GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet

Crash course on commercial and free Ubuntu support

2 commentaires

I am putting together information that will be included in the official Ubuntu Certified Professional training material, and I thought it would be interesting to make my initial draft available here. Most of this information is already public, while some of it is derived from existing references, such as the Ubuntu releases lifecycles. I like to call this a crash course about support options available for Ubuntu, so if anyone reading this feels there are things that are badly missing, just comment and I’ll gladly revise it – or dig it.

Commercial Support

Canonical Global Support Services are deployed to enable 24×7 support infrastructure. Support requests are handled through telephone and the web. Canonical offers three types of production support: Desktop, Server and Thin Client/Cluster Support.

Canonical Ltd. provides various levels of commercial support for packages in the “main” component, including the Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu releases. Support can also be obtained from a growing network of companies and partners that are listed in the Canonical Marketplace at :
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/commercial/marketplace

Free community support

A range of free support options are also available from the Ubuntu Community, including forums, IRC channels and mailing lists. The Ubuntu Local Community Teams provide multi-language community support. For more details please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/support

Support lifecycles for Ubuntu releases

Ubuntu desktop and server releases are issued every six months, providing versions including feature and security updates of all applications. Each Ubuntu release is supported and includes free security updates for at least 18 months on the desktop and server.

With the Long Term Support (LTS) version the support lifecycle is extended to three years on the desktop, and five years on the server. Ubuntu versioning is based on year and month of a specific release, ie, 7.04 is for the April 2007 release.

Note: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is considered to be the same as Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS when updated.

Detailed release announcements are posted on the ubuntu-announce mailing list at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/

Updates policy and stable release updates

Once an Ubuntu release has been completed and published, updates for it are only released under certain circumstances, and must follow a special procedure. Most notably, security updates are backported and feature updates are not available until the next stable release.

Stable release updates (SRU) are automatically recommended to a very large number of users, and so it is critically important to treat them with great caution. Therefore, when updates are proposed, they must be accompanied by a strong rationale and present a low risk of regressions. This includes any community-proposed updates or bugs escalated from commercial support customers.

Free security updates are included for at least 18 months on the desktop and server. With the Long Term Support (LTS) version you get three years support on the desktop, and five years on the server. There is no extra fee for the LTS version, all Ubuntu editions are available on the same free terms. Upgrades to new versions of Ubuntu are also free of charge.

Ubuntu components

The Ubuntu software repository contains thousands of software packages organized into five components, on the basis of the level of support we can offer them, and whether or not they comply with our Free Software Philosophy. The components are called « main », « restricted », « universe », « multiverse » and commercial.

The standard Ubuntu installation is a subset of software available from the main and restricted components. You can install additional software using installation software such as Synaptic Package Manager or Aptitude. Other components are added by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list file. See « man sources.list » for more information on editing the sources.list file.

Supported packages

There are several CD and DVD versions of Ubuntu available. All versions are basically a selection of specific packages put together on the same media for convenience. Packages that are included are organized by groups called Seeds. There are seven primary seeds:

  1. Minimal
  2. Boot
  3. Standard
  4. Desktop
  5. Ship
  6. Live
  7. and Supported

The minimal, boot, standard, desktop, and either ship or live seeds go onto our CDs and the “Supported” packages are available from the FTP site. “Supported” in this context means any needed packages that other packages depend on but can’t fit on the CD/DVD.. Seeding a package pulls all of its dependencies into the appropriate part of the archive and ensures everything needed to build that package is at least placed in “Supported”.

You can view the current seeds and the current full list of packages for them at:
http://www.ubuntu.com/support

GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet

Party 5

3 commentaires

Ubuntu QC invite à un petit 5 à 9 bien informel pour se rencontrer, discuter et surtout comme prétexte pour partager une bonne bière, ou autre ce jeudi 19 avril, à l’occasion de la sortie officielle de la prochaine version d’Ubuntu Linux.

Quand: Jeudi 19 Avril, 17h à 21h
Où:Bar St-Sulpice 3ème étage, 1680, rue Saint-Denis Montréal, QC H2X 3K6 – Téléphone: (514) 844-9458

Le St-Sulpice est un point d’accès Île-sans-fil, quel heureux hasard 😉

Plusieurs employés du centre global de soutien technique de Canonical à Montréal (dont moi même) seront de la partie, nous offrirons des CD ou DVD de Feisty et des autocollants à ceux qui en voudront. Je veux préciser aussi que ce n’est pas une présence « corpo » officielle, d’ailleurs je vais devoir prendre congé (communautaire) pour y être.

GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet

The Codebreakers transcript released – help wanted for subtitles

Un commentaire

Remember The Codebreakers: A BBC World Documentary on FOSS and Development ? Well, after many months and a few emails nicely asking for it, the Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme have sent me their original transcript for the documentary 40 minute version, licensed under a Creative Commons BY licence.

The main purpose for me was to produce subtitles in French, but there’s been interest in the Colibri list for Colombian FLOSS users to do it in spanish too, so I asked again and got the file today. It’s an easy but tedious and long job. We have to first produce an appropriate English subtitles file, then translate it – an dof course test it.

If you want to get the transcript and / or feel like helping producing an English subtitles file, please visit the subtitling project’s wiki page. Pass the word around!

Update: the links had moved, I just corrected them (as of July 12 2007)

GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Planet

Ubuntu BumpTop – You know you want it

3 commentaires

So I missed DemoCamp Montreal again, though JP had invited me… 🙁 I was busy spreading some Ubuntu love elsewhere (more on that later).

It seems he found BumpTop to be really nice. I remember seeing a demo about this some time ago, not sure where (online). They’re actually implementing it and hiring to ge it done. Come on! You know you want this running on Ubuntu 🙂 Can’t we sneak someone in there ?

General, GNU/Linux

Cinq choses que vous ne saviez peut-

Un commentaire

Maudit… Étant donné que Nicolas m’as taggé, je n’ai d’autre choix que de participer à ce jeu futile mais combien divertissant. À défaut d’avoir le temps de se voir et en savoir plus sur lui, j’ai bien apprécié son billet.

Nicolas expliquait:

L’idée est de se décrire et d’inviter 5 autres personnes à faire la même chose sur leurs blogues. On peut donc suivre le fil des invitations en suivant les liens dans les deux sens.

Allons-y!

  1. Je suis né en France

    2. – eh oui. Parfois je m’en vante. Parfois je présente mes excuses. Parfois j’en abuse 🙂

  2. J’ai déjà été SysOp, à Montréal mais aussi à Sherbrooke, où les chicanes pour le feed officiel Fidonet et la création de l’Alliance des Opérateurs de l’Estrie étaient à l’ordre du jour. Pour tout dire, sans Éric Hamel je n’aurais pas survécu dans le bas monde des BBS 🙂
  3. Je n’utilise pratiquement plus de papier toilette, même quand je ne suis pas chez moi. Oui, je m’essuie ! Mais j’utilise des serviettes que je lave ensuite avec les couches de ma plus jeune fille. Ah, oui, on n’utilise que des couches de cotton pour elle, même à la piscine.
  4. Ma carrière en technologies libres a débuté avec un cours de 10 heures sur Edulinux à Sherbrooke, pour lequel j’ai eu un joli diplôme. J’ai du réapprendre mais sutout « désapprendre » beaucoup de l’informatique non-libre dans laquelle j’avais évolué.
  5. J’ai participé à la création du groupe Usenet soc.culture.ecuador. Ben quoi ? C’est utile, non ?

À mon tour maintenant de tagger quelques copains, question de rigoler un peu: JP, Dann, JF, Marco et Lino sont les heureux gagnants.

Consultant et conférencier en logiciels libres et GNU/Linux basé à Montréal, Québec (Canada)