Ubuntu Developer Week

August 29, 2009 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

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Next week, August 31 through September 4, is Ubuntu Developer Week. If you’ve always wanted to help out with an open source project but didn’t know how to get into it, this is your chance. The week consists of 25 one-hour sessions held interactively through IRC and led by some of the best of the Ubuntu development team. Participate in as many or as few sessions as you want. Check out the Ubuntu Developer Week page or their fancy brochure (PDF) for more information.

Want to see what it’s all about before committing to a live session? You can view the IRC logs from the January sessions. In addition to ‘Getting Started’, you may find the ‘Packaging 101’ and ‘Launchpad Bug Tracking’ session notes interesting.

Ubuntu Repository Crash-course

August 27, 2009 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2542951&dest=-1]

[Alan] has just posted an Ubuntu screencast that will take you through a crash course in the Ubuntu repositories. If you are new to Ubuntu this will give you a much better grasp on how software repositories are handled.

The different types of updates are discussed: Security updates fix bugs that cause a system vulnerability. Updates (generic) are for bug fixes that aren’t a security threat. Proposed updates are for testing before an update hits the ‘updates’ section. Finally, backports are updates from a newer version that have been ‘backported‘ so systems running older versions of Ubuntu can have the benefit of newer features and fixed bugs.

He also provides some tips on selecting package sources (main, universe, restricted, and multiverse), and choosing the fastest mirror to reduce download times. This screencast is just part one and we hope to see 3rd party repositories, personal package archives, and repository caching covered in future installments.

Fedora Rawhide Nightly Builds

August 27, 2009 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

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The devs over at the Fedora Project are hard at work on the development version: Rawhide. They’ve just setup automated nightly builds of the liveCD which can easily be downloaded and tested on a CD, DVD, USB drive, virtual machine, or separate partition.

Rawhide will be released as Fedora 12 upon completion. With this version you have a choice of Gnome 2.28 or KDE 4.3 for your desktop. There is also improved power management, expanded support for mobile broadband, easy bug reporting, and many more new or improved features. So roll up your sleeves, download last night’s build, and help test some open source software.

[via Download Squad]