Weekly News #17

Corey and the gang are back with another round-up of everything that’s been happening in the shared worlds of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu and all that jazz.

In Ubuntu Weekly News #17, we have:

  • The winner of the UbuntuVideo.com contest has been announced.
  • Daniel Holbach has kicked off a new Bluetooth team.
  • Ubuntu’s been getting mentions all over the press.
  • An overview of Apport – a new feature in Edgy to help collect backtraces.

And of course, there’s loads more!

Read all about it at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Issue17.

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Behind Ubuntu: Matt Zimmerman: 'Technologist'

Top dog ‘mdz’ joins the walk of fame

Kenny Duffus sent us word that Behind Ubuntu have a shiny interview with Matt Zimmerman (aka mdz), Ubuntu’s Chief Technologist Officer (CTO).

Matt was one of the early people to come on board to the Ubuntu project having been recruited from his involved work with Debian, particularly in their Security Team.

For those people who’ve met Matt and attempted to work out where his driving motivation comes from, you may find some intriguing clues. The interview contains a series of question across many topics, the larger part being about life rather than computers. In response to whom Matt admires most, he expresses:

I admire people who relentlessly pursue their own curiosity and, in the process, challenge the rest of us to do the same. People who question what they see and explore it deeply, who are never satisfied with an incomplete answer.

If you are the type of person who is also inquisitive to the extreme, answers await you inside this interview! Could you be the next Ubuntu CTO or lead the Ubuntu Technical Board?

The full text is available on Behind Ubuntu along with several previous interviews.

Weekly News #16: Akademy, latest changes in Edgy

The Ubuntu Weekly News #16 is out, containing a round up of events during the last week of September. Covered topics are:

  • Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Beta Release
  • Akademy 2006
  • Poster Competition Results
  • Universe Version Freeze
  • Changes in Edgy Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Ichthux
  • Launchpad News
  • Feature Of The Week – Bip

For Kubuntu, the big event in the KDE calendar kicked off—the Akademy KDE Conference happening in Dublin, Ireland. Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell provided a raving report of goings-on.

We discover that SABDFL didn’t make it in the end; the plane apparently “got sick”, being left stranded at Stansted awaiting a replacement card to arrive from Canada:

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.

It’s excellent to hear of so much communication between the distributions, with everybody analysing and appreciating the extra development that each operating system provider spends polishing their installs.

Where do all the old Microserfs go?

Where do you want to go after you leave?

Here at Fridge central we got a tip off that the Microsoft Alumni Network (aka MSA) has an interesting logo. We found out that the MSA organisation “is a network comprised of approximately 12,000 former Microsoft employees.”.

Well, there you go, if you’ve ever worked for Microsoft and left, you’re probably on the address list of the MSA.

Ex-Microsoft employees from the early days have occasionally been known as Microserfs and there’s even a book by Douglas Coupland with at least two different covers available. The book details in a lighthearted way how it “might” have been like to work for Microsoft in the early heady days of times gone by.

All of that background information got us thinking about the Alumni Network logo, currently in use. The circular MSA logo has a very familiar colour palette of browns and contains a very familiar layout involving three individuals holding hands from above. Perhaps the designer of the image knew something about where all of those ex-Microsoft employees might have gone to—and what operating system they might be running now!

What do you think? Perhaps you might even know an ex-Microserf running Ubuntu, or even a present employee still working at Microsoft who likes to use their iPod or Ubuntu box afterhours…

Improved bug watches, reformatted CVE reports – Launchpad news

It’s been another busy couple of weeks for the Launchpad team, with work focused on polishing existing features.

  • Improved bug watch integration with upstream: it is now possible to specify a remote bug tracker for a specific upstream product.
  • New optimised CVE report format.
  • Several distribution management enhancements: improved mirror listing format, significantly optimised code and more
  • Product series can now have Bazaar branches linked to them.

Read the full version of the latest Launchpad news and the small update to it.

We look forward to seeing you on the Launchpad users mailing list!