Ubuntu Tutorials

Well today was a very eventful day and I’m just now getting back home and prepping to get to bed.  Of course part of my winding down ritual is posting some contents on the blog (particular during this conference–I need some kind of expression medium to make sense of everything!)

All in all it was a very good day.  Met some people that I had not met IRL and enjoyed some good company.  Thanks to everyone that came by to mention how much they enjoy this blog.  I really appreciate it and it makes me want to keep going.  Sometimes I wonder if anyone is listening

Thanks to everyone who came out to our US Teams BoF for the evening.  A good discussion on the building, framework and resources available for localized support throughout the US.  We still have states in need of teams.  Any and all volunteers to join this project are welcome.

I’m excited to see some more great presentations tomorrow.  I would say that it’s information overload, but you can never get too much Ubuntu!  I can’t anyway.

I had better get to bed so I can keep going for another day tomorrow as well.  If any of the readers are attending OSCON perhaps come say hello.  Enjoy the rest of the conference everyone.  I’m sure I’ll have more to post after I have some time to take it all in, organize my notes.. and after I catch up on some sleep!

Quick reminder for any of you Ubuntu Live attendees following the planet or my rss.  Please come see us tonite at 8:00pm – 9:00pm in c122.  I’d like to talk briefly about the status of the US Teams Project, get feedback and tell all of you how you can get involved.  …plus it’s a great way to meet some other community members from around the country.

Hope to see you there!

I thought I’d share some of the quick news so far from the Ubuntu Live conference.  From what I can gather there are not a lot of us from the community side here (if you are, please come find us!)  There are a few key points that I thought I’d share with the rest of you from this mornings keynotes.

Mark Shuttleworth spoke first and gave us what seemed to be an Ubuntu State of the Union address and a bit of a future roadmap.  Current estimates put Ubuntu user base between six and twelve million (hard to measure, of course).  It is also currently being used in two-hundred countries and growing.  I am surprisingly not surprised at these numbers.  Ubuntu’s popularity is soaring and it only looks like its going up!

Ubuntu 8.04 (Gutsy +1) will be the next LTS release and LTS will be scheduled for every two years.  Just as the 6 month cycle is expected and adhered to (with the exception of Dapper), the LTS cycle will be adhered to as well.  This will put is with LTS at 6.06.1, 8.04, 10.04, etc.

There is more to catch up on but I better run now.. you’ll hear more from me later.

I’ll admit I waited until the last minute to get this one in, but a BoF (birds of a feather) I submitted on behalf of the US Teams Project was approved for Ubuntu Live. Anyone that is a part of an Ubuntu LoCo, would like to be part of an Ubuntu LoCo or would like to help start an Ubuntu LoCo come see us!

US Teams Project, scheduled for Sunday, July 22 from 8:00-9:00pm in Room C122.

Yes, that is tomorrow, after the regular presentation and what-not, we’ll be in Room C122 from 8:00pm to 9:00pm.  All things LoCo are welcome and invited!

Comment or email me with questions, etc.

I have been thinking lately about how much I’ve gained from the use of all the free software on my machine. All the tools I use daily, that someone took the time to sit down and code and release under a Free Software license. When I write little scripts and release those I feel like I’m contributing a little bit back to the community, but I doubt I could ever repay everything I’ve used. Even if I wrote a hundred applications and contributed them all back I think I’d still be in debt to the free software community as a whole.

For this reason I have decided to donate a percentage of this sites income back to a Free Software / Open Source project each month. The AdSense on this site has given me added incentive to continue blogging, and now I feel like I have a responsibility to give back where I am able.

What does this mean for the site?

It doesn’t mean much really. It means that AdSense will continue to be a part of this site, just like it always has. It means ads may appear in the RSS feed after a time as well. I do promise, however, that I will never go beyond text-based ads.

How can I help?

If you would like to help in donating to a Free Software project along with me you have two options.

First, you can make sure that you don’t block the text-based ads on this blog or RSS, or occasionally visit a link. If you use AdBlock or AdBlock Plus it is simple to selectively allow ads on a particular site. Just by your viewing the ad a small bit of revenue is generated, which can be donated to a Free Software Project.

Second you can donate directly to a project of your choice. See the list below for projects that I have collected so far.

I will choose a project from the below list each month and post which project and the donated amount on the site. I feel that is the responsible thing to do considering each of you is helping with the donation amount as you visit the site. You should know what is being done with it.

For the month of July 2007 I will donate 25%. This number may go up based on the amount generated.

The Free Software Donation List (feel free to comment with additions)

Freenode (IRC)

OpenOffice

Gnome

KDE

Ubuntu

Debian

FreeBSD

Fedora

Mozilla

FSF (Free Software Foundation)

OSI (Open Source Initiative)

VIM

Gimp

Inkscape

OpenSSH

Python

Well you asked for it. Last week I did the first vim tip of the week and it looks like you all want more. I got another goodie today that you might enjoy. How many of you know what SHIFT-K does in command mode? No, don’t go look it up. Do you know right now? If not keep reading. If so, I’m impressed.

Instead of just telling you what it does I want you to give it a try for yourself (no better way to learn than to do, right?). Follow the below instructions and see if you can figure out what it does. First person to figure it out and comment with the answer wins!

Ready, Set, Go!

Open up a new file with vim:

vim file1

switch to insert mode (i,I,a,A,o,O, etc).

type a few linux commands into a new line (any command you want):

vim awk man aptitude

switch back to command mode (esc)

put your cursor on any of the commands and press SHIFT-K.

Pretty slick, particularly when trying to decipher shell scripts if you’re unfamiliar with the commands, or reading documentation that refers to related apps!

…so, what does it do? Enjoy.. and be back next week for another tip! Thanks Dax for pointing this out to me.

I’m sitting in the Las Vegas airport right now waiting for my connection to Portland for Ubuntu Live.  I’m stoked man–st0k3d even!  I, of course, plan to blog the hell out of this conference, but before I get that far I wanted to invite anyone that wants to meet up, go out, hang out, hack, and otherwise cause geek-havoc to let me know.  I’m up for it all and I’ll be there all week.  Hit my contact page and we’ll line something up.

See you Sunday!

For any of you running the Thunderbird 2.x series, perhaps based on my tutorial on manually installing the latest Thunderbird, there has been a security patch released today.  Below are instructions on upgrading manually, and a quick outline of some of the major security fixes.

Upgrading

Download Thunderbird (Save as...)

sudo tar -C /opt -zxvf ~/Desktop/thunderbird-*

One of the security patches looks specific to Windows, but the other could be Linux related.  They are outlined below:

MFSA 2007-23 Remote code execution by launching Firefox from Internet Explorer

MFSA 2007-18 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption

Note: manually installing Thunderbird or any other application not from the official Ubuntu repository limits the level of support that can be received from the community.  Please keep this in mind or know what you are doing.

I have recently decided that it is time for a redesign on this site.  We’ve been using this theme for quite some time now–it’s time for a change.  The only problem is that I don’t want to try and take it on.  I’m no good with web design anymore.

Would anyone be interested in volunteering a design?  I would be really interested in perhaps a design contest that the community can vote on.  I’ll definitely give a static link back to the winning designer for publicity.

If you are interested in trying your hand at a redesign for Ubuntu Tutorials (including format, logo(?), etc) please use the contact page to let me know.  I’ll give you the details of my few basic requirements.   Thank you.

Welcome to Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3, which will in time become Ubuntu 7.10.

Pre-releases of Gutsy are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, or even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Tribe 3 is the third in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Gutsy development cycle. The Tribe images are known to be reasonably free of show-stopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Gutsy. You can download it here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/gutsy/tribe-3/ (Ubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/gutsy/tribe-3/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/gutsy/tribe-3/ (Edubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/gutsy/tribe-3/ (Xubuntu)

See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors for a list of mirrors.

Another set of new features landed in Tribe 3, and are ready for large-scale testing. Please refer to the following web pages for details:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/tribe3 (Ubuntu)
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/GutsyGibbon/Tribe3/Kubuntu (Kubuntu)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GutsyGibbon/Tribe3/Xubuntu (Xubuntu)

This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. Among these are the following (so you don’t need to bother reporting these if you encounter them):

* The desktop CD hangs on a lot of systems, especially slower ones with little RAM. Sometimes it is just slow, sometimes it will hang eternally. If you experience this and waiting a bit longer does
not help, try to restart the computer and the live CD. If that still does not help, please use the alternate CD.
(https://launchpad.net/bugs/126964)

* On Edubuntu server installs, the “Building LTSP root” step takes a very long time (in the order of 15 minutes) without visible progress. It will eventually finish, though.
(https://launchpad.net/bugs/121547)

If the graphical system does not come up or is very slow, please file a bug against compiz:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+filebug

Please include a copy of the files ~/.xsession-errors and /var/log/Xorg.0.log, and the output of glxinfo and xdpyinfo.

If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop Gutsy, have a look at the gutsy-changes mailing list:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/gutsy-changes

Please be aware that this list usually has several dozen mails every day.

We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list if you’re interested in following Ubuntu development. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a month) carrying announcements of
approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other interesting events.

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

Bug reports should go to the Ubuntu bug tracker:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu

Enjoy,

The Ubuntu Development Team
http://www.ubuntu.com