuntu community will release a free to the bone variation of Ubuntu, which hasn't been named yet (how about gnubuntu?). BTW, the other candidate for 7.10 codename was Glossy Gnu.
• Ubuntu will be easier to deploy in a massive manner, thanks to a planned unattended installation infrastructure.
• It's still not certain whether Beryl/Compiz (or whatever its name will be after the merger) will be enabled by default.
• These are just little hints - decisions on goals for Gutsy will be made during UDS-Sevilla, May 5-11 in Andalucia, Spain.

My girlfriend Kasia, a gibbon-lover, graciously approved the new codename. Now just persuade Autodesk to port AutoCAD to linux and she "might" make the switch :)

According to Andrew Brown (The Guardian), Xubuntu is a perfect OS for computer-haters. Why? It's secure (they won't infect it), runs on older hardware (they shouldn't be forced to spend money on hardware they don't need) and it's simple.

Nothing you haven't knew/read before, but it neatly fulfills our need to read how great *buntu is.

Transgaming released 6th version of Cedega (application that lets you play Windows games under Linux). From TFA:

The addition of Shader Model 2.0 support enables recent games to be played at the highest detail settings; a superior FBO implementation provides better overall graphics performance and compatibility with DirectX® 9; improvements to the ALSA support provide a better audio experience in the game and allows users to listen to their own music while in-game; and a new memory allocator, coupled with other enhancements, has improved the performance of games

Read more about Cedega at Wikipedia. Also, Wine is an excellent choice (and is free; and you can easily install it from repositories).