UbuntuUpdates.org

Maverick went into feature freeze today and it's now time to track 10.10 updates here.

But beware, the number of Maverick daily updates is still very high and ubuntuupdates.org home page, as well as the updates Atom feed, will get flooded with Maverick changes.

For those of us who are not yet interested in 10.10, there is a solution: in the home page, select "Show updated packages for: Lucid" and Go. That will filter out all packages that don't belong to Lucid. What it does is append "dist=lucid" to the URL. That preference is saved in a cookie so you don't have to select it again the next time you load the page.

The same applies to the Atom feed, simply add "dist=lucid" to the URL to see only Lucid updates. For a complete list of ubuntuupdates.org Atom feeds, please read All UbuntuUpdates News Feeds.

• This is 32-bit only.
• The Ubuntuzilla binaries are installed under /opt, they don't replace the official Ubuntu binaries for Thunderbird except that /usr/bin/thunderbird gets renamed to /usr/bin/thunderbird.ubuntu and that a symlink is created from /usr/bin/thunderbird to /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird.
• The Ubuntuzilla packages come with all the dependencies they need. All libraries from libssl to libldap are part of the packages and are installed under /opt/thunderbird for example. This way the packages are compatible with any version of Ubuntu.
• The Thunderbird profile directory from the official Ubuntu installation is reused.
• Addons for the new version get updated automatically.
  
• Gnome interaction is okay but font smoothing is imperfect.
• You may or may not like the new search boxes: there are now 2 of them, the first one at the top is always visible and uses the main Thunderbird search engine. The other one can be toggled ON or OFF and correspond to the search box there was in Thunderbird 2: search subject, sender or recipient. For me, this latter form of search resolved 95% of my problems and it's much faster than the new search engine. I also regret the lost vertical space due to the superposition of 2 search boxes.
  

The Opera PPA got updated a few hours ago with Opera 10.60. Check it out!

The release notes for 10.60 are available on the opera website.

UbuntuUpdates feeds got a much needed makeover today.

The changelog feed is the one that received the most attention. There are now several variations of that feed based on the desired release and the inclusion/exclusion of PPA updates. It's now formatted in HTML and includes links back to the website.

Here is the full list.

New package versions with changelog

• All updates, excluding PPAs
• All updates, including PPAs
• Lucid updates only, excluding PPAs
• Lucid updates only, including PPAs
• Hardy updates only, excluding PPAs
• Hardy updates only, including PPAs

News

• Posts
• Comments

Bugs

• Launchpad, Debian and CVE bug fixes

It's there, in the Kubuntu Updates PPA. All packages were updated today to version 4.4.4. Check out kdeutils for example.

The changelog only says:

   * New upstream release
     - Bump build-depend versions
     - Bump up package standards version

It's now possible to name a package in a ubuntuupdates.org URL and get directly to the page for the latest version of this package. Just append its name to http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/. For example, to get directly to the package page for the latest version of Firefox, use http://www.ubuntupdates.org/firefox

Not sure you want exactly the latest version of that package? Go to the search page instead: just insert "pm/" before the package name. That displays the full list of versions of this package in all repositories: http://www.ubuntupdates.org/pm/firefox.

To summarize,

• Link to package: http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/<package name>
• Link to list of versions: http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/pm/<package name>

Ubuntuupdates.org started tracking the changelogs for PPAs 2 days ago on 5/23. From now on, all packages belonging to Launchpad PPAs and to some 3rd party repositories such as GetDeb are shown with their changelog. Make an informed decision when upgrading a package of choosing to use a PPA: all modifications and bug fixes for each new version are enumerated on the package page.

See for example the logs for the newest Nvidia beta driver 256.25 that is available for Lucid in the Ubuntu-X-Swat PPA.

Enjoy!

Happy users of Freenx in Karmic are left wondering what happened to it in Lucid. The FreeNX-Team Stable repository for Lucid does not have it. If you really want it you have to go to the FreeNX-Team Testing PPA and as its name implies, stability is not guaranteed.

But fear not, Google released last year a new implementation of the NX server. Even though neatx-server misses some minor non essential features of the original freenx-server, it's said to be better designed, more maintainable and in my experience, it works better, especially with KDE.

Neatx-server is available in the same FreeNX-Team Stable repository. There's not much documentation but it's so simple to use in Ubuntu that it's not really needed.

add-apt-repository ppa:freenx-team/ppa
aptitude update
aptitude install neatx-server

Use the NoMachine FreeNX client as you would do to connect to freenx-server.

Note: If you had freenx-server installed in karmic, you may have troubles with the /etc/alternatives symlink as it may be leftover and still point to the old nxserver executable. Make sure you have:

/etc/alternatives/nxserver -> /usr/lib/neatx/nxserver-login-wrapper

Naming the packages for the 195 Nvidia proprietary driver nvidia-195-* would have been too easy so they decided to use nvidia-current, nvidia-glx-185 and nvidia-185-modaliases instead. This is the list of nvidia packages installed on a machine running the 195 driver in Lucid:

# dpkg -l | grep nvidia
ii  nvidia-173-modaliases     173.14.22-0ubuntu11 Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-180-modaliases     185.18.36-0ubuntu9  Transitional package for nvidia-185-modalias
ii  nvidia-185-modaliases     195.36.15-0ubuntu2  Transitional package for nvidia-185-modalias
ii  nvidia-96-modaliases      96.43.17-0ubuntu1   Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-common             0.2.23              Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
ii  nvidia-current            195.36.15-0ubuntu2  NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernel module and
ii  nvidia-current-modaliases 195.36.15-0ubuntu2  Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-glx-180            185.18.36-0ubuntu9  Transitional package for nvidia-glx-185
ii  nvidia-glx-185            195.36.15-0ubuntu2  Transitional package for nvidia-glx-185
ii  nvidia-settings           195.36.08-0ubuntu2  Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driv

Run

# dpkg -L nvidia-current

Kernel 2.6.31-21 for Karmic was just released with the "proposed" status. The changelog and bug fixes are available here. It's based on upstream 2.6.31.12 for which the changelog can be found on the kernel.org 2.6.31.12 page.

Find all versions of Ubuntu kernels per release and repository on the linux meta page.

The openoffice-pkgs PPA finally got populated today with the 3.2.0 packages. See for example the openoffice.org-base package.

I haven't tried to set it up yet. If you do, please let everybody know how it went by adding a comment below.

All Lucid Lynx software packages are now tracked in this website. The Lucid home page shows all the Lucid upgrades as they happen.

Enjoy!

There is no less than 3 different versions of Chrome available in Ubuntu. None is available in the official Karmic repositories but the browser you want is just a PPA away.

The safest bet is to use the Google Chrome PPA. It's maintained by Google itself and that's where the official version of Chrome for Linux are. If you install Chrome from the Google website, you'll get the google-chrome-beta version from this repository.

The second option is google-chrome-unstable. It also comes from the Google repository, it's just a little bit more bleeding edge.

And the 3rd one, for those feeling really brave, there is a PPA with the Chromium builds: it's called Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds and the package you need to install from this repository is chromium-browser. Now, this one is not for the faint of heart as this package is built entirely automatically and does not get tested at all. It's generally ahead of google-chrome-unstable by a few days.

Still undecided? You can compare all 3 versions on the chrome(*) page. It's updated daily, list all the available version and links to the PPA pages for installation instructions.

Here is a snapshot of the 3 packages taken on Feb 24th:

And finally, good news, in Lucid (soon to be added to ubuntuupdates.org), chromium-browser is in the universe repository, no need for a PPA anymore.

Firefox 3.5.8 for Karmic was released on all platforms today February 17th. It includes security and stability fixes. Firefox 3.0.18 was also released for Intrepid.

No sign of a new 3.6.2 version.

The full list of bug fixes is available at bugzilla.mozilla.org and I copied it here for your convenience:

The official KDE 4.4 packages have been uploaded to a PPA for Karmic. To set it up follow the instructions on the kubuntu backports PPA page.

On that same page, you'll find the full list of packages that are in the PPA. By selecting individual packages, you'll find their description and changelog. For the full KDE desktop, the package you want to install first is kubuntu-desktop.

To compare versions across all distributions, repositories and PPAs, you can do a package search. Here is an example for kate, one of the best if not the best text editor available in Linux.

kde.org has a great overview of the new release.

2.6.31-20 kernel just got released in "proposed". At first sight it's the same as 2.6.31-18. It has the same very long list of bugs fixes. What that means is that 2.6.31-19 was really ONLY a security release and it didn't get the bug fixes included in 2.6.31-18.

Keep in mind that proposed that software released in "proposed" is only for the early adopters. If you still have 2.6.31-17 and you have to upgrade, go for 2.6.31-19.

Full list of fixes is available on the 2.6.31-20 changelog page.

2.6.31-19 changelog is available on Karmic linux kernel package page.

2.6.24, 2.6.27, 2.6.28 and 2.6.31 all got updates on Wednesday night February 3rd, with patches for around 10 CVEs. The new Karmic kernel is 2.6.31-19.

Here is the list of CVE notices:

The list of kernel versions per distribution are available on the linux page.

I just noticed some visitors to this website were reporting a user agent like this one: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.307.0 Safari/532.9"

See that? That's Chrome 5.0. I went to check the latest version of Chromium at UbuntuUpdates and here it is, 5.0.307.0. It's only in the Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds PPA though.

I'll give it a bit more time before trying it... The official version is still 4.0.249 in the Google Chrome repository

The latest addition to ubuntuupdates.org is the PPAs page. Personal Package Archives are repositories that are not supported in any way by Canonical, but that offer versions of packages that are up to 6 months ahead of the official repositories.

It's sometimes frustrating to have to wait for that long for major new versions of the most popular applications. Take Thunderbird 3.0 for example, it was officially released by Mozilla in December, 2 months after Karmic but is not and will not be part of any official Karmic repository. However it's in the Mozilla Daily Builds PPA and you can install it from there.

As before, UbuntuUpdates.org lets you list all versions of any package in any release. But now, versions of the same package from PPAs are also listed. For example, the MythTV package, part of the Mythbuntu PPA, is shown here alongside official repo versions. The PPA page itself shows the list of member packages and explains how to setup the PPA.

UbuntuUpdates.org doesn't track all existing PPAs (there are thousands, see official launchpad.net PPA website), it only tracks those that appear to be the most popular. If there is a PPA you'd like to see here, leave a comment and I might add it as long as it's not too exotic.

Firefox 3.6 can easily be installed in Karmic from the Mozilla Daily Builds PPA. Just setup the PPA as described here and run

sudo aptitude install firefox-3.6

Then to start the new browser: Alt-F2, and enter "firefox-3.6". All your settings from the regular Firefox will be copied and unchanged in the new installation.

At the time of this writing (1/13/2010), Firefox 3.6 is just a release candidate (RC1). The final version is due to be released this month. The Register has the best review I found on the new features.

The list of Firefox versions available per Ubuntu release is available on the UbuntuUpdates firefox search page. As a reminder, the officially supported version of Firefox in Karmic will stay at 3.5. You install other versions at your own risks. Firefox-3.6 is branded as "Namoroka" in Ubuntu 9.10.

PHP5 got security updates in Karmic and all other supported Ubuntu releases. The new version is 5.2.10.dfsg.1-2ubuntu6.4. The patches are for:

• CVE-2009-2626
• CVE-2009-4142
• CVE-2009-4143

2.6.31-17 was just released as an update (in 'proposed' on 12/10/2009, in 'updates' on 1/6/2010) but 2.6.31-18 is already knocking at the door. It just got into 'proposed'.

The full list of 2.6.31.18 changes is listed on the linux package page. There is a very long changelog, this kernel version cumulates changes from upstream versions 2.6.31.7, 8 and 9.

What stands out is the amount of changes related to ext4. Other than that, the fixes are spread out across all areas of the kernel.

Here's an extract from launchpad.net bug 480144:

SRU Justification/Impact: The upstream process for stable tree updates is quite similar in scope to
the Ubuntu SRU process, e.g., each patch has to demonstrably fix a bug, and each patch is vetted by 
upstream by originating either directly from Linus' tree or in a minimally backported form of that patch.
The 2.6.31.6 upstream stable patch set is now available. It should be included in the Ubuntu kernel as 
well.

The patched kernel 2.6.31-15 features a number of patches to apparmor, usb-storage among others. It apparently fixes some Karmic boot issues with 2.6.31-14.

It's only in the proposed repository so far. Find all versions of linux kernel per release and repository on the linux meta page.

Every time a new release of Ubuntu is out, Canonical servers get pounded and the download speed for regular updates as well as new release upgrades falls into the two-digit zone. At that speed, a new release download, which can easily go over 1GB, will take a full day. When Karmic RC was released last week, I couldn't download anything at more than 50KB/s.

No reason to panic though, there are many Ubuntu mirrors out there that are not very well known but can deliver much higher speeds than the overloaded us.archive.ubuntu.com. The full list of mirrors is available on ubuntu.com.

The easiest way

There is a good description of the easiest way at addictivetips.com. It's a perfectly fine method. Be careful about the automatic test that tries to figure out what the fastest mirror is: in my case, the fastest it found was 12000 kms away from where I live.

The manual way

You can also change the settings by hand, you have to edit /etc/apt/sources.list (make sure to create a copy of the original first) and replace every occurrence of us.archive.ubuntu.com by the mirror hostname you chose, optionally followed by a path prefix like "pub". I picked the Argonne National Laboratory mirror and the string I used was "mirror.anl.gov/pub".

So for example you change every occurrence of

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic main restricted

deb http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu/ karmic main restricted

At this point you can start the update tool of your choice: aptitude, apt-get, update-manager. All packages will be downloaded from the mirror. When updating a desktop to Karmic from home today, I got a steady download speed of about 320KBytes/s which is the most I can get from my ATT DSL line. And from my workplace I got 3 MBytes/s downloads!

Be aware that mirrors can sometimes be lagging and when that happens you may not get your updates exactly at the same time they are published on Canonical servers.

You can check the "freshness" of the mirror by downloading the SYNC_STAMP.txt file. For example: http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu/SYNC_STAMP.txt

Happy Karmic upgrade!

All of Dapper, Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty got kernel updates today due to multiple vulnerabilities found in kernels 2.6.15, 2.6.24, 2.6.27 and 2.6.28.

Detailed description of the vulnerabilities can be found at USN-852-1.

In short, the list of faulty components include:

• AppleTalk
• eCryptFS
• NFSv4
• SCSI driver
• KVM
• UDP stack
• and a bunch of other drivers...

ubuntuupdates.org has the full list of kernel versions available for the 4 most recent Ubuntu releases. Look for the 'linux' package or directly go to the linux package versions page.

As an example, the new kernel for Jaunty is 2.6.28-16.