Looking Forward, Ubuntu Linux 6.06 383
SilentBob4 writes to tell us that Mad Penguin has an interesting look at the upcoming version of Ubuntu. From the article: "All in all, Ubuntu 6.06 is gearing up to be quite an impressive release. Granted, I saw some bugs during my stay on the distribution, but can I really complain? It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room. Considering some of the horribly authored software I've looked at over the years, I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry. As I said before, it smoked Fedora Core 5 performance-wise, so in that department it's solidly ahead."
*Really* Mad Penguin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:*Really* Mad Penguin (Score:2, Funny)
Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining! (Score:5, Insightful)
If everybody that whines gets the attention they want, Ubuntu will become as bloated as any other general purpose distro.
"1) Canonical sponsors many more gnome developers than KDE developers -- just look how many more gnome-related commits appear in the Dapper commit log."
Duh. Ubuntu is a distro built around Gnome.
"2) Edubuntu, whose education-specific programs come almost exclusively from the KDE Education Suite, runs on gnome instead of KDE. Canonical has never sponsored a KDE Education Suite developer, even though Edubuntu simply wouldn't exist without their work."
And the KDE Education Suite developer would still be doing what they were doing if there were no Ubuntu. Sounds like they are starting to get a bit eager for some of the pie, even though they volunteer to do what they do.
"3) Canonical does not financially support the team that creates Kubuntu-LiveCDs, so they have to pay all the expenses from their own pockets."
Did Canonical say they would finacially support the team creating the Kubuntu-Live cds? If not, hey, it's a vounteer operation just like most other distros. Suck it up. You chose the job.
"4) Kubuntu doesn't accept community contributions (ie. contributions by anyone beside Jonathan Riddell and Andreas Mueller). A lot of volunteers wanted to contribute, but they can't because they have no access."
Don't know anything about this situation, so I'll give it a big "So what? The people that run Kubuntu can do whatever they want to do. It's their baby.".
"5) The name of the version featuring gnome is called Ubuntu, while the version featuring KDE has a K added to the front. This makes it sound like gnome is the default, standard, and KDE is some sort of offshoot. It would be more equitable to name them Ubuntu-KDE and Ubuntu-GNOME, or Kubuntu and Gubuntu.
"
Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river. Maybe because Gnome *IS* the default standard for Ubuntu, and KDE is an offshoot?
Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining! (Score:3, Insightful)
I normally don't say things like this, but I think that Kubuntu should merge with Mepis. I've been using Mepis 3.4, and it's really a better Kubuntu than Kubuntu. Now that Mepis is changing to be based off Ubuntu, I'm not sure if there's a purpose left for Kubuntu. I agree with you that Ubuntu should stick to making a great Gnome distribution, but
Re:Gnome imperialism (Score:3, Insightful)
Mandriva may use KDE as a default but offers a well-polished and stable GNOME environment (and a bunch of other desktops) as well, just a few mouseclicks away. They employ developers that work on both "big" desktops, too.
What a wanker. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ubuntu *is* a Gnome distro.
This is a problem. Gnome is ugly in our eyes.
Your problem, not mine. If you don't want Gnome, don't use ubuntu. It's that simple.
because I as a user do not want it.
But there are plenty out there who do. Your personal opinion is not going to decide if Gnome is successful on the desktop or not.
And I cannot stand the Gnome imperialism.
And I cannot stand the KDE imperialism.
Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining! (Score:3, Informative)
Um.
It is developed as an alternative. It's called Kubuntu. I think you mentioned it earlier. You can even just apt-get install kubuntu-desktop.
Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining! (Score:4, Insightful)
Same with the name - Gnome is the first and default desktop, with Kubuntu a later addition. And if there is any workers missing, it would be someone dedicated to polishing Edubuntu, not adding people to projects that alreade have staff working on it.
Further, it seems it's not actually the German Kubuntu people that are protesting, but some offshoot of the official group that (somewhat strangely) wants to both leave the commonality of Ubuntu behind and get paid for it by Canonical at the same time. They also seem to be asking for transfer of "officialdom" from that other KDE group. It looks more like some internal fight among the KDE people than anything else, with this offshoot angry that Gnome, not KDE, is the default desktop for Ubuntu.
Re:KDE / Kubuntu developers are complaining! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu is a GNOME based distro. Kubuntu is an offshoot KDE version.
Ubuntu with its default Gnome interface is polished and very 'usable'. My son learned to navigate it at 3 years old. KDE is no where near as simple to navigate, its a whored up MS Windows start menu + pretty OS X-ified effects. And I use KDE.
Cheers.
Features - GCC 4? (Score:5, Informative)
* Linux kernel 2.6.15-18 PREEMPT
* X.org 7.0
* gcc 4.0.3/glibc 2.3.6
* GNOME 2.13.94
* Firefox 1.5.0.1 web browser
* Evolution 2.5.92 email/groupware client
* OpenOffice 2.0.2 productivity suite
* Gaim 1.5.0 instant messenger
* Gimp 2.2.10 image editor
I haven't been keeping up with the 4.0 branch of GCC, but is 4.0.3 really stable enough for the average home user?
Re:Features - GCC 4? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Features - GCC 4? (Score:5, Informative)
It's really been very stable - I've had no trouble compiling quite a bit of C and C++ software with gcc-4.0 on both Breezy and Dapper (6.04^H6).
Re:Features - GCC 4? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Features - GCC 4? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Features - GCC 4? (Score:2)
Re:Features - GCC 4? (Score:2)
Ubuntu's There (Score:4, Insightful)
"I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry."
Isn't FC intended as a test distro for new Red Hat stuff? I'm not a seasoned FC user but I've always thought FC releases were not first and foremost stable so much as innovative.
Re:Ubuntu's There (Score:3, Informative)
The article is about Ubuntu 6.06, which is still in alpha. I'm using it right now on my home PC, and its alpha status shows at times: every once in a while, they'll release an update that'll suddenly break a program. You probably installed Ubuntu 5.10, which like RHEL is "stable" in the sense that they rarely release updates th
Re:Ubuntu's There (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the difference? The people making Fedora intend for it to be stable. It's just driven more by the needs/desires of a community of users. RedHat can then cherry-pick the changes that they like to build a standardized business product.
Re:Ubuntu's There (Score:2)
For the life of me I cannot understand why people rave about Ubuntu's installation procedure. The vast majority of it is no different to any other distro's text-based install and the disk partitioning section is, IMHO, relatively very difficult, unintuitive and confusing.
Re:Ubuntu's There (Score:2)
It installs with very reasonable default settings and exactly one of every type of program that most desktop users are used to having. One can get the default installation by doing little more than saying "OK" at 3 or 4 installation dialogues.
The vast majority of it is no different to any other distro's text-based install and the disk partitioning section is, IMHO, relatively very difficult, unintuitive and confusi
Re:Ubuntu's There (Score:2)
Re:Ubuntu's There (Score:2)
Re:Ubuntu's There (Score:4, Insightful)
I am rather disapointed with Ubuntu's (Breezy Badger) install options. The only network install option appears to be a PXE boot network install. I've fallen in love with FC/RHEL Network/Kickstart installs. I even made a custom ISO that will kickstart (or manually) install FC4, FC5, RHEL3, & RHEL4 for both i386 and x86_64 over the network (and it runs memtest of course). I'm working on a multi distro kickstart USB stick as well, but I don't have nearly enough hardware that boots off of USB.
Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, all this talk about Linux stability is really more related to the advancement of bloated desktop environments and poorly tested features and new versions.
Every distro is constantly rebuilding the latest KDE and GNOME with $NEW_FEATURE and sometimes it doesn't work we
Re:Ubuntu's There - Linux stability (Score:2, Interesting)
Stability is only an issue at the desktop level (Gnome, KDE, OOffice, Firefox and so on), and xBSD are running the same stuff as Linux at that level, and they're overall equally crash-prone no matter what platform.
On the kernel level, I haven't seen a crash for years - and tha
My personal experience (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks (u|k|x|edu)buntu devs.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5 (Score:5, Insightful)
Compile your kernel.. you will get a bigger speed gain here by filtering out what you don't need and it's a WHOLE lot easier than switching distros. If you REALLY want the last 5-10% then compile and strip EVERYTHING yourself custom for YOUR processor. No distro is going to do that for you because they need to remain generic so that they run on "x86" instead of "Dual Proc Pentium 3 Coppermines only". If you want to do that, then get Gentoo, which exactly why Gentoo exists. Switching from one generic binary distro to another is just changing a few details about how certain peices of the OS fit together and what is on or off by default and has nothing to do with speed.
Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Your comment ommits the fact that some people don't want to invest allot of time to see performance benefits. Yes you can compile everything, but most people don't want to sit around for that. Don't get me wrong, I like gentoo as much as the next ricer, but I will admit the strengths of ubuntu/debian. And you as a gentoor (new word?) should appreciate not having to disable extra stuff, but rather enable the bloatware.
Re:Ubuntu vs. FC5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Usability is getting better and better for each new release of Gnome.
It is now at a state where it leaves Windows XP in the dust, and is seriously starting to get to the same levels of usability as MacOS-X.
Vista will need to be very good to beat this, or pe
But is it fixed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Installation:
On my first install, I tried partitioning a 300 GB Fat32 partition at the end of the drive for sharing cross-OS stuff (mp3s, etc. I'd tried a windows Ext2 driver previously, but it eventually corrupted the partition and I lost all my recent mp3s) and 2 GB swap and the rest for the OS. Ubuntu absolutely failed to format the one partition Fat32, gave me an error and choked. OK. How tbout ext2? Well, that choked too. Not caring about that partition, I decided to just bypass the step manually and have it copy the OS. I can always format the partition manually. It choked setting up apt (for reasons I don't understand). I decided that, despite manually partitioning every linux distro I've ever used, I'd let ubuntu choose for me. This seemed to "work".
Configuration:
The first thing any computer user wants to do is get on the internet. I've got a static IP where I live so I decided to set up the networking. Unfortunately, without a working hostname, there's literally no way to do this. On bootup, gnome suggested I manually edit my
On the positive side all of my devices (audio/video) were configured correctly but on the downside, there doesn't seem to be any good way of upgrading packages (Firefox to 1.5 or my NVidia drivers) when the current version isn't in the repository (I'm probably missing something).
I'm hoping with the new release, Ubuntu can fix some of these usability issues while keeping their slick package management.
Re:But is it fixed? (Score:2)
It seems the best way to fix it is to use something like boot&nuke, completely wipe the drive, and then start from scratch. Seems odd, but it fixed the problem for me.
Re:But is it fixed? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the installer already did this... Yeah, right here, on this install guide [mrbass.org] it shows on the 5 [mrbass.org]
Re:But is it fixed? (Score:3, Informative)
2) reconfigure
Very impresses with Dapper Drake (Score:2, Insightful)
Very happy with Ubuntu 5.10 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very happy with Ubuntu 5.10 (Score:5, Informative)
You know that wonderful "apt-get" program you like so much in Ubuntu?
apt-get has you covered:
1. Back up your "/etc/apt/sources.list" file. 2. Edit it with your text-editor of choice, changing all the spots where it says "breezy" to "dapper". 3. Update by typing "sudo apt-get update" and 4. upgrade by typing "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade". Wait for downloads, and all should be good. 4 steps (5 if you count the waiting) to the upgrade process.
Re:Very happy with Ubuntu 5.10 (Score:3, Interesting)
Dapper Drakey Diablo (Score:2)
Someone call the analogy police (Score:5, Insightful)
You may now proceed to mock my spelling and grammar in response. Nonetheless, I think that this article is a prime example of "juvenile journalism."
I like it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I like it (Score:2)
Re:I like it (Score:2)
Ubuntu (Score:5, Interesting)
We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.
An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.
That having been said, I'm running Dapper as of yesterday, and I had to do crazy tricks to get it to actually print to my standard, detected printer.
Drivers for E-machines (Score:2, Interesting)
Screen resolution could use some help. (Score:4, Insightful)
This review is too kind on the matter for the audience I talk to; suggesting that novices use "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" and answer questions about their hardware is not something I'd recommend to novices. While other parts of Ubuntu GNU/Linux shine for the novice, this is not one of them. Fedora Core GNU/Linux has always been better at letting me use the GNOME screen resolution adjuster (and setting the default to the highest screen resolution at the highest refresh rate so I don't often have to adjust the screen resolution at all) and getting the desired results.
I hope Ubuntu's chosen resolution picks the native resolution for LCD screens. I mostly work with users who have older computers and CRTs but are planning to switch to LCDs real soon now.
Re:Screen resolution could use some help. (Score:2)
It's quite obvious that ... (Score:3, Funny)
It's time to change that absolutely ghastly default colour scheme.
Otherwise Ubuntu is beautiful.
I don't know much about linux, I'll admit,... (Score:2)
Ubuntu 5.10 made a change to (I think) the hotplug system or something and ditched or moved to something called "udev" (iirc)
It totally broke ipw2200 WPA support and the ability to monitor packets (war driving with kismet)
Why do they need to cock about with this kind of stuff without maintaining some kind of backwards compatibility or way of ensuring it works "out of the box"
The ipw2200 chipset is quite old now as is my Dell 8600 laptop (18 month old tech, maybe more)
Disapointing.
Re:I don't know much about linux, I'll admit,... (Score:4, Informative)
Breezy (5.10) uses hotplug and udev. This is the nice, comfortable way with which most people using Linux 2.6 are probably at least vaguely familiar. Dapper (6.06) has ditched hotplug and uses udev. Why? Linux 2.6.15 and udev perform everything that the older 2.6.12 kernel, udev, and hotplug performed. Read more here [0].
Next, Dapper currently has v1.1.1 of the ipw2200 driver, and it supports "wardriving" just fine.
[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-an
What still bugs me about Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
I recently did an update on my debian box and again the german keyboard is gone and I've got wrong (english) characters everywhere. There goes half and hour of research and fixing again. When I go about and reinstall it (or Ubuntu or something else) I better be fully aware of all my hardware and it's chipsets or else I will have serious trouble getting Linux to work. When you run Linux you usually know your HW inside out but it's been nearly 3 years ago since I last did some larger setup and config. I write my HW specs on small stickers that I put everywhere on my cards and MB but thats quite a prospect - opening your box so you can prep for a fresh Linux install that will take 20hrs.+ before everything is where it was before.
Obviously I'm getting old and gotta get real work done rather than fiddling with crummy x86 architectures, but admit it, I've got a point, no? Remember the C64? Unpack, plugin, works. That's how modern computers should work.
Re:What the name? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"smoked" (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess for every "in the wild" example there's a counter-example
Where are the downloads? (Score:2)
Re:Where are the downloads? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"smoked" (Score:2, Interesting)
He also said Ubuntu looks very professional while the latest Fedora looks like a circus act. Come on, now. Based on screenshots, Ubuntu and Fedora look very similar. I don't see how either looks more or le
Re:"smoked" (Score:5, Insightful)
Even within core+extras I have had to manually resolve conflicts with rpm when upgrading from one release to the next. It has been a long time since I have come up against an upgrade that couldn't be resolved by apt with no help, or at most using "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade".
Again, I haven't used Ubuntu, so I don't know how much of this applies to that comparison, but I would say it is definately possible to soundly beat fedora on package management.
Also, apt-get continues to be way faster and use way less memory. When I recently upgraded a system to FC5 and upgraded 100+ packages from extras the transaction check thrashed the machine to death (with 512 MB RAM) and still took over and hour after upgrading to 1 GB RAM (On a dual Athlon MP). apt-get has never done than even on much less powerful systems.
Re:"smoked" (Score:3, Informative)
Well, considering that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do anything at this current time, that shouldn't be a problem.
Yum is an ongoing disaster. Inferior to apt in every single facet of its conception and design. It can't even do dist upgrades. It's also a huge resource hog. Up2date regularly hangs and
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:2, Informative)
It covers Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Gentoo, SuSe, and Madriva. It should have enough information to get what you need done.
Have you tried searching the Ubuntu forums?
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:2)
File a bug report?
Ubuntu picked up my AC97 audio automatically, both version 5.04 and 5.10.
smash.
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:2)
Same here. Ditto for the Dapper Drake prerelease. Didn't have to "install" anything as far as drivers.
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:2)
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:2)
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:3, Informative)
1) start by using win32 versions of some popular OSS for your daily or occasional tasks. You probably already use Firefox, but OpenOffice and the GIMP are good ones to put on a windows machine. Perhaps the best lessons for me at this stage were installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP, but go with whatever you use.
2) use them. Go through an upgrade
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget about getting a perfectly working desktop system, and just concentrate on learning Linux. Don't treat the project as a plug and play Windows or Mac replacement so much as a side project learning a new (and very different) system. Linux is a rewarding and fun system with the right expectations, and the willingness to take your time learning stuff.
If you are new to *nix altogether - I would even say forget about the GUI altogether and learn Linux from the ground up with the command line (on a
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:2)
Re:User guide to linux? (Score:2)
You seemed to think it was so easy; surely if it was that easy it would have taken as long to write that response.
funny (Score:2)
Re:Two Things (Score:3, Informative)
You can always apt-get banshee [banshee-project.org]. Banshee allows you to manage your ipod, and the daapd plugin (which is also in the apt repositories) allows you access iTunes music shares, as well as share your own library with iTunes clients.
Taste (Score:3, Insightful)
If there are specific instances where behaviour
Re:Two Things (Score:2)
1) No iTunes clone
Waahh? Why the heck do your game devs need iTunes (or a clone thereof) at work? Tell those hippy iPodders to tweak their playlists at home! </tongueincheek>
Re:Two Things (Score:5, Insightful)
Might I suggest...
OSX?
Seriously, if your measure of acceptability is "closer to Apple standard" and your problem with a desktop is that it doesn't behave identically to OSX, why are you thinking of switching to anything? OSX is obviously already perfect.
On the other hand, I'm personally never likely to use any environment that's much like OSX very often. Just not my cup of tea. A lot of us think that OSX isn't the holy grail of desktop computing. Sorry about that.
Re:Two Things (Score:2)
Thank you.
Re:Two Things (Score:2)
Re:Two Things (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you mind writing a couple of sentances then? I've not noticed much difference :-/ Also some backing up of your statements generally would be a good idea -- a lot of moaning "it sucks!" with no specifics or suggestions make you look like just another troll
Re:JTunes??? (Score:2)
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
As for the god part, I just dislike being looked down upon because I prefer a quick su over endless sudos.
I once actually got banned on freenode for advising a newbie to use su. Apperently it was a violation of the "ubuntu philosphy".
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
That seems pretty bad. Unless they politely said that su was a bad idea, and you tried insisting that it's not in front of the newbie. That just brings up confusion, and somebody needs to pull rank.
I'll explain to you why sudo is the way to go. With my school research, we were using some software that required linux, and I set up a few computers with it for some other students. They didn't know much of anything about linux at the
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
---
It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers
Thank you for proving my point.
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
Except it's not just for novices. I've been on linux since 97 and migrated from debian to ubuntu last year. It's a god send. Just because I know how to recompile the kernel and setup runlevels by hand doesn't mean I want to. Ubuntu makes typic
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
You should say you were banned from #ubuntu as freenode has no such policy. And come on over to #gentoo; we let people recommend su all the time. :)
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
'bout damn time, I say.
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2, Interesting)
I _am_ a programmer. I _do_ develop software, and I write code all the time. And I love Ubuntu, for precisely the reason the OP seems to dislike it. If it's simple for the beginner, it mostly means it's simple for the experienced user as well.
I'm not interesting in using a desktop. My interest is in doing my job or pursuing my hobbies, and a desktop should just get out of the way and make it as easy and transparent as possible for
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:3, Insightful)
Then don't go and Godwin [wikipedia.org] yourself right off the bat by saying "the people on the freenode channels are complete nazis when it comes to "Politically correctness" and "being helpfull"."
The vast majority of Ubuntu people seem to really stick with that "Linux for Human Beings" thing they have plastered on their website. And good for them.
On a slightly different note: when did observing and calling someone out for rude or dumb behavior start getting derided for being
I Love Ubuntu (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't feel like Ubuntu is dumbed down at all. I feel like it's easy to use, with sensible defaults. I love that it's a distro that works out of the box, and yet it still allows me all the power of a Debian box (without the politics and glacia
Re:I Love Ubuntu (Score:2)
Sadly, that is exactly what is being killed off here.
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:3, Insightful)
But back to it. Today I was checking out the screenshots
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
I've been using Ubuntu since Hoary was first available. (Debian Sid before that) Up untill a week ago I was running Dapper too.
That screenshot was _VERY LIKELY_ caused by the "apt-get dist-upgrade" style command.
The only time I have ever seen a "please reboot now" was after a new kernel version was downloaded.
I am back on Hoary now, but only because I was having other problems.
Re:I dislike Ubuntu (Score:2)
Screenshot 6 is just another me
Re:Is it as messed up as FC5? (Score:2)
Since them I've done about a dozen test in
Re:silly irony here (Score:2)
Re:Can it play MP3 out-of-the-box? (Score:2)
Re:New Ubuntu Installer - not as good as Mandrake (Score:3, Informative)