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Ubuntu Developer Conference - Paris

Since Sunday, the second greatest GNU/Linux show on Earth (after Linux.conf.au) rolled into Charles de Gaulle airport, just outside Paris. This is the organized human carnival where terms like 'specs', 'BOFs' and 'lightening-presentations' fly about during the day and give way to hushed mentions of Mao! and Talking! during the evening.

On the agenda for this week are nailing down all of the features that will make it into the next release of Ubuntu (codenamed the Edgy Eft, as covered by LWN previously), expected to hit your desktop in a mere four months. You can keep an eye on all the specifications on the brand new "Blueprint" component of Launchpad and even take part.

There are over sixty people in attendance, including the majority of the core Ubuntu distro team---congratulations also to those busy expecting babies and not able to make it this time. Everyone is welcome to attend, just grab a peek at the schedule of the day and turn up at the Radisson hotel.

Ubuntu has been gradually perfecting the ultimate open-source development conference, with each edition of the Developer Summit the process gets smoother and more refined. What matters here is high-quality, high-bandwidth person-to-person communication. It's important because the rest of the year everyone is working in separate countries and time-zones, with the only contact being via text-based IRC chat.

If you want, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu, LTSP, they're all here and Wednesday's morning talk came from Intel aficionados (and Debian veterans) Mike Jennings and Max Alt. This was a sneak preview into the technology that Intel is expecting to release to the market in the next year and how Ubuntu can be ready for increased power-saving, hardware-based Xen and multi-core goodness; all out-of-the box, of course!

Thirty years ago there were futurists with predictions of computers that would talk. During todays bird-of-feather accessibility session, that came just a little closer to reality... Thanks to the wonderful discovery of small and efficient GPL'ed eSpeak speech synthesizer, the next release is likely to feature text-to-speech right from the installer boot menu.

If you want to know the future of computing for everyone, then perhaps this is the place to be. It's round, delicious and slightly caramel in colour---just like the crème flambeau we ate for pudding.

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New Releases

GeeXboX 1.0 released

The GeeXboX project has announced the release of version 1.0. "Here we finally are ... after more than 3 years of perpetual development, GeeXboX finally reaches its so long awaited 1.0 release. Many of you were waiting for it and this is probably the best edition of GeeXboX that you've ever had."

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First Mandriva Linux 2007 alpha arrives (DesktopLinux)

DesktopLinux takes a quick look at the alpha release of Mandriva 2007. "The first development images of Mandriva Linux 2007 have been released for download and testing, the team revealed June 22. Only Mandriva One live CD images for the i586/x86_64 architectures were currently available, but the team said the usual full 4-CD sets would appear on Mandriva mirrors within several days."

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Distribution News

Mandriva Linux 2007: Get Ready For Evolution

Mandriva looks forward to its Mandriva Linux 2007 release, due out this fall. "Mandriva Linux 2007 will be available in three versions: Discovery (for the Linux beginner), PowerPack (for the advanced computer user) and PowerPack+ (for SOHO users)."

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OpenPKG project diverges 2-STABLE branch

The OpenPKG project has separated the OpenPKG 2-STABLE branch from the OpenPKG CURRENT branch. This branching allows maintenance of the existing OpenPKG code and RPM specification base and independent development in OpenPKG CURRENT simultaneously.

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New mailing list: opensuse-translation

The opensuse-translation list has been created for the discussion and coordination of translations of the SUSE Linux distribution.

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Ubuntu post-summit specification review process

Matt Zimmerman reports that a team was formed to review draft specifications formulated at the summit. "Of course, there wasn't enough time to review and approve all of the specifications written during the summit, so this process will continue over the coming days. The deadline to have specifications approved for Edgy features will be next Thursday, July 6th."

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for June 27, 2006 covers a new version of Parsix, a Debian Query Language, Priorities of Alternatives, Improving Debian's Publicity, Tracking Critical Bugs, Separating shared Libraries and Executables, Debian in Cuba, Automatic Loading of Kernel Modules, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for June 26, 2006 looks at a call for release testers, a call for x86 arch testers and developers, ALSA information, Java upgrades and more.

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter - Issue #4

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter covers the Paris Developer Summit in review, Matthew East interviewed on "Lug Radio", GNOME 2.15.2 now in Edgy, Feature Of The Week - Pattern Matching in Nautilus, a preview of what is coming next week, and much more.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 157

The DistroWatch Weekly for June 26, 2006 is out. "This week's issue features a first look review of Xandros Desktop 4, a new version of the commercial desktop distribution released last week. Is it worth the asking price? As always, it depends... In the news section we'll take a brief look at DrakLive, a script responsible for creating all recent builds of Mandriva One, highlight what looks like growing dissatisfaction with the state of affairs among Gentoo developers, and direct your attention to a couple of interesting links - a Creative Commons & Fedora Project competition and a desktop NetBSD guide. Finally, good news for the fans of Ruby on Rails - a new PCLinuxOS-based live CD features a complete and pre-configured Ruby on Rails development environment for the coders of database-backed web applications."

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 5: kexec-tools (add ppc64 patch), scim (update for gtk2 change of path), openmotif (fixed XmList widget size problem), kdeutils (bug fix), kdegraphics (bug fix), xen (rebase to new Xen-unstable), kernel (rebase to upstream 2.6.17.1), cscope (bug fix), shared-mime-info (bug fix), tetex (bug fixes), scim-hangul (rebuilt to fix broken upgrade path), autofs (bug fixes), mkbootdisk (fix tail command usage), ipv6calc (upgrade to 0.60.0), k3b (update to version 0.12.15), NetworkManager (update to 0.6.3), python (remove perl dependencies from python-tools), mesa (bug fixes), scim-qtimm (bug fix), xorg-x11-xtrans-devel (updates various components), libX11 (updates various components), xorg-x11-server (updates various components), xorg-x11-xdm (updates various components), xorg-x11-xfs (updates various components), xorg-x11-xinit (updates various components), xorg-x11-apps (updates various components).

Updates for Fedora Core 4: kernel (rebase to upstream 2.6.17.1), python (remove perl dependencies from python-tools), python-docs (built older version for FC4).

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rPath updates

Updates for rPath Linux 1: dovecot (add runtime requirement), conary, conary-build, conary-repository (update to Conary 1.0.21), epdb (update to Epdb 0.9.1), anaconda, anaconda-utils (bug fix), anaconda, anaconda-utils (bug fixes), bind, bind-utils (bug fix for x86_64).

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Slackware updates

Slackware has a Linux 2.6.16.22 generic kernel in testing and lots of other upgraded packages this week, according to the slackware-current changelog.

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Planning for Ubuntu Edgy: A mid-week report from the Ubuntu developer's conference (NewsForge)

Benjamin Mako Hill covers the Ubuntu summit for NewsForge. "At the time of writing, there are more than 170 identified goals under discussion at the Paris developer summit. Only a portion of these are marked as high priority, few have moved past the stage of "braindump," and only a handful have been approved. These specifications provide an idea of where Ubuntu might go in the next release. Of course, no promises are being made -- officially or unofficially."

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Distribution reviews

DSL-N: Damn Small Linux gets bigger (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Damn Small Linux - Not. "DSL-N sports a 2.6 series kernel instead of the 2.4 in DSL for better hardware support. It picked up the ATI card in my test desktop and the inexpensive USB-to-PS/2 converter on my laptop, along with the wireless hardware. It's also got a lot of "mainstream" GTK2 applications. Gaim takes over from naim for instant messaging, AbiWord replaces the Ted editor, Gnumeric spreadsheet preempts Siag, MPlayer replaces XMMS, and the CUPS printer drivers take the place of Apsfilter. The Mozilla suite takes care of your Internet browsing, email, and HTML editing needs."

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SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10

TechWorld reviews a SLED 10 beta. "I installed the beta of SLED 10 on a Fujitsu LifeBook P5010 notebook, my stock torture test for new desktop Linux distributions. The P5010's Intel-based hardware is standard enough to warrant support, yet funky enough that it throws Linux a few curves. No Linux install on this machine has ever passed with flying colours -- until now, that is."

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Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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