Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu Linux Preview Released
psykelus writes "Ubuntu Linux, a Debian-based distro (formerly flying the flag of 'no-name-yet.com') annouced a preview of their first release (Warty Warthog) earlier today. Ubuntu is the most shiny Debian-based distrobution ever, sporting Gnome 2.8 and an extremely streamlined, mostly automatic installation & configuration process." For a limited time, they're also sending out free disks on request.
How many CDs is this one. Mandrake alone is 3 and it's not that great. I wish I could get a Distro without asking a friend, Satalite internet is horrid.
I want the 'Merry Muircat' edition. It would be faster and lighter than the warthog.
But there's been ... like ... nine Debian derivative distributions to come out in the last year.
How do I know which of these will follow through, which of them will continue to be active in a year, and which ones will have maybe two more minor releases then just sort of peter out? How do I know what will happen to this one, in the long run? How do I justify not just taking the safe route and installing vanilla Debian?
I'd love to have a "user friendly" Debian distro to recommend to people so that they aren't stuck using Mandrake, but when three projects aspiring to that title crop up a year... can I consider them safe to recommend? I just don't know what to do.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I was telling my wife that the real problem with Linux is that there just aren't enough distributions out there. If some of these people, these so-called "open source programmers" would get off their asses and crank out a few more distributions THEN this stuff would really take off.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Since the site seems to be down, how about someone who has it putting up a BitTorrent link?
This is getting painful. Would someone please teach the slashdot editors how to use a spellchecker? (Don't get me started on grammar...) Maybe I should write a HOWTO...?
You guys forgot the Coral cache already?
ubuntulinux.org.nyud.net:8090 works for me! =D
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Who can type faster:
:)
Bruce Perens? Or Mark Shuttleworth?
Interesting contrast; when a new release of Windows comes out, I don't see Bill Gates answering questions from all and sundry in public forums like this. (Of course, I don't follow Windows closely, so maybe I'm wrong on that.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You know, if we end up slashdotting their free CD order system and they try to even partially fulfill the free CD offer to us, we might end up putting the distro out of business before they can even go out of preview release mode. ;)
Bleakness... Desolation... Plastic Forks...
Here's a coralized link:
Ubuntu Linux
I's really like to check out their site, but it's basically unusable due to excessive traffic, it seems. Using http://www.freecache.org/http://ubuntulinux.org (sorry, can't get the link working in the preview) it seems to work so :-) ...? I just don't feel this should be in the description...
Btw, what's it lately with wordings like the most shiny
We've got torrents online. They are here:
It's good to see that the ratio between number of linux-distributions and linux-users are once more restored as the total number of distributions now passed the total number of linux users. :-)
Harald
It's not out of nowhere, in fact I think slashdot reported on this project already.
g 01 659.html
This is Canonical software, far as I can tell, and there has already been discussion about it on the Debian lists -- since Canonical employed a swath of regular Debian developers.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/07/ms
To get those free CDs shipped to you, you can go directly to this link:
http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org
Thanks for the linkage. I'm not usually under a rock or anything, but it must have flown under my radar.
I'm somewhere in the middle =).
unf.
In short, "humanity towards others".
Two defintions:
Ubuntu on Wikipedia
And a shameless plug for my writeup on E2
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I'm pretty awesome at this slashdot thing, huh? This link works better
Please don't bankrupt these poor chaps -- CDRs may be cheap, but they ain't free; nor is shipping.
But Maaa! Everyone else has a
Oh the humanity of it all :-P
/dotting them.. show them the LOVE!
Yeah thats right keep on
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
As long as its IRC client doesn't join #Debian on freenode by default, like Knoppix, Kurumin and all those others do or there will be hell to pay.
People can't seem to get it into their heads that #Debian is for Debian and not derivatives and they should ask for support from where they got it.
Dear Sir,
My name is Ikembe Otobamo. Until recently I was employed by the large software firm Microsoft. During this time, I earned many stock options and sold them at a great profit. During my time at Microsoft, I also began developing a linux distribution called 'Ubuntu'.
When Microsoft discovered I was using Linux, I was quickly dismissed from the firm. Unfortunately, that also meant I had no work authorisation and had to flee the United States.
Meanwhile, I have accumulated over $16 million USD due to stock sales, and I thus need s bank account in the United States to hold this money for safekeeping. If you would be so willing to help me, I offer you 10% of this money and interest incurred. I will also supply you with unlimited copies of my "Ubuntu Linux" distribution for your own perusal. This distribution also contains our specialised "Mozilatobe" browser suite and our "Gnombolo" X11 interface.
Please consider my offer; your assistance will be most appreciated.
Sincerely,
Ikembe Otobamo (Nigeria)
many
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Matt Zimmerman, who announced this preview on debian-devel, is a prominent debian developer and member of Debian's Security team, and I understand that other prominent Debian developers are also involved. There have also been other postings relating to Canonical and this distribution on the debian mailing lists over the last couple of months so it is not exactly out of the blue.
I've been testing for a while, here's the skinny:
* Even sleeker installer than Sarge. Still curses, but it doesn't ask you nearly as many questions, and sarge doesn't ask that many to begin with
* Project Utopia out of the box
* GNOME 2.8
* A good percentages of packages available that are available in sid.
* Time based releases every 6 months coinciding with GNOME releases.
* Check the list, it's a who's who of debian and gnome guys working together on a desktop distro.
* Matching live CD (Not this release though)
while I'm downloading with the torrent I'm get around 200KB/s and still going up. Now I've hit the 300KB/s mark.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
"defrag ext2" "lack of Token Ring support" Brilliant AND hilarious. Nice troll. I applaud you, sir.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
This might appear credible to me if I weren't more familiar with linux. Either it's a joke, or it's astroturfing. It's just about far enough over the top to have me think it's a joke. It's just about serious enough to have me think astroturfing. I can't figure out whether to laugh or point out the flaws in the arguement.
knoppix is debian and it's one cd. There ya go! I think they will be around for a spell, too.....
Your lawyer is either more intelligent than the GNU foundation, or didn't read the GPL FAQ.
[quote]
Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop non-free programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?
Yes, because the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally, on the license you use for your code.
Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical reasons--for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its output file. In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits the copyright status of the input.
As it happens, Bison can also be used to develop non-free programs. This is because we decided to explicitly permit the use of the Bison standard parser program in Bison output files without restriction. We made the decision because there were other tools comparable to Bison which already permitted use for non-free programs.
[end quote]
[source: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html]
I'm not going to argue about your modifications to the kernel; I don't know enough about kernel code to competently do that. I can argue that you can use GCC to compile things and not release the source. That's just a blatant piece of FUD, unless I'm mistaken.
HTH.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
It's your fault if you used GPL libraries!
Sorry man
This is Slashdot. As David Craig Simpson once drew: "Both of those views have been expressed with a straight face; therefore, I must treat them both as equally valid!" [idrewthis.org]
But yeah. It's moderately flawed. Nevertheless, it sent me into a quick Google-powered refresher of licenses, so it can't be entirely bad. =P
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Is this perhaps an attempt to get something more user-friendly out in front of people without the Debian name on it, in order to get feedback without getting flamed by the crowd that so dearly loves the traditional Debian installer?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If enough people do this, the most technologically impressive distro will succeed. As Gandhi said, you must be the change you want to see in the world.
That's my definition of good philosophy, really...something that you can turn to in even the smallest decisions.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
What problem does this solve that other Linux distributions don't? So Debian is aiming for a 100% Free Software GNU implementation, Mandrake is aiming at the desktop users, Red Hat is aiming at the corporate desktop, Slackware is aiming at the traditional UNIX users, Gentoo is aiming at the power users... where does this new one fit in?
would anyone know if it contains x.org packages? it would be nice to try for us to try out on a debian/debian-based distro without the need of compiling anything or risking breaking the system :)
my blog
Lets have the BEST of everything in one core repository.
like This one?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
with debian's background it's the perfect linux distro to support things like this. Just use anaconda (open from red hat) for the installer, then apt for updates, have it point to a mirror for the new distro to support newer (yes, less stable) apps for install, and you'll have a great OS, with the structure of Debian, but w/o the upkeep (which I happen to like, but I digress...)
THis lin-distro has 'wow' factor in my book.
CB()^&*$&^)!
free ipod and free gmail!
how to get a free t-shirt: My bank is happy to help you... just send me $25 to permit you as an administrator to my account ..
- Andy Fitzsimon
it's a distro planned and financed by a very rich and somewhat famous man who is doing alot to promote open source in South Africa. It will probably have, if it doesn't already, the prominant local languages embedded in it.
so it may not be very well known here, but it will have an impact there. imagine one of America's most rich and famous men (besides gates) starting a distro with as much money behind it as they cared to spend, which in Shuttlesworth's case, is alot. so i wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be better than most community distros
It's more "been kept really quiet" rather than "come out of nowhere". They annouced that *something* was going to be coming, and we had a rough idea of who was doing it for quite some time now. They've just held back the details from the masses until they had this preview.
It's quite a nice distro already, with a lot of promise. I'm going to be using it for my primary system to give it a fair shot.
501 Not Implemented
I really think you just want standards. The problem isn't the number of distros. It's "well if I take the time to learn all the ins and outs of RedHat, will I be able to carry that with me to Debian?" If you have some common standards (and there are already a lot in place) then the answer to the question starts to get closer to "absolutely!"
The danger in lots of distros going in different direction is that they are percieved and treated as completely different operating systems.
I'm not saying that we actually need some kind of standards body to apply bogus certifications to linux distributions, but it would seem like a partial solution to the "there's to many distros, what do i do?" problem.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/07/msg01 659.html
From a few months back, talks about what and why.
I bet this is the release that will push linux on the desktop to the forefront. I can hear the CEO of a fortune 500 company saying in a financial conference call, "we're going with the proven stability of Warty Warthog from no-name-yet.com."
Seriously, what's with these names?
Do these double as LiveCDs? There is mention of a LiveCD in the support documentation, but I don't see them for download
Who cares about Yet Another Distro? What's different about this one?
It's Debian, in a friendly wrapper, free and for free.
You can get Debian in a friendly wrapper by buying Xandros, or Linspire. They include nonfree software, and Linspire hooks you in to a software distribution scheme that costs a minimum of $50 per year.
You can get Debian free if you are a Linux expert. Get a Debian installer and have fun. However, Debian has 10,000 packages, and you need to know enough to pick and choose which ones you want. Ubuntu has 1,000 packages, and they have made default choices for you. (Want something Ubuntu doesn't offer? Grab it from the main Debian distribution; it will work.)
Also, Debian comes in three major branches: stable, unstable, and testing. Stable is really stable, but only updates every two years or so. Unstable updates daily but can be unstable. Testing updates automatically from unstable when the packages appear stable (a week goes by without major bugs posted against the unstable package, IIRC). Ubuntu on the other hand is promising a six-month release cycle; if you use Ubuntu, you should have a nice stable system, but you will get new packages much more often than if you use Debian Stable.
Ubuntu will occupy a similar niche to Fedora, but Red Hat makes all the decisions for Fedora while Ubuntu will have a community process.
The closest distro to Ubuntu is probably Bruce Perens's UserLinux project. But UserLinux is focused squarely upon business, whilst Ubuntu seems to be more focused on individual users.
Ubuntu should preserve all the things I like best about Debian, while being more friendly to newbies and offering a much fresher stable release. There isn't another distro quite like it.
I'm downloading it now and I look forward to trying it out.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Mepis is a great distro, runs off cd and has a very easy to use install. Many features built in, try it!
Heh, and now I wish I had mod points today.. you and the poster of the parent (if not the same) are just too funny.
This guy started https://thawte.com! I've always wondered why I had to deal with South Africa for our SSL! You learn something new every day.
I don't respond to AC's.
I just installed Yoper on my brothers computer, which can only run win98 or some version of Linux.
I previously had Suse 9.1 on there and it ran rather slow.
I installed Yoper yesterday and that computer seems to be running smoothly! I love it as it's easy to use, my brother is impressed as it runs quickly.
The forums at Yoper are quite helpful as well.
Configuration and installing programs isn't bad at all!
i'm not trying to flame, but people waste their time creating a distro, most of them with nothing special/different to offer
...Note to self, PREVIEW! >_<
i'm not trying to flame, but people waste their time posting these comments to slashdot, most of them with nothing special/different to offer
Mucking around with your distro and editting config files isn't all its cracked up to be once you've been doing it for a while. I have to constantly hear this "but Gentoo lets you get into the nuts and bolts of the OS" B.S. I'm getting old, I have better things to do then tweak or screw around with my OS. Training to be an admin? Fine monkey around guilt free while your still learning. Want to use your OS for actually doing anything? Join the rest of the world.
Think in 20 years anyone will still be obsessed with the commandline and knowing every detail about their OS? God I hope not.
Kirk : Scottie! Get that warp drive online!
Scottie : But captain I'm still busy customizing my USE flags!
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I'll be releasing my own Debian Based "Distrobution" - Called YADBD (pronounced yabbadabba)
Yet another debian based distribution.
It's going to include all the latest stuff ala gentoo with the ease of installation ala Knoppix, and the ease of administration ala Debian itself.
W00t!
btw, it's "Ubuntu", not "Ubuntu Linux" or "Ubuntu GNU/Linux". Just "Ubuntu". Yes, the website is "ubuntulinux", but please ignore that ;-)
2 004-September/000000.html
The official announcement: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/
What's next, CANIBALLinux?
""Ubuntu" is an ancient African word" Uhhh. Any particular part of Africa? Does the entire continent speak one language or what?
LiquidCoooled's three posts in this thread have been modded as troll and flamebait. Quite unfair when you actually read them and realise there's nothing inflammatory -- unless you're a close-minded zealot with rose glasses on.
I'm posting this with my karma bonus to show my disappointment. So there.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
its 10 times faster compared to getting porn of the torrent...
spelling is for people who doens't know better...
"Our release policy of releasing every six months is (at the time of writing :-) unique in the linux distribution world."
Yeah, because hey, Gentoo is releasing every three months. Therefore six is unique on a technicality.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Generally I don't whinge about moderation -- never with regard to my posts -- but the injustice meted out to yours was a bit too much.
Cheers,
CD
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
LFS really does teach an awful lot about the structure and composition of a Linux box.. it's not just compiler output. (Gentoo I give you is very like a regular distro with slow install time and loads of compiler output)...
LFS is a real education.. maybe that you wouldn't want to build 100 systems that way, but once and you've learned a whole load about how a Linux system works.
Ok, so you don't learn about the construction of Unix based systems, files, sockets, signals etc.. but still more that a modern distro.
The thing I like about LFS, from a geek point of view, is knowing what's been installed and where (and why even), something you can lose in Gentoo, becuase it pulls stuff in, which you may not understand why.. the benefit is that maybe they know better.. but why not use a binary distro and trust they know better.
Bob did not fail... it begat Clippy !!!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Read from the site: "Ubuntu" is an African word, meaning "Humanity To Others"
Oh, yeah, right. And which one of the 1000 languages spoken there might it be?
I call shit, which means "shit" in European.
Of course, that's nothing new.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think it's great that the distribution focuses on only one DE.
"I need TP For my Ubuntu!"
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I went from Mandrake to Slackware, and I did indeed learn a lot from slackware (way more than mandrake...that was kinda "look ma, i'm running linux!! *point, click* and there's this thing...i think it's called a terminal...and you can do stuff!!! Uh...i dunno what yet...but stuff!!")...but where I really got my *nix education was FreeBSD and Gentoo. My friend was also a long-time slack user, then I showed him gentoo and that's all he uses now. Now, I'm not saying gentoo is intrinsically better than slack, they're both damn fine distros...but depending on the kind of learner you are, slackware might not be the best place to learn how *nix works. I do have a soft spot in my heart for slack, though. It was my first real distro and did teach me the basics.