The fourth test release of the upcoming “Dapper Drake” has been announced. This is the debut of the new graphical installer, dubbed Espresso, which adds an icon to the desktop that allows users to permanently install Ubuntu right from the Live CD. A nicer tour of the new features is available on the wiki. You can also follow the progress of Dapper development in Jane Weideman's latest status update.
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Vincent Untz is back with the second issue of the popular Ubuntu Desktop News, which summarizes all the work done on the desktop these past few months. This update is huge, and includes some real goodies: Gstreamer .10 for multimedia support, the inclusions of avahi for full zeroconf suppport, the addition of ekiga and xchat-gnome, and, to top it all off, a quick interview with MOTU Daniel Holbach.
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Got a spare computer and some free time? Daniel Holbach is looking for volunteers for the new testing program. It's a short list of things you can check off while installing a test release. There is also a longer, more thorough test is available for those that want to really put the installation process through its paces. Feeback is direct through the wiki pages, and will go a long way to getting good data back to the developers to see what needs to be fixed. Instructions and quick links to CD images are available on the introduction page.
Daniel also wants everyone to know that this upcoming Bug Day will be very special:
But we want this to be a special Bug Day. We're going to have lists of things to do of different Ubuntu teams, so we can better track the impact we had. Planning is one thing, but we'll surely stick to our concept of success: the Hug Day. This is a very special Bug Day: on Hug Day, when someone closes a bug, then someone else should hug him/her. Why? This is a very special way for us to tell everyone that we love contributions! And triaging bugs is a really big contribution.
See his announcement for more details on getting involved.
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Ever wondered what it takes to host an Ubuntu mirror? Well, here’s an update from our Swedish friends at UMU’s Academic Computer Club. They operate one of our biggest mirrors, and have the numbers and pretty graphs to show for it:
The 42TB total network traffic over the week around the Breezy release shown in this last graph is equivalent to about 70 thousand cd-images. We estimate that about 10-15 thousand cd-images were downloaded during the first day and about 100 thousand cd-images (60TB) during the week following the release.
Thanks to Mattias and his team for pushing their network to the limit in the name of Free Software!
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Jane brings us one last report of the “distro sprint” in London, UK, which concluded this past week. As you can see from her past reports, much work was accomplished by the core team this week. Expect to see a great deal of these improvements in the next development snapshot, which has yet to be announced.
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