Here is the list cities and hosts (sort by alphabet order):
City / Host
———————————————————————
Beijing / Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Dalian / Dalian Maritime University
Deqing / Deqing High School
Guangzhou / Sun Yat-Sen University
Hangzhou / Alibaba, Inc.
Ji’nan / Shandong Polytechnic University
Jinzhou / Liaoning Railway Vocational College of Technology
Nanjing / Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nanjing / Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Shanghai / Shanghai University
Shenzhen / Unconfirmed (*)
Tianjin / Tianjin Normal University
Wenzhou / Wenzhou Vocational College of Science and Technology
Wuhan / Wuhan Railway Vocational College of Technology
Xiangtan / Hunan University of Science & Technology
Yantai / Graduate School of China Agricultural University
Zhengzhou / Henan Experimental High School
Zhongshan / Zhongshan Institute of University of Electronic Science and Technology

* I haven’t confirmed where will host the release party in Shenzhen, however it has been handled by Shenzhen LUG already.

The 1st thing to keep in mind is that, involving Debian’s development is easy, but becoming something _official_ requires a lot of time and efforts, so just be patient, :)

Here are my advices:

So you are a DM after some time of hard work, then you could plan on becoming a DD now. Being a DD is much more complex than becoming a DM, since you’ll have many privileges and people have to make sure you have the ability to use it correctly. You’ll need to read through all Debian documents and read/ask again about the details then.

[1]http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/
[2]http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
[3]http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/

可能有些用 Ubuntu 的朋友要问为什么现在还会有那些崩溃的现象，其实这是发行版的问题，迟迟没有能将新版推送到用户手中。

感谢 Shawn P Huang，Shellexy 和 BYBird 的提醒，博客上的那篇文章也做了更新。

Before we start our tour, there are two concepts to know, input method framework and input method engine:

1. SCIM (Smart Common Input Method)

Most Linux input method users may have the experience of using SCIM, which is created by Chinese developer Su Zhe for promoting his Intelligent Pinyin input method and providing a better input method framework.

Some friends of mine are still keep using SCIM even though it is not being maintained, nor SKIM, its sister project on KDE. SCIM was the default choice of distros for years. People developed lots of input method engines for it, for example scim-pinyin, which has been mentioned above as Intelligent Pinyin input method. Users may be also familiar with scim-python, scim-xingma-*, scim-googlepinyin and the still-maintained scim-sunpinyin.

On a distro maker’s point of view, the glorious age of SCIM has just finished.

2. IBus (Intelligent Input Bus)

IBus is the de facto standard of input method framework on nowadays Linux distros, whose author is a Chinese developer, Huang Peng, who has been mentioned as the author of scim-python and scim-xingma-*. IBus is aiming at a “next generation input framework” comparing to SCIM. I think this goal has been achieved – new comers may only know IBus from the very beginning of his adventure on Linux.

IBus is written in C++, and is designed to be highly modularized: core input bus, gtk/qt interfaces, python binding, table engine, table modules and other input method engines. It uses Gtk immodule, thus is the best choice for GTK+ applications. What’s more, Flash Player support Gtk immodule only and IBus has no problem to work with it. The author of IBus is really helpful with other input engine developers, so there are many input method engines available on IBus framework.

But IBus has obvious limitations from its design:

Note: ibus-pinyin has been rewritten in mainly C++ with many improvements, and such changes will land on major in very near future (maybe some of them have already published it, I didn’t do a detailed research here).

3. Fcitx (Free Chinese Input Toy for X)

Fcitx is an old and new input method. It bears at the same time as SCIM, and now gets a new life with the brand new 4.x series. As name suggests, it is first designed to be a Chinese specific input method by Yuking. During 3.x series, the aim of being a feature rich Chinese input method gave it quite a few of fans, but also kept it from being a default choice of major distros. Fcitx uses XIM, which works well for most platforms (like GTK+ and QT), but has some small problems.

However, starting from 4.x series, Fcitx has been given a new goal with a new maintainer – a college student at Peking University, Weng Xuetian. Now he has published 4.0.1, the second version of 4.x series, with features like customizable skins, tables which has been wanted for a long time. It has been heavily modularized: all tables are separated, developer-friendly input method engine interface, graphic user configuration tool. Also, 4.x series does not use GBK encoded Chinese configuration files anymore, and UTF-8 encoded English configuration files are used. I would like to highlight its perfect user experience of fcitx-sunpinyin, it is worthwhile for every Pinyin users to give a try.

There are still issues on its way of (probably) being the default of distros:

Properly speaking, Fcitx is still not a input method framework because of the reasons listed above, but it will be, also as said above.

Above are the most famous input methods, here is a list of other things in Linux input methods with short descriptions.

1. ucimf (Unicode Console Input Method Framework)

ucimf is an input method framework for Linux unicode framebuffer console, which is mainly with fbterm and jfberm. It is developed by Chinese developer, Mat. He maintains a series of input method engines ported from BSD licensed Mac OSX input method OpenVanilla.

There are other solutions under framebuffer console, for example ibus-fbterm (development has stopped), but I still recommend to use ucimf because it full featured and well maintained.

2. SunPinyin

One thing to clarify, Sunpinyin isn’t a frame work, but it is important so I would like to mention it here. We have mentioned scim-sunpinyin, ibus-sunpinyin and the recommended fcitx-sunpinyin. In fact there is also a standalone xsunpinyin alive. SunPinyin is a statistical language model based Chinese input method, which was firstly developed by Sun Beijing Globalization team, and opened source to community with Opensolaris project, with LGPLv2 and CDDL dual-licenses.

SunPinyin would be heavily used from now on, it is the best Pinyin engine on Linux and some other platforms.

3. SCIM2
SCIM2 was trying to be a next generation SCIM, but abandoned because of the emerging star during that period – IBus.

4. ImBus

ImBus is created by the author of SCIM, and he would like to make it a general input method framework including all known best techniques with minimal dependencies. But the project halted with the same reason like SCIM2, no code in its svn repository.

5. Fitx (Fun Input Toy for Linux)

Fitx was a flash in the pan on Linux, the project stopped soon after its emerging. Fitx is a ported version of FIT input method on Mac OSX, but implemented using SCIM framework.

6. gcin
gcin is a input method developed by traditional Chinese community, targeted to traditional Chinese users.

7. uim

uim is a input method framework made by Japanese developers. It is a little different because uim isn’t an input method server (XIM is a server), it’s just a library. Because the designer believe many people don’t need a full featured platform but only something enough to work.

For information about input method types, there is a good website: http://seba.studentenweb.org/thesis/im.php

Update:
2011-01-15 21:30
Thanks to Zhengpeng Hou, I’ve added some description about uim, and a notice about whether fcitx should be considered as a framework now.
2011-01-28 00:15
Thanks to Shawn P Huang, ibus-pinyin has been rewritten in mainly C++ with many improvements.

I tried to have someone look into the problem, and now get the answer, quoting Bastian Blank :

This is a result of the filesystem design, no bug. For decent performance don’t use O_SYNC on files. For qemu use cache=writeback in the disk definition.

1. Live USB introduce – 白清杰 [linuxbqj AT gmail DOT com] (Chinese)

2. You in Community – Aron Xu [happyaron AT ubuntu DOT com] (English)

3. How Applications Speak Fluently – Eleanor Chen [chenyueg AT ubuntu DOT com] (English)

Hello everybody,

We are happy to announce that we’ll hold Beijing Ubuntu 10.10 Release Party on 16th Oct, 2010.

Time: 2010-10-16 14:00-17:50
Location: Building 3, BUAA, No. 37 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing, P.R.China (Google Maps)

Activities:
14:00-15:00 Presentations
14:00-14:20 Qingjie Bai (From Kanas FOSS Store) Howto: LiveUSB Making and Usage
14:20-14:40 Aron Xu (Ubuntu Simplified Chinese Translation Team Leader, Ubuntu Member, Organizer): You in Community – The Foss Essentials
14:40-15:00 Eleanor Chen (Ubuntu China LoCo Contact, Ubuntu Member, Organizer): How
Applications Speak Fluently – Introduction to FOSS I18n and L10N

15:00-17:50 Installfest and discussions (so take your laptop with you!)

There is no need for registration or invitation, feel free to join us and have fun!

I am a big fan of Firefox, but I use Chromium in some cases that Firefox cannot handle very well. The script will maintain a directory in good shape so that you can run your program properly, even when you are running chromium and the script won’t crash you by the update. But never tell me you don’t close it for a long long long time that this script has ran for times and your browser crashed, just restart will make it okay.

Put it in your ~/usr/chromium/ and setup cron to run it every day or any time you would like to, it will update your chromium from http://build.chromium.org to your user’s directory. Be aware this program is run in a common user’s account, and by default it gets the AMD64 version.

If you wish to change to I386, find and replace “chromium-rel-linux-64″ with “chromium-rel-linux”.

Note: replace any “&lt” or “&gt” (and following ; mark)you find in your script with “”, I am not able to to make them show up correctly in this page. :-(

#!/bin/sh
# Copyright (C) 2010 Aron Xu <happyaron.xu@gmail.com>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see .
 
LATEST=`wget -q -O - 'http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux-64/LATEST' | awk 'NF > 0'`
 
cd $HOME/usr/chromium/
 
if [ -f ./CURRENT ]; then
	CURRENT=`cat CURRENT`
	if [ $LATEST -le $CURRENT ]; then
		exit;
	fi
fi
 
if [ -f ./OLD ]; then
	OLD=`cat OLD`;
fi
 
if [ -d ./update ]; then
	rm -rf ./update/* && cd ./update/;
else
	rm -rf ./update && mkdir ./update && cd ./update/;
fi
 
wget -q http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux-64/$LATEST/chrome-linux.zip
unzip chrome-linux.zip
rm -f chrome-linux.zip
 
mkdir ../$LATEST
mv ./chrome-linux/* ../$LATEST/
rm -rf ./*
cd ../
 
rm -f chromium-browser
ln -s $LATEST chromium-browser
 
rm -rf $OLD
mv CURRENT OLD
echo $LATEST > CURRENT

It is very easy to change this shell script to grab a specific build of chromium if you want to have “bug free” version (I mean build bot doesn’t complain).

#!/bin/sh
# Copyright (C) 2010 Aron Xu <happyaron.xu@gmail.com>
#
# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program.  If not, see .
 
LATEST=$1
 
cd $HOME/usr/chromium/
 
if [ -f ./CURRENT ]; then
	CURRENT=`cat CURRENT`
	if [ $LATEST -le $CURRENT ]; then
		exit;
	fi
fi
 
if [ -f ./OLD ]; then
	OLD=`cat OLD`;
fi
 
if [ -d ./update ]; then
	rm -rf ./update/* && cd ./update/;
else
	rm -rf ./update && mkdir ./update && cd ./update/;
fi
 
wget -q http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux-64/$LATEST/chrome-linux.zip
unzip chrome-linux.zip
rm -f chrome-linux.zip
 
mkdir ../$LATEST
mv ./chrome-linux/* ../$LATEST/
rm -rf ./*
cd ../
 
rm -f chromium-browser
ln -s $LATEST chromium-browser
 
rm -rf $OLD
mv CURRENT OLD
echo $LATEST > CURRENT
echo $LATEST > GRAB

Again, put it in ~/usr/chromium/ and run:
sh grab-chromium.sh 59353
(59353 is a build of chromium that no build bot bugs show up, you can change it to any version you’d like to grab).

If you like to run chromium with a long list of parameters, just create another script. Mine is here:

#!/bin/sh
$HOME/usr/chromium/chromium-browser/chrome %U --disk-cache-dir="/dev/shm/browser.`whoami`.cache/chromium" --disk-cache-size=52428800

You can add it to your desktop’s menu.

“man -t” uses groff -mandoc to format the manual page to stdout.

“ps2pdf – bash.pdf” means the input is from stdin and output to bash.pdf.

We use a simple pipe to join the stdout of “man” and stdin of “ps2pdf”.

That’s it!

Here is my workaround about this problem, install p7zip and convmv packages on your system first, then:
$ env LC_ALL=C 7z x file.zip
$ convmv -f gbk -t utf8 --notest *

File names extracted by unzip are not able to be converted to correct one whatever you do with it, but what is done by 7z can be converted by convmv.

Moving more on, we can automate this action to a script:
#! /bin/sh
LANG=C /usr/bin/7z x -y "$1" | sed -n 's/^Extracting //p' | sed '1!G;h;$!d' | xargs convmv -f gbk -t utf8 --notest >/dev/null 2>/dev/null

Save it us unzip.sh, then try:
$ sh unzip.sh file.zip
This will act as what unzip does, but with additional care about converting file name encoding from gbk to utf-8. Moreover, convmv can detect whether your file name is already utf-8 encoded and will skip it.

If your file names are encoded other encoding, please replace “gbk” with the appropriate name.

Here is my former way of dealing with them: I choose Gmail as my primary email service provider, and use the online Gmail web page for managing most of the emails – view and move to trash. As for emails need my reply or participate, I use Thunderbird 3 + Enigmail with Gmail’s IMAP support, so I can GPG sign my outbound emails and verify signatures of inbound ones from other people. I keep emails on Gmail server and have a backup copy on my PC from Thunderbird’s IMAP sync.

Yes, everything looked good in the days I have only a not-too-much amount of emails and I was happy with all above worked well for a long period. But a bad thing appears while my mailbox size is growing quite fast in the near half year: Thunderbird’s speed is lower and lower, the local Mbox file is larger day by day. Personally I don’t think Mbox format with big amount of emails stored in a single file is so reliable because when there is something wrong, everything soon follow.

My initial thought of turning to another way is, I need to find a better way for managing large amount of growing emails, and three overall requirements are listed below:

Next, search the Internet and we can surely found Mutt should be counted in our list of choices, and there are several different usages. Before comparing among them, I need to say something about the email system first.

There are three key elements in an email system: MUA (Mail User Agent), MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) and MDA (Mail Delivery Agent):

When we are receiving and sending emails on our local computer (not the web based way since it is actually handled by remote server), we need all of the three parts. We get emails from remote server’s inbox with MTA; filter and deliver the emails to our email spool with MDA; read, write and manage emails with MUA; and send emails with a sending MTA. As for the local storage format, there is Mbox that I don’t like, and Maildir I am interested in. More about storage format will be described in following paragraphs.

There are many alternative all-in-one solutions like Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail and so on, they combine the functions which are required to manage emails for an end-user and hide them behind. Now I am not finding another all-in-one application so I need to choose every program to take their roles in the route of receiving and sending emails. Since I have decided to use Mutt as my MUA from beginning, I don’t need to be bothered by this topic, again.

First I need a receiving MTA for fetching emails from Gmail server. There are two popular choices: Fetchmail and Getmail4.

Both of the two supports both IMAP and POP3 protocol that are my choices of receiving emails. I prefer to use IMAP because the protocol is designed to have the functions POP3 has and many other features including sync between server and clients. I don’t really need to have mails synced because the local copy is mostly a backup, and I can do it through web interface or Thunderbird if I really need them to be synced. Setting up an IMAP synced local mail solution is kind of off topic from this article, and you may want to try imapsync if you are sure you really need. Another reason of my choosing IMAP over POP3 is, Gmail’s POP3 implementation has violated the commonly expected behavior and there are much more limitations than IMAP (you can fetch around 200-500 mails per session in POP3, and probably be locked 24 hours if you access it several times in a short period, but when you are a newbie and trying to test your configuration you may exceed the limits).

Now try them out to find which one is better for me. The configuration files always have your email account and password, so make it only readable by yourself using:
chmod 0600 /path/to/file
Here are the configurations for both the programs, username and password are changed to “user” and “passwd”:

Before we start our test, we need to setup our MDA – Procmail. It is the time for me to tell you why I prefer Maildir local storage format to Mbox used by Thunderbird. In Maildir, every email is stored in a single file, and a real folder contains all the files in a “folder” on remote server. The email files are in plain text. There are three most important benefits from Maildir:

And here are disadvantages:

As I can search the text of email within web interface of Gmail, I don’t need to care too much about the searching disadvantages. I am using Ext4 and is strong enough to handle thousands of small files in one directory. At last I am choosing Mutt which supports Maildir very well. I’d like to take the advantages of it now.

Here is my configuration of Procmail, $HOME/.procmailrc:
VERBOSE=off
DEFAULT=$HOME/.mail/inbox/
MAILDIR=$HOME/.mail/
LOGFILE=$HOME/.mail/procmail.log
Don’t forget the slash after “$HOME/.mail/inbox/”, if you lose it Procmail will use Mbox, and you if add it, Maildir instead.

So we can kick off our test now, keep in mind that neither Fethmail nor Getmail4 nor Procmail need root privilege, just run them in your account:
$ fetchmail -v
$ getmail
I have to admit my prediction of result is totally wrong. I thought Fetchmail is used by many many people and is written in the efficient C, Getmail4 only has a smaller user base and is written in Python which may take more resource on many cases. But the result tells me, under the current configuration, neither of them work for me: Fetchmail fails to fetch around 1/10 of my attachments and only get 0.x KB for a 5MB+ email; Getmail4 stuck when fetching mails larger than 5MB.

What a hell! But I am not stopping because there is another way – Getmail4 is designed to have some MDA functions built-in, so it can deliver messages directly to Maildir or Mbox format for user. It is time to say I like Gmail’s excellent spam filtering feature so that I don’t need to pay so much time on setting up a spam filter with Procmail or Maildrop, and a simple delivery is okay. Now I change the [destination] section of $HOME/.getmail/getmailrc to:
[destination]
type = Maildir
path = ~/.mail/inbox/
and run again:
$ getmail
Great this time and all my emails are retrieved successfully after a long time’s wait (just leave it here and move on other stuff).

After choosing a suitable receiving MTA (my choice is with MDA built-in), I still need a sending MTA. There are several popular choices, for light-weight ones: msmtp, esmtp; for powerful ones: exim4, postfix and qmail. The last three ones are run as root daemon, designed to be full replacement of the traditional sendmail. Usually we don’t need such big things for a daily purpose, and they are really worth considering if you would like to run a *real* MTA that can exchange emails with other servers.
Either msmtp or esmtp is designed to work as an agent to forward local email to a real MTA server supports SMTP protocol. Currently msmtp is more welcomed, but the feature list is shorter than esmtp. After a detailed check, that esmtp is not maintained now, so I choose msmtp. Here is my configuration, $HOME/.msmtprc:
defaults
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_certcheck on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
logfile ~/.mail/msmtp.log

account default
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
from user@gmail.com
auth on
user user
password passwd
There is your username and password in this file, so follow the instruction before to change this file to 0600 mode. “tls”, “tls_starttls” and “tls_certcheck” tells msmtp to use STARTTLS for encryption, and check for validation of the cert.

Finally, I go to the key part – Mutt. Here is some essential lines from my $HOME/.muttrc:
ignore *
unignore From Subject Lines
hdr_order From Subject Lines

color hdrdefault black default
color quoted red default
color signature brightblack default
color indicator brightwhite red
color attachment black default
color error red default
color message blue default
color search brightwhite magenta
color status brightyellow blue
color tree red default
color normal blue default
color tilde green default
color bold brightyellow default
color markers red default

Thanks to Roy L Zuo (roylzuo at gmail dot com) for great aid! There are much more lines in my mutt configuration, and the colors are suitable for white background.

In conclusion, here are my choice:
Mutt + Getmail4 + Msmtp

Before using the following solution, please confirm that you won’t use media players on Windows that cannot handle UTF8 encoded ID3 tags correctly, and you won’t use MP3 players that don’t support it.

Firstly, install python-mutagen package. For Debian/Ubuntu, use:
$ sudo aptitude install python-mutagen
For Fedora and others, probably:
# yum install python-mutagen

Secondly go to the directory containing files need to be converted.
For files with GBK tags:
find . -iname "*.mp3" -execdir mid3iconv -e GBK {} \;
For files with BIG5 tags:
find . -iname "*.mp3" -execdir mid3iconv -e BIG5 {} \;
There is a good thing that the program could check if the encoding we selected is suitable, so when we convert GBK encoded files, the BIG5 ones won’t be changed. But please don’t use GB18030 option because it will cause problem when the file aren’t really GB18030 encoded.

If you need to edit tag text yourself, try easytag to help you. :P

Here is the project homepage:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~happyaron/udc-cn/

We have released both HTML and PDF. Also, Docbook format is available.

Meeting minutes:
1.What is Ubuntu loco contact? [happyaron]
2.Vote for new loco contact, and the new contact decided is Eleanor Chen. (10 Pros, 0 Cons, 4 not voted)
3.Discussed about FullCircle China team’s work.
4.Made decisions about participating the Ubuntu Global Jam, and proposed for opening a classroom for teaching people who are interested in becoming an MOTU.
5.All participants agree with organizing more community activities, but not get a conclusion on when is the best time for starting a Ubuntu user group at Beijing.

Here is the meeting log (Chinese):
ubuntu-cn-meeting.log

Enjoy!

HTML view:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~happyaron/udc-cn/
PDF generation still have some problems.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution No-Commercial Share-Alike .

Being an user of Ubuntu, I must say all the work done by the community and Canonical is awesome; but as a contributor from a not English spoken country, I would be extremely happy to see we can launch localized edition Live CDs, in other words language specific edition Live CDs for users that have different languages and preferences.

For different languages there always be different cultures, and this caused to different user preferences. There are many people don’t have enough knowledge about English to use a not localized computer in this world. A user of this kind will find it essential to download and install many thing to complete their language support when they installed Ubuntu from our Live CD in the past and at present. Most of these users have some common usage of software, so install these “language preferred” software is another required task before the system is usable. Do you think such a thing is very annoying? Yes, users would be much happier when they find an operating system designed to be very considerate.

We have spent lots of man power on improving the process of installation including language support, and a GNU/Linux distribution always ships not only a system but also a set of selected applications, but I think things are still not perfect for us. Microsoft and Apple make their operating systems have different language’s editions, and as a non-native English speaker, I ‘d like to say it worth. Users prefer to have a fully localized environment in every corner they can see from the very beginning. But for Ubuntu we can only add translations of software that used during installation. The live session is an exciting feature, but I always here somebody ask “why are those all in English?”"is there a fully translated Ubuntu available?” I’ve explained our current situation times by times, and these people always return to say “Ubuntu is great, but if there is a fully translated one, things will be even better.” The way to solve such problem, is having a language specific edition.

So there are teams and individuals appear to make their distributions based on Ubuntu, or we are regarding them as Ubuntu Derivatives. The existence of these derivatives help us spread our distribution in the positive side, but there are really negative side, it’s not just a problem on user choice, like between Fedora and Ubuntu, but something influence our build of community. Those derivatives always not only ship language packs but also some small tweaks for specific user groups (not like Mint, which makes some bigger differences). Due to many reasons, there always be breakages and bugs that never existed in official Live CD. Users have to choose a provider that he or she can trust when they are about to turn to Ubuntu but can hardly accept to start from a global edition Live CD with minor support of his or her language. But who can make sure the quality of these derivatives? Perhaps nobody can tell. For the derivatives provided by non-profit organizations, situations are better than those profit-driven teams. I know some editions have changes that bring security holes, ship Ads (e.g. hard change on Firefox home page which point to a site full of Ads), and of course some of them refused to open there changes. Yes, users are able to drop those unwilling changes, but why he or she tries a derivative if they like to deal with such issues? We may still say it doesn’t matter a lot up to here. Then, most of those derivative’s authors don’t supply support even though some of them have make changes and cause problems, and even some of them push the support work to local community deliberately. Apart from general questions, these users always ask about problems caused by derivative’s changes. It is an annoying and overwhelming job to answer, even just tell them “to use the official one” can be an awful thing that few people like to do. This lead to discount to our community, and those users may think Ubuntu and our community are not friendly because most of them don’t know the real situation exactly.

Making official localized Live CDs can also lead to a new stage of Live CD usage. A Live CD can be used as a demo, a rescue system, or even a temporary working environment, the live session is a feature that many users like very much. As mentioned before, a not English spoken user can find some very limited support in the current Live CD. We need to admit it can hardly be used to do anything other than run a installation. Even for a demo purpose, other will always ask about the nearly all English environment. I’ve said in the beginning of this piece, users prefer to seeing that every corner he or she can reach is localized. To achieve a better usage of Live CD, a full localization is critical for these users. As for languages that need input method to input characters, for instance CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean), without a full featured input method, their usage of Live CD can be even more limited. It is really hard to input these complex scripts, though we have ibus with general m17n support by default, but you can only type characters one by one, such thing look very ridiculous for nowadays input method development and usage. When you cannot input a sentence, how can you make it even if you just want to search the web for some articles via live session?

Apart from the meanings of official localized Live CDs above, users can save time on downloading and installing language support and perhaps other common software using a localized Live CD. For example, to complete a basic language support of Chinese needs around 100MiB to be downloaded, such a size only count in the language packs and input method without pulling in any other common software like StarDict to land on the system. With a localized Live CD, users can have a usable environment to be installed when they can’t access a fast Internet connection, or even without a connection, such feature is obviously welcomed by many users who have desired it for long. With a fully localized environment, we can simplify user’s configuration process, and make it really almost ready-to-use once installed.

Making the localized Live CDs don’t need any changes on our most infrastructures, it is just a matter of default selection of software in the CD. This will cause some more work for CD image team, translation exportation and our ISO building facilities, but I think it worth it. The intention of default package sets and some QA work can be done by the LoCo teams.

We can’t provide Live CDs for all languages, especially at the very beginning, but starting with having a try for some languages that have special need of care and a big amount of potential users is worthwhile. We can accumulate experience and make the process better. Windows and Macs can have language specific editions, why we can’t?

Providing official localized editions can be a big step forward on spreading Ubuntu and free software to the world. The progress of making it out is another try on the cooperation of development community and local communities. Ubuntu is Linux for Human Beings, I think such an action is really to that point, which will benefit a lot of users throughout the world.

Here are the correct steps:

First, add “NetworkManager daily trunk builds for ubuntu” PPA:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/trunk/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/trunk/ubuntu karmic main

Second, comment out line “exec pppd call dsl-provider” in /etc/ppp/pppoe_on_boot, that is to say disable my previous “pppoe on boot” setting which is configured by pppoeconf.

Third, rename /etc/network/interfaces to backup file. NetworkManager will only handle connections which haven’t declared in interfaces, if you didn’t any tunning on such file, you can delete it, but backup before doing any change is a good habit, :)

Forth, edit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.network-manager-settings.system.policy , find out the line contains “System policy prevents modification of system settings”, and below it there is a “auth_admin_keep“, change it to “yes“. This will enable you to edit a system wide connection. If you consider this will do harm to your security, then revert the change once you have set up your connection correctly.

Fifth, reboot your system, because these settings won’t take effects even though you have run “sudo services network-manager restart” and “sudo services networking restart”.

Now it is working on my system, cheers!