First things first
Check out our participate page to get a good feel:
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate

How to get started
Ubuntu is very easy to get started with. The first step would be to jump on IRC, and join some of the #ubuntu- channels depending what you are looking for. Ubuntu needs you! We are one of the fastest growing distributions, and have a ton of users, and need the development community to grow along with us.

Easiest way to help
Bug triage. What this means is that you help troubleshoot bugs, categorized them, reject them as needed. This helps because the right people can see the bugs easier when there are not 60,000 open. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/HowToTriage.

Getting started with packaging
This is a bit harder, but the best way to get started here is to check out the MOTU. MOTU deals with a huge amount of packages. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU

One thing to keep in mind is that some things may not be able to be learned in a matter of hours. But you get to work with fun people, and learn valuable skills, and most importantly help make your OS kick ass.

Update
I have been reading feedback on this post, and probably I should have explained what IRC was. I am going to post a blog on the future about IRC and how to use it, but here it is in a nutshell: IRC is a chatroom program. It lets you communicate with other ubuntu users and developers in chatrooms sorted by topic.

You need an IRC client
Windows: MIRC
Linux: Xchat (ubuntu users can install this in synaptic, or at the command prompt type sudo apt-get install xchat)

You need to know how to use it:
Windows users: http://www.mirc.com/irc.html
Linux users: http://www.ddruk.com/articles/display.php?id=48

You need to know where we are:
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channels: #ubuntu, #ubuntu-devel, #kubuntu, #ubuntu-effects, #ubuntu-bugs, #ubuntu-motu

“But I don’t know how to use Linux at all!” — Start out by downloading Ubuntu (Edgy) at http://www.ubuntu.com. Once you download it, we have a great support community at http://www.ubuntuforums.org.

I am from digg and I am so sick of these Ubuntu posts!
I guess it’s popular to have an operating system that costs you nothing, and is only getting better. Go figure?

This blog is just spamming to get adwords revenue!
Yes, you caught me. I made $2.64 since January.

Some drama with openbsd this week. Read the story here.

Trying to get a spec implemented

If people could review, make comments etc, or help me out implementing this that would be great. Basically, this is the default behavior of page up and page down in suse, and it works great. For example:

At the command line I type “ssh” then hit page up and it will come up with “ssh sharms@sharms.org”. Hitting page up again will come up with “ssh sharms@test.com”. It takes a partial command from the command line, and matches it with history entries. This is awesome with respect to saving time typing.

This is also a great opportunity to try and get other features into bash that make it easier to use (there is a good comment on the spec with more useful changes).

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Spec/EnhancedBash

Update: Test run
If you wonder what the heck I am talking about, follow these steps:

• Edit file “.inputrc” in your home directory
• Paste the following lines:

"\e[5~": history-search-backward
"\e[6~": history-search-forward

• Open up a new shell
• Type “history”
• Find a command that you have recently used
• Now type part of that command (ex ss) then hit page up and it will come up with the most recent match
• Keep hitting page-up for more matches, or hit page down to go back to the last match
• Advocate getting this spec implemented!

Interviews

• Interview with Nat Friedman
• MP3 interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Tutorials

• How to use dual monitors in Ubuntu
• Managing users in Ubuntu

Hardware

• System 76 Darter laptop review

Good things

• EMI to sell DRM free music