I’m breaking my two week blog holiday early to bring you a super cool genetic wallpaper video:

View Video on Blip

As I show in the video, once you have a nice svg (manually edited of course) you can use the script to nudge elements in it. Comment here if you think this is cool.

This week was a short one in the UK but it seems as though we set out to fill it with as much as we possibly could! For a start we hit beta this week. If you’ve not upgraded to Maverick, you really should. We all have and are enjoying the updated Radiance and Ambiance themes. On the subject of arrivals we also welcomed Lilly to our web team this week – we’ll set her up on the blog in the coming weeks and coax a post or two out of her.

Elsewhere in the world of the web Ale asked you guys why you use Ubuntu. We’d love more input into this thread so if you have ideas leave them in the comments and join in the conversation. Another post which got a lot of interest this week was Otto’s post about the default wallpaper. This explains in some detail the idea behind our approach to this design and we’ll be updating you and hopefully roping some of into helping us make our grander ideas a reality in the next cycle.

Away from the blog we’ve been busily working on the font family which is extremely close to being ready to share more widely. We have a few bugs we want to review and in the next week we’ll be adding milestones to the project and assigning some bugs to future releases so everyone can see what we’re focusing on fixing in time for 10.10. The release is by no means finished in October. Much will be added and refined over time. More on that from the Dalton Maag team soon.

Maverick on netbook and desktop is also taking up a lot of our time as we work closely with the platform and DX teams to make sure all the work we do and that is contributed by you guys in the community, is rolled into the next release. Unity in particular is coming together and if you’ve not tried it yet you really should!

We also wished Charline “Bon Voyage” as she set off to Japan to take part in the EPIC conference and she’ll be talking about her experiences once she’s back from there.

And lastly, while we’re on the subject of travel, I got an e-mail this morning from Rick. He’s apparently still traveling and bumped into Jane at Linux Con. I await with interest the next mail I get from my missing statue!

Have a great weekend – especially our lucky American cousins who get a nice long weekend!

Amber Graner interviews Ohio LinuxFest Planner - Esther "Moose" Filderman. Take a moment to learn more about the Ohio LinuxFest and Moose in this interview.

After spotting the silly pyromania on planet.fedora earlier today, I thought for a while; Am I on Team Evil, or am I on Team Stupid. Then, I decided.

I’m on Team Linux.

You?

2010 has been a very important year for Joey and I and OMG! Ubuntu!

About 4 months ago we decided it was time to formalise the website and begin expanding the OMG! network. To do this we had to create some sort of over-arching entity that would allow us to easily refer to our products, because we aimed to have more than one. We also felt it was about time we started turning the OMG! brand into a commercial venture. We knew we wanted to start a company, and after about two weeks of trying to come up with names we finally settled on ‘Ohso.’

Tyler came to us with the idea of launching OMG! SUSE! and we let him have at it which expanded the Ohso network to two sites. With the launch of Ubuntu Gamer coming up before the end of the year, we’ll have three, and possibly four. We decided we needed some sort of user-facing image, and, myself being a stickler for consistency, found this idea of a network of very different but at the same time very similar websites an appealing design challenge.

We wanted to get away from Blogger as it was slow and very restricting in what we could do, so the new design couldn’t come soon enough. In July I sat down at my desk and started thinking of ideas. To start I wanted to create a nice colour pallete that we could use across multiple sites in varying levels – this would be the first relationship the network would have. It was important to establish something that kept the OMG! cheekiness and funk that we’re known for, but at the same time creating something elegant to raise the bar to that professional level. Looking at other tech sites, I could see that a lot of the time they have gone with function over form – being a designer, I felt we could have both. I wanted to make OMG! Ubuntu! the best looking blog on the internet.

Since we already had a very simple colour pallete with OMG! Ubuntu! purple and orange, I compared this to the new Ubuntu branding, aubergine and orange. Our colours are different to Canonical’s, with our purple being a lot darker and our orange being lighter, but I found they worked together well. In the new site design I wanted to convey a professional image, to me (and I think you’ll agree) the deep purples work better than bright oranges in doing this. The header is a gradient of OMG! Ubuntu! purple to Ubuntu aubergine.

Because orange is a bright colour, it’s very useful for attracting attention – especially when used in such contrast with aubergine. I decided to use orange sparingly around the site for highlights.

These two colours, along with varying shades of gray make up the bulk of the website colour pallete. But there was a problem with links – orange was too bright and not readable, and purple was already too prominent. I experimented with some aquas and blues which I used in the new Ubuntu Manual site design, and settled on a lovely deep aqua for links. I think this provides a nice middle ground between the luscious purples and candy orange.

Once I had settled on a colour pallete (which is very important) I started looking around for inspiration. With the new site we wanted to achieve a couple of imporant things regarding posts that the old blogger site didn’t do well:

• Making featured posts more prominent
• Allowing readers to easily find previous posts
• Better social sharing

To feature current posts we decided on a large, prominent carousel banner that is 960 x 200 – this gives us a good way to show off breaking news stories, and we can have as many in the loop as we like. It’s consistent with the new Ubuntu web design, so readers should feel quite at home. I also wanted to make use of Joey’s funky and eye-catching graphic design which I know is something that makes OMG! unique. Scrolling down to read posts is a tradeoff, but if you visit any of the large Gawker Media or Weblogs sites, you’ll see they employ similar tactics to an even greater degree.

The original design

With almost 2000 posts dating back a couple of years (a lot of which are still relevant) it was important to get the most reuse out of this material. Combining a prominent and effective search bar with clear categories will hopefully allow readers to find what they want much more easily than trawling through the endless menus present in the old site. The five categories in the banner serve three purposes:

1. For new visitors to understand what the site is about at a glance
2. So readers can quickly filter something they’re interested in
3. To create an association with the categories in the header and then in the body

We have a new icon set (courtesy of ipapun) that comes in two flavours, light and dark, which means we can use these on other websites as well – giving some more consistency across the network. There are quite a few categories missing that we need to create more icons for, so we’ll slowly be expanding the set.

The posts themselves needed to improve on the current site in a number of ways:

• More prominent social buttons for sharing
• Clearer formatting and font
• Better use of image collections
• Excerpts for post previews

A lot of this was fixed simply by moving away from blogger. The new site uses a nice gallery plugin to handle image collections. The original design for posts was a bit different to what you see now – the floating categories on the left of the post also contained tags and sharing buttons. We soon realised this wasn’t particularly feasible for longer tags, and Joey wanted more prominent sharing buttons – now we have lovely tags down the bottom of the post, along with small sharing buttons, and then at the top of the post is a floating bar with Digg, Facebook and Twitter. It’s much less obtrusive than the last bar. You can thank Niall for that!

Hope you like grids

This leaves the side bar and footer. The side bar stuff was hacked up by Niall who spent quite a lot of time fooling around with the Facebook widget and the recent comments (pulled from Disqus) stuff, so that’s why they look quite nice. The footer is pixel perfect to my design – I wanted to achieve a few things with the footer:

• More professional look
• Obvious that the site is part of the Ohso network
• Trademarks and copyrights for Canonical and Ubuntu
• Links to other sites in our network and social pages
• Links to static pages

I can’t really say much more about the footer other than it looks really good!

Our to-do list before launch

Overall, I feel the site is quite pleasing to the eye and a big improvement over the last site in terms of design. I think that we have established a unique look and feel, elements of which we will be able to use across many sites to give an excellent network consistency. I am pleased with how the this website has turned out, although there are a few bugs to iron out here and there. We launched the site on the date we set months ago, which is really good – sticking to the schedule without delays is a promising start for a small company like Ohso.

I love the site and I hope you guys do too, thanks for reading how it was created. We’ve got a lot more planned for the rest of 2010, so unfortunately we can’t celebrate just yet. Getting this website out the door is a huge milestone, but it’s back to work for us!

Ubuntu Gamer coming soon…?

For those more technically inclined, Niall (our web developer) will be posting an article about the challenges of creating a new website and moving service and server soon while keeping everything intact with (not much) down time.

Follow me on Twitter! I often tweet new ideas and upload teasers of designs I’m working on.

According to the Ohio LinuxFest website the Registration and Contest Deadline for OLF has been extended.  Below is the announcement from their website.  I’ll be speaking at the UbuCon and on Saturday at OLF  - Hope to see you there!!

Columbus, Ohio — September 1, 2010 — Registration for the 2010 Ohio LinuxFest has been extended through September 8th, and theregistration contest has also been extended until the 1,000the registration has been reached.

One lucky registrant will win an upgrade to the Supporter Pass, or a Professional Pass registration for Ohio LinuxFest 2011 worth $350, at the choice of the winner. Full details are available at http://ohiolinux.org/node/37 – sign up today and have a chance to win!
Online registration also qualifies attendees for door prizes and giveaways the day of the conference.

As always, the main schedule takes place on Saturday. The schedule kicks off with a keynote from GNOME Foundation Executive Director Stormy Peters, followed by five tracks of talks from open source and Linux experts like Taurus Balog, Amber Graner, Catherine Devlin, Dru Lavigne, Paul Frields, and Jon ‘maddog’ Hall. This year’s OLF also features a special medical track for those interested in the use of free and open source software in medicine.

The final keynote will be a real treat for Linux and open source enthusiasts interested in free media. Christopher “Monty” Montgomery of Xiph.org will be talking about next generation open source media formats.

Once again the Ohio LinuxFest is free to all, but space is limited. Sign up today at http://ohiolinux.org/register.html If you want to support OLF, the organizers have made a supporter package available for $65 that includes lunch and an OLF t-shirt. For those who want to attend Friday’s OLF University sessions, a professional pass is also
available for $350.

The Ohio LinuxFest is a grassroots conference for the open source community that started in 2003 as an inter-LUG meeting and has grown steadily since to become the midwest’s largest open source event. It’s an annual event for Linux and open source enthusiasts to gather, share information, and socialize.

Are you interested in developing applications on Ubuntu then this is the week for you! Ubuntu App Developer Week September 27 through October 1st, 2010

Ubuntu App Developer Week (formally Opportunistic Developer Week) was announced on The Fridge earlier this week.

“What is Ubuntu App Developer Week?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week is a week of sessions aimed at enabling and inspiring developers to write applications that scratch their itches. Our goal is to give all attendees a taste of the wide variety of tools on the Ubuntu platform that can be used to create awesome applications, and to showcase some applications that have been created and explain how they were put together.

“When is Ubuntu App Developer Week?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week is scheduled for Monday, September 27th through Friday, October 1st, 2010.

“Where will Ubuntu App Developer Week take place?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week will take place in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat on freenode.net.

We are now looking for Sessions and Session Leaders.  Do you have suggestions for a session or would you or someone you know like to lead a session for Ubuntu App Developer Week?

We’re currently putting together the timetable for Ubuntu App Developer Week at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAppDeveloperWeek/Timetable

If you’re interested in helping others write good code, showcase interesting tools you use, share advice and answer questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Daniel Holbach (daniel.holbach AT ubuntu DOT com) or me (akgraner AT Ubuntu DOT com) and we’ll sort out a slot for you.

More information on Ubuntu App Developer Week Can be found at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuAppDeveloperWeek

Blacklisting stuff from being logged, has been a feature in Zeitgeist for a long time now. Yet we never came to develop a UI for it.

So upon popular demand we started to mockup this feature.

The UI is simple and straight forward. (I sketched it using Pencil)

It uses much from what Sezen has to offer, in this case we use the same categories and the searching functionality. So when you search the categories with results get highlighted to allow you to control the logging of the results.

• You can go toggle Incognito mode by setting Logger Status to inactive. This will block everything from getting logged in Zeitgeist.
• Under General you can choose which Applications you want to log. In this case I am allowing Firefox to be logged but disabling Cheese and Banshee. The application lists will be pulled from the what has been logged by Zeitgeist as well as the applications installed. The option to add new applications to be logged manually is also possible through the add and remove buttons. Same applies for Directories.

• The Documents/Music/Videos/Websites/People/Notes and Other Categories all use the same widget layout. You can enable and disable logging for all items of types of each category. In this case by toggling the Allow Logging Documents and controlling single items from a list populated by manually adding items using the Add Button. Remove Button on the other hand will ask you to remove all instances for all time. We will think of  a way to delete single instances but for now it can be done over the Activity Journal.

This is just some initial mockups. If you want to join the development please join #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net and don’t hesitate to ask for guidance. If you have a better idea for mockups please don’t hesitate to present it to us.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Unzip 5.x has an option -O to specific the encoding of file names in an ZIP archive, but when 6.0 is arriving with unicode support, that option disappeared as well. CJK users need special cares on support and conversion of obsolete encoding while they are switching to utf-8.

Here is my workaround about this problem, install p7zip and convmv packages on your system first, then:
$ env LC_ALL=C 7z x file.zip
$ convmv -f gbk -t utf8 --notest *

File names extracted by unzip are not able to be converted to correct one whatever you do with it, but what is done by 7z can be converted by convmv.

Moving more on, we can automate this action to a script:
#! /bin/sh
LANG=C /usr/bin/7z x -y "$1" | sed -n 's/^Extracting //p' | sed '1!G;h;$!d' | xargs convmv -f gbk -t utf8 --notest >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Save it us unzip.sh, then try:
$ sh unzip.sh file.zip
This will act as what unzip does, but with additional care about converting file name encoding from gbk to utf-8. Moreover, convmv can detect whether your file name is already utf-8 encoded and will skip it.

If your file names are encoded other encoding, please replace “gbk” with the appropriate name.

Thanks to Daniel Holbach, the people testing uTouch and reporting back in the Multitouch Testing Tracker now appear in the Ubuntu Hall of Fame.

If you have been helping testing MT and you’re name does not appear there, is due to a bug in the ISO tracker, that prevents testers that haven’t set their Launchpad ID properly. This bug has been fixed, and it will be released in our next roll out of the testing tracker, but, in the mean while, there is a workaround that I explained in a previous post.

Please, if you are helping testing uTouch, check out how to appear in the Hall Of Fame.

Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

A few hours ago, Amazon launched a public preview of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) which is a powerful feature if you have a number of developers who need to access and to manage resources for an AWS account. A unique IAM user can be created for each developer and specific permissions can be doled out as needed.

You can also create IAM users for system functions, dramatically increasing the security of your AWS account in the event a server is compromised. That benefit is the focus of this article using an example frequently cited by EC2 users: Automating EBS snapshots on a local EC2 instance without putting the keys to your AWS kingdom on the file system.

Before the release of AWS IAM, if you wanted to create EBS snapshots in a local cron job on an EC2 instance, you needed to put the master AWS credentials in the file system on that instance. If those AWS credentials were compromised, the attacker could perform all sorts of havoc with resources in your AWS account and charges to your credit card.

With the launch of AWS IAM, we can create a system IAM user with its own AWS keys and all it is allowed to do is… create EBS snapshots! These keys are placed on the instance and used in the snapshot cron job. Now, an attacker can do very little damage with those keys if they are compromised, and we all feel much safer.

The AWS IAM documentation is required reading and a great reference. This article is only intended to serve as a practical introduction to one simple application of IAM.

These instructions assume you are running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on both your local system and on Amazon EC2. Adjust as appropriate for other distributions and releases.

IAM Installation

Ubuntu does not yet have an official software package for AWS IAM, so we need to download the IAM command line toolkit from Amazon. This can be done on any machine including your local desktop. The IAM command line tools require Java so we need to make sure that is installed as well.

Eventually, you’ll want to install this software somewhere more permanent, but for this demo, we’ll just use it from a subdirectory.

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre unzip export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk wget http://awsiammedia.s3.amazonaws.com/public/tools/cli/latest/IAMCli.zip unzip IAMCli.zip export AWS_IAM_HOME=$(pwd)/IAMCli export PATH=$PATH:$AWS_IAM_HOME

The AWS IAM tools require you to save your AWS account’s main access key id and AWS secret access key in yet another file format. Create this AWS credential file as, say, $HOME/.aws-credentials-master.txt in the following format (replacing the values with your own credentials):

AWSAccessKeyId=YOURACCESSKEYIDHERE AWSSecretKey=YOURSECRETKEYHERE

Note: The above is the sample content of a file you are creating, and not shell commands to run.

Protect the above file and set an environment variable to tell IAM where to find it:

export AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE=$HOME/.aws-credentials-master.txt chmod 600 $AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE

We can now use the iam-* command line tools to create and manage AWS IAM users, groups, and policies.

Create IAM User

How you manage your users and groups is sure to be a personal preference that is fine tuned over time, but for the purposes of this demo, I’ll propose that for tracking purposes we put non-human users into a new group named “system”.

iam-groupcreate -g system

Create the snapshotter system user, saving the keys to a file:

user=snapshotter iam-usercreate -u $user -g system -k | tee $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt chmod 600 $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt

You will want to have this snapshotter keys file on the EC2 instance, so copy it there:

rsync -Paz $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt REMOTEUSER@REMOTESYSTEM:

Allow IAM user snapshotter to create EBS snapshots of any EBS volume:

iam-useraddpolicy \ -p allow-create-snapshot \ -e Allow \ -u $user \ -a ec2:CreateSnapshot \ -r '*'

There’s a lot of preparatory and other commands in this article, but take a second to focus on the fact that the core, functional steps are simply the iam-usercreate and iam-useraddpolicy commands above. Two commands and you have a new AWS IAM user with restricted access to your AWS account.

Create EBS Snapshot

For the purposes of this demo, we’ll assume you’re using the ec2-consistent-snapshot tool to create EBS snapshots with a consistent file system and perhaps a consistent MySQL database. (If you’re not using this tool, then you could have simply used ec2-create-snapshot from any computer without having to go through the trouble of creating a new IAM user.)

Make sure you have the latest ec2-consistent-snapshot software installed on the EC2 instance:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alestic/ppa sudo apt-get install ec2-consistent-snapshot

Create the snapshot on the EC2 instance. Adjust options to fit your local EBS volume mount points and MySQL database setup.

sudo ec2-consistent-snapshot \ --aws-credentials-file $HOME/.aws-keys-snapshotter.txt \ --xfs-filesystem /YOURMOUNTPOINT \ YOURVOLUMEID

Follow similar steps to create users and set policies for other system activities you perform on your EC2 instances. IAM can control access to many different AWS resource types, API calls, specific resources, and has even more fine tuned control parameters including time-based restrictions.

The release of AWS Identity and Access Management alleviates one of the biggest concerns security-conscious folks used to have when they started using AWS with a single key that gave complete access and control over all resources. Now the control is entirely in your hands.

Cleanup

If you have followed the steps in this demo and you wish to undo most of what was done, here are some steps for reference.

Delete the IAM user and the IAM group:

iam-userdel -u $user -r iam-groupdel -g system

Wipe the credentials and keys files and remove the downloaded and unzipped IAM command line toolkit:

sudo apt-get install wipe wipe $HOME/.aws-credentials-master.txt \ $HOME/.aws-keys-$user.txt rm IAMCli.zip rm -r $AWS_IAM_HOME

Make sure to wipe the snapshotter key file on the remote EC2 instance as well.

Support

If you’re looking for help with AWS IAM, there is a new AWS IAM forum dedicated to the topic.

Came in this morning to a mail from Rick, my Meerkat who went for a walk a little while ago.

Apparently he was giving a keynote at Linuxcon!!

" ... Thanks all for coming, have a great conference!"

More as I get it …

While I’m not convinced that Sweden will actually win the world cup there’s lots to like about this “five minutes into the future” look at how we might share content and interact with devices in a few years time. I’m setting a reminder in my calendar. I’ll catch you in 5 years, see if we made it

There are more videos on the http://www.youtube.com/user/TATMobileUI.

Discovered via the delightful Steve Clayton’s blog.

Packages for the release of the KDE Software Compilation 4.5.1 are available.

Bugs in packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.

Users of 10.04 LTS can install it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

To update, use the Software Repository Guide to add the following repository to your software sources list:

Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released. See what's new and what you have to look forward to in Ubuntu 10.10.10, Ubuntu 10.10 Beta gives you that view into what is come.

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 10.10 beta.

Codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”, 10.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a smoother, streamlined boot experience.

Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install time cloud setup.

Ubuntu 10.10 Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

The Ubuntu 10.10 family of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today.

Ubuntu Desktop features
————————

The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This includes the new dconf and gsettings API.

Evolution was updated to the 2.30.2 version, which operates much faster than the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager.

Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter’s authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to improve performance.

The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls.

The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new “Featured” and “What’s New” views for showcasing applications, and an improved package description view. You can now easily access your package installation history too.

New Design: The boot process is cleaner and faster. New themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to music within the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta for details.

Ubuntu Server features
———————-

Cloud computing: The configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images (cloud-init) has gained new features in Maverick Beta, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format. Cloud image instances can now manage their own kernel and upgrade kernels with apt. This is done by using pv-grub, provided by Amazon.

Ubuntu Netbook features
———————————-

The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It includes the global menu bar. The date/time indicator now has a real calendar widget.

The standard photo management application has been switched to Shotwell.

Kubuntu features
————————

For Maverick, Kubuntu have merged the Desktop and Netbook images into one. Ubiquity, Kubuntu’s installer, will detect the screen size before the install and use either the Plasma Desktop workplace or the Plasma Netbook workplace as needed. Users will be able to switch between the two in System Settings.

Plasma Netbook now sports the Global Menu by default.

The standard web browser is now Rekonq, a KDE browser based on Qt Webkit.

Bluedevil has become the default bluetooth stack.

Pulseaudio is the default sound server.

KPackageKit updates bring a faster backend and an updated UI that provides a new Categories page, and new features such as a backup/restore tool for the list of installed packages.

Kubuntu’s installer (Ubiquity) now has updated look and layout.
Qapt-batch now replaces install-package as the update/batch-installer utility

KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications were updated to 4.5.0 (the recently released 4.5.1 update could not be integrated before beta release and will arrive shortly).

Qt was updated to the current 4.7 beta release.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/MaverickMeerkat/Beta/Kubuntu for more details.

Xubuntu features
————————

Xfce4 was updated to the current 4.6.2 release.

New default applications include: Parole (Xfce4 Media Player), replacing Totem Movie Player; Xfburn (Xfce4 CD/DVD burning tool), replacing Brasero; and xfce4-taskmanager (Xfce4 process manager), replacing Gnome-Task-Manager.

Edubuntu features
————————-

Edubuntu now includes Gnome Nanny, which provides parental controls in Edubuntu. There is new wallpaper included (periodic table breakout). In addition, an OEM Install mode is now available.

For those interested in learning more, there’s a new web site as well.
Check out http://www.edubuntu.org.

Ubuntu Studio features
———————————

In this release, Ubuntu Studio has better integration between Pulse Audio and JACK. JACK and Pulse Audio can now be used side-by-side if they are using different audio interfaces. If they are trying to use the same audio interface, JACK will take precedent. The network connections can now be configured with gnome-network-admin.

Mythbuntu features
—————————

In this release, Mythbuntu has updated to MythTV 0.23.1.

There is also a new backup and restore tool.

Other
——-

• On the Desktop: GNOME 2.31, KDE 4.5.0b, Xfce 4.6.2, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, X.org server 7.5
• On the Server: Apache 2.2.16, PostgreSQL 8.4.4, PHP 5.3.3, LTSP 5.2.4
• “Under the hood”: Linux 2.6.35.3, GCC 4.4.4 (default) / 4.5.1
  (optional), eglibc 2.12.1, Python 2.6.6 (default) / 3.1.2 (optional)

The full release notes can be found at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta

About Ubuntu
——————

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

To Get Ubuntu 10.10 Beta
————————————

To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Beta from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS,
follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MaverickUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 10.10 Beta; The following link will direct you to a download location near you:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/download

Or, choose the mirror closest to you:

Africa:

• http://ubuntu.mirror.ac.za/ubuntu-release/10.10 (South Africa)
• http://ubuntu.saix.net/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (South Africa)

Asia:

• http://mirrors.sohu.com/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (China)
• http://ftp.riken.jp/Linux/ubuntu-iso/CDs/10.10 (Japan)
• http://ubuntutym2.u-toyama.ac.jp/ubuntu/10.10 (Japan)
• http://ftp.kaist.ac.kr/ubuntu-cd/10.10 (Korea, Republic of)
• http://ubuntu.qualitynet.net/releases/10.10 (Kuwait)
• http://mirror.yandex.ru/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Russian Federation)
• http://tw.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Taiwan)
• http://ftp.linux.org.tr/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Turkey)

Europe:

• http://ubuntu.lagis.at/releases/10.10 (Austria)
• http://ftp.mgts.by/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Belarus)
• http://ubuntu.ipacct.com/releases/10.10 (Bulgaria)
• http://hr.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Croatia)
• http://releases.ubuntu.cz/releases/10.10 (Czech Republic)
• http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ubuntu-cd/10.10 (Denmark)
• http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Estonia)
• http://ubuntu.trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/releases/10.10 (Finland)
• http://ubuntu.mirrors.proxad.net/10.10 (France)
• http://ubuntu.mirror.tudos.de/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Germany)
• http://gb.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Great Britain)
• http://mirror.greennet.gl/releases/10.10 (Greenland)
• http://speglar.simnet.is/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Iceland)
• http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Ireland)
• http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Italy)
• http://ubuntu.mirror.root.lu/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Luxembourg)
• http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.10 (Netherlands)
• http://no.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Norway)
• http://ubuntu.task.gda.pl/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Poland)
• http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/ubuntu/10.10 (Portugal)
• http://ftp.astral.ro/mirrors/ubuntu.com/releases/10.10 (Romania)
• http://rs.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Serbia)
• http://ubuntu.cica.es/releases/10.10 (Spain)
• http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/10.10 (Sweden)
• http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/ubuntu-cdimage/10.10 (Switzerland)

North America:

• http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Canada)
• http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/10.10 (United States)
• http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/ubuntu-releases/10.00 (United States)
• http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/10.10 (United States)

Oceania/Australia:

• http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/ubuntu/releases/10.10 (Australia)
• http://mirror.linux.org.au/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (Australia)
• http://releases.ubuntu.nautile.nc/10.10 (New Caledonia)
• http://ftp.citylink.co.nz/ubuntu-releases/10.10 (New Zealand)

South America:

• http://mirror.pop-sc.rnp.br/mirror/ubuntu/10.10 (Brazil)
• http://ubuntu.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/10.10 (Brazil)

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

The final version of Ubuntu 10.10 is expected to be released in October 2010.

Feedback and Participation
—————————————

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on freenode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

More Information
————————

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

[Discuss Ubuntu 10.10 Beta on the Forum]

Originally posted to theubuntu-announce mailing list by Robbie Williamson on Thu Sep 2 23:50:39 BST 2010.

I was thinking about this issue a lot. Games have a hard time on Linux with multiple sound architectures, different package management systems and not many ways to deploy their app easily. So the answers to these are use pulse audio, make a few different packages for different distros (which is expensive) or just deploy it on Ubuntu (which would piss off other distros) and deploying it at the moment is hosting it on your own website as a download.

In maverick we are getting a marketplace in the software center to sort out the deploying part and i presume thats going to have a centralized payment system so thats good for the game developers. My idea is that we can take this further. My idea is make something like like battle.net or steam (kinda).

Ok for those who don’t know steam is the payment management and distribution system for games and battle.net is just a payment management system for blizzard’s games.

So we have an SSO and now a marketplace, distribution and centralized payment system for maverick. Why not expose some info to games developers? The info that is needed depends on the game but if its something like WoW you would need the account info and if they paid for the game to log you in.

The idea is kind of a win win situation, the user wins because there is no login and its a simple system to handle everything for them and the developer wins because he doesn’t have to code a complex login system and he gets the payments handled too.

Thoughts?

Releases are big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big they are. I mean, you may think it’s a long haul to release a single package or application, but that’s just peanuts to a distribution release. Because of this, we must work our way up to it, incrementally…bit by bit…milestone by milestone. So with that, we formally announce Ubuntu 10.10 Beta in all it’s glory. Please download and give it a whirl, and if you find a problem, by all means file a bug…but Don’t Panic.

For more information on the release, please see the announcement.