Ubuntu Traffic

Welcome to the tenth edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of October 23 - 29 in 2004. Ubuntu Traffic summarizes the most important mailing list and IRC discussions involving the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

You can sign up for any of the mailing lists summarized here at http://lists.ubuntu.com. You can also join the IRC discussion summarized here in #ubuntu and other channels on the Freenode network: irc.freenode.net. Please join in and maybe you be featured in the next traffic!

First, the following bits and pieces didn't get a full story but are worth mentioning:

Lucas Nussbaum posted to ubuntu-devel asking if anyone was interested in a Sparc64 port of Ubuntu and, perhaps more importantly, if people were interested in helping work on making one happen. He got one positive reply so a few more volunteers would probably be greatly appreciated.
There was some interested discussion over on the doc list about the potential creation of an Ubuntu magazine. It's not entirely clear what the overlap would be with Ubuntu Traffic and if the two projects could just be merged. There was a separate discussion of a tips and tricks newsletter. I think there is certainly some good area for collaboration here.
Sivan Green announced a meeting dedicated to talking about documentation issues. The location for info is here: http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/DocumentationTeamMeeting
Jeff Waugh posted a link to http://www.ubuntu-art.org saying, "Interesting! I think you have to register to get into the download section though."I'll second that. It looks great.
David Eriksson sent a plug for SynCE, a dedicated Windows CE <-> synchronization tool similar to ActiveSync on Windows. Because of a number of limitations he listed, it's not super well-suited to Ubuntu and he appealed to Ubuntu developers to help eliminate these and raise its support to the Ubuntu "Just Work" level.

The Sounder list saw one thread of serious length discussing the marketing of Ubuntu. Josh Kress started it out saying:This is mainly intended as the beginning of a discussion on how the community and Canonical can work together to promote Ubuntu. Stay in contact with press, volunteer for booths at fairs/expos, official standpoints of Canonical etc.

The main areas Josh covered included the creation of:

Core Marketing Team (2-3 members), ideally with at least one member of Canonical at every time.
Local Marketing Teams (2-3 members), for each country (or each state in big countries)

He also posted these general ideas:

Discussions should take place on mailing list, either on an extra list or on sounder with a [marketing] tag in the subject, according to the [doc] tag on the devel list.
Of course, teams can or even must be bigger. However each team, may it be local or core, should have those 2-3 team-leaders.
Try to create professional, decent marketing, focusing on the strengths: the project, the philosophy of Ubuntu, the people.

His proposal went into much more detail that I'm covering here. You can check it out on the sounder list. John Levin followed up to say,I'd like to know what Canonical, as a company, are planning by way of marketing. I presume they have some ideas and a press officer of some sort?

Short answer: No formal press officer yet. I am not the authoritative voice of Canonical but I am personally very interested and have been active in promoting Ubuntu (although I tend to like to stay away from the term marketing). My a process perspective, it's correct to continue this discussion on either the devel or sounder list with a special tag. Whena more organized structure because necessary, we can go with that. Other interested parties should look at sounder and ubuntu-devel.

This has come up before at a community council meeting and we were waiting to see where the energy would take us. Lets make something happen in terms of an organized effort and a real push toward the promotion of Ubuntu.

Folks that use the wiki frequently may have noticed some serious work on the wiki and some major changes. Mark Shuttleworth gave the devel list the update which explained the status with the new wiki (we're switching) plus the justifications behind this and the drawbacks that this will stick us with:

Congrats to the doc team for getting off to such a fast start, it's amazing to see it blossoming like this.

Moin was a quickstart option for us, but I'd like to make the wiki a more central part of the web site, so we are going to be switching to A wiki that is integrated with the website as of Monday.

The wiki will support the following formats:

native HTML
ReStructuredText (a very nice format)
StructuredText (not great)
Moin without tables

We will have to convert the existing tables in the (fantastic) hardware section of the wiki to HTML to ReStructuredText.

The new wiki has some glitches and gotchas that we will fund development on, but which we'll have to live with for now:

it doesn't have the same level of revision control
doesn't do Moin tables (but does native HTML and ReStructuredText tables)
preview mode is very new, so you pretty much need to get it right first time

But it has some big advantages:

it's fully integrated with the web site search, so searching on the main site will find relevant wiki pages
it inherits the full skin of the main web site

Not only that, but we will be able to give permissions for the doc team to edit FAQ's, HOWTOs, and other web site documents directly.

The new wiki will be at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/

Steve Alexander (stevea) is responsible for the wiki code update on Monday, Brad Bollenbach (bradb) will be handling the actual execution of that. Louise McCance Price (lulu) has overall responsibility for the web site.

We'll try to big-bang it on Monday so that it Just Works, and at the same time send out a mail telling folks how to log in to the site to work on the wiki.

It will need registering in the new site, but we promise that's the last registration you'll ever need to work with the web site or any of our infrastructure, as we finally have a robust backend for it all.

In case you missed it, the key link there is http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/

The new wiki runs on zwiki. Alexander Poslavsky pointed out the following useful links on the documentation list:

http://zwiki.org/FrontPage
http://zwiki.org/QuickReference#1 (shortcuts!)
http://zwiki.org/FAQs (DTML scripting)

Simon Michael posted a nice review of the different types of markup available saying:

structured text - zwiki's "native type" - the one we use on zwiki.org, so most tested and works most smoothly with other zwiki features (comments etc.). Simple, forgiving, allows HTML when you need it, and for my money the most bang for your buck.
moin markup - very new in zwiki and will still have issues. Most of your pages use this at the moment. Moin extended link syntax, macros etc. not yet supported.
restructured text - apparently popular, well specified, good for generating pdfs etc, but fussy and complicated.
html - plain HTML plus zwiki links. Uses the epoz wysiwyg html editor if possible; most of your browsers should show this.

Your mileage will vary; I prefer ReST for example. That said, there's going to be a lot of benefit to standardizing a bit. Mark Shuttleworth has said that he still wants the default language to be Moin markup. For longer documents that the Documentation Team are working on, I think the choice will be to go with something a little more geared toward producing larger docs like ReST.

Both John Hornbeck and Matt Zimmerman announced the create of a new Documentation list. The list is for discussing documentation and related topics. You can sign up at http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc The new list should be used instead of ubuntu-devel with [doc] tags.

The list has been off to a great start logging in more messages this week than the entire devel and sounder lists combined!

Matt Zimmerman announced a meeting to kick off the development of Ubuntu's next release: the Hoary Hedgehog. The meeting was a marathon running over 4 hours. It took me almost as long to go through the log and summarize it but it's done and linked here for your convenience. It's a great read for people that are curious as to what Hoary Hedgehog will look like:

Meeting Summary: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/hoary_kickoff-20041025-summary.html
Meeting Log: http://people.ubuntulinux.org/~mako/hoary_kickoff-20041025-log.html

Look for status updates from Matt Zimmerman. These will also be included in Traffic.

Another important Ubuntu meeting this week was the Community Council meeting which touched on a number of issues. I (Benjamin Mako Hill) wrote up and posted the summary to the lists. That message is here:

Today Community Council held its third meeting. I've written up a summary you can read at the link below. The agenda covered:

Discussion of proactive security
Mentoring new developers:
Formation of the Masters of the Universe
Future of the Documentation Team; appointing a team leader:

You can read it here:

LaMont Jones posted an announcement of the release of the Warty Live CD:

Ubuntu 4.10 -- Warty Warthog -- released on October 20th and has gotten great feedback so far. The Ubuntu Team is now pleased to announce that the companion Warty Live CD is released as well!

The Live CD contains a snapshot of everything in the Ubuntu 4.10 but in a bootable trial form. It will allow you to try out Ubuntu before installing it, without repartitioning or overwriting any existing software or data. To use it, just place it in the drive and reboot your computer. It also contains a small collection of Free and Open Source software shipped in Ubuntu that you can install on your Windows system.

The Live CD is only available for Intel and compatible "i386" processors.

You can get it from one of the follow locations:

Bittorrent: http://releases.ubuntu.com/warty/warty-release-live-i386.iso.torrent
Direct download: http://releases.ubuntu.com/warty/warty-release-live-i386.iso

Matt Zimmerman stepped forward to make an announcement on ubuntu-announce this week:

In the past few weeks, users who have been following the mailing lists have heard developers saying "no" to the introduction of new features with comments like, "we'll put that on the list for Hoary." The Ubuntu development team is pleased to announce that, while still in an immature stage, "Hoary" has arrived.

With Ubuntu 4.10 'Warty Warthog' safely and successfully out the door, the Ubuntu developers have begun doing work on our next release, codenamed the 'Hoary Hedgehog.' With our six-month release schedule, it is due to be released in April of 2005.

For those of you who have missed the daily churn of new packages, Hoary is for you. It will include daily updates from Debian's development branch (sid), with Ubuntu additions and customizations where appropriate. For the next six months, it is within Hoary that Ubuntu development will be taking place and where the latest version of Ubuntu packages will always be available.

PLEASE NOTE: While up-to-date, this development snapshot is not (and not meant to be) a stable distribution. Bugs and breakage, while they will be kept under control wherever possible, are a reality in such a system. Pre-release versions of Hoary are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone without who is not comfortable running into occasional breakage. It is recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

To install Hoary, you may edit your /etc/apt/sources.list configuration file to replace all instances of 'warty' with 'hoary.' You can then go about updating and upgrading to Hoary with apt, aptitude or synaptic as you would normally.

Users who decide to upgrade to Hoary may be interested in signing up on the Ubuntu development mailing list to track major problems and discussion in the development process if they have not done so already. They may also be interested submitting any bugs they find in the Ubuntu Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/

Finally, there is also now a mailing list that will include details all of the changes made in hoary (just like 'warty-changes' did for Warty). You can subscribe to it here: http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/hoary-changes

John Hornbeck followed up onto -devel to say, I am about to make a HOWTO for starting to use hoary. I would like to see what a fresh hoary sources.list would look like, I have a ton of crap in mine and don't want to try to sort it out due to fear of messing myself up. :-) So if someone could post what it would look like.

Matt Zimmerman posted the following strong warning to John and the answer to the question:

If you do this, please ensure that it includes appropriate language (as in the Hoary announcement I sent out) which clearly warns users about what they are going to do.

If you are going to lower the barrier to entry for Hoary, it is essential that the uninitiated know exactly what they are signing up for.

A fresh hoary sources.list from a hypothetical fresh hoary install would look something like this:

## Uncomment the following two lines to fetch updated software from the network
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.
# deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe
# deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary-security main restricted

i.e., exactly the same as the Warty one, with the string 'warty' replaced with 'hoary'.

This week saw ten security advisories for Ubuntu. Thanks to Martin Pitt who sent the advisories and to everyone that had a hand if finding the bugs and creating the patches. Here's the list: