Rebel Zero

It’s that time of the year again to get registered for Ohio Linux Fest.

It runs from Friday, September 10 through Sunday, September 12. Three levels of registration are available:

• Enthusiast which is free
• Supporter for $65 which includes lunch on Saturday and a free t-shirt
• Professional for $350 which gives you access to OFLU classes on Friday, lunch on Friday and Saturday, and a free t-shirt.

There are presentations all day on Friday and Saturday given by many notable people within the Linux community. Mackenzie Morgan, Bryen Yunashko, Amber Graner, Jordan Keyes, and Tarus Balog to name a few.

Keynotes will be delivered by:

• John “maddog” Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, on Friday evening.
• Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, on Saturday morning.
• Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, creator of the open source OGG Vorbis audio format and founder of the Xiph.org Foundation, will be giving the closing keynote on Saturday evening.

There are also a ton of sponsors, including Google, HP, IBM, and Linux in the Ham Shack, with booths and tables for most of them in the Expo.

Special rates for rooms at Drury Inn and Suites are available, as well as rooms at the Red Roof Inn for those that need a place to shack up for the night.

More detailed information is available at the Ohio Linux Fest website. Space is limited so register as soon as you can.

Personally, I haven’t been too excited with the Maverick Meerkat release cycle. It seems more of an enhancement to the Ubuntu stack rather than the progressive development usually seen out of Canonical. The one big exception to this is the new Ubuntu Unity interface for Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.10. Just check out Ubuntu Ads video of it below.
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Lucid Lynx, which has the distinction of being an LTS (Long Term Support) release, has reached its first milestone with the first of four point releases, 10.04.1, on August 17 with plenty of bug fixes.
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Mark Shuttleworth continues his tradition of naming each subsequent release of Ubuntu following along the English alphabet. After Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat is finished, work will begin on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

“So the Narwhal, as the closest thing to a real live unicorn, is an auspicious figurehead as we lay down the fabric from which dreams will be woven.”

As we welcome the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx, we say farewell to 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

Intrepid was the first release to include the Ubuntu Live USB creator. Guest sessions were also introduced to provide a temporary user account with restricted privileges with the idea that one could lend a computer to a friend or colleague for simple tasks like a quick email check. Encrypted private directories with the use of the ecryptfs package provided users with an alternative to the drawbacks inherit to the optional full-partition encryption using LVM and LUKS.

Intrepid did all of this and more using Gnome 2.24 and the Linux 2.6.27 kernel. As much as Intrepid forged ahead, it has finally reached the end of its 18 month life cycle. Users will be encouraged to upgrade their Intrepid installations to at least 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to continue receiving security updates and critical bug fixes.

I’m a little late in joining the flood of announcements regarding the official release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx. I spent release day working in the morning and spending most of the evening helping my Mom purchase a new car. She absolutely loves it, by the way.

I am currently in the process of downloading all of the CD isos through the use of the torrents. Those will be seeded out over the next few months, probably until the first point release, 10.04.1, which we should see in July. I also have 5-packs of Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Kubuntu Desktop CDs on order through Canonical that I hope to have in a week or so.

You can visit the “How to get Ubuntu” section of Ubuntu’s website which lists all of the available ways to get a copy of your own. The fastest way of course is to download a copy which can be burned to a CD or made into a bootable USB drive. You can also order your own CDs like I have. If all else fails, you can request a CD to be sent to you which can take up to six weeks to arrive.

Another option that is not so well known is to get in contact with one of Ubuntu’s many LoCo teams scattered around the globe and request a CD from them. They usually get a number of CDs to help spread the news about Ubuntu. The United States has plenty of state/region based teams to cover almost every state. Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Australia (sorry, no Antarctica, yet) all have country based teams. The Loco Team List provides all of the contact information for each team and whether or not they provide any local support.

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From the dmsetup changelog, Scott James Remnant adds the following:

Version 2.02.54-1ubuntu4:

* Some idiot thought it’d be a good idea if device mapper didn’t respond
to “add” events, like those during boot. Take their change out back
and shoot it in the head. LP: #561390.

Tell it like it is, Scott.

There was a regression that was introduced with the update of Thunderbird to 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 that prevented the application from starting. Chris Coulson provided a description and a manual fix for those affected by it to the Ubuntu Developers list which is quoted below:

Some people have experienced a problem with Thunderbird failing to start after upgrading to 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 (see [1]). An updated version which fixes this bug has been uploaded already and the affected binaries removed from the archive. If you have already updated to the affected version and you are experiencing this problem, then you will need to recover manually in order to use Thunderbird again.

The issue is that under certain conditions, the thunderbird wrapper script replaces your profile with a recursive symlink. If you are running the affected version and thunderbird no longer starts, please open a terminal and run “ls -ld ~/.*thunderbird*”. If you see output similar to the following, then you are affected by this bug and will need to proceed with the instructions following.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.mozilla-thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
drwx—— 3 chr1s chr1s 4096 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird.upstream

To recover from this, you need to:
1) Delete the recursive symlink (~/.thunderbird) by running “rm ~/.thunderbird”.
***Only do this if you see the output above, else you could be deleting your profile. If you are unsure, then rename the file instead***
2) Move ~/.thunderbird.upstream to ~/.thunderbird by running “mv ~/.thunderbird.upstream ~/.thunderbird”

Once you have done this, you will be able to open Thunderbird again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards
Chris

[1] – https://launchpad.net/bugs/563893

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx is now at Beta 2 and we are only three short weeks away until the final result.

Video courtesy of Paolo Sammicheli & Leo Iannacone