Smita pipes in her opinion of recent Ubuntu news.

Also, just as a reminder, the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase ends in one week, on 06 February 2009.

Keir Thomas, the author of Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference, provided some numbers on the Ubuntu News Team list:

I thought I’d provide a quick update on the book.

Since the website went live about 48 hours ago, the PDF Edition has been downloaded over 100,000 times. This makes it the world’s most widely-read Ubuntu book (at least according to Nielsen book-sale
figures), and possibly the most widely read Linux book of all time

The best thing, however, is that I might have helped convert some people to Ubuntu. I think the book might have pushed some people over the edge — they’ve been thinking about adopting Linux, and my book gives them the reason to do so. I’ve read quite a few comments here and there to this effect. Although I wrote the book primarily to make a living, I think this is just great. I couldn’t be happier. The print edition of the book’s doing really well at Amazon.com, by the way, and is probably the best-selling Ubuntu book right now.

Thank you all for your kind comments, and support.

Cheers

Keir

Awesome job, Keir!

Ubuntu Developer News Issue #1 has been released. Topics include:

• Colin Watson elected to the Technical Board
• Package bug reporting guidelines in launchpad
• Testing Days
• New D-Bus Uploaded
• Launchpadlib support in ubuntu-dev-tools
• The removal of /dev/.static/dev
• udevadm, and why you should stop what you’re doing
• Developer changes

To find out more about the Ubuntu Developer News, see the wiki.

Thanks to James Westby for pushing this through.

In this episode #18:

• Of course the Dell and college student story
• Ubuntu hard drive “killer” bug gets fixed
• Differences between Ubuntu and Debian users
• An interview with Jorge Castro

Thanks to Jorge for taking the time to do this. He covers a lot of areas, like the Global Bug Jam, Ubuntu and social networking, and Ubuntu and Debian getting along.

I will point out the video and audio for Jorge’s interview doesn’t sync up well at all. We recorded the interview with Skype, its kinda surprising how bad the tools are for recording video with it. We promise to do better next time!

We dent and tweet out when we are about to stream live. If you want to know when that happens, follow http://twitter.com/ubuntupodcast or http://identi.ca/ubuntupodcast.

We recorded a video interview with Jorge Castro tonight, discussing the Global Bug Jam, upstream relations, Ubuntu and social networking, and much more. Hopefully we’ll have it up in a couple of days.

To tide  you over, Smita, Dan Trevino’s better half, gives us a quick roundup of recent news.

Thanks to Dan for all the hard work he put into the Florida Team. Congrats to Chris Crisafulli for taking over Dan’s  position as head of the Florida LoCo team.

Some topics discussed on episode #17:

• NY Times covers Ubuntu
• Ubuntu wins awards from Linux Format Magazine
• EXT4 in Ubuntu 9.04
• New ARM netbooks with Ubuntu
• Interviewing Jorge Castro next week
• etc, etc, etc

As usual, thanks to all the folks who stopped by the Ustream.TV live feed. We dent and tweet out when we are about to stream live. If you want to know when that happens, follow http://twitter.com/ubuntupodcast or http://identi.ca/ubuntupodcast.

Ubuntu Forums wins 2008 Best Support Resource from Linux Format Magazine (beating out Google).

NY Times: A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows - Cool article in the business section. Basically, covering Ubuntu, OSS, and Mark.

Paul Frields announced it.

Obviously, we have to do the Sparta movie scene here:

THIS. IS. FEDORA. AAAHHHHH!

The name was suggested as a reference to the US Civil War ship, but the Sparta angle is much more entertaining. Like Keith Kuslak suggested on Twitter, hopefully we will see some interesting YouTube videos come out of this.

Pretty cool choice by the Fedora community.

That happens to be our own Craig Eddy posing!

Audio files are coming soon.

Some topics discussed on episode #16:

• Interviewing Jorge Castro in a couple of weeks, Global Bug Jam
• Notifications in 9.04
• LoCos on TV
• Ubuntu Privacy Remix
• Tabbed Browsing in Nautilus
• etc, etc, etc

As usual, thanks to all the folks who stopped by the Ustream.TV live feed. We dent and tweet out when we are about to stream live. If you want to know when that happens, follow http://twitter.com/ubuntupodcast or http://identi.ca/ubuntupodcast.

Digg It!

These are some notes from the December 2008 Team Reports:

• The IRC Council has three new members.
• Corporate blogs can now be syndicated to the planet, as long as they follow the guidelines.
• Considerable work has been done on the “Growing the Xubuntu Community” spec.
• The Mali LoCo is working with the French Team to share resources.
• Alan Pope will be sending a hard drive with all the repositories to the Mali LoCo.
• Tunisian LoCo will be attending the 4th FOSS Tunisia
• New York LoCo elected a new VP and treasurer
• Pennsylvania LoCo is continuing work on NTR Dual Boot Re-Image Project