05 Jul

Lubuntu Eoan Ermine Wallpaper Contest

The Lubuntu Team is pleased to announce we are running an Eoan Ermine wallpaper competition, giving you, our community, the chance to submit, and get your favorite wallpapers included in the Lubuntu 19.10 release.

Show your artwork

To enter, simply post your image into this thread.

We will close this thread towards the beginning of September (exact date TBD, and depends on how many entries we get) when the competition for 19.10 will close and the judging will begin.

The wallpaper selection committee will select the finalists for the Lubuntu Members to vote on.

The rules

There are a few rules though. Please make sure you are happy to submit your work under these rules before you post it. Posting your images here indicates acceptance of the rules.

Ownership

The images you upload must be yours. If you see an image which you know to be misrepresented please flag it and we will take care of it.

Size

Please don’t upload the full-size image to discourse. Large images will slow down this thread so please use smaller images here. In due course, we will contact submitters for access to finalist images, which should be at least 2560×1600.

Quality

As previously mentioned, the final image size should be at least 2560×1600 pixels. Images much smaller than this won’t scale up well. Equally, images with a lot of compression artifacts won’t look good. Your image won’t be accepted if the quality is low.

Watermarking

All watermarks, names, logos, etc must be removed.

License

Your image(s) must be licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.06 or CC BY 4.03 license. If you do not specify a license in your post then we will assume that you are licensing the image under the CC BY-SA 4.0. By entering the competition you are agreeing to these license terms.

There is more information available here.

You can help Lubuntu look better

Get snapping & adding your submissions here.

Additional note: If your image is smaller than 2560×1600 and is so great you feel it should be considered, submit it anyway with a note on what resolution can be supplied. We may decide it’s so good we must include it as well.

27 Jun

Donate to Lubuntu!

The Lubuntu Team is happy to announce that we now have ways that you can directly donate to the project and purchase apparel. You can find quick links to all of the sites described in this post on our Donate page.

Why does Lubuntu need donations?

Lubuntu is a community-developed project that relies on support from the community to continue development. There are specific costs we would like to address to take the burden off of specific contributors, their employers, and the Ubuntu project as a whole. Specifically, Altispeed Technologies has graciously provided hosting support for our Phabricator instance, forum, and other pieces of critical Lubuntu infrastructure. We would like to eventually move off of Altispeed’s infrastructure, or be able to pay for the infrastructure ourselves.

Additionally, Lubuntu Developers attend several major Linux conferences each year, specifically LinuxFest NorthWest, the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, SouthEast LinuxFest, and others. Lubuntu would like to be able to support some of these conferences and trips to these conferences without relying so much on e.g. the Ubuntu Community Donations Funding.

Rationale for each platform

We have accounts on four different platforms set up thus far: Patreon, Liberapay, PayPal, and Teespring. All four of these serve a specific purpose, and are meant to provide a variety of options for donation.

Patreon is, by far, the most popular recurring donations platform existing today. Donations could either be per-release or per-month; we selected the per-month option to best suit our users. In exchange for high visibility and ease of use, Patreon takes 8% of the donations per month, plus any additional fees that may arise. While this isn’t ideal, it works best for many people.

Liberapay is meant to provide a reasonable alternative to Patreon. Not only does it not take such a large percentage of donations, the platform is free software. The downside is that they previously had issues with one of their payment processors, and they have less visibility. However, it is a preferable option for people who wish to avoid Patreon.

We created a PayPal account for the purpose of one-time donations and payment processing for Liberapay temporarily. The advantage is that this allows for many types of currencies, and PayPal is a large platform which has a fair amount of visibility.

Teespring allows indirect donations via apparel purchase. Once purchases begin, we will publish a full breakdown (from our perspective) of what portion goes to Teespring and what portion goes to Lubuntu. The “profit margin” varies per-product, and we will publish all of that as purchases come in.

Accountability and transparency

We have observed with some other open source projects that accept donations that accountability for purchases and transparency in general is lacking. When Lubuntu accepts donations, it is essential to us to publish exactly where money is flowing and how it is being used to help further the project. While the decision-making process is limited to the Lubuntu Council and official members of the Lubuntu project, we see no reason to hide where the community’s money is going.

What’s next?

We plan on publishing updates to our donations process, reports on where the money is going, and all other pertinent information directly on the Donations page. Check there for regular updates.

Are you aware of another platform we should utilize? Do you have further questions about how we plan on using the money? Leave a comment below or contact the Lubuntu Council.

24 May

“Your fair discourse hath been as sugar, Making the hard way sweet and delectable.”

As you may have noticed on Twitter, Mastodon, IRC, our mailing lists, and this website, we have now launched a forum using the incredibly popular open source Discourse software. We join Ubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, LXQt, Phabricator, and others that share this powerful tool for communication with us.

Lubuntu Discourse

This forum is a general meeting point for any topic, but most notably (at this point) support and development. It will not supercede other forms of communication like the mailing lists, but instead will complement them. While we’re on the subject of mailing lists, there are options in Discourse that we’re working on enabling for people that prefer mailing lists over forums. Keep watching for updates about that.

You can click on “forum” on any page on our website to get to it or simply navigate to https://discourse.lubuntu.me or https://forum.lubuntu.me to join the conversation.

The quote in the title is from William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act II, scene 3, line 6 (c. 1595).

12 Mar

Statement Regarding Infrastructure Data Loss

At 2:15 AM Central US Time, the Lubuntu Team was informed by our hosting provider, Altispeed Technologies, that there had been a problem with the server we use for Lubuntu’s infrastructure, including Phabricator, Weblate, Jenkins, the IRC bridge and other services. This resulted in complete data loss for all of the aforementioned services. Below is a statement from Altispeed Technologies regarding the incident:

In an effort to demonstrate good stewardship of Linux and open source,
Altispeed Technologies donates the server, storage space, and bandwidth for
hosting many of the Lubuntu resources. During a migration effort last night,
the virtual machine that stores production data for the Lubuntu Phabricator
instance (among other services) was inadvertently destroyed. Despite having
backups enabled, our VPS provider was unable to recover the data and it has
been permanently lost.
Our team is working to re-provision the system and we have signed an
agreement with a datacenter to run our services under our control. All
Lubuntu resources hosted by Altispeed will be moved at that time. We
apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and will continue to
work towards giving back to the community.

We still have complete access to the Git repositories hosted on the Phabricator instance, as they have been mirrored to GitHub, however, all of the tasks on our Phabricator instance as well as the wiki and login information for all users has been lost.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and expect services to be back up before the end of the day Central US time. On a positive note, starting anew has allowed us to refine the way the services are organized on the server, to offer a faster and more secure experience going forward.

19 Jan

Introducing the Lubuntu Council

The Lubuntu community has grown exponentially since our switch to LXQt. With new users, contributors, and Lubuntu enthusiasts among many other people who have decided to join our community, we are finding the need to scale the project further than the unwritten technically-led oligarchy that we currently have in the Lubuntu project. Therefore, we are pleased to announce the Lubuntu Council.

Read More →

20 Dec

Sunsetting i386

Lubuntu has been and continues to be the go-to Ubuntu flavor for people who want the most from their computers, especially older hardware that cannot handle today’s workloads. However, the project and computing as a whole has drastically changed in many ways since its origin ten years ago. Computers have become faster, more secure, and most notably, have moved off of the traditional 32-bit i686 (generalized as i386 in Debian and Ubuntu) architecture.

As an increasing number of Linux distributions have focused their attention on the 64-bit x86 architecture (amd64) and not on i386, we have found that it is harder to support than it once was. With i386-only machines becoming an artifact of the past, it has become increasingly clear to the Lubuntu Team that we need to evaluate its removal from the architectures we support. After careful consideration, we regret to inform our users that Lubuntu 19.04 and future versions will not see a release for the i386 architecture. Please do note that we will continue to support Lubuntu 18.04 LTS i386 users as a first-class citizen until its End of Life date in April of 2021.

We would like to sincerely thank the contributors to and the users of Lubuntu on i386. Without you, Lubuntu would not be what it is today. The Lubuntu Team would like encourage you to read our post regarding taking a new direction if you would like to understand more about our future aspirations as a project. Lubuntu is far from slowing down; if you would like to join our growing team of contributors, check out our Telegram/Matrix/IRC channels.