Ask Ubuntu Founder (And Astronaut) Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth isn't one to rest on his laurels. Founder of Thawte Consulting, Shuttleworth has used the wealth generated by Thawte's 1995 sale to Verisign to start a venture capital firm, to further South African science education (and education in general) with his eponymous foundation, to push for the acceptance of open source software in South Africa, and to become the first citizen of an African country to visit space with his 2002 flight to the International Space Station aboard the Russian Soyuz shuttle -- basically, to live life as a Neal Stephenson hero might. His latest project is Ubuntu Linux, a Debian-based distribution designed for ease of use, extensive language support, and thorough cooperation with the larger Debian organization. Mark's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers about these projects -- Ubuntu seems to be chief on his mind -- so please add your questions below, one per post (but as many questions as you'd like). We'll forward 10-12 of the best to Mark for his answers, and post them verbatim as soon as they're ready.

Re:FLOSS jobs

[Daengbo]

The ubuntu home page has a "bounty" section, mostly for Python work, but I don't think that's what you want.

Re:Updated Packages

[MartinG]

You can find the answers to these using google.

They currently have gnome 2.8 already, but not xorg yet. xorg is planned for the next release.

Re:Modifications

[zerblat]

This is answered in the FAQ [ubuntulinux.org].

Dear stratjakt

[justsomebody]

don't see how 900 000 000 000 competing distros does anything but slow linux adoption down.

True, but if you'd botter to try ubuntu you'd notice one thing. This is gnome based distro aiming for the same goals as Lycoris and others. And after few minutes I was hooked up. The only downside for now is xfree instead of xorg. But even that is gonna change in next release. I believe that I'm not wrong when I say that it is the most cleaned and polished distro out there (and I tried preview release)

If you'd botter to search for your answer on ubuntulinux.org (or try ubuntu) page it would be easier to understand

But let me outline you:
- Fedora like ^^STABLE^^ release timeline (every 6 months)
- 1 cd setup, and no install options
- synchronized with Gnome releases
- Selected software only
and here why debian:
- Access to debian apt repositories
- Large community

Re:Arch

[tlord]

> I read somewhere that Canonical these days
> employs Tom Lord, of Arch version control system
>fame

They do not. What you recall reading is not true.

-t

From their website:

[greechneb]

Why does Ubuntu install Gnome by default? Do you support KDE and KDE apps?

The default desktop environment for Ubuntu is Gnome. You will find all the KDE packages you could want in the universe component of Ubuntu. We don't at this stage have the resources to put the same level of post-freeze work into the KDE packages as we put into the Gnome packages.

We are working with the KDE team to collaborate on that, so that Ubuntu will be an excellent platform for KDE users too... more on that in due course.

Re:Africa & the world economy

[armondf]

I am appalled at this writing. I live in South Africa, a country considered to have one of the best democracies in the world. We enjoy perhaps greater freedoms than many western countries. AIDS is not just an African problem, and it saddens me to see that there still exists this perception that AIDS is fundamentally an African problem. The AIDS epidemic is a global threat, and drug companies are doing R&D to combat this disease. The next scheduled crew on the International Space Station is tasked with various biological and medical experiments, including one focusing on research for a vaccination against the virus that causes Aids [news24.com].

Your comment "Africa is also a heavily divided continent, with the spread of Islam coming in through the north" is rather naive. Most African countries have a large ethno- and religious diversity. In South Afrca, we have various Christian religious groups, as well very large concentrations of Islamic, Moslem and even Jewish Faiths. In fact, one of the successes of South Africa's very highly regarded Constitution is that it does not include factions from specific religions. South Africans (as many other African countries citizens) enjoy freedom both of expression and religion.

It's about time that people from non-African countries stop taking what they see on *old* National Geographic Africa specials as African fact. There are many many Africans who are technologically more qualified than many American PHd's.