LinuxPlanet Casts

Show Notes

• Intrepid Alpha was released Thursday Aug 14th
  • Latest xorg is available
    • much better support for hot-pluggable input devices such as tablets, keyboards, or mice.
    • most users will be able to run without an “/etc/xorg.conf” file.
  • Encrypted Private Directory
    • You can always encrypt whole drives or partitions
    • But what if you just want to encrypt a folder in your home directory?
    • And don’t want to encrypt and decrypt continiously?
    • This new feature will encrypt a directory with your regular login/password and decrypt it whenever you login.
  • New Guest user session switching applet
    • Creates a temporary password-less user account with restricted privileges
    • it cannot access any regular user’s home directory,
    • cannot permanently store data.
    • useful to lend people to do quick email check or surf the web
  • Updated Network Manager
    • Managing 3G connection
    • no need to login to set up a connection
    • Managing PPP and PPPOE connections (which is used by lots of DSL providers)
  • Other interesting Intrepid news
    • Tomcat6 had been uploaded to intrepid and is waiting for testing.  It should be available for Intrepid
    • Current behavior when RAID fails is for the system to boot to a recovery console.
      • Server team is adding an option that would allow administrators to specify that the system should instead boot in the degraded RAID state.
      • This would allow systems with redundant disks to get back up and running without requiring human intervention.

• Free IT Athens working with Clarke County School District to provide up to 2,000 computers to students and families who can afford them
  • Athens is about an hour NE of Atlanta
  • Very much needed in county where 80% of students qualify for free or reduced price lunches
  • Pilot program involved 130 used computers
  • 600 more to be refurbished in the fall
  • 1200 more next year

• Empathy is a set reusable IM widgets, that could possibly replace Pidgin in Intrepid
  • Not meant to be cross-platform like pidgin
  • Has voice and video support
    • Some folks who tried it out said Empathy works flawlessly with Google Talk users.
  • Its uses the Telepathy framework in Gnome
    • Telepathy supports real-time unified IM, voice, and video communication over DBus
      • DBus is the way applications talk to each other
  • Can also use libpurple, the libraries the pidgin uses, for networks that aren’t implemented yet.
  • No final decision has been made yet!

• How To Forge has a slick 2 page how to on installing openVZ on Ubuntu Server. Talking about more virtualization, this is an awesome way to run multiple environments.
  • We spend lots of time talking about vmware and virtualbox (like last week), don’t forget to try out openVZ
  • openVZ is in the repos
  • Ubuntu Florida LoCo website ran on OpenVZ until Aug, and will soon be running there again.

• How To setup DHCP server on Ubuntu Hardy Heron in 3 simple steps!

• Intrepid Ibex theme not getting that great of a response form the UI. This seems to be a common trend with a lot of bloggers on the Alpha releases of Ibex.
  • Remember, nothing is final yet!

• Ubuntu Love Day Manila 2008 – On August 23, 2008, the Ubuntu Philippines LoCo, with University of the Philippines Department of Computer Science and Engineering, will hold an event for sharing experiences, learning, and meeting fellow enthusiasts
  • Invited 6 resource persons to share their experiences with Ubuntu in different areas of interest:
    • The Ubuntu 30 day challenge – Aileen Apolo (Google)
    • Ubuntu on virtualization and integrating to a Windows Network – Wallen Tan
    • Ubuntu: Saving lives (and then some) – Charo Nuguid
    • Choice is Good! Welcome to the Exciting, Productive and Wacky World of Ubuntu Derivatives – members of UP Linux Users’ Group (UnPLUG)
    • Ubuntu and the OLPC XO-1 – Rowen Remis Iral (OLPCPH)
    • Kubuntu & KDE: Contributing to an International Software Project – Juan Carlos Torres (KDE Project)

• Ubuntu attracts the lion’s share of LinuxWorld’s smaller crowds!
  • Each Ubuntu presentation and training session throughout the three days of LinuxWorld was heavily attended, especially compared to similar sessions elsewhere where relatively few attended.
  • Even though attendance was a bit sparse during this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo when compared to previous years, the Canonical booth — where the latest Ubuntu Linux software was being shown off — still managed to draw a crowd.
  • Cancellation of Ubuntu Live might been a good thing
  • LinuxWorld had people who use many different distros, Ubuntu got exposed to them, not a self-selected group

Josh is on vacation this week, down in Destin, probably having way too much fun.

Show Notes

• Alpha 3 released, Alpha 4 comes out August 14th
• Mark Shuttleworth talk at OSCON got huge coverage: basically, Mark throws down the gauntlet: Make Desktop Linux Better than Apple
  • In 2 years, can the Linux desktop go from stable, robust, and not so pretty…to just blowing by Apple?
  • Journalists and bloggers are asking: Is it possible? Apple controls the whole stack, Linux/Ubuntu can’t
  • Journalists and bloggers are asking: Is it possible without someone taking charge?
  • Will be interesting to see what the ArtWork Team can come up with.
  • 8.04 was supposed to have some cool new themes, but it got pushed.
• Ultamatix, successor to Automatix released – it basically installs applications and commonly-used audio and video codecs.
  • Some of the applications might not be free or might having licensing issues
  • Or sometimes no one has gotten around to putting them into the repositories yet.
  • AX was very controversial. When it started out, made it easier for new Ubuntu users. But it would tended to cause people lots of pain eventually during upgrades.
    • Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu CTO, said “I cannot recommend the use of this program, and systems where it has been used cannot be supported with a clean and official upgrade path.”
    • Matthew Garrett, who was on the Ubuntu Technical Board at the time, took a look at AX: “In its current form Automatix is actively dangerous to systems – ranging from damage to small items of user configuration, through removing user-installed packages without adequate prompting or warning and up to the (small but existing) potential to leave a system in an unbootable state.”
    • They were asked to work with Ubuntu developers, but not much progress was made.
    • Eventually Automatix got sold off and there was no release for 8.04
  • Ultamatix – Not done by the AX people
  • Ultamatix creator says he tried to fix the problems that Automatix had -
  • Its been pointed out that Ultimatix uses apt force-yes options:
    • from man pages of force-yes: “This is a dangerous option that will cause apt to continue without prompting if it is doing something potentially harmful. It should not be used except in very special situations. Using force-yes can potentially destroy your system!”
  • It seems like when people are reviewing it, they are not looking under the hood. Specifically, a certain linux.com article which was a rave review of Ultamatix.
• Linux pre-installed on 2.8% of machines sold in the UK since Vista has been released.
  • Might not seem like a big deal, but its big news since it jumped from .1%
• Full Circle Magazine #15 is out.
  • Pretty cool magazine, kinda like Linux Format
  • Only available online in PDF format
  • First issue came out June 2007
    • The Ins and Outs of Directories.
    • How-To : Separate Home Partition, Create Your Own Server Part 7, Using GIMP Part 4 and GRUB 101.
    • MOTU Interview – Mathias Gug from Server Team
    • Also gets translated into several languages
• Launchpad 2.0 Out – Its where a lot of Ubuntu-related projects are hosted.
  • What is LP?
    • Hosting service for open source projects
      • share code
      • file bugs
      • translations
      • New 2.0 release include:
        • APIs to access LP data without going through the web interface
        • code reviews
        • mailing lists
        • integration with bugzilla and trac, which are pretty common and widely used apps for filing bugs
  • Some other big name projects like MySQL and Zope
  • Source code for it has been closed so far, at OSCON, Mark Shuttleworth said code would be released in the next 12 months.
  • Good thing of having only one Launchpad is being able to file bugs properly. Say someone files a bug in Ubuntu that is really in MySQL, its easy to assign the bug over to MySQL.
  • Once open sourced, you’ll see lots of different Launchpads pop up and the collaborative nature will become tougher.
• Ardour screencasts – Ubuntu UK team is in the process of doing a 13-part series on mixing a podcast with Ardour:
  • So far discussed:
    • setting up environment
    • arranging tracks
    • adding music, cool effects like fading in and out
    • compression
    • filters

If you have problems listening to the ogg or mp3 on the webpage, please try downloading it.