Howdy lazywebbers!  I am currently in the market for purchasing a decent, relatively inexpensive portable music player. These are just some of my preferences for such a device:

• Must work with Linux of course
• Must support ogg vorbis either natively or by using rockbox
• Must be small, something around the size of the iPod Shuffle or a tad bit larger
• I don’t want to pay a lot for it, and I know you typically get what you pay for, but I will be using this while doing some extreme workouts and biking events.

I know if it is out there, you all will know. I went to a couple of stores today and none of them jumped out at me except for the Sansa Clip, which is nice and I heard it support ogg with a new firmware upgrade, plus it has FM radio on it. If any of you have this and it works well, let me know, as that might be the one I am looking for.

Yes, I’m going to GUADEC this year, I’m very happy about it and I hope to see a lot of friends there, ok I’ve seen a couple of them during the last Ubuntu Developer Summit at Prague but it’s always great to get together more often to talk, discuss and have a lot of fun, see you guys there!.

In my last post, I talked about the migration of a rural community in northern Nicaragua to Ubuntu Linux.

After a year’s hard work, one of the biggest government offices has begun to migrate their systems from proprietary software to FOSS alternatives.

There are two interesting projects that involves Ubuntu there. The first one being the digitalization of thousands of public records using Ubuntu Hardy and XSane. There are 15 computers devoted exclusively to this task.

The other project involves 12 cashier booths with Ubuntu and a custom-made software for receiving and making payments.

In addition, as a first phase of the Migration Project, about 50 desktop computers are being migrated to Ubuntu right now in different departments.

The coolest thing about all this, is that the government office asked us for help, and as a consequence, three of our team members are now full-time employees, giving Ubuntu support to their users.

It’s awesome to work in the open source community, but it totally rocks when you get paid for it!

More pictures here.

Funny foto provided by Enrico Ronconi from Ubuntu Italian Community

Yeah Enrico is a NERD!

Those who have followed our interviews for a while will recall that we like to highlight people from many different backgrounds, levels of technical proficiency, and experience with Linux. Why? Because this gives a real cross section of one of the more beautiful aspects of the Ubuntu community–we are a well-rounded and diverse bunch with perspectives and backgrounds that are not as common in other Linux communities as a result of the focus on accessibility to technology that has always been at the forefront of the Ubuntu philosophy of Linux for Human Beings.

Okay, it is time for our first interview victim, *ahem* I mean volunteer, in this project’s new location. Today we highlight forestpixie, a man who was originally hesitant to be interviewed because he didn’t feel he had an adequate geek status, and who I felt should be included for just that reason. Kev represents one of the many sorts of people whom we welcome in the Ubuntu Forums, and in the larger Ubuntu community; people who want their computers to “just work” securely, easily, and well. Enjoy!

1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real” life — name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

Hi, my name is Kev, I’m a 45 year old atheist and divorced unfortunately; I have 3 children, 2 of who are quite grown and have flown the nest – the other is 8 and lives with me, so I am one of the ubiquitous UK single parents. At the moment I am trying very hard to get back into the workplace after 4 years out – although I’m trying to change profession as well. I apprenticed straight out of school as an aircraft wireman and over the next 20 years I worked in similar fields ending up at a small company making harnesses for some quite diverse customers – from small personal hovercraft to sports cars.

I live in the south of England close to the New Forest, which is a forest in the King’s hunting ground sense. It has very little in the way of trees and is in fact for the most part lowland heath – some of the UK’s 20% of the global lowland heath environment left.

About 8 years ago I was made redundant, again, but rather than look for work I took the chance to further my education, as I’d not been able to do so when I left school. So I enrolled in a degree course at a local university and did Heritage Conservation, using my knowledge of the area I live in when it came to write my dissertation, one of my local Wildlife Trusts provided me with an area to work in and they have my research on restoring heathland. Since then I have tried to keep my mind active with various courses at my local college while my youngest was growing up, now she is old enough for me to carry on with the rest of my life.

My only real hobby at the moment is playing around with the 3 ‘buntus and trying to learn more about it.

2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

I’ve never got into programming any computers, when Commodores and the like appeared in the early 80’s I was not interested in them, so I’ve only ever used computers as tools. Though I think I might start to look at programming, just to see what it’s about really.

Computers came quite late into my life, I suppose I first used computers when I started my apprenticeship  – we used  tape run DITMCO testing equipment to emulate the rest of the aircraft wiring. Once I left there I had little to do with computers until a company I was working for started to use a DOS based production software, it wasn’t until the mid 90’s that I bothered at all at home – although the first one I did have I built myself, since then I’ve become  a bit more involved as I have ended up being maintenance for family and friends.

I remember when I started to look at Linux, in fact one of the first I looked at was Dapper Drake, at the same I got  Debian, Gentoo (not knowing ) and Fedora discs through a website somewhere – at the time I was using a USB modem – I tried, I really tried, probably not for long enough though,  then gave up. Then I downloaded Topologilinux to run inside windows, I guess that maybe came before wubi – my word that was fun, anyway I really couldn’t get my head round the commands needed to get the modem to run and I wasn’t too sure about changing the firmware, so I left it all alone for another day.

Another day came when I changed to a router and I tried the Dapper cd again, it connected to the net without any problem, so I downloaded Feisty from windows and dual booted for a while before I finally got rid of windows completely.

The next step will probably be to look at different distros, maybe some of the ‘harder’ ones – just to see if the grass really is greener…

3. When did you become involved in the forums? What’s your role there?

I became involved in the forum on the first day that I installed Feisty – I needed a question answering after I installed it and found the answer quite quickly with a search, shortly after followed my first threads – one a real question, the second on how to bump, it was the first time I’d used a forum and really couldn’t work that out.

I have no formal role on the forum, in common with most of the users there, but I do visit very regularly during the day and when I can help I do so; I haven’t yet got the knowledge to deal with the more exotic problems so reading the replies on these is good for me as well. Of course following other peoples problems should enhance your own understanding – although nothing beats having a broken system which needs to be fixed as a learning tool.

4. Are you an Ubuntu member? If so, how do you contribute? If not, do you plan on becoming one?

No I’m not and don’t plan to become one, at least not in the foreseeable future.

5. What distros do you regularly use? What software? What’s your favorite application? Your least favorite?

Are all the *buntu’s different distros? I regularly use Ubuntu as I prefer it to the others, I do have Kubuntu and Xubuntu installed as virtual machines which I use to play with both for me and to use when I’m trying to help others. I will be installing Intrepid on a spare partition in the next week or so, to look at that and maybe get a bit more involved.

The software I use most are music players – which is currently a bit of a bugbear for me – Pulseaudio seems to have thrown Amarok a bit and it pops and crackles more than a bowl of cereal –so I’m using others – and Exaile, Banshee don’t like starting from where playlists were stopped. At the moment I’m using Audacious which does what it says on the box without any extra noise thrown in

OpenOffice wasn’t new to me as I was using it long before I finally turned up at the door here – at the moment I have OO2 installed but have been using the OO3 beta for a couple of months now with no hiccups. Firefox is the same, I used it in windows – although I have to say it hasn’t been a bed of roses since Hardy and I’ve now gone to Opera for the time being, perhaps I’ll not bother with it again.

I don’t have a favourite application as such – although the music starts in the morning and goes off at night – computers and software are just tools to me, similarly I don’t have a least favourite application – although Character Map probably comes quite close.

6. What’s your fondest memory from the forums, or from Ubuntu overall? What’s your worst?

Other than the first helpful reply I received and first thanks I got for my help I think that my fondest and worst memory are inextricably linked – and those who know me will have a pretty good idea what is coming next

In June I came across a thread where a user had sadly died and his widow was trying to get his account dealt with as per his last wishes, as it had no reply I replied and also reported it so that it would be moved and dealt with by those who can. One staff member moved it, then an admin closed the users account, and mine got caught up accidentally. I got logged of and couldn’t log back in – over the next 30 minutes I ended up with another 3 accounts trying to get to the bottom of what had happened as I kept not being able to log them in either – a catalogue of errors on my part that was.

Eventually, after a few days, I was told by matthew that they couldn’t bring back my old account -  sorry and all that , so I’d now lost all my beans and my thanks and was left with a start date of June 2008, very few beans as most of the posts had been in the Forum Feedback forum, no custom title and I was now forestpixie2 and okthinkigivingup depending on my mood, forestpixie3 had the wrong e-mail set so I couldn’t get at the account

So I was left not being able to access any of my old posts or threads which was a bit uncool to say the least.

Matthew did change my user back to forestpixie as a name – he also offered to put my beans back, but as they would revert to the ‘real’ new account count on maintenance it did seem a bit pointless, he gave me the custom title option back – so that’s good, and most importantly changed my start date to 2007 again. It was quite amusing really, one day people read my solutions as I had a whole bunch of beans ( even though they are meaningless) and had been around for a while, the next day with a start date of June 2008 and less than 50 beans I was roundly ignored.

But I’m me again - just plain old forestpixie – still with only a few beans, but I got my title and start date and as a bonus I don’t have a bean image on my user and I haven’t seen anyone on the forum like that !

So all in all it was quite good fun at the time and accidents do happen, if they didn’t they would be called deliberate, it was no-ones fault and I would go through the same exercise in the same way if I needed to.

So I hope that adminX, if it was him,  doesn’t think in any way that I blame him – I really don’t, the most important thing was that the widow got her wish and for that I’m glad I reported the thread.

The support that I got from many users while I was in a state of flux was a real high point, it will always remain with me so for all of that and more – I thank you

7. What luck have you had introducing new computer users to Ubuntu?

Quite a bit, I look after probably a dozen pc’s for friends, family and acquaintances – most of them have moved over after being left with a dualboot for a while – which makes it sooo much easier now I don’t worry quite so much about spyware and malware. One of the best has to be the one who is trying to get his head around vista after Win95 – he hates vista can’t get anything done, because he can’t find anything – he never had the gradual change through Win98, 2000 and XP, he loves using Ubuntu though.

I’m not much of a one for trying to push people towards anything though and while I’m quite happy to set up dualboots for people, it’s up to them afterwards.

As I get further in time from using windows myself it gets harder to remember the answer to phone queries , although maybe that is age, so the more of them who use Ubuntu the more likely they are to get a sensible answer from me, which I guess helps their decision along a little bit.

8. What would you like to see happen with Linux in the future? with Ubuntu?

I’d like to see Linux get real access to hardware drivers from all suppliers, but I haven’t been around long enough to give a particularly insightful answer to that one.

I’d like to see Ubuntu flourish and grow generally, but I wish that the fascination with eye candy could be put behind the need to get more widespread hardware support; luckily I’ve not needed to try for wireless – but I do shudder at the thought of trying. I turn Compiz off, although I did have a little play around, so am not too bothered and like my desktop to be nice and simple as you can tell. (Screenshot here.)

9. If there was one thing you could tell all new Ubuntu users, what would it be?

How about 2 things? Firstly that there are no ogres, the odd troll floating about, but mostly that it’s a friendly place where people will try their hardest to help, especially if you’ve tried to search for a solution yourself. Secondly – that ‘help I’m a noob’  is not very useful as a thread title

Yesterday, my friend Marc had to visit a court in Barcelona, after being accussed for an electoral penalty.

Marc has always had a strong Catalan sentiment, and fights for the independence of his country from the French and Spanish states in as many ways he finds convenient. In this direction, he's been involved in countless activities promoting independence, in the Internet and in the streets.

For now, he has to deal with living in the Spanish state, and recently this became a legal problem. Spain held parlamentary elections in March, and Marc was appointed to serve at one of the polling stations in Barcelona. Believing he had nothing to do with an election process to elect the Spanish parliament, he conciously refused to take his seat during that Sunday, infringing the Spanish electoral law.

He presented his allegations to the officer, and refused to declare anything else. He now faces a fine ranging from 180 to 1800€ or community work (which he would, again, object to perform). The officer told him that he's apparently the first Catalan to object like this, so what will happen next (besides he'll have to sit in court and see how it goes) is unprecedented.

While Marc and I don't share many of our political views, I admire his dedication and his solid defence of his ideals. If I had been called to serve in a polling station last March, I would most probably have had my own personal debate on what to do, but suspect I would have ended going there to avoid creating these kind of situations, and would have had to participate in a process that I consider broken, unfair and undemocratic. I admire and support Marc for being stubborn enough to get this far.

His case has had quite some echo in the Catalan blogsphere and some Catalan media like VilaWeb. Some people have started a campaign to collect money to help Marc pay the fine. The response so far has been surprisingly positive.

Marc, molta sort i una abraçada!

Just wanted to give a quick update on Severed Fifth and some of the work going on in the project:

• Recording is going well. The vast majority of the music is tracked, I just need to finish up vocals. Go and see studio reports 1 2 and 3 for more details. I think things are sounding pretty damn meaty right now. I can’t wait to get it out there.
• I am about to start a travelling spree for a five weeks, in which I will not be able to record vocals. As such, I plan on releasing a bunch of sneak peaks of the songs each week to show you how things are sounding.
• The Severed Fifth Street Team has kicked off, and it is great to see some representation across the world. I am excited to see how we can take the Open Source methodology and apply it to music. We have some great people on board, and I can’t wait to see what is possible. Come and join up the street team help make the new music economy happen.
• After a significant amount of time thinking about licensing, I have decided on a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license for my music. This license satisfies a bunch of the things that are important to me. I am happy for people to share the music, remix it and play with it as much as they like both commercially and non-commercially, but I felt uncomfortable with people selling the music as-is, even with attribution. The reason for this is that Severed Fifth is there to explore different methods of generating revenue, and I feel it is reasonable for an artist to have sole rights to sell their music commercially. However, I did not want to prohibit other artists taking my music, mashing it up and selling their work. This license strikes that balance perfectly.
• Speaking of licensing, I have written up the Severed Fifth Licensing Page. With the page I did not just want to make it a boring page full of legal terms - I wanted it to be a page that gives useful information about what people can actually do with the content. I would love any feedback from you about how to make the page not only useful for explaining rights and restrictions, but also inspiring people to use the content in interesting ways.

Finally, I had my first piece of Severed Fifth Merchandise come through. I ordered some high quality gloss stickers which I plan on selling on the store, but will also bring along to conferences to give some out. If you are at LugRadio Live UK 2008, GUADEC, OSCON or DebConf come and ask for one. They look like this:

Rock and roll.

Things are moving fast in the mail server area. As outlined in the mail server post one of the new feature targeted for intrepid is DKIM integration. Scott Kitterman uploaded the last bits to the intrepid archive and announced that amavisd-new has DKIM verification enabled by default. He is also providing packages for hardy in his PPA.

And this is how you can help out:

Install an intrepid or hardy test server and run this setup against a mail stream of some volume. Don’t forget to report any issue you encounter. If everything goes smoothly drop a message to Scott and the ubuntu server team - it’s always appreciated when we know that new features are working correctly.

Review the instructions from the Mail Filtering section in the Ubuntu Server Guide. If you see anything that needs to be updated create your own Ubuntu Server Guide bzr branch, update the section and submit it for review to the Documentation Team.

Scott gave more details about DKIM integration as well as testing instructions in his post to the ubuntu-server mailing list. Check it out and help shaping a rock-solid Intrepid Ibex mail server.

Today, considering it is a holiday here in the US, I figured I’d take a day off from the tutorials and ask a question of you.

All of my servers run logwatch (which will make for a great tutorial coming up soon), and I pretty regularly see something like this in the daily output:

--------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------

1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1898670412:1898670413. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1911943385:1911943386. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1922304386:1922304387. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1922444120:1922444121. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1949802160:1949802161. Repaired.

———————- Kernel End ————————-

I’m not really sure what that means, but if anyone can offer me some feedback I’d appreciate it.  So far I’ve seen conflicting answers from basic Googling.
Random Posts

• XO Laptop Specs.. for those interested
• AllTray changelog credit
• My Firefox Extension List
• Compiz-Check and EnvyNG Configuration Tips : Ubuntu 8.04
• Extended Video on the Macbook : Xrandr ftw!
• A Few Blog Updates / Responses
• How to Install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10
• Configuring AWStats on Ubuntu Server
• Server Rebuild
• Tomboy 0.5.0 Released Today (deb package available) : Ubuntu (6.10)

I just talked to a few teams who are organising the next biggest Global Hug Fest. Among them Nicolas Valcárel of the Ubuntu Perú team and Leandro Gómez of the Ubuntu Nicaragua team. They’re both very excited and in full preparation mode for the Global Bug Jam.

Here’s what Nicolas had to say about his team, the event and the preparations:

Daniel: Who are you and which LoCo do you represent?
Nicolas: I’m Nicolas Valcárcel, contributor to the server team and MOTU. I represent the Peruvian LoCo team, in which i’m part of its Council.

Daniel: How is the organisation of the Global Bug Jam in your Loco coming on?
Nicolas: Quite well, it’s not a hard event to organize, we just need some enthusiast with laptops, a table, chairs and internet, which is not hard to find, almost every restaurant meets the requirements, but we are talking with a local university to run it in there, if not, plan B is a starbucks

Daniel: When you spread the news to your Loco team members, how did they like
the idea?

Nicolas: They like it really much, since a lot of them want to participate, but they don’t know how, and it’s the perfect oportunity for new contributors to jump in with someone on their sides guiding them.

Daniel: Did you organise events like this before? What are the challenges? If somebody wanted to organise such an event in your Loco (or elsewhere) what should they try to get right?
Nicolas: We have organized a lot of events, but not like this one. We have do a lot of talks and conference events, which are quite different and in our experience to organize an event you only need to have the desire to do it and start calling, talking and pinging the people to have things up and running. Fortunately on the Peruvian LoCo team we have our Events King, who make always the events happend, Thank you Michael!!

Daniel: Are you going to blog about the event and post pictures?
Nicolas: Of course! I will try to do it while running the Bug Jam!

Daniel: Who are you and which LoCo do you represent?
Leandro: My name is Leandro Gómez (leogg) and I’m the founder and former Team Leader/Team Contact of the Ubuntu Nicaragua Team.

Daniel: How is the organisation of the Global Bug Jam in your Loco coming on?
Leandro: Great! We’re very excited and looking forward to be part of this global effort to make Ubuntu better.

Daniel: When you spread the news to your Loco team members, how did they like the idea?
Leandro: Personally, I’ve noticed that the members of our team are more aware now, and more interested in contributing with the ‘greater’ Ubuntu community. We finally reached a point when we start to contribute at a global level. For example, after the translation sprint, many members began to contribute on a regular basis with translations on LP.

Daniel: Did you organise events like this before? What are the challenges? If somebody wanted to organise such an event in your Loco (or elsewhere) what should they try to get right?
Leandro: We’ve organised almost 40 events in the last 16 months, including one packaging jam and one translation sprint. The challenge -not only with the events, but with the whole LoCo work in general- is to motivate people. If you have a highly motivated team, everything is possible. And this can only be achieved by giving the example. The team leader(s) must be the most dedicated people in the team and the one(s) who work hardest. It’s also very important to recognize the individual contributions of your team members. They must feel that their contributions are valuable, and that
they’re a making a difference with their work. But you must also encourage them to ‘push the limits’, to improve and to reach higher goals every day.

Daniel: Are you going to blog about the event and post pictures?
Leandro: Yes, of course! And maybe some live video streaming too We’re also planning to have an article published on a local newspaper a few days before the event.

Daniel: If you have your team loco and another nice picture of your Loco team’s activities to go with the interview, please attach it to your reply.

Leandro: You can find more in our photo album.

It’s nice to be able to plan ahead for something like UDS.  Jono recently announced the next developers conference for Ubuntu the week of Monday the 8th of December.

The last UDS Mountain View I was just starting a new job, my current job,  and didn’t have any vacation time or the ability to take time off.  The last summit, UDS Prague I missed due to my wife’s pregnancy and the fact it was so close to her due date.

Now I’m looking forward to attending and have already marked my calendar.

Yesterday i saw Kung Fu Panda, which i found really amazing since it’s content messages, but there it was an specific quote from Grand Master Oogway which i found really true and wonderful:

Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
But today is a gift,
and that is why it’s called the present

So, live now, be happy and don’t worry about the rest!

Well, sometimes you want to work on a new feature in your project, and while you are working on it, you see: "Hell, something is missing here...".

With "here" I mean actually in some tools or libraries you need for your project.

Happend to me, when I was starting to work on the "File new report" feature for Leonov.

What I need was some list of Projects available on Launchpad.

Anyways...the solution is: FIX IT YOURSELF ! No need to wait for others, just sit down and learn from the code already written by other contributors.

That said, I started to work on generating my own list of projects with py-lp-bugs, following the way of BlueprintList.

Much better, while you are working on something like that, when you run into problems. Now you have to ask someone with a bit more knowledge then you, so I asked Markus, my rockstar regarding py-lp-bugs. He reviewed the code and said: "ok, your code looks ok, but something is really wrong here"..and he found out, that something in the upstream code was totally buggy. He fixed that, and pushed it to py-lp-bugs/trunk.

Now it works like a charm...and I'm happy, that my little "Obstacle" is removed. (See: LP: #245398 as reference and the actual code base for this new feature to py-lp-bugs).

Anyways, the problem I have with all that:

It takes some time to remove those "obstacles" and somehow, even for opensource projects, you need to document your work, even on other projects. I sat down, and was restructering our "product backlog" page on http://wiki.leonov.tv/ and came up with this layout.

http://wiki.leonov.tv/LeonovProductBacklog

Hopefully everybody can understand the layout and the purpose of all this.

If you want to be taken seriously, you need documentation of your work. For the project maintainer and for your audience it's important to know: "Where are you with your work?" Especially for the project maintainer: "Ok, there are many red topics on this list....we definitly need more people working on our project" statement is essential.

This means: Leonov needs more people who are working on the gtk and kde side of life...

That means: Dear People, step up and work with us on this rocking project :)

Laura Cowen, Alan Pope, Dave Walker and Tony Whitmore present the ninth episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

This fun packed episode brings us:

• Discussion:
  • Efficient PC hardware review
    • We review the Wraith PC from E fficient PC. Listen in to our next episode (number 10) for a chance to win this great computer!
  • Ubuntu mobile edition confusion
  • Lugradio Live discussion
  • Drobo disk storage robot and Drobo Share
• Competition:
  • The competition from Episode 8 is still open. It will end on the 12th July. (we have extended the competition due to the last episode being late).

Listen on http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org or subscribe below:

High quality feeds

Low quality feeds

Well, the gauntlet is down (BTW - desktop power integration. Cool!). The use case Ted talks about is actually quite interesting - we were at UDS last month, waiting on a SVN server that was apparently so slow we could have walked to it and copied stuff onto harddisk more quickly. (Really. No kidding). bzr was idling and blocked on network IO the whole time... kudos for the plugin Ted!

For my response, may I present a new index format, (branch url) 70% smaller than bzr's current default, equally fast at most workloads, up to 20 times faster at others. I started this this week, and John jumped in in overlapping time periods, but I think it counts!

Note that the perfromance wins are a component improvement - other things we haven't addressed yet can make the index improvements less visible. But several early adopters have told me that they see a 25-30% reduction in 'time bzr log > /dev/null' or other commands.

To install:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~lifeless/+junk/bzr-index2 ~/.bazaar/plugins/index2

bzr branch https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jameinel/+junk/pybloom ~/.bazaar/plugins/pybloom

To use:

cd <repository you want to experiment on>

bzr upgrade --btree-plain

(or --btree-rich-root for bzr-svn users).

A version of this will be going to trunk soon, and it will be able to upgrade from any repository that you have that uses the plugin as long as you keep the plugin installed.

When I saw Robert's interesting and fun Bazaar search plug-in I had a few thoughts:

I've now written a plug-in to provide desktop power management support to Bazaar. You can install it like this:

This hack-ish plug-in uses the initialization of the plug-in to call the DBus interface for power management to inhibit the power manager. It then relies on the fact that the power manager will drop an inhibit request from a client that disconnects from the bus which happens when the process exits. Both are relatively unsupported, and mostly undocumented ways to use the systems, but it works.

Why would you need something like this? Well if your trying to create a repository from a really slow SVN server which takes longer than the sleep timeout of your laptop (not that I've done this) you can end up really wishing your laptop hadn't gone to sleep. Yes, things restart, and you don't loose everything, but you'd really rather your laptop was awake the whole time. With this plug-in your laptop won't go to sleep while Bazaar is running.

The only thing left to consider is: What is Robert going to do to retaliate? 7 lines of Python?

In all, over 200 updates have been integrated, and updated installation
media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded
after installation. These include security updates and corrections for
other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and
compatibility with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. — Release Notes

This one has Firefox 3.0 Final, bunch of intel driver fixes, and sudo will work even if your hostname is messed up.

Elliot Murphy and John Arbash Meinel were kind enough to invite me to co-write This Week in Bazaar. This week covers using bazaar in your build process. It was quite fun, and quite informative to chat with Elliot and John. Thanks to both of them Go read it!