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Ubuntu Traffic #9 For 2004/10/22

By Benjamin Mako Hill

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Welcome to the ninth edition of Ubuntu Traffic. This issue covers the week of October 16 - 22 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!

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

Mailing List Stats For This Week

We looked at 1682 posts in 8154K.

There were 408 different contributors. 225 posted more than once. 214 posted last week too.

The top posters of the week were:

 

1. Ubuntu 4.10 -- Warty Warthog Release!
2004/10/20 - 2004/10/22 (28 posts) Subject: "Announcing Ubuntu 4.10 'The Warty Warthog Release'"
People: Matt Zimmerman, David M. Carney

Mark Shuttleworth announced the release of the final version of Ubuntu 4.10 -- the Warty Warthog on the predicted date -- October 20th. Since the announcement mail contains familiar information for most people who know what Ubuntu is or have seen any of the earlier announcements I've not included it here.

The various lists were peppered with responses of congratulations and good will from users. I'll add my own and say that the final, highly polished Warty is a fantastic tribute to the hardware of the entire team that put in so much hard work into this over a longer time. Great work guy!

For folks who are upgrading to the final version from an earlier copy, Matt Zimmerman posted the follow recommendations:

The Warty final release is now out the door. Get it while it's hot!

For those of you who have been following our pre-release versions, there may be a few extra steps that you need to take in order to be brought up-to-date. There have been a few new defaults which were set up during installation, which would not be propagated through normal package upgrades.

To ensure that you have all of the changes added since the Warty preview release, follow these steps:

  1. Upgrade your system in the usual way
  2. Follow the instructions at http://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/WartyWarthog/UpgradeNotes

In a separate thread, David M Carney asked, "Second day with no updates to Warty? apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade nets nothing. How's Hoary?" Jonathan Byrne asked if Warty was at least marginally safe yet and if anybody had tried it out yet. Matt Zimmerman filled people in saying, "It doesn't exist yet, and there is actually a fair amount of work to be done in order for it to do so. There will be announcements in the usual places when it's ready, and the feeding frenzy can begin. :-)"

 

2. Documentation Team Work
2004/10/12 - 2004/10/22 (15 posts) Subject: "[doc] [Draft] Ubuntu-specific documentation to work on"
People: John Hornbeck, Enrico Zini

The documentation team saw tons of good work and some interesting developments over the week. I've combined it as best as I can into a single story here.

The week before, John Hornbeck announced a documentation meeting for Friday, October 15 saying, "There will be a documentation meeting this friday at 1400UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on the freenode server. Please if you are interested in working with docs on Ubuntu be there. If you cannot make it but are interested please email me and I will see what I can do." Here is the info on the meeting:

Enrico Zini also posted a summary of ideas that were discussed at the meeting in terms of different ideas for Ubuntu-specific documentation that needed to be written. The list was ideas the Enrico and Sivan Green had been bouncing around in private emails. This might for a nice short term working plan:

  • Ubuntu First Steps (installation guide)

    Short document, mainly about troubleshooting. If the description of the installation itself can't be short, it means that our installer is too complex, and needs to be fixed.

    Ideally, we could have 2 pages with a step by step presentation of "when it goes well", and all the rest about "what to do when it goes wrong", with a well made index covering particular hardware, error messages and other troubles we see that can happen and we can't avoid by acting on the installer.

    The installation guide could also include and stress a "get online in the community" part, framing "joining the others" as an important part of getting the system completely working. We may even consider creating an ubuntu-welcome mailing list, and use that in the examples for the documentation.

  • Stretch your arms with Ubuntu (a look around)

    Between installing and everyday usage: a sort of "stretch your arms" in form of a tutorial with a small sequence of simple and useful things to show off what is in the system.

  • Ubuntu Everyday Usage (user's guide)

    I see this as a collection of best practices, indexed with goals.

    Not "how to use a word processor", but "printing a letter"; not "image manipulation", but "my digital pictures collection".

    Two use cases:

    • I have an itch, I find it on the index and then read the best way to scratch it.
    • I have bought a computer, installed Ubuntu, and I want to cherry pick what seems cooler for me to do, and quickly see how to do it

    Since documentation exists outside of Ubuntu, we have a chance of being concise, and then pointing to other existing things. There are already nice OpenOffice guides around, so we don't have to rewrite them and we can just point to them "to learn some more".

    Learn is important here: it makes explicit that this documentation is intended to address how to "do". If someone wants to "learn" as well, we can point them to the right place.

  • My Ubuntu (tweaking and customizing)

    "make your personal computer really /personal/"

    Here go all the customization issues:

    • to make your computer look cool and blend well with the colors of your jacket.
    • to tailor the interaction to one's needs, creating shortcuts and automating things one does often
    • to make your system match your quirks, instead of adopting quirks to match your system

Note that there may be some nice overlapping of patterns in these items:

  • the "First Steps" could have a continuously updated troubleshooting part collecting the installing problems that come out during the distro lifetime ("if it's too late to fix it, document it")
  • "Stretch your arms" could also be a nice addition to the live CD, guiding curious people in having a look at the system
  • "Everyday Usage" could be the point where we collect and share best practices and everyday creativity, from the community, to the community. Tips&Tricks (keyboard shortcuts, useful lesser-known packages) could fit there as well.

Enrico also posted the "Long Term Documentation Plan" draft which, addition to being long-term, is also very long -- so long that I don't even really know where to start with summarizing. That said, if you're at all interested in working documentation stuff, it's definitely a good read and is on the -devel mailing list.

There was also a thread about the limitations of using the wiki to store the hardware compatibility information. Most people, but not everyone, agreed that the Wiki was less than ideal and Matt Zimmerman mentioned that fixing this was one of the of the proposed goals for hoary.

John Hornbeck posted a message to the devel list about work on the wiki breaking links saying, "It seems a lot of work that is going into the wiki, such as renaming pages to conform to new standards we wish to have is breaking the old links. We really need to make sure we are not causing more harm by changing the name, than we are doing good by changing the name. The idea of place holders was brought up, saying we link the old page straight to the new one. I like this idea and say we go for it, but do we keep a ongoing link from the old page? I think this is something for discussion." Matt Zimmerman replied to say that this was something that had bothered him about Moin and people brainstormed some other solutions including switching to a different wiki.

Finally, Alexander Poslavsky asked about the documentation in http://www.ubuntulinux.org/support/documentation/ and wondered if it could also be maintained in the wiki in addition to on the site because it was more easily editable by a larger number of people and because it was then searchable. John Hornbeck liked this idea but Matt Zimmerman said that the goal should be to make the website more editable by more people and that the website already had a search feature.

 

3. Live CD Test Image Released
2004/10/19 - 2004/10/20 (19 posts) Subject: "LiveCD test image available, please test"
People: LaMont Jones

LaMont Jones announced a test image of the Ubuntu Live CD:

The current test-image of the Live CD for i386 is available at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/sounder-test/live/warty-live-i386-20041019-18.iso.torrent

Or, if you can't use bit torrent, the actual ISO is at: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/sounder-test/live/warty-live-i386-20041019-18.iso

Any feedback you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Known issues:

  1. Artwork is still a work in progress, and predominantly pre-dates the install CD release-candidate.
  2. Sound doesn't work on at least some machines. It would be nice to which configurations work and which don't.
  3. acpid doesn't run on the live CD.

 

4. Localization
2004/10/19 (2 posts) Subject: "Impoving localization support"
People: Stefan Rotsch, Thom May

Stefan Rotsch posted to say that:

I did an installation using the German language (but I'm quite sure this affects other languages as well), and after all I've got a nice, localized desktop, but two main applications remain untranslated by default: Firefox and OpenOffice. Localization of these takes the step of installing the appropriate language packs (mozilla-firefox-locale-de, openoffice.org-l10n-de), which is a quite simple task, but from my point of view could/should be done automatically to make the _whole_ desktop "just work".

So: Couldn't this be done automagically during the installation process? What about creating/maintaining a pseudo-package for each language available in the installer, which could perform this installation?

Thom May replied and suggested that he check out the language support goal of the Hoary release (https://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/HoaryHedgehog) saying, "if you have any comments on the way we should achieve this, please feel free to contribute to that page or start a new page to discuss it."

Internationalization is one of the key elements of the Ubuntu philosophy. Comments and held in this important area is always appreciated.

 

5. Ubuntu for IA64
2004/10/20 (2 posts) Subject: "Ubuntu for IA64 - Gelato meeting report"
People: Theirry Simonnet, Mark Shuttleworth

Thierry Simonnet posted an update on the "gelato" conference in Beijing on IA65 saying:

I'm just back from Beijing. I've presented to the Gelato members Ubuntu Linux as a potential enterprise-grade IA64 Linux distribution and asked for it to be a Gelato certified distribution (to integrate Gelato's research projects and to provide standardized and up-to-date distribution).

Chinese universities use an IA64 port of RedFlag Linux (http://www.redflag-linux.com/eindex.html), we couldn't find out whether they are willing to change that. HP Labs use Debian, but are able to use any kind of free distribution without support.

On the other hand, many members want to have a standard, up-to-date, Linux distribution for their clusters, grids, and standalone servers. Many persons are OK to work on the port but there was no further discussion about its "future support" (ie: next revisions).

The first step of Gelato collaboration would be to start the project. HP Universities Relations department asked me to organize the various stages of the collaboration (schedule, tasks, means, localization, evolution steps).

HP is able to provide some boxes for development. As a new Gelato sponsor, Intel will provide the members with some prototype processors. Mid November, Intel will start a new grant program and will select eligible projects based on their abstracts.

My goal is to create a collaborative team to release first an IA64 Ubuntu distribution suitable for:

  • grid computing usage (grid tools and scientific apps packages)
  • clustering usage (clustering tools packages)
  • standalone servers

I will soon make a call for Gelato's people to create this team. I have to wait for HP's clearance first.

Mark Shuttleworth replied to Thierry saying:

Thanks very much for the report back to the list, and congrats on your progress. We will have 3 buildd's and a porting box up and running, hopefully today (20 October 04) for the Hoary release process, so we should be able to have a fully supported release of Hoary for IA64 if your porting effort goes well.

We would also be very happy to host more development machines in our data center space, directly attached to the rest of the Ubuntu infrastructure.

Good luck with your ongoing porting.

Thanks Thierry and to everyone that has been active in the work behind the IA64 port!

 

6. Accessibility for Blind/Vision Impaired Users
2004/10/20 (1 post) Subject: "Modifying Warty for blind/vision impaired use."
People: Luke Yelavich

Luke Yelavich posted a message saying:

As some of you may have noticed, there is now an accessibility documentation area on the Ubuntu wiki. From discussion with various Ubuntu developers, I understand that accessibility for Ubuntu is going to be worked on for future Ubuntu releases.

What I would like to do for the present however, is create a small derivative of the official Warty ISO, with a few accessibility modifications, such as console screen reading support. This certainly doesn't require a lot of work. as the majority of the modification involves patching the kernels with the Speakup screen reader. Other blind people have done the same thing for Debian CD images in the past, and the screen reader doesn't modify any part of the kernel, say the build files to allow Speakup to be built either into the kernel, or as modules.

I want to do this, to allow my blind and partially sighted peers to enjoy what Ubuntu has to offer, even if they can't entirely access X. I am mainly referring to things like laptop support configured off the bat, automatic mounting of removable media, etc.

With a little more work, it would even be possible to offer a working Gnopernicus out of the box, which to date, no distro has done properly, however I feel this is not as important at this stage.

I intend to go ahead and do what I have outlined above, and make it available to the blind/vision impaired community. I am wondering if the Ubuntu developers and management are interested in my work, as it could certainly be a basis from which a truly accessible derivative of Ubuntu could be developed.

If any developers are interested in helping me, I would also appreciate your assistance.

Thanks Luke and good luck with this effort. Perhaps this conversation can happen on -devel until it seems that another mailing list is necessary. I see this fully as in line with the goals of the accessibility team. By using your work to help kick off the existing accessibility team, you can make sure that improvement and such that you make can get into the next released version of Ubuntu.

 

7. Update on Pressed CDs
2004/10/21 - 2004/10/22 (24 posts) Subject: "CD Shipping"
People: Francisco Maia, Neil Woolford, Benjamin Mako Hill

Francisco Maia posted to ubuntu-users asked about the CDs saying:

I just went in the Free CD Shipping Page and I ran into a little problem: I filled the form and set the number of CDs I wanted to receive. I was in the hope that the next page would give me the price of the CD shipping and asked me to confirm my request. What happened was that the system told me that it was going to send me the CDs without saying from where (I live in Portugal). The problem is that the shipping price can be very high (if the CDs are shipped from the US, for example).

My questions are:

  • Does anyone know the usual shipping price for 10CDs?
  • Does anyone know from where the CDs will be shipped?
  • Is there a way to cancel the CD shipping if the price is too high?

The answers to your questions are:

In a separate but related thread, Neil Woodford asked: "I know I'm being impatient, but I've no broadband access and really want to try the release version of Warty. I've been impressed by the lack of clutter on the previews, and want to get out there and push Ubuntu onto friends' and relatives' machines. The sooner I get into practice with it the better. Any idea of how long before the CDs ship?" I responded to Neil saying:

After the Live CD is finalized, we'll send it all off to the folks who are pressing and shipping the CDs. That will probably be early next week. I've already finalized the database for the first shipment which includes everyone who gave full shipping information (I have been and will continue to email people who did not) as of 2 days ago.

We're pressing a lot of CDs so i could be anywhere from 2-4 weeks to perhaps twice that long until they start showing up on people's door depending on the speed of the local mail and when you ordered (it should be roughly first ordered, first shipped).

If you didn't make the first shipment, because either you were too late or because you didn't get complete information on time, you'll be able to get in on a second shipment that should follow relatively soon. I'll post more information on this in the next week or two.

As I write this, the Live CD is done and the CD pressing has commenced for the first batch. (Almost) everybody who entered full mailing information is included in this first batch but this does not include 100% of people who have entered data at all. Many people left off some information necessary to mail (e.g., zip codes in countries/regions where they are necessary, countries, names, etc.). I've already mailed many of the people who left off this information about fixing their data and will be mailing the rest over the next week. Please keep an eye or for this and come to the website to fix this if I ask you.

Next week:

What you need to do:

These packages will take time to arrive. Please try to be patient and and resist the temptation to email about the status of packages. Know that we can't directly track the progress of individual and there are thousands of you and only a few of us handling this. :)

 

8. Security Advisories
2004/10/22 (2 posts) Subject: "[USN-1-1] PNG library vulnerabilities"
People: Matt Zimmerman

With the new release, Matt Zimmerman made the first two security advisories for Ubuntu:

[USN-1-1] PNG Library Vulnerabilities

The following packages are affected:

  • libpng12-0
  • libpng12-dev
  • libpng10-0
  • libpng10-dev

Several integer overflow vulnerabilities were discovered in the PNG library. These vulnerabilities could be exploited by an attacker by providing a specially crafted PNG image which, when processed by the PNG library, could result in the execution of program code provided by the attacker.

The PNG library is used by a variety of software packages for different purposes, so the exact nature of the exposure will vary depending on the software involved.

The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 1.2.5.0-7ubuntu1 (libpng12-0 and libpng12-dev) or 1.0.15-6ubuntu1 (libpng10-0 and libpng10-dev). In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.

Information and links to packages is in the announcement here: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2004-October/000000.html

[USN-2-1] xpdf Vulnerabilities

The following packages are affected:

  • cupsys
  • xpdf-reader
  • xpdf-utils

Chris Evans discovered several integer overflow vulnerabilities in xpdf, a viewer for PDF files. The Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) also uses the same code to print PDF files. In either case, these vulnerabilities could be exploited by an attacker by providing a specially crafted PDF file which, when processed by CUPS or xpdf, could result in abnormal program termination or the execution of program code supplied by the attacker.

In the case of CUPS, this bug could be exploited to gain the privileges of the CUPS print server (by default, user cupsys).

In the case of xpdf, this bug could be exploited to gain the privileges of the user invoking xpdf.

The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package(s) to version 1.1.20final+cvs20040330-4ubuntu16.1 (cupsys) or version 3.00-8ubuntu1.1 (xpdf, xpdf-utils).

Information and links to packages is in the announcement here: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2004-October/000001.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

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