Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #251 for the week January 30 – February 5, 2012, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released!
• Developer Week: Summaries Days 1-3
• The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Needs You!
• Ubuntu 12.04 Development update
• Ubuntu Stats
• LoCo News
• Launchpad News
• Canonical Design Team: Multi-Monitor Update and Greeter Prototype
• Didier Roche: Unity 5.2 is now released!
• Paul Tagliamonte: Mapping the Ubuntu Community
• With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform
• You Don’t Have To Quit Ubuntu!
• Canonical Promotes Standard Ubuntu Branding with New Website
• Other Articles of Interest
• Weekly Official Ubuntu Flavors Team Meetings
• Upcoming Meetings and Events
• Updates and Security
• And much much more

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• Elizabeth Krumbach
• Chris Druif
• Vikram Dhillon
• Liraz Siri
• And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

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

Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the Precise development cycle.

This is the first Ubuntu milestone release to include images for the armhf architecture, for the ARM CPUs using the hard-float ABI.

New packages showing up for the first time include:

• Linux Kernel 3.2.2 (3.2.0-12.21)
• Upstart 1.4
• Unity 5.0
• LibreOffice 3.5 beta 2

You can download Alpha 2 images here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server)

Additional images are also available at:

http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu Cloud Server)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu Core)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/precise/ (Ubuntu Netboot)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Edubuntu DVD)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Lubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Mythbuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/precise/alpha-2/ (Xubuntu)

Alpha 2 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. For a more detailed description of the changes in the Alpha 2 release and the known bugs (which can save you the effort of reporting a duplicate bug, or help you find proven workarounds), please see:

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

If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop 12.04, we suggest that you subscribe initially to the ubuntu-devel-announce list. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other interesting events.

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

Originally sent to the ubuntu-release mailing list by Kate Stewart on Thu Feb 2 20:27:28 UTC 2012

It is the week of Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 which is to be released in just a few hours. Everybody has been getting their good work into Ubuntu, so it is a great opportunity for everyone to go check it out and test it. If you are excited by 12.04, just check out our testing pages and report back your results. The earlier we get them, the better!

Currently there is also a test rebuild of the whole archive going on, which will hopefully identify all the build errors early enough. In two weeks time Feature Freeze will be reached, at which point we stop introducing new features, packages, and APIs, and concentrate on fixing bugs in the development release.

Jeremy Bicha, a great contributor to the Desktop team, wrote up a nice explanation of how the components of the Ubuntu Desktop were chosen this cycle. It shows how much consideration goes into putting the release together and how coordination between Ubuntu and its upstreams is important.

Events

It is Ubuntu Developer Week, the event for getting involved, learning more, peeking behind the scences, and learning more from experience developers. Day 1 and Day 2 have already passed, but if you couldn’t make it to the sessions, read the following summaries to find out what happened. They contain links to the logs of the sessions.

• Summary day 1.
• Summary day 2.

Ubuntu Developer Week will only still be today, Thursday 2nd February 2012.

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

• There’s Merges that need to be done (main, restricted, universe, multiverse).
• Also is the Ubuntu Mozilla team looking for help, so if you’re excited about Mozilla and what’s happening there, join IRC, talk to the guys on #ubuntu-mozillateam on irc.freenode.net.
• And then there’s Security bugs you can take a look at, the team is a friendly bunch and they’re incredibly helpful in getting your patch reviewed.
• There are bitesize bugs.

<if teams ask us to add more stuff to this list, we’re of course happy to do it>

First timers!

We had two new contributors to Ubuntu who got their first upload in: Jean-Michel Vourgere and Sébastien Ramage. Great work! Both helped keeping Debian and Ubuntu in sync and good fixes into Ubuntu.

New contributor: Simon Steinbeiß

Benjamin Kerensa talked to Simon Steinbeiß, here’s what he has to say:

How did you get involved?
I got involved in Ubuntu by starting to use Xubuntu and then hanging out in its IRC channels. I engaged in discussions about Xubuntu’s artwork and default application set. After a while I started bringing in proposals and my own ideas. The developer team was really helpful and that’s how I got involved in the Xubuntu artwork team.

What was your experience like?
Well generally positive. Obviously there are always compromises to be made. When doing a gtk-theme for yourself or a panel-layout you apply different criteria then when doing it for an unkown amount of anonymous users. But I’d say it’s a rewarding job and the reviews of Xubuntu’s artwork have been pretty good since I’ve been involved (*brag* )

What did you like most about it?
The fact that there was a good community and everyone wanted to make Xubuntu better. I have “converted” quite a few friends of mine who formerly used Windows, so I got personally interested in making Xubuntu better. It seemed easier to improve things in Xubuntu itself than going around after each release and fixing things for my all my friends I also liked the fact that my artwork could be seen and used by so many people, it’s always great for an artist to have such a wide audience.

Is there anything that should have been easier? What do you recommend to other contributors who think about starting to get involved?
That is difficult to tell. I have the feeling that with many open-source or community-driven projects it’s about building relationships to people initially and that depends on the structure of the team you want to be a part of. If it’s a good team with good leadership it obviously might be easier to get involved. But it also depends on other factors like your personal motivation – no-one should be trusted with important tasks right from the start, so hanging in there for a bit is a necessary step to build trust.

What do you do in your other spare time?
I’m currently doing a PhD in the humanities. I finished my MAs in Philosophy and Religious Studies (no, not Theology!) and I’m currently conducting research projects in both fields at my university.

Get Involved

1. Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
2. Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
3. Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

• Help out with fixing packages that don’t build anymore.
• Help out with security bugs.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

• Be interactive and reach us most immediately: talk to us in #ubuntu-motu on irc.freenode.net.
• Follow mailing lists and get involved in the discussions: ubuntu-devel-announce (announce only, low traffic), ubuntu-devel (high-level discussions), ubuntu-devel-discuss (fairly general developer discussions).
• Stay up to date and follow the ubuntudev account on Facebook, Google+, Identi.ca or Twitter.