Quintet rushes to Network Manager Glory

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-20

NetworkManager is a tool that was designed to make managing wireless networks easy, particularly for laptop users. Unfortunately the tool has always needed some work to get it working right in Ubuntu, seemingly always releasing at the most inopportune time in relation to the Ubuntu schedule, or depending on some development driver in a far away land …

This time, however, things are looking up. Johan Kiviniemi, Mario Danic, Adam Conrad, Luka Renko, and Anthony Mercatante have volunteered to get Network Manager 0.6.1 packages up to shape, with the intent to make it in time for the final release of Dapper. They've put in a ton of work patching code, testing cards, and packaging it all up for testing. Unfortunately, time not particularly abundant these days, but Matthew Garrett was quick to point out:

This is entirely a community contribution, but now that the hard work has been done it should (with luck) be possible to squeeze this in. If people could test the packages and find any bugs as quickly as possible, that makes things a great deal more likely.

The team has put up pages for for NetworkManager (the GNOME front end) and KNetworkManager (the KDE front end) with instructions on how to get started. Bugs can be reported to debian (AT) johan.kiviniemi.name. You can also find _ion and Pygi on Freenode (irc.freenode.net) to report bugs. You'll also find more information in the dicussion thread below.

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Change to release schedule for Dapper

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-20

While the change in schedule has been publicized throughout the web, sabdfl just made the official announcement detailing the six week delay in the Dapper release. The exact schedule has already been posted. The magic day is now June 1st 2006, so keep the beer chilled for just a bit longer. Note that:

This is not a general relaxation of the freeze process. While there are some new features that are being integrated, the general stabilisation and bug fixing freeze remains in place, with some specific exceptions.

This is extra time is also an excellent time for our multilingual volunteers to get in some last minute polish. Dafydd Harries is asking for some help in bringing the localization efforts up to par, especialy for “those languages with complex display and input requirements like Korean, Japanese and Chinese in all its variants.”

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Heavy Metal for Niagara

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-11

Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, leader of the Ubuntu Server Team and community SPARC port, has announced that Ubuntu is now available for testing on Sun's new Niagara machines. Fabio thanked kernel hacker David S. Miller for his work on Linux support for Niagara, and a number of Ubuntu developers for their expert help and assistance with integration. A netboot image is available, with a complete CD installer coming soon. If you're lucky enough to have one of these beauties, please test the netboot installer, and send your feedback to the Server Team!

What is Niagara? A massively multi-core, multi-threaded CPU design. While x86 compatible CPUs are only just starting to have dual cores, Niagara CPUs can have up to eight cores, with four threads per core – that's 32 simultaneous running threads. It's a very different kind of beast, so porting it to Linux was a bit of an adventure. Check out Dave's blog for some great war stories.

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Distribution of the Year

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-09

Ubuntu has won Distribution of the Year in the 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards, an annual poll of the user support website's forum members.

We'd like to thank the academy– wait, no, that's a totally different award. We'd like to thank the readers of LinuxQuestions.org for supporting Ubuntu!

Mr. Dell opens up about Desktop Linux

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-08

Michael Dell, chairman and founder of Dell, mentioned Ubuntu in a number of contexts in a recent interview on DesktopLinux.com. Of great interest was his comment that, “Ubuntu is now the most popular desktop distribution on Dell PCs”. Rock and roll!

“If we say we like Ubuntu, then people will say we picked the wrong one. If we say we like and support Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, and Xandros, then someone would ask us, 'Why don't you support Mandriva? The challenge we have with picking one is that we think we'd disenchant the other distributions' supporters.”

Dell offers an range of workstations and laptops called the nSeries which do not include Windows, opting instead for a very basic FreeDOS. These machines are intended for buyers who are keen to run Linux without paying for an operating system they won't use.

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