Gerry Carr (Canonical marketing manager) just announced on the Ubuntu marketing mailing list two advertisings for the Ubuntu Server edition. Some US business and IT-related websites show the videos. Here are the videos on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMlCeDu-0c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L51uZjaZU&feature=related
See the complete announce.
One of the thing I should have done on the 18th of october, is blogging about the new Ubuntu release : 7.10, codename Gutsy Gibbon. No need to make another list of new (great) features included in the release, I would like to talk about the server team.
During gutsy cycle, Canonical have hired a bunch of people for taking care of the server platform. The team has been growing (thanks to the community), and we are now 78 members. This team is working hard to make Ubuntu Server rocks (well, it's already rocks, but rocks more). First results have reached gutsy, there will be more for hardy, the next Ubuntu release (due in April) which will be a LTS (Long Term Support, which for the server team means 5 years).
Lot of people have been asking "Why I should use Ubuntu as a server, Ubuntu is a desktop distro?". I remember Adam Conrad saying about differences between Debian and Ubuntu as a server : "Release schedule, LTS releases, commercial support from Canonical, and a different logo". From my experience, I think it is an excellent summary of the advantages of Ubuntu.
If you're looking into contributing or if you want to help us, reporting bug is a good starting point!
Yes, I know I should have blog more frequently during the past months. I have been really busy at work (do to company growing and growing). Well, I have migrated to the latest and greatest WordPress release, updated my theme (the old one was broken during the upgrade), and better configured my blog : it is now host on the root of my website, permalinks are more understandable (thanks JB for his help).
During Ubuntu Live in Portland, Canonical (the Ubuntu main sponsor) announced the availability of Landscape a tool for Canonical support customers.
This tool was designed to manage your IT infrastructure: all your servers/desktops/laptops are configurable through a web interface. The web interface also permit to get an inventory (hardware and software), to monitor them, etc. For a complete (and better) description visit the presentation page on Canonical website.
This tool appears to be the dreamed tool for the sysadmin I am. I have to confess that we have started a super-secret project for a similar tool. Well, that's said, I also have to confess that landscape looks better than our tool right now...
I have just discovered during the last days that MSN was filtering the content of the messages we sent. On his blog, Nion explains in details what's going on. To make it brief, we can't send anymore URL/mail addresses that ends with ".info". Sadly, my domaines ends with... ".info". I don't use too much MSN, but that's annoying...
For people who still use MSN, it's time to move to a better alternative. Who said Jabber? 
Cendio has recently released in OpenSource a component called "seamlessrdp". The difference with opening a session with rdesktop on a Windows server it that individual application is integrated in your environement.
You need two components : a component on the server side, another on the client side. On the client side, rdesktop superior to 1.5 get it.
For the server side, you will get details intructions on Cendio seammlessrdp webpage. It just consists in unzipping a zip somewhere on your Windows machine.
Here is the command line I use to launch Internet Explorer on a remote machine :
$ rdesktop -a 24 -A -s "c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe" windows_server -u lionel -p -
Here is the result on my desktop :
Guillaume a déjà blogué à ce sujet, mais une équipe de joyeux acharnés travaille à la traduction du magazine de la communauté Ubuntu à savoir fullcircle. Nous avons déjà traduit les numéros 0 (le pilote) et 1, vous pouvez les télécharger sur le site de fullcircle :
Nous travaillons activement à la traduction des numéros 2 et 3 (oui, nous avons pris du retard). Si vous souhaitez rejoindre cet effort de traduction, il y a cette page sur le wiki d'ubuntu-fr qui explique comment se déroulent les traductions. Vous pouvez également vous abonnder à la liste de diffusion fullcircle-fr où s'effectue la coordination de la traduction.
I am now using Django (a python web MVC framework) for several web development I am involved. I have been questioned several times for the reasons of this choice. In this post, I will try to explain the reasons that lead us to work with Django.
We had to develop several web applications, and we do not want to start from scratch, we wanted to use a framework. As I am working in a firm specialized in Java, and some of my mates are Java developers, we first consider using a Java framework: Cocoon, Srping and others had their chance. Due to framework complexity and lack of time for learning the framework, we had to resign. Moreover, interactions with system were not easy (like for creating accounts, we wanted for that to make both command line interface and web interface available). I could add that Sun JDK was not free, and more complicated to setup.
Then we were in the "Rails boom". We gave RoR a try! We had a script language, free with lot of library. Rails looks great, develop really fast, quite easy to learn, BUT, how difficult it is to deploy in a production environment. I ever made a post about that, I will not add anything to my old post.
Due to my Ubuntu love, and love from Ubuntu guys to Python, we give python framework a try. We tried Django. It was easy to learn (as I am not a good coder, this was necessary for me 
), easy to deploy, and we things we enjoyed:
Sure, the fact that we all use Ubuntu and that python is something very well maintained in Ubuntu biased our choice. We now have several projects that are going on, and we have no regrets regarding choosing Django.
Django 0.96 with newforms has just been released. You should give it a try!
Thanks to Johan Kiviniemi, the last upload of the command-not-found package in Feisty added support for zsh:
lionel@ouessant ~ % echo $ZSH_VERSION
4.3.2
lionel@ouessant ~ % mutt
zsh: command not found: mutt
The program 'mutt' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install mutt
My colleagues are going to be happy now!
The package command-not-found is now part of the default Ubuntu Desktop installation. What does the command-not-found package do ? Let's take an example:
lionel@ouessant:~$ mutt
The program 'mutt' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install mutt
bash: mutt: command not found
When a command is not found in your computer, it search in a database in which package this command is and give you the command to install it.
Great isn't it ?