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Why Is The Ubuntu Hoary Beta Release A Milestone?
Mayank Sharma writes "As reported earlier on /., Ubuntu released the "beta" Live CD of their next version, Hoary Hedgehog. While, there have been several Ubuntu reviews after that, no one seems to have covered why the release was an important one. Here I review the CD and, based on a irc conversation with Jeff Waugh, try to explain why this CD is a milestone for the Ubuntu project."
that I distribute my "How to boot and use XP" manual on a ubuntu live cd
looks like his review is beta too.
The community's new candidate for the poster child distribution, Ubuntu, recently unveiled the Live CD of its second version code-named "Hoary Hedgehog". Meant for people who like to be on the bleeding edge (and can live with the few odd bugs), Hoary might not be the distro for the virgin Linux user. But that's just one argument against a dozen which shout "Grandma use Hoary".
/mnt and mount the device manually.
Anyways, the final Hoary is still a couple of months away with its release scheduled in April 2005. What we have here is the Live CD -- a preview of the things to come (Download).
I tried the CD on my lousy PIII-1.7 Gig Celeron box with 384 Megs of RAM and it ran without showing any signs of unstableness for 48 hours. It couldn't detect my Linksys Wireless card (no Live distro ever has), but detected my ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card and booted me into a 1024x768 environment. For comparison, the previous Ubuntu Live CD (Warty Warthog) throws me into a 640x480.
Desktop and Applications
The Live CD does take time to boot, detecting hardware, configuring devices, setting up network -- the same things Knoppix does -- but differently and slowly. But once booted you see a neat GNOME desktop, clean, wide, and brown. Ubuntu means "Humanity towards others" and the soothing music during boot reminds you of that. But the drum beat that is associated with every application start can only be compared to a "thud" and depending on how you use the system, can be quite irritating.
This Ubuntu Live CD comes with Gnome 2.9.4, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, GIMP 2.2.2, Evolution 2.1.3.2 and FireFox 1.0. Expect these version numbers to bump up by the time the final Hoary is released.
There is Rhythmbox and Totem Movie Player and both have important plug-ins/codecs missing for playing MPEGs or MP3s and there's no other MP3 player. So I installed one using the Synaptic Package Manager which is a front-end to apt-get. (Did I mention Ubuntu is based on Debian?) From the graphical menu of Synaptic I selected xmms and was prompted to select its dependencies as well, which I did. Presto I can play MP3s. But where's my music?
As with other Live distros, this one also doesn't touch my hard disks. But unlike others it doesn't mount them either. The desktop has a sole "CD-ROM" icon. To use your partitions, create appropriate directories under
Since my Wireless card wasn't picked up, I plugged my wireless router using one of its ethernet ports to a standard ethernet card which was detected and configured using DHCP.
The Live CD packs all the stuff in three drop-down menus making it a lot easier for new GNOME users to find their way around. The Applications Menu contains all the application under its 8 sub-menu's; the Places Menu helps you get around to resources like the CD-ROM, your home directory, your network server and more; and the Desktop Menu lets you control your computer, by helping you change preferences or tweak system settings through the Administration sub-menu.
Don't try and look for a hard-disk anchoring option as the Live-CD is for demonstration purposes only, which means it cannot be installed.
So what's unique?
New applications, better configurability and a polished desktop, are things that one expects from every new release. So, what's so unique about this Live CD that the Ubuntu guys are calling it a "milestone release"?
The #ubuntu channel on irc.freenode.net is a nice place to hang out, have fun, and get answers. There I bumped into a helpful jdub (aka Jeff Waugh, a Ubuntu developer) who helped me understand what makes this release so special.
The previous CD was based on Morphix (a more-modular spin-off of Knoppix) while this one shares a lot of code with the install CD from the kernel up. Ubuntu now uses the same kernel everywhere, on the live CD, the installer and when installed. Additionally, the Hoary installer itself is a tiny bootstrap program, which is highly extensible, relatively easy to modify,
Ubuntu was the theme of the 2003 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's national youth gathering.
-offtopic? check
-non-negative comment about christians? check
mod shield, activate!
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
So what was so special/milestone-ish? The fact that it uses the same kernel? The artile really was NOT englightening.
Does Ubuntu really have such a rabid userbase already or are the developers astroturfing all these stories? I hadn't realized there was so much demand for yet another Debian derivative.
I read the review. And I already like Ubuntu. But why is this release a milestone? What do I get over and above Warty Warthog?
Paul Beardsell
I've been using Ubuntu for the last 5 months now and I can say that the new Live CD is excellent. There were a lot of rough edges in the get-go, but it's all coming together. I tried using some KDE distros to begin with and I found them to be too involved with impressing the eye. Gnome in Ubuntu is set up very well with enough to look at to make you feel at home (such as in a windows/mac environment), but only so much so that you can do what you need to do and get it done fast. BTW, the article was not a very good one. Go to the ubuntu website (http://www.ubuntulinux.com) and check it out for yourself if you're curious.
Ubuntu, the way linux should be.
Try Ubuntu FREE! --
Celerons are not Pentium 3 chips, that's a milestone right there.
Everybody here knows Ubuntu is all about nudism, which is very unlikely to be part of a Christian youth camp.
"To use your partitions, create appropriate directories under /mnt and mount the device manually."
That is exactly the thing keeping me from switching to Linux. I recently tried Suse 9.1 Pro, and Mandrake 10.1 Community. Both detected all of my hardware fine with the exception of my external hard drives(USB2.0, 160GB drives formatted with FAT32).
Everytime I try to switch to Linux there is always one piece of hardware that doesn't work, and everytime I give up after spending a week trying to get it to work. WinXP on the other hand is up and running in under 4 hours, with any non-functioning hardware easily brought up and running with a simple driver install.
I don't mind the need to mount/unmount drives in Linux, but coming from Windows I expect to be able to do so in the GUI without having to dropdown to a command line, and SU to root just to muck around in some config files in order to add support for something that should have been autodetected and configured in the first place. To top it all off, most distros finally made it possible to mount a USB key drive as a User, but the external HD's still need to be mounted as Root?!? I really hope a true Desktop Linux distro comes along soon, because I honestly don't want to touch Longhorn with a ten-foot pole, and there's now an affordable Mac on the market offering a suitable alternative.
I posted this in my journal here, but I might as well rant in public too. What the hell is up with Ubuntu? I tried to download it, there's only one US mirror, which I got 20KB/sec on. Other mirrors weren't much faster.
So I figure I'd get the torrent. 5 hours later and still zero seeds, 0 progress on the amd64 iso.
Screw it. This "large user base" apparently is in someone's head, because no one seems to be willing to distribute this distro.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Unless I missed something obvious, the article never specifies why this release is important enough to warrant a /. article on its importance.
Great: a new ubuntu (I am just about to install the first one.) So I searched the article for ONE reason why I should skip Warty and download Hoary in vain.
Grumble, grumble... "The state of journalism nowadays...."
In addition, it has very few apt-get sources, making it hard to get a variety of software. Also, it's networking setup is trashm: it does not show up on windows or linux networks, and it has problems with sharing file and security.
All this aside, it does have it's pluses. It has good hardware support, and it makes Linux easy for newbies.
This sig sucks.
Ummm... granted you will need to set it up once by creating an fstab entry (one line in a file, easy to edit) and set the device in the GNOME "mount button" properties window, there is such a thing. Also, if you know that a newly inserted device will take /dev/foo, you can somehow set it up to be automounted on insert, like can be done with a CD-ROM drive.
This seems like a bad thing at first blush, but it's a good thing that Ubuntu is not distributing software that some users can't redistribute (notably, users in countries burdened with software patents, like US users).
It's a real hassle to not be able to double-click on a file and have it do the right thing immediately, but there is a good reason for not including MP3 software: (for those who aren't aware of this) MP3 is patent-encumbered. In some countries all implementations of MP3 are covered by patents held by the Fraunhofer corporation and patent licenses are acquired through Thomson. If you want to merely share a verbatim copy of a GPL'd MP3 player with your friend (again, in some countries), you need a license.
This restriction makes the software non-free for some users, despite the license. This is why free software proponents endorse the use of unencumbered protocols and file formats to do the same job. Ogg Vorbis is a fine replacement and most reviews I've read say that the Vorbis codec sounds better than MP3, or can sound just as bad but with a smaller file size. Have a friend set up a blind test for you and figure out what you like.
There are restrictions on various other kinds of formats too, and there are unencumbered replacements for most of them.
Digital Citizen
You are legally entitled and encouraged to copy, share, and redistribute this CD, for yourself and your friends.
(notably, users in countries burdened with software patents, like US users).
USA citizens are less than 300 milions in a 6 bilions people world.
I think that linux distributions should break their chains and start to distribute codecs as well.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down