Since we entered FeatureFreeze one and half month ago the Ubuntu developers have shifted their focus on fixing bugs. As such the archive hasn’t seen a lot of new package versions or shiny new features. Here are a few highlights from the archive that happened during last month:
Python 2.6 transition
One of the main focus of the MOTU team has been conducting the python 2.6 transition. Scott Kitterman and other MOTUs have uploaded numerous packages to the archive in order to get ready for python 2.6 in Jaunty.
Loads of bug fixes
Most of the uploads have been fixing bugs: bacula packages can now be installed successfully in Jaunty. The samba package has been updated twice to new upstream versions to fix the broken ‘force group’ option as well as saving files on Samba shares using MS Office 2007.
Karmic is known in Jaunty
Some packages have been updated to know about the next release codenamed Karmic Koala. Lintian, vim and other developers packages in Jaunty won’t complain when karmic will show up in Changelogs and other places once the release cycle opens.
Ubuntu in the cloud
In the realm of cloud computing things are moving fast.
Ubuntu on EC2 saw another beta released. ec2-init is now accepting more options such as disabling the root account and supporting RightScale managed instances. The EC2 API tools have also been packaged: managing EC2 instances using command lines tools is just a package installation away in Jaunty.
Eucalyptus, which helps to build private clouds using Ubuntu, saw a handful of bug fixes by Soren Hansen: better support for EBS in KVM, compression for image transfers are amongst the improvements. Collaboration with the upstream developers is working well as Ubuntu patches are integrated in new bzr snapshots.
kvm saw a packaging cleanup: Dustin Kirkland dug through the patches and kept the relevant ones while removing obsoletes patches. Builds on lpia and ia64 have also been enabled. DKMS support has been improved so that the kvm kernel module available from the kvm-source package can be easily updated.
likewise-open5 in universe
Likewise-open make it a snap to integrate an Ubuntu system in an AD environment. Thierry Carrez uploaded the latest version to the Ubuntu universe. Version 5 has seen many architectural changes: gone is the monolithic daemon – it has been replaced with a collection of daemons that handle one task. However upgrades from 4.1 to 5.0 aren’t supported. The system has to be rejoined when moving from 4.1 to 5.0. As a consequence 5.0 and 4.1 are available in Ubuntu with 4.1 in main and 5.0 in universe.
MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 upgrades
Even though MySQL 5.0 is still the supported version in Ubuntu, MySQL 5.1 is already available in universe. Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 is now possible in Jaunty thanks to the work of Mathias Gug.
screen-profiles
Dustin Kirkland has been busy updating the screen-profiles package. The ec2-cost script has been fine-tuned while a new package, screen-profiles-extra, has been created to ship additional color profiles.
