The Ubuntu development landscape and the whole project has grown so much that it gets harder and harder for everybody to follow what’s going on in each and every team and across the board every day. There’s a lot of different cases where this becomes obvious:

• An announce sent to a team list might be missed by others who it might concern as well.
• A conversation in a bug report might not get the exposure it actually deserves.
• An announce didn’t hit the mailing list, but was in a couple of blog posts.
• Procedure changes, effects and handling of a package transition, etc. etc.

In the vast majority of cases there is no intended active secrecy, but more of an oversight that causes others to be out of the loop, which might result in duplicated work, wasted efforts and frustration.

To help to solve the problem a number of us sat down at UDS and tried to figure out common cases where slips like the ones above might happen and have happened and how to avoid them. The outcome of this is an updated https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperCommunication

This page tries to help identify information that is worth announcing and documenting and how to best do that.

Please share the page with others that might benefit from it and please feel free to improve the page with more information to avoid misinformation and lack of information on the general team.

Thanks in advance and ROCK ON!

The maintenance release 1.6.5 of LyX has been published yesterday. It brings bug-fixes, new layouts and modules and some feature requests have been implemented. The LyX team recommends to upgrade to this version.

For more information and download visit:

• the LyX Homepage,
• the announcement containing a detailed list of changes,
• the download area.

The Ubuntu IRC Council is looking for people who are willing to help: If you are interested in the Ubuntu IRC world and in improving and sustaining transparent and healthy governance in this area, we would like to hear from you. The only preconditions for nominees are that you be an Ubuntu member and that you be passionate about improving IRC governance, in particular in the areas outlined by the CC as their principal governance expectations.

Read the full announcement.

With the release of the development snapshot of version 2.29.3 gEdit is moving forward to 2.30 which will be released in April 2010.
Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wrote a interesting post about auto completion features that will come. Jesse van den Kieboom shows in a screencast amazing features of multiediting too.
Besides that two really nice plugins, that will improve your workflow with many files, are available at the gEdit Plugins Page: Tabs Enhanced and TabSwitch. Both allowing you to configure the behavior of the file tabs like:
* using Ctrl+Tabulator key to switch through files
* Middle click on tabs for closing files
* Closing gEdit when any file tab is closed
* Do not show file tab bar when only one file is opened

UPDATE 09/12/08:
Jesse van den Kieboom wrote an interesting post about snippets handling too.

At the GIMPusers community you will find a brief summery about the features that will ship with GIMP 2.8. At all GIMP 2.8 looks promising. I hope we will get some other yet undocumented surprisings too :)
Ubuntu users can try out the development branch of GIMP 2.8 at Launchpad.

After a longer break a maintance release of Gogh 0.12.3 is available. Besides that the Gogh Project has moved to Google Code.
Gogh is a an bitmap graphics editor for artists. It is designed to work with pressure-sensitive input devices, like a Wacom tablet. An alternative to Gogh is MyPaint.

One thing I really like about Ubuntu is that all kinds of contributions to Ubuntu are valued and recognised through Ubuntu membership. We have several hundreds of Ubuntu members already who have all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of different areas of expertise. They are united by having made significant and sustained contributions to Ubuntu.

There are a number of myths about Ubuntu membership that we want to debunk. If you come across somebody who’s uncertain about Ubuntu membership, tell them:

• ALL kinds of contributions are welcome, not only technical contributions.
• Launchpad Karma, number of uploads, etc. CAN be a determining factor, but they don’t need to be.
• There is no strict time limit for “having been around <n> years before being able to apply”.
• Apart from the Regional Membership Boards, the Edubuntu Council, MOTU Council and Kubuntu Council approve membership too.
• Endorsements of fellow team members are important. Be a team player.
• If you’re unsure if your contributions are significant and sustained, ask your team mates.
• Read the Membership documentation.

Together with the RMBs the CC just did a number of changes to the Membership document, I hope it’s much clearer now.

Today TYPO3 4.3 hit the streets with a lot of new nice features:
* Mass uploader
* AJAX Frontend Editing
* Optimized performance
* Improved security
* Integrated System Scheduler
* Improved caching framework
* Improved recycling of deleted records
* New templating engine
...and much, much more!

Besides that fantastic release the important tt_news extensions is released as version 3.0 which brings a lot of improvements too.
But that's not all: Templa Voila 1.4.0, another very important extension, hit the streets.
So the TYPO3 development is very active this time :)

This year again the german Ubucon took place in October in Göttingen. I didn't have have time to be there but now various image galleries are online.
On one picture i saw the Ubuntu flyer Germany first time in real life! Now i know that it really exists :)

At the beginning of that week i wrote a post about the upcoming Xmind 3.1, now it is available for download at the Xmind-Website. Xmind 3.1. shipped with:
* Presentation Mode
* Better theme behavior and default themes
* Brainstorm mode
* Improved search capabilities
* Improved Sorting
* Gant-Chart and Tasks
A bad detail is that half of the new features are only available in the commercial Pro version.

A month ago i wrote a post about the interesting interface idea of 10/GUI. Today i found an interesting Touch Interface concept for Mobiles: Emblaze's First Else

More details about it can be found at Engadget or at the Else website.

After a longer developing step and 4 prereleases, Inkscape 0.47 is now available as final. This version ships with huge improvements, to much to describe them here so check out the screens and release notes.
Hopefully this final will be available for ubuntu Karmic soon :)

May many Blender heads know that there is always a dev build of Blender at Graphicall.org, but now a first official alpha of the new Blender 2.5 is released.
3D artists that hate the old interface of Blender should definetly check out the new version! I tested the Alpha0 myself and it was running fast and very stable. The new Blender 2.5 interface looks quite amazing.
By studing the timeline and documentation you will see this is just a beginning and we get a lot but we will get much more :)

The first TYPO3 User eXperience Week is over. A lot of interesting projects that will improve the usability of TYPO3 will come. I wish i could be there :(
A short summery can be found at the TYPO3 news website.

At the beginning of the year i wrote a post about the brilliant mindmapping software Xmind. A lot of the new features of the upcoming XMind 3.1 are illustrated at the developer blog.

Hey everybody!

If you are a KDevelop and/or Kate/Kwrite developer and do not read the mailing lists: There’s a hack sprint coming up in Berlin in 2010. I think there’ve been enough sprints in Berlin already so that you know it’s a great city for such an event. Though this time it won’t be at KDAB or Nokia offices, but at the Physics Faculty of the FU-Berlin. Since I (currently) work there as an IT admin, it was my first choice and worked out. I hope it will be a good location for the meeting. If you want to attend, vote on doodle:

http://www.doodle.com/vkyh9up9794zr4s8

But you probably also should register either on the KDevelop or KWrite mailing lists so I have some kind of way to contact you.

PS: in unrelated news I’ll do an internship at KDAB next year! yay

Eine Weile ist es her, aber ich habe mal wieder etwas zu berichten und zu dokumentieren. Mein Terminal des Herzens unter Linux ist rxvt-unicode, oder auch kurz urxvt. Zusaetzlich bin ich sehr begeistert ueber die Farben vom Projekt Tango. Wie passend, dass urxvt per Konfiguration einem die Moeglichkeit gibt die Standardfarben anzupassen. Also habe ich mir [...]

After development and many weeks of testing, final bug fixing and translations the new TeX Live 2009 has been released today.

Some changes and improvements in 2009:

• pdf(La)TeX now automatically converts included eps files to pdf, using the epstopdf package, if graphics.cfg is loaded and pdf output is chosen.
• The execution of certain external commands, for example epstopdf, makeindex, and bibtex, using \write18, is now enabled by default. The texmf.cnf file determines those commands.
• Updated AMS Type 1 fonts are included, the Euler fonts have been reshaped.
• The new editor TeXworks is included for Windows and MacTeX. Other distributions like Ubuntu and Debian Linux will provide this cross-platform editor with their own packaging system.
• Asymptote is included for several platforms.
• dvipdfm has been replaced by dvipdfmx.
• pdf is now the default output format for Lua(La)TeX. dvi output can be achieved by using the new executables dviluatex and dvilualatex.

In my opinion it’s a big step forward because several Linux Distributions like Ubuntu and Debian Linux are clinging to TL 2007 until now. While TL 2008 has been skipped the packaging for TL 2009 for Debian and Ubuntu is in progress, thanks to the work of especially Norbert Preining and Frank Küster. Though v2008 and v2009 worked fine on Linux it’s important to provide TeX with the distribution repositories, less workarounds will be necessary.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.