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Webserver? Ubuntu is a DESKTOP system. It doesn't have server install wizards. If you want advanced wizards, then you need a full featured Linux distribution like Mandriva or Suse.

1st. As a said, it's small but it's still non-trivial. A correctly partitioned machine is going to have the smallest footprint possible. This makes rapid deployments painless. I.E. use a 200MB disk image on an EC2/vmware or "ghosted" image is a hell of a lot easier than a 4000MB image that include an image editor, gui client, google earth, calculator, web browser, etc. As I said, non trivial.

2nd. Let's find a few examples, shall we?
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn

What isn't running on a typical server:
Squid
Ghost
CUPS
Firefox
Thunderbird
Evolution
libcdio
xorg
gd
pigeon
emacs
libpng
gnome-screensaver
openoffice
libsnd
elinks
kdm

and on, and on, and on...

Now, let's take a few of those and look for priv escalations:

PulseAudio (573-1)
Xorg (571-2)
Xorg (571-1)
THunderbird (CVE-2007-3844)
ppp (SA20996)

None of those would be installed without a gui. At least a few of them are default GUI install.

3rd.
Let's pick some daemons (Always running) that use memory:
Trackerd - up to GIGs of memory usage. Not installed on servers, but on desktops.
Xorg - several hundreds of megs.
CUPS - dozens of megs.
gdm/kdm and children - hundreds of megs.
bluetooth daemons - dozens of megs
dbus - dozems of megs

Need I go on? With a server, even one w/ 16GB of ram, with a gui, you could easy have 1/8th of that being used before daemons on a default install.

4th. I never implied NOT patching, merely not having to patch because the utilities were NOT installed. It's the difference between a few K and 2 seconds of patch time (If it were, say, a "passwd" update) and hundreds of megs of patch downloads just because I had pidgen, firefox, xorg, etc. to update. These are computers, they're not always perfect. A dpkg could be interrupted for some reason and has much more of a chance with many more packages. This causes me to personally have to fix the error on the server. When you're running hundreds, you quickly realize this is inefficient.

5th. Then you've never ran anything *big*. I'm talking hundreds of machines, where you cannot afford the BS of personally attending to each machine.

Well, if you want to know the exact cause of the problem all these years later, it's because you installed to a tertiary harddrive, on a system whose BIOS could only count to two drives when using the BIOS interrupts to load the boot manager off the disk. This (among other BIOS restrictions that limit where you can successfully install) is (currently) briefly mentioned on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Booting which is linked from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/

As for suggesting that people install grub to the MBR, what's the alternative? Document how to install grub to a superblock and mangle windows NT's boot.ini file to find Linux as a boot option, assuming you had a post-winnt windows install in there... Oh, and dd a chunk of your linux partition as a floppy image file on the winnt partition so that ntldr can read that image and boot it? Yeah, that's real granny friendly (and it still would have failed for you, I suspect), but if your granny wants to try they can get the instructions from http://www.tprthai.net/bootmgr.htm

Well, if you want to know the exact cause of the problem all these years later, it's because you installed to a tertiary harddrive, on a system whose BIOS could only count to two drives when using the BIOS interrupts to load the boot manager off the disk. This (among other BIOS restrictions that limit where you can successfully install) is (currently) briefly mentioned on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Booting which is linked from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/

As for suggesting that people install grub to the MBR, what's the alternative? Document how to install grub to a superblock and mangle windows NT's boot.ini file to find Linux as a boot option, assuming you had a post-winnt windows install in there... Oh, and dd a chunk of your linux partition as a floppy image file on the winnt partition so that ntldr can read that image and boot it? Yeah, that's real granny friendly (and it still would have failed for you, I suspect), but if your granny wants to try they can get the instructions from http://www.tprthai.net/bootmgr.htm

Have a look at BulletProofX. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BulletProofX

YES!!! Hypothetical: you're new to Linux. Someone tells you to open up a "terminal". OK.... You don't know what a terminal is but it resembles that command line thingy you've seen once or twice (and reminds you of the hackers at the movies). Now you see "sudo". wtf?? apt-get... wtf again. This kind of banter of "just type in garbel garbel garbel" just helps keep our operating system exclusive to us. While I don't think this year is "the year" (has it ever been?), Ubuntu has definitely made things way easier.

So, going back to your question. The average user is not going to understand that sudo mean "execute a command as another user", in this case the super user. Hell, they probably don't even understand what the root user is. They aren't going to understand that "apt-get install" will install packages for them. They also aren't going to understand what the ubuntu-restricted-extras package is. We can tell them to copy and paste this, but this reminds me of the "if you give a man a fish" cliche.

So what can they do instead? Well, this is where good package management software starts to show where linux has been advancing in the "average user" realm. I'm on a Gutsy laptop right now typing this. In hopes of not disproving my point, I opened add/remove. I typed in "mp3" in the search box. The first result was the restricted-extras package, which according to it's subtitle is "codecs to play mp3, sid, mpeg1..." :) However, I think this wouldn't have shown up with the default repositories enabled. But, according to Ubuntu Brainstorm the needed repositories will be enabled by default in Hardy. The terminal is a powerful and efficient tool. Yes, if I know the name of the package I want I use apt-get. But I do this because at this point I know what "sudo" and "apt-get" means. Telling new users to do it this way takes them out of their comfort zone. It's not necessary and doesn't teach them anything. For more anger about resorting to the terminal, I refer you to an excellent (NSFW) Mark Pilgrim rant.

So basically you're saying since Ubuntu added BulletProofX in 7.10, it's ready?

So basically you're saying since Ubuntu added BulletProofX in 7.10, it's ready?

From their own description of the OS...Ubuntu and Debian are closely related. Ubuntu builds on the foundations of Debian architecture and infrastructure, with a different community and release process. ... Debian is "the rock upon which Ubuntu is built".

Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian. A very good one.

InnerWeb

It would have been much easier to download and run an installer.

With the example you gave, yes. Let me give you another example:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Consider, also, that this is not for a single app. It's for a repository -- Medibuntu has dozens of apps. But even for a single app:

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

What you described just shows that AWN's install procedure sucks.

This isn't always true. Firefox 2.0.0.13 for Windows is 5.8MB while the same version for Linux weighs in (compressed) at 9.2MB.

That is true. It is again an example of where this has gone wrong -- Firefox 3.0 for Linux is about a meg, because it splits things into smaller packages (xulrunner probably being a big one).

When apps come bundled in installers with everything they need, it's easy to keep them around or move them from machine to machine without re-downloading them.

Not as large an issue when re-downloading is so quick. I suppose it makes more sense for a proprietary app, though.

It's a tremendous advantage not to be dependent on an Internet connection or a developer to package his or her app for the particular Linux install I happen to be using this hour.

I only very rarely run into apps which don't already have an Ubuntu package in some form -- could probably count them on one hand. In such situations, the procedure really isn't good -- usually involving compiling from source -- but this is easier now, and these are also not necessarily the kind of apps that a normal user needs.

That said, I do think that a package manager could be built to combine the best of both worlds. It's on my long list of things to do Real Soon Now.

Also, I don't have to worry about the windows taskbar or system tray jumping around on me.

Because it's impossible to move. But then, most Linux GUIs start out with these things "locked", forcing me to be a bit more explicit to end up with the taskbar in the wrong place.

Anyway, my point was that it's about on par with modern GNOME and KDE, but other shells are available, work well, and tend not to break apps. And KDE can be customized even more than GNOME, which is already ahead of Windows. So the only good thing about the Windows GUI is that, precisely because you can't customize it very much, it's very easy to find your way around a new Windows system -- as you said, consistency. But ultimately, that's only superficial, and they seem to be breaking it with every major new version of Windows...

It's also an interesting observation, given that most Microsoft applications can be customized to an absurd level. By clicking and dragging, you could accidentally move the Explorer location bar out of place, make it tiny, etc. I actually appreciate this (and see a bit of it in KDE), but if it's good in their apps, why not in the OS? (And vice versa -- if it's bad in the OS, why not in their apps?)

I should note one more thing: Power almost necessarily provides a way to shoot yourself in the foot. Take the web browser. If the homepage could not be changed, and there was no address bar -- if you totally kiosk-ified it -- it would be more user-friendly, and less prone to the user screwing it up in weird ways. But that would defeat the whole point of having th

Unlike windows, ubuntu actually admit to their vulnerabilities. http://www.ubuntu.com/usn We had 4 package updates last night. 3 hours before we were able to get in and update. that's 3 hours of being vulnerable with a published way in. No operating system is secure. Especially one with setuid commands all over the place.

Wifi and dual screens are going much better in Ubuntu, and 8.04 gets released this month.

Ubuntu is at the point where you can get document editing, web browsing, email, image editing, and more from the DEFAULT install... hell, even from your live disk.

Almost everything is easy in Ubuntu, and any issues are easily fixed by searching google (Which is not always the case with Vista, Xp, and other windows OS's I use).

On a side note, here is a link to setting up sync contacts using evolution from your blackberry: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=190938

Link for using iphone, ipod touch: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PortableDevices/iPhone
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=588246

They also seem to suggest "syncevolution", link here: http://www.estamos.de/projects/SyncML/

I guess what I am trying to say is: That was a LOT easier than to try and trouble shoot why Vista won't sync with device X in my opinion.

The Ubuntu provided NVIDIA binary drivers are NOT automatically copied into initrd/initramfs and to the best of my knowledge never have been (it is possible to manually specify to happen but why would you? This is not a driver needed to load the kernel from the harddisk). It IS true that there is a script that runs early on (but long after the ram disk has been disposed of) that often means that the Ubuntu provided driver is loaded before manually compiled ones. How to stop this happening is covered in the Ubuntu NVIDIA manual install doc though.

Is that it can install the OS, standard apps, open office, and a whole bunch of this free stuff in 1/10th of the minimum required for Vista, and it still looks this good.

Wait. No. It doesn't surprise me at all. Never mind.

What 'insecure' OS would that be. A real solution would be to use one of thiose bootable CDs.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

6.10 AKA Edgy wasn't a LTS release. 6.06 AKA Dapper Drake was the last LTS release.

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution)

The LTS releases get 3 years of support on the desktop, and 5 years of support on the server.

Which means you'll get full support for Dapper on the desktop until June, 2009 and on the server until June, 2011.

Oh, and I never said you were a moron. I said people who claim to not be able to use this distro either didn't actually try, or are morons.

However, you sure seem determined to prove that you are indeed a moron. Keep up the good work.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu610end-of-life

So my point is that Ubuntu has officially announced end of life for 6.10 to be April 25th and that they will stop patching security only 18 months later. 18 + 18 is 36 (i.e. 3 years) which is exactly the period after which my work laptop is due to be replaced. 18 months is not long term and neither is 36.

So I'm not a fucking retard, thank you very much. Next time you call someone a retard, check your facts. Also you might want to reflect on what that actually makes you (you might want to use a mirror to check your behind).

Already exists.
So why would we want Win7 w/o backward compatibility and with hardware support on par w/ Vista?

Windows is a program which inserts code into the master boot record, often before the user has broken open the packaging of their new computer, resulting in loading of malicious code at power-on which causes the computer to phone-home and results in the gradual loss of available disk space on the affected drive. Multiple other vulnerabilities have also been reported.

Various removal tools are available free of charge. This is considered a critical and urgent update.

Apple has also done some serious innovating in OS X: expose, ubiquitous zeroconf, system services, launchd, etc. What I find interesting is that major Linux developers don't copy those features from OS X. [emph mine]

Let's have a look at your examples.

Zeroconf - Avahi
Expose - Kompose
System services - errr, that's been replaced by Launchd on your list.
Launchd - ReplacementInit - Considered Apple's LaunchD and Sun's SMF amongst others, but none were quite the right fit.

I have several theories as to why this is.

Out of the three feature examples you've given, two are implemented in linux, your premise is incorrect, your theories are utter bollocks.

I dont ever use windows now. whats the point when ubuntu gnu/linux survives having bricks thrown at it with no AV. In the past I have found clamAV is very effective for removing windows viruses, I even use it on liveCDs when the host system wont work. but seriously, give ubuntu another go guys.

Promise me that if you get included in a focus group about Windows 7 that you will say the exact opposite of how you actually feel about the matter.

"Yes, I would *LOVE* a subscription model!"

"I think I would continue my subscription for at least *10 years*, or until Microsoft brought out something even better!"

"I can't wait to *rent* features, so I can try them before I buy them!"

All the while, you're downloading the latest Ubuntu, and handing out copies to your friends and family.

I call it the Sharpening Stone effect; if Microsoft is intent to slit it's own throat, the least you can do is help to sharpen the knife so the death throes aren't so bad. Come on, at least think of Microsoft's (neglected) children!!

And Linux has certainly had issues with looking pretty, which is understandable as talented designers aren't as generous as programmers,

When you post stuff like this people are just going to point out the youtube.com video WINDOWS VISTA AERO VS LINUX UBUNTU BERYL. 3 million people have seen it. Why haven't you? It's from February of last year. Compiz has improved some since.

Here is Compiz running on a seven year old 800 MHz PIII with 128 MB of RAM. It runs better than Vista did on the last dual core notebook with 1GB I tried it on, and it looks better too.

Here's Compiz running on an eee PC. Isn't that sweet? I hate lugging around 15 pounds of kit and the eee will be my next PC purchase. It weighs two pounds. Did you hear they're only 300 bucks (No, not the software. The whole thing!)?

They'll put up with a bit of slowdown for an OS that feels powerful, looks pretty and has lots of neat little toys.

I hear Vista comes with a few docklets or widgets or whatever they're calling them now. Ubuntu comes with this small collection of neat little toys. I didn't count them. I think there's thousands of them in there. People might find one or two interesting things in there.

Now what were you saying again? Oh, yeah,

talented designers aren't as generous as programmers,

Now you're projecting. In design are you? Apparently others are more giving. Perhaps that's because what they get back is "Progress" and that's good value.

It's even easier if you use TorK or Vidalia.

TorK is in the repositories for Ubuntu Hardy: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=tork&searchon=names&suite=hardy&section=all

But you can download and build either yourself for use with Tor. They make it a little easier to configure Tor, providing a GUI.

well... I posted a new idea about importing existing ubuntu accounts. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5320/
let's see if it rises some interest.

Let's say there was a 3D graphics computer that with pre-installed Blender, The Gimp / Cinepaint, InkScape, etc. I wouldn't particularly complain about that 'bloat'.

You mean UbuntuStudio?

Actually, is states that it does not "affect the existing bootloader", but you are right...I definitely missed the boat there. I read that description, but I think my past experience unconsciously dismissed that line because I do not see how that is possible. That said, I have googled a bit since posting my original message and it appears that it does not replace your boatloader, but does require upadtes to the existing loader...as well as adding another one. Specifically, it does this:

1. On installation, WUBI adds an entry in the settings of the ntldr boot loader of Windows 2000/XP/2003.

2. That entry points toward a special version of the grub bootloader (grub4dos) that does not overwrite to the Master Boot Record on your hard drive.

3. On boot, it searches for wubi/boot/initrd and wubi/boot/linux.

(paraphrased from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide)

Modifying boot.ini is no big deal...as long as they stay away from my MBR. Thanks for keeping me honest.

cheers,
Steve

http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/

Torrents are down there at the bottom.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/

Torrents are down there at the bottom.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/

Torrents are down there at the bottom.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-i386.iso.torrent

Kubuntu

• Rock solid KDE 3
• Commercial support provided by Canonical for a term of 18 months
• Release available through ShipIt for everybody as well as downloading

Kubuntu KDE 4 Remix

• Cutting edge KDE 4.0
• Support provided by the Kubuntu community via Ubuntu Forums, Kubuntu Forums, IRC, and the Kubuntu Users Mailing List.
• Release available through CDs for groups who need it (ie. LoCo teams, conference teams, etc.) as well as downloading

I think you're confused. Canonical splitting any of their official distros into a limited free version and a fully-functional paid version would violate their own promise that Ubuntu will always be free of charge. Even if they wiggled out of that on a technicality, Ubuntu lives purely on the strength of its community. Canonical know that and would be insane to risk losing them through such a move.

The actual situation is that Kubuntu will be splitting into two versions, both of them free in all senses of the word, for the 8.04 release. One (using KDE 3.5.9) will be officially supported for 18 months (it won't be a Long Term Support release, since KDE 3 likely won't be supported in three years, though it will still support upgrading directly from 6.06) while the other (using KDE 4.0.2) will be community supported. This is probably because (like me) they think that KDE 4 really isn't ready yet as it hasn't had much time to mature and many of the Extragear application (some of which come with Kubuntu) haven't been updated yet, the most notable for me being Amarok.

My understanding is that Kubuntu will only do this split release system for the 8.04 release, with the 8.10 release likely to use KDE 4.0.x officially.

Can somebody change the typo "relatime" to "realtime" in this page: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/beta Thanks, Sundar

The same cannot be said of Ubuntu.

One unpopular idea on Ubuntu brainstorm was posted by just such a user. People have been told that advanced/better means not only to have more memory but also to need more memory.

Still, it's great to see that FF is getting to the point where they can start optimizing more.

The current alpha release (tribe6) already includes FF3 beta, so that'd be a yes.

While I think any *nix admin would benifit from being comfortable with CLI I don't know of an elegant way of setting this up via GUI.

Everything depends on your DE. I've never done administration as anything more than a hobby. All I have in front of me is Gnome (which I wouldn't expect to have it). In googling and poking around this box, it looks like it's built in to certian apps without options for different users.

This page
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomePanelEnhancementsIdeas under "GNOME menus and sudo" looks to be struggling with something related to this in Gnome.

I'm not sure about any other DEs, but Gnome looks to be missing this. Oh, and just to check, I changed the command for an icon to "sudo -u apache gnome-terminal" which just hung for a few mins then quit.

pxc@cooldude:~$ apt-cache show subversion Package: subversion Priority: optional Section: devel Installed-Size: 3452 Maintainer: Ubuntu Core developers Original-Maintainer: Peter Samuelson Architecture: amd64 Version: 1.4.4dfsg1-1ubuntu3 Depends: libsvn1 (= 1.4.4dfsg1-1ubuntu3), libapr1, libc6 (>= 2.6-1), libsvn1 (>= 1.4) Suggests: subversion-tools, db4.4-util, patch Filename: pool/main/s/subversion/subversion_1.4.4dfsg1-1ubuntu3_amd64.deb Size: 252964 MD5sum: ce6362598e34f76d91da61b11ee0c658 SHA1: 31cd84a9df9936b29cf9840177919b1c6da87e0f SHA256: 63f0cdac47afe41715c541dff596e1055576243939f122025d1927fedab244b1 Description: Advanced version control system Subversion, also known as svn, is a version control system much like the Concurrent Versions System (CVS). Version control systems allow many individuals (who may be distributed geographically) to collaborate on a set of files (typically source code). Subversion has all the major features of CVS, plus certain new features that CVS users often wish they had. . This package includes the Subversion client (svn), tools to create a Subversion repository (svnadmin) and to make a repository available over a network (svnserve). . Homepage: http://subversion.tigris.org/ Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com Origin: Ubuntu

It has Linux and was sold as a toy for $199:
http://www.aware.com.tw/about.php

Specs are pretty low and I have the feeling there is no battery..

The only place where I can find it being mentioned by someone who really saw it is in an IRC log of #kubuntu

I found it while I was searching for the manufacturer of the recently announced Elonex notebook.
The domain of Aware Electronics is registered to the manufacturer of the CPU in the Elonex one.

I have found the ubuntu community does not want support for the latest hardware, which is something most people would want. I posted the following brainstorm ideas... http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3868/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3932/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3843/ At least one is a prerequisites to allow hardware companies to support their products "out of the box".. Yet, people are still making excuses. Linux is a programming OS, because they don't understand that a good kernel lets you load external drivers. Every flamewar involves "oh it should be added to the kernel" in terms of drivers. What people fail to acknowledge is that it may be 6 months because the distro carries the new kernel on the install CD. Oddly enough, Linux users get better wireless support by using ndiswrapper and windows drivers then Linux wireless drivers, because they don't need to recompile each driver every kernel upgrade, just ndiswrapper. For anything not in the kernel, you have to constantly recompile. Windows fixed this years ago I've been waiting 3 months just for linux to support my computer (and some of the hardware isn't even that old). But now, I dunno if I can be bothered honestly

I have found the ubuntu community does not want support for the latest hardware, which is something most people would want. I posted the following brainstorm ideas... http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3868/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3932/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3843/ At least one is a prerequisites to allow hardware companies to support their products "out of the box".. Yet, people are still making excuses. Linux is a programming OS, because they don't understand that a good kernel lets you load external drivers. Every flamewar involves "oh it should be added to the kernel" in terms of drivers. What people fail to acknowledge is that it may be 6 months because the distro carries the new kernel on the install CD. Oddly enough, Linux users get better wireless support by using ndiswrapper and windows drivers then Linux wireless drivers, because they don't need to recompile each driver every kernel upgrade, just ndiswrapper. For anything not in the kernel, you have to constantly recompile. Windows fixed this years ago I've been waiting 3 months just for linux to support my computer (and some of the hardware isn't even that old). But now, I dunno if I can be bothered honestly

I have found the ubuntu community does not want support for the latest hardware, which is something most people would want. I posted the following brainstorm ideas... http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3868/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3932/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3843/ At least one is a prerequisites to allow hardware companies to support their products "out of the box".. Yet, people are still making excuses. Linux is a programming OS, because they don't understand that a good kernel lets you load external drivers. Every flamewar involves "oh it should be added to the kernel" in terms of drivers. What people fail to acknowledge is that it may be 6 months because the distro carries the new kernel on the install CD. Oddly enough, Linux users get better wireless support by using ndiswrapper and windows drivers then Linux wireless drivers, because they don't need to recompile each driver every kernel upgrade, just ndiswrapper. For anything not in the kernel, you have to constantly recompile. Windows fixed this years ago I've been waiting 3 months just for linux to support my computer (and some of the hardware isn't even that old). But now, I dunno if I can be bothered honestly

People who know the truth and are sure of themselves don't have to use insults like you do. Blame shifting and malice are for the desperate:

There is no "Microsoft bugs and malice" involved in an interface specification and any bugs occuring [sic] would be solely the domain of either poor implementation of NDIS or by bugs explicitely [sic] in the vendor-provided network driver. You're a complete tool to suggest otherwise. There is no "firmware game", and these network cards aren't braindead - you are.

If I'm a braindead tool, Microsoft is in big trouble because anyone can verify what I did. Firmware, like this, is loaded in Windows with software that's nothing more than SDK parts provided by MickeySoft. Bugs come from the clowns who play, the malice is all from Redmond. The game is painfully obvious.

Almost all current wireless cards and USB devices either require binary firmware loaded by a free software driver, or require the use of Windows drivers via a free software emulation layer (Ndiswrapper). Ndiswrapper is an inefficient use of processor cycles. The binary drivers it requires are often of poor quality, which can lead to stability problems and support headaches.

The usual problems with proprietary software apply. Bugs in the proprietary drivers can result in a security vulnerability in the system itself that cannot be corrected without vendor intervention. Bugs noticed by the community can take months to be fixedif they are fixed at all. Vendors regularly ignore the concerns of users who have already purchased their product. For instance, in the specific case of the binary NVidia drivers, there have been several high-profile security vulnerabilities that remained unpatched for far too long.

Hardware that requires binary firmware with a free software wrapper simply circumvents the issue by moving all intelligence into a black box that the user cannot open. This is merely smoke and mirrorsit creates the illusion that the hardware vendor respects freedom while the concerns of the community remain marginalized.

But the dam has given way. Hardware that sucks does not sell, regardless of who's really at fault. Companies playing the Microsoft game are having trouble but people selling software that works with free software are doing well. Things are not perfect by a long shot but Vista's failure to generate substantial income for Microsoft's partners has changed the game forever. Here's the winner:

By making the recommended changes in any or all of these five areas (free software drivers, proprietary BIOS locks, free BIOS support, the Microsoft Tax, Digital Restrictions Management) hardware vendors will help establish a mutually beneficial relationship with the free software community. Vendors will realize increased sales, and the free software community will have hardware that meets its ethical requirements.

The Free Software Foundation is eager to assist hardware vendors interested in making the changes recommended in this paper. Vendors should not hesitate to take advantage of this largely unexplored opportunity.

... somewhere visibly on one of the main Ubuntu pages.

These images (for Mac PPC, Playstation PS3 and IBM POWER hardware) are kept current by the community, and they are right here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/7.10/release/
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/ports/releases/7.10/release/
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/ports/releases/7.10/release/
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/ports/releases/7.10/release/

And no, linking there shouldn't be an issue for a "brainstorm" submission.