Arthur acquaints

In about a week we release version 6.0.3 of ownCloud Community Edition! It is a maintenance release that includes nearly two months of improvements (including performance improvements) and some fixes. I want to use this opportunity to shed some light on the fixes the LDAP back-end has seen.

There are no big things, however, but the performance improvements in sharing related methods and in the configuration wizard will significantly enhance the experience for end users and admins. The following list is not a complete one, but addresses the most notable changes.

Since recently, Google delivers its YouTube videos using the weak RC4 cipher. There are rumours that the NSA can break RC4 in real time, so it is recommended to disable this cipher in your browser, if you want to play safe. However, when you disable RC4, you cannot watch YouTube anymore.

Why does YouTube insist on RC? Is it better than without transport encryption? Is it just temporarily? And how can I still the videos without re-enabling RC4?

Read an English announcement at Danimo's.

Das Release von ownCloud 6 ist keine Woche mehr entfernt. Der letzte Release Candidate ist veröffentlicht, die nächste Version klopft an der Tür. Dies gilt es gebührend zu feiern!

Release Party

• Mittwoch, 11. Dezember, 19 Uhr
• BeLUG, Lehrter Str. 53, 10557 Berlin (ca. 10min vom HBf)

We just released the Beta 1 of the upcoming ownCloud 6 series! It is spiced up with two new features. The most exciting one is probably collaborative editing of ODF documents. However, I do not want to write about it, ownCloud Documents is already covered by Frank.

The other feature that just went inside is revamped LDAP settings in a wizard-like fashion. Now, the minimum number of required fields you need to fill in is *drumrolls* 3! Of course without loosing the flexibility you are used to. Providing the LDAP server host, a user DN and a password is usually enough. ownCloud will take care of everything else. Some settings will be suggested, you can just accept them, and more will be auto-detected.

New wizard-like LDAP configuration

Kubuntu 13.10 has been released a day before yesterday! Hooray!

I did an upgrade a little bit prior to the final release, and everything went smooth and works properly. There is just one thing where I needed to put hands on manually. This is my Apache (used for development only) configuration which seemed to be incompatible with the version brought with 13.10. This however is nothing Kubuntu specific, but related to all Ubuntu-flavours.

Photo: Dominik Wagenführ, CC-BY-SA

Last weekend I attended Ubucon, an Ubuntu user conference organized by the German Ubuntu community. I was giving a talk about, surprise, ownCloud. If you are interested in my talk, please find the slides in PDF on the program page. Beware, they are in German! Those who have seen my talk, please give your honest feedback on the Ubucon feedback page!

A detail that is not on the slides is that I was wearing my "I am the first one" Jolla T-Shirt (like this). It provoked the question about an ownCloud mobile client for SailfishOS. I want to answer it here as well.

ownCloud 5 Enterprise Edition, released earlier this month, is now available for Univention Corporate Server (UCS) – the innovative heart for the cost-effective operation and simpler administration of server applications and IT infrastructures. As before with previous ownCloud packages for UCS, ownCloud integrates it with the system's LDAP Directory and Configuration Registry (UCR). That means that the new LDAP features can also be (pre-)configured using UCR. For a good overview, we also have updated the documentation.

As you may know, the LDAP backend in ownCloud 5 got a couple of new features and some changes under the hood (see point 3 on ownCloud 5 released, Google Reader Alternative). Seven maintenance releases later, some bugs have been smashed, but an irksome quirk is left.