- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Flashplayer 9 beta out now
by Ian McDonald 19 Oct '06

19 Oct '06

For all of those people who haven't been able to use MySpace and YouTube fully under Linux you might want to check this out: http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/beta_is_live.html I haven't had a play yet but looking forward to trying it. I've also tried gnash which is an open source alternative to flash but unfortunately it doesn't really work very well at all - the sites I tried on it crashed or did nothing. -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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Openfiler
by Chris O'Halloran 19 Oct '06

19 Oct '06

Hello, The company I work for is about >< this close to setting up Openfiler as a file server. The IT guys have setup 1.1 and liked what they saw but were waiting for OpenFiler 2 to be released as stable for use. It is now, so our IT guy downloaded the ISO file, cut it to CD but it won't boot. He came to me and I suggested that we check the md5sum to verify the image. I've looked high and low on the site, googlged around, searched wikis and mailing lists and even hooked on to a few mirror sites to see if I could find a text file with the md5sum. But I am stuck for an answer on this one short of posting to the openfiler discussion list. Any other suggestions? Cheers Chris

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Linux on the Playstation 3
by Ian McDonald 19 Oct '06

19 Oct '06

Interesting article here: http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20061018.ars -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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Ubuntu 7.04 planning begins
by Ian McDonald 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Folks, Efty Edge is not quite out and Feisty Fawn is getting underway. I like the sound of multimedia enablement and improving the end user experience. From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark-AT-canonical.com> To: ubuntu-devel-announce-AT-lists.ubuntu.com Subject: Planning for Ubuntu 7.04 - the "Feisty Fawn" Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:48:22 +0100 Salve, Ubuntero's With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set to be spot on schedule October 26th, we're starting to look beyond it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007. In the next cycle we'll expand on the brand new infrastructure that has landed in Edgy as well as branching out in some exciting new directions. This combination of courage and restlessness is also found in a young deer that sets out to explore a world that is new and exciting - seeing the world through eyes unprejudiced by what has gone before. In that spirit, the release will be be code named "The Feisty Fawn". The main themes for feature development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies. Ubuntu's Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for both users and developers. Detailed planning will take place at the developer summit next month in Mountain View, California. Please join us there to help shape the Feisty Fawn! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperSummitMountainView This will be our sixth release, marking the third anniversary of the project's inception, and will be a return to our standard six-month release schedule following the shortened catch-up cycle used for 6.10. Edgy has been a wild ride, with some remarkable achievements (nothing like re-inventing and substantially improving on init!). Feisty will be a little more focused on features that are very visible to end-users. We welcome new participants in our community - whatever your talent we look forward to working with you! Jono Bacon, our new community lead, will find a way to make sure your contribution is well received. Mark -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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Slackware 11 review
by Ian McDonald 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

Given the recent interest in this I'm posting this review I've just seen: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/10/16/2045208 -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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NTP syncing on a local network
by Ian McDonald 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

I'm wanting to sync two machines to within 1 msec for my research using ntp. Questions: - is this realistic given how clocks drift? Has anybody done this? - is there a quick way to force them to converge I've had a quick read of the ntp pages and made one of my machines a broadcast server and the other broadcast clients I think but they seem to be taking a while to converge. The man pages say they will fix at 0.5ms/sec but I'm not seeing that. Comments appreciated. NB I don't want my clocks to be deadly accurate to the "real world", just to each other. Ian -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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Suggestion for meeting topic next year
by Denise Bates 15 Oct '06

15 Oct '06

Hello folks, At last months meeting there was a call for suggestions for meeting topics for next year. I would like to propose the following..... As I am in the process of upgrading my stable of computers to Slackware 11.0, I remain puzzled why the BS about Slackware being hard to use has any traction at all. While I expect _any_ discussion of Slackware will probably be branded as a distro war, I think that I could deliver a constructive, informative talk on the _underlying essence_ of text-based installation, package management, and configuration. I would invite the audience to engage in _constructive_ discussion of whether the extra demands made by GUIs on computer resources justifies any ease of installation, package management, and configuration (if any). I would like to have a newbie actually install and configure a computer as part of the presentation. I realise that time will be tight, but I should be able to keep it around the one-hour mark. I suggest the following parameters- ** The installer does not have to be experienced with Linux, but it would be helpful if they were savvy with the computing basics on any operating system. I can give them a printed copy of Slackware Basics and the Slackware Manual. If they get stuck and cannot find the information that they require within one minute, then I could tell them what to do (to keep the presentation moving along). ** The computer to be used should be representative of current modest-specced machines available- no Winmodems, odd-ball, or defective components. ** The installation should be a typical one for a typical home user - no esoteric networking or overly specialised hardware. I would have the installers machine hooked up to the projector, so to show how she/he is progressing. Given these parameters, the newbie should be able to complete the installation/configuration in well under an hour on a reasonably fast machine. I could offer up a few Slackware CDs if any member of the audience also wants to do an install during the presentation. I would welcome the participation of other Slackers as co-presenters. I would also like to attend equivalent presentations by other folk who prefer a substantially different distro (I am particularly curious about Gentoo and LFS). Again, I stress that I am not attempting to start a distro-war. I would be attempting to discuss the underlying philosophy behind the oldest surviving Linux distro and to question whether the purported user-friendliness of GUI-based administrative suites can be justified. regards, ********************************************* Dr Denise J. Bates, PO Box 50, Meremere New Zealand E-mail: dbates(a)iconz.co.nz Telephone 09-2336433 Mobile 021-2541330 *********************************************

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Memory module information
by Leslie Katz 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

I've acquired half a dozen old memory modules. I've been able to identify them from Googling as two 72 pin SIMMS and four 168 pin DIMMS. The DIMMS have PC speeds varying between 66 and 133. It may be that one or more of the modules will fit into a friend's computer, which is itself pretty old. Is there some command I can ask the friend to run which will give us information about the installed memory modules now in her computer--such things as type and PC speed--so that I can find out now whether I should even try to install any of them for her?

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Date for October meeting
by Ian McDonald 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

Folks, Normally the meeting for October would be on October 23rd being the fourth Monday. This is also labour day. We are trying to decide whether to have it on that day or the 30th. If anybody can't make either day can you send me an e-mail off list please? The speaker will be Perry Lorier on Plan 9 which is an alternative operating system with some really interesting concepts. Ian -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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[Fwd: FW: Signing up for an account on the new Genesis Energy website TMS 43752]
by Dominic Tennant 09 Oct '06

09 Oct '06

FYI, this is Genesis' response to my email :)

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Splitting an image file over CR ROMs
by Chris O'Halloran 08 Oct '06

08 Oct '06

Hello, I have a disk image of about 8.4G that I took from a friends computer about 18 months ago. Since then the harddrive has been reformatted and that data lost. I would like to send disk image via CD's to the UK where the disk image can be reassembled. I imagine that might take about 12-13 CD's the file is recognised as a xxxxxx.dat file and I am sure I made it using something like dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/mnt/hdb11/image_name.dat Would people be prepared to offer any hints on how to do that? Cheers

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Linux Installation
by Sahil Gupta 08 Oct '06

08 Oct '06

Hi Wlug, Long time no see! This is slightly off-topic. I'm currently located in Australia and need a couple of boxes installed with Linux. The machines are located in Hamilton at present and can be dropped off/picked up by someone, along with a Slackware 11.0 install disc. Would anybody like a quick job on installing a distro on a bunch of machines? Cheers! Please reply off-list. Regards, Sahil Gupta VoiceValley

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Slackware 11.0
by Denise Bates 06 Oct '06

06 Oct '06

Hello folks, At last, Slackware 11.0 has been released! Will anyone with a fast connection be downloading copies of the ISOs? I am currently in Hamilton and still on dial-up, and I would be very grateful for a copy - the usual exchange blank CDs and other inducements are offered.... regards, -- ********************************************* Dr Denise J. Bates, PO Box 50, Meremere New Zealand E-mail: dbates(a)iconz.co.nz Telephone 09-2336433 Mobile 021-2541330 *********************************************

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[Fwd: Signing up for an account on the new Genesis Energy website]
by Dominic Tennant 06 Oct '06

06 Oct '06

Hi everyone...just tried signing up for an account with Genesis today and discovered that I needed IE to do so. I sent them this email, and I figured in the spirit of open source I'd share it with you all, in the event that you wish to either support this by emailing Genesis yourselves, or if you just want to use it as a template (if you think it's worth it :)) Regards, Bnonn

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Spam and encrypted emails
by Chris O'Halloran 06 Oct '06

06 Oct '06

http://www.clear.net.nz/terms.html Clear have advised that spam from known spam addresses will be blocked and that other messages will be quaranteened for only 3 days after which the messages will be deleted. As I am not a systems administrator I was wondering what the usual policy for encrypted email (eg GPG) in regard to spam filtering. Is encrypting an email a guarenteed way for people to communicate and avoid messages being deleted by aggressive ISP spam policies. I assume spammers wouldn't bother encrypting email because receiver's couldn't decrypt the emails. Thoughts? Chris

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X and projectors Fwd: Ubuntu Weekly News #16
by Ian McDonald 05 Oct '06

05 Oct '06

Great news in this - looks like X will finally get better automatic support for external VGA ports on notebooks.... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Corey Burger <corey.burger(a)ubuntu.com> Date: Oct 5, 2006 8:19 PM Subject: Ubuntu Weekly News #16 To: ubuntu-news(a)lists.ubuntu.com Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue No. 16 for the week of September, 24 - 30, 2006. You can always find older Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter issues at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter == Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta Release == The beta releases of Kubuntu 6.10 and Ubuntu 6.10 were made this week. Kubuntu features stylish new artwork, improved power management and better accessibility. See: https://wiki.kubuntu.org/EdgyEft/Beta/Kubuntu Ubuntu features Firefox 2 beta and adds Tomboy and F-spot. Artwork hasn't been neglected either. See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyEft/Beta == Akademy 2006 == Report by Jonathan Riddell. "Even though I was not able to attend the whole Akademy this year (due to the Kubuntu beta release) the conference, e.V. meeting and BoF sessions I did make it to were exciting and showed great promise for KDE 4. Firstly, thanks to Canonical for making Kubuntu a Gold sponsor of Akademy, it was lovely to have large Kubuntu banners all over the lecture theatres as well as a hacker lab full of Kubuntu machines. KDE 4 has been a long time coming, but with the presentations at the weekend we got to see the multimedia layer Phonon in action and the hardware layer Solid at work. In the KDE 4 build environment we saw a full KDE 4 session being run - a first for many people. There's still plenty of work to be done; the Plasma desktop still has no screenshots and the Telepathy project Decibel is behind schedule, but with the first developers' preview now out and packages available in Kubuntu Edgy, development should now accelarate. We were pleased to have a number of speakers from other communities including Gnome's John Palmieri, who convinced us that it's not just KDE who are happy to have competition, Keith Packard, who wrote some special code to ensure his laptop worked with the university's projector and showed other wonders of hotswap pluggyness that will be coming into X soon, and Jin Yoon, who showed us the open platform used on his Ricoh printers. Looking very promising is KHTML, where the decision on whether to keep the original KHTML or convert to a version of WebKit will likely be taken soon. We also got to see the Qt 4 C# bindings and using Javascript to manage any application's object tree just like a web page DOM. The Akademy Awards were given to the author of Krita, a painting application that now rivals the free and proprietary competition; the poor soul who converted all of KDE from autotools to the CMake build system and the Mandriva coder who has made more KDE 3 to KDE 4 commits than anyone else. Unfortunately, Mark Shuttleworth had to cancel his visit after Canonical One needed repairs, but I managed to hold a successful Kubuntu BoF on my own showing what we had done in Edgy and working out how to get those changes further upstream. The SuSE developers were especially interested in Ubuntu's thinkpad-keys daemon. KDE e.V. is KDE's legal body, and in a day long meeting we went over the usual administrative matters that projects the size of KDE have to. We also chose the location of Akademy 2007 of which I will be one of the organisers, details to be announced soon." == Ubuntu Poster Competition Yields Results == Ubuntuforums.org user HanZo has created a winning entry for a poster design competition that happened at the forums. You can look at the beta image at http://doc.ubuntu.com/~marketing/DIY%20Material/Batch%201,%20Posters/HanZo/… The image will yet be edited a bit (especially the white text), but is a sure winner now. HanZo will be getting 5 free prints. There will be a total of 500 prints, available by email order from Jenda Vancura approximately for production costs. To read more about the competition, please read http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=248546 == Universe Version Freeze == Daniel Holbach tells us that the Universe Freeze is now in effect. This means that no new upstream versions will be synced and no new packages will be admitted entrance to the Universe repository. All is not lost for those certain emergencies though, as you can always file a UVF exception; the process for this is explained [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Processes/UVF here]. For an exception, please make sure you attach all the necessary information and in cases of NEW packages have it reviewed and approved on REVU beforehand! Universe Freeze is in accordance with the Edgy release schedule which can be found [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyReleaseSchedule here]. == Changes in Edgy == As previously mentioned, universe is moving towards frozen, which will slow down the changes in Edgy somewhat. However, this week was a busy one, as people raced to beat the freeze. === Ubuntu === Sebastian and Daniel of the GNOME uploading team started in on GNOME 2.16.1 at the end of the week, with the bulk being uploaded after Sept 30th. 2.16.1 is the first of 3 bug fix releases on the stable branch of GNOME. Bits of the underlying libraries were also updated as well, with the uploading of gtk 2.10.4 and gtkmm1:2.10.2 by Sebastien and Daniel respectively. Other updated GNOME and GTK-based applications this week included glom 1.1.2, clamtk 2.24 (both uploaded by Daniel Holbach), lat 1.0.7, bluefish 1.0.6, and wifi-radar 1.9.7 (synced from Debian), the new Novell/SUSE menu, slab 0.0.cvs.20060915, synced by Sebastian Bacher, who also uploaded glade-3 3.0.2 and Sebastian Droege uploaded brasero 0.4.4. The world of Telepathy continued at is usual frantic pace this week, with the syncing of telepathy-stream-engine 0.3.6, farsight 0.1.8, gst-plugins-farsight 0.10.2and telepathy-gabble 0.3.7 from Debian and the new telepathy-butterfly 0.1.0 (a connector for MSN), its underlying library pymsn 0.2.1 and telepathy-blue 0.0.1.1~darcs20060926 (a bluetooth/sms connector). Daniel Holbach also uploaded libgalago 0.5.1+svn20060928, telepathy-feed 0.13 and cohoba 0.0.4. Also on the communications front, Daniel Holbach uploaded gossip 0.17 and loudmouth 1.1.4 while asterisk 1.2.12.1 was synced from Debian. A new Firefox plugin for interacting with Launchpad was uploaded this week, firefox-launchpad-plugin 0.1. If you fancy your web browsing slightly more basic, links 2.1pre23, the new version of the Links webbrowser might be more up your alley. === Kubuntu === A few pieces of Kubuntu were also updated, including a new SVN snapshot of kde-systemsettings, 0.0svn20060929, uploaded by Anthony Mercatante. He also uploaded the 0.1 release of knetworkmanager, the KDE frontend to the Network Manager tool. Not yet part of Kubuntu, strigi is a desktop search and indexing tool. This week saw version 0.3.8 of the program, strigi, and the applet, strigiapplet. === Xubuntu === The Xubuntu people, while not as insanely busy as the GNOME uploading team, still manage a respectable output. This weeks haul includes the new xfce4-dict-plugin 0.1.0, uploaded by Gauvain Pocentek and a number of new bits of xffm, the XFCE file manager. They include xffm-applications 4.5.0, xffm-book 4.5.0, xffm-locate 4.5.0 and an underlying library libxffm 4.5.0. === Ichthux === The Ichthux team keeps rolling along, with Raphael Pinson uploading bibletime 1.6 and bibletime-i18n 1.6. He also uploaded ichthux-konqueror-shortcuts 0.1, a new set of Ichthux specific bookmarks. Jordan Mantha also uploaded sword-text-dutsvv 1.3, sword-text-swahili 1.0, sword-text-tagalog 1.1, and sword-text-viet 1.4. === General === The multimedia side of Ubuntu got a great deal of action this week. Daniel Chen uploaded an SVN version of vlc, 0.8.6-svn20060918 as well as mutagen 1.7.1, Sebastien Droege uploaded the new last-exit, 3.0 as well as banshee-official-plugins 0.11.0, William Alexander Grant got working on the new soundcoverter, 0.9.1, and Anthony Mercatante uploaded the new kmplayer 0.9.3. In the MythTV universe, ivtv 0.7.0 and the new myththemes 0.20, the latter uploaded by William Grant, made their way into the archives. A number of new versions of various multimedia tools were also synced from Debian, including mpqc 2.3.1, cdtool 2.1.8, rosegarden 1.2.4, djplay 0.3.0. For those of you who use your Ubuntu machine for a bit of gaming, this week was not all work. bomberclone 0.11.7, lincity-ng 1.0.3, pioneers 0.10.2 and stellarium 0.8.1 were all synced from Debian. If you the scientific pays the bills or floats your fancy, this week brings the syncing of tulip 2.0.5, openbabel 2.0.2, and pcb 20060822 from Debian, William Alexander Grant uploading biosquid 1.9g+cvs20050121, amap-align 2.0, astronomical-almanac 5.6, and treeviewx 0.5.1. In a more medical vein, the gnumed-client 0.2.2a was synced from Debian. Mattias Klose may have the misfortune to have to deal with OpenOffice.org, but he still has time to deal with Zope and this week he did exactly that, uploading zope-cmfplacefulworkflow 1.0.0, zope-pluginregistry 1.1, zope-pas 1.2, zope-plonepas 2.0.1, zope-statusmessages 2.0, and zope-passwordresettool 0.4, all new packages to Debian and Ubuntu. Various pieces of Java software also got updated this week. They include classpath 0.92, an integral part of the free Java stack. This release brings Cairo graphics. You can read more at http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4573. Also updated were axis 1.4 and wsdl4j 1.5.2. If you use any of the distribution revision control systems (and you should be), this week brought you some new toys. Users of bzr were given 0.11-rc3 (the final was out as of writing) and if you prefer a graphical frontend, olive 0.11, a Summer of Code project that is going strong after the summer is over, was uploaded as well. bzrtools was also updated to 0.11.0 for the new bzr release. Another popular system is mercurial, which was updated to 0.9.1. And for those that cannot decide, there is a tool for moving between revision control systems. It is called tailor and you get version 0.9.26 as of this week. In other server news, several popular applications were updated. They include egroupware 1.2-105 (Users of groupware should read http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html) and horde3 3.1.3.The 0.5.5 release of the, "light and fast" web server, cherokee found its way into Ubuntu. If you fancy a spot of file sharing, nicotine 1.2.4.1 and mldonkey 2.8.1 are now available. However, if you seek the need to protect your identity while doing it, tor 0.1.1.23 can help you do that. Users of gmail received a gift with the uploading of gmailfs 0.7.2, which allows you to turn your gmail account into another file system. The more prosaic use case of merely checking a gmail account got easier with the release of checkgmail 1.10, which apparently uses Atom feeds for notification. On the server end of the mail system, maildrop 2.0.2 and geximon 0.7.3 are now available. A couple of final things you might be interested include a new version of espeak, the speech synthesizer, 1.15, a new Intel video driver update by Matthew Garrett, 1.6.0, the 2nd release candidate of the 1.0 release of Fluxbox, 0.9.15.1+1.0rc2. Andrew Mitchell uploaded the new krb5-auth-dialog 0.6, which is a dialog for dialog for reauthenticating kerberos tickets. Those of you still stuck with Windows partitions will notice the new ntfs-3g 20060920, which allows full read and write to NTFS drives, all done in userspace. Lastly, Xen has 2.6.17 this week, thanks to the hard work of Chuck Short. xen-source-2.6.17 and xen-restricted-modules-2.6.17 were uploaded right on the last day of the month. == Launchpad News == Welcome to another round of Launchpad updates covering changes included in this week's rollout. This cycle was mainly focused on polishing of existing features, although a number of new features that are under development were brought closer to deployment. === Bug watch enhancements === The new features deployed in this rollout make bug watches a bit more convenient to work with: it is now possible to specify a remote bug tracker for a specific upstream product; when adding new bug watches to distribution bugs, the bugtracker and product name will be prefilled if there is information linking the package to an upstream product. The prefilling also works for upstream products that are officially using Launchpad as a bug tracker. For instance, if you visit the page for the [https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/bzr/+bugs bazaar source package in Ubuntu], notice a bug which is an upstream matter, when marking it as upstream you will notice that the name "bazaar" is already filled in. This small improvement is the first in a number of enhancements planned for upstream bug forwarding. Bug information can now also be synchronized from archived debian bugs; this is the reason why a number of bug watches were updated at once this week (and you may have received some bugmail letting you know!). === CVE reports === The CVE report pages were reformatted and optimized; you can see the general CVE status for Ubuntu at https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+cve here This listing displays CVEs related to bugs, and their current status. There are now also CVE reports for upstream products -- but no products have CVEs linked to their bugs yet! === Other bug tracking improvements === Handling of binary package names as input in the Package: field was improved in the bug-filing and bug-changing page. Oh, and the 'Untriaged' status was renamed to 'Undecided'; this avoids confusing the concepts of "status triage" and "importance definition". Time to update your bookmarks! === Distribution and package management enhancements === On the distribution management front, this rollout included new formatting for mirror listings; the number of official mirrors for Ubuntu is growing rapidly, and we aim to make this information authoritative for the distribution in the coming weeks: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+cdmirrors https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+archivemirrors This rollout meant deployment of the optimization and code improvement work done in the London sprint. Visible results of this deployment are significantly faster publisher runs (with no-op runs taking negligible time, and the faster 'real' runs taking around 7 minutes). Package builds are now issued to saner sets of architectures, taking into account package-specific architecture restrictions. With respect to upload processing, failed uploads now trigger email notifications to theperson uploading as well; uploads to frozen releases go straight to the pending-approval queue, and superseding backport uploads behave as expected. The Soyuz team also invested long hours into an acceptance testing system which was used to verify the changes done over this period prior to rollout. The test system successfully pointed out regressions and allowed fixes to be verified before deployment. A script for automatically retrying failed builds was implemented, and the queue tool was updated to include pocket information and behave correctly in a few corner cases (read the detailed changelog for the details). === Branches in the Bazaar === One interesting Launchpad feature for upstream products is the tracking of series and releases. Each release represents an actual new tarball release of upstream; a series represents a line of tarball releases that were spawned from the same long-term code branch. Product series can now have Bazaar branches linked to them, this branch ideally containing the coding work done for that specific series. The product can select which series is its main development ("trunk", or "HEAD" in CVS terms) series, containing new feature work being implemented. This allows Launchpad to more closely model the coding work done on an upstream product, which will in turn make it easier to use Bazaar to manage the codebase for a product, and in particular, derivations of that codebase. === Other news === On the translations front, improvements to the automatic package imports were deployed; they reduce the amount of manual nursing required for imports of packages with unusual directory layouts. Language pack generation was optimized, as were the pages that report translation status for languages in specific distribution releases. A number of additional performance improvements are in queue and will be deployed as part of the next rollout. In the ticket tracker, subscriptions of support contacts were modified to be implicit. This means that new support contacts are automatically notified of all existing ticket modifications. The calendaring feature in Launchpad was temporarily disabled; we found it was too buggy to be useful, and have chosen to now focus on features which are priorities for this period. Full announcement and changelog at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/launchpad-users/2006-October/000667.html == In The Press == Ubuntu isn't quite yet synonymous with Linux, but it is increasingly referenced in the tech press whenever the subject of Linux is raised. Check out this recent comment by Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz: ''We're not anti-vendor. We're not here to bash anybody. Every single business we're in must be multi-platform if it's going to be successful. When I'm selling the hardware we're talking about, I'm going to be thrilled to talk to the Linux community about running Ubuntu on Niagara. When I'm talking about Solaris I'm going to be thrilled to talk to you about HP and Dell. They are no longer competitors in my mind. They are now channel partners.'' You can read more at http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3634846 Malcolm Yates, Canonical's ISV and partner manager has been interviewed by Information Week on the topic of Ubuntu's growing relationships with Independent Software Vendors and Original Equipment Manufacturers: "I think the next few months will see us involved more and more with enterprises looking at using Ubuntu to deliver business solutions. Previously, we have seen Ubuntu deployed in organizations where it it was hidden, but now with full and extended support, we are getting calls, to move to Ubuntu as a major Linux platform." You can read the whole thing at http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=37538&r=hstory Ubuntu Member Melissa Draper was recently interviewed by Australia's LA Updates. You can listen to it at http://www.localfoss.org/taxonomy/term/20 In his speech to the Labour Party conference in Britain last week, Bill Clinton talked about the importance of the "spirit of ubuntu". The resulting BBC News article featured a stylish thong from our very own Cafepress Ubuntu shop. The article can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5388182.stm. And a few weeks back, the newsletter of DistroWatch mentioned the Ubuntu Marketing Team, and more specifically, the Ubuntu Surveys. You can read the newsletter, including the non-Ubuntu bits at http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20060918. If you have not yet taken the survey, you can do so at http://surveys.geekosophical.net. == Meetings and other similar events == [CommunityCouncilAgenda Community Council Meeting] 2006-10-03 17:00 GMT == Upcoming Events == [http://www.linuxinfotag.de Linux Info Tag in Dresden] Dresden, Saxony/Germany 2006-10-08 == Feature Of The Week - Bip == Bip, an IRC proxy, keeps you connected to IRC, stores logs, and can even produce a backlog which displays upon connection from your IRC client to the server. You can install Bip on a server that stays connected, and connect as many clients as you wish while using the same nickname. So, once you setup Bip, you connect to it like you would any ordinary server, while using your IP, port, and a custom password (which bip can generate and encrypt) - Bip will do the rest. For instance, Bip is setup on server 192.168.1.3, using the default Bip port of 7778, and using the username 'Bip', password 'biprocks', and network 'freenode'. I would set my client up to connect to the server and port, and in the "Password" section for the connection on my IRC client, I would enter Bip:biprocks:freenode. Now, I am connected from my localhost to my Bip server, which means I can reboot my localhost and never loose connection to IRC, meaning I won't miss a thing. People on IRC won't even know I rebooted! Info: http://bip.berlios.de Help: #bip on irc.oftc.net for the official support channel. Also, feel free to contact RichardJohnson on IRC as nixternal for more help. You can find him on Freenode and OFTC regularly. == Additional News Resources == You can subscribe to the Ubuntu Weekly News via RSS at: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/uwn/feed As always, you can find more news and announcements at: http://www.ubuntu.com/news and http://fridge.ubuntu.com/ == Security Updates == * USN-353-1: OpenSSL vulnerabilities - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-353-1 * USN-352-1: Thunderbird vulnerabilities - http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-352-1 == Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Updates == No updates were made, however, several packages were backported: * Accepted amarok 2:1.4.3-0ubuntu8~dapper1 * Accepted konversation 1.0-0ubuntu5~dapper1 * Accepted ktorrent 2.0.2-0ubuntu1~dapper1 * Accepted libvisual-plugins 0.4.0.dfsg.1-1ubuntu1~dapper1 * Accepted cpio 2.6-10ubuntu0.1 == Bug Stats == * Open (15684) (+124 over last week) * Unconfirmed (8228) * Unassigned (11028) * All bugs ever reported (56546) Daniel Holbach has posted a list of Bug Tasks for people looking for things to do. You can read more at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2006-September/000908.html == Conclusion == Thank you for reading the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. See you next week! == Credits == The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by: * Melissa Draper * David Symons * John Little * Eldo Varghese * Richard Johnson * Jenda Vancura * Paul O'Malley * Corey Burger * And many others == Feedback == This document is maintained by the Ubuntu Marketing Team. Please feel free to contact us regarding any concerns or suggestions by either sending an email to ubuntu-marketing(a)lists.ubuntu.com or by using any of the other methods on the [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam Ubuntu Marketing Team Contact Information Page]. -- ubuntu-news mailing list ubuntu-news(a)lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-news -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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endace info request
by Gavin Denby 05 Oct '06

05 Oct '06

ooops works better when I send from an approved address .. anyway ... anyone here use, or know much about these units other than the limited website details http://www.endace.com/ Wondering if anyone is using, or has used these and what they think of these Certainly looks like an interesting mix of open source and hardware embedding

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endace
by Gavin Denby 05 Oct '06

05 Oct '06

anyone here use, or know much about these units other than the limited website details http://www.endace.com/ Wondering if anyone is using, or has used these and what they think of these Certainly looks like an interesting mix of open source and hardware embedding

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Novell goes after SCO money
by Ian McDonald 03 Oct '06

03 Oct '06

In an interesting twist Novell is basically trying to shut SCO down saying they haven't been paying them for their Unix licenses and this is what is funding their lawsuits - money that doesn't belong to them but Novell. http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2130519101.html I think everybody has long since realised that SCO's threats to Linux are nearly over but this would be nice to finally die... -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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Suse drops ReiserFS as default and explains why
by Ian McDonald 03 Oct '06

03 Oct '06

Interesting read for people interested in Linux filesystems and trends: http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-defa… Maybe Perry's filesystem could become the default one they are talking about as they want a cluster/distributed file system in the future -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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Interesting interview with Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu future
by Ian McDonald 02 Oct '06

02 Oct '06

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/mag/shuttleworth2.html -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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Waikato Linux Users Group Incorporated Committee for 2007
by Craig Box 02 Oct '06

02 Oct '06

Congratulations to the following people, who were last night voted in as the Executive Committee for the WLUG for 2007: President: Ian McDonald Vice-President: Lindsay Druett Treasurer: James Pluck Secretary: Bruce Kingsbury General Committee: Simon Green Chris O'Halloran Rod Aldridge Minutes are now available at http://www.wlug.org.nz/MeetingTopics.2006-10-02. Unfortunately, the turnout for the AGM last night was a bit disappointing. If you need to pay your 2006-2007 subscription, information on how to pay is available at https://secure.wlug.org.nz/join.html. Craig

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AGM tonight, 7:30, TW2.07
by Craig Box 02 Oct '06

02 Oct '06

In accordance with Rule 6 of the charter, I would like to remind all members that the Waikato Linux Users Group (Incorporated) will be holding its Annual General Meeting tonight, Monday, 2 October, 2006, at 7.30pm, at the regular meeting location of room TW.2.07 at the University of Waikato. New committee -------------- All WLUG members are encouraged to stand for election onto the WLUG committee for 2007. The charter specifies the committee as consisting of a President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and three general committee members. **Please note at this point there is nobody seeking election for the position of secretary!** To stand for the committee, please email secretary at wlug.org.nz. If you wish to nominate someone, please contact them and ask if they are willing to stand; if you would rather not contact them yourself, feel free to email me and I will pass your request on for you. People with uncertain futures (who may be leaving the Waikato) are encouraged not to let this stop them standing for election, but please only stand if you are committed and prepared to take on a relatively small workload. To be granted voting rights at the meeting, you must have been a paid member for 2005-2006, and signed a new membership form for '06-'07. (Remember, you have 90 days to pay.) Regards, Craig Box WLUG Secretary

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Opensource ORC
by Ian McDonald 28 Sep '06

28 Sep '06

If this interests you have a look at: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/09/18/191251 -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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One laptop per pc update
by Ian McDonald 28 Sep '06

28 Sep '06

For those that saw the documentary and want to know more about technical status update this is interesting at: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=222 -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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