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."

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[Johnny Doughnuts]

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".

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 /mnt and mount the device manually.

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,

Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

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, and extraordinarily clever says jdub. And yes, Ubuntu now has a Live CD for every architecture they support, i386, AMD64 and PowerPC.

Re:A lot needs to change

[PCM2]

If you set the preferences on the file browser to "Always open browse windows" (or something like that), then that's what it will do. Easy to solve -- though I agree, I expected something much more like Mac OS X's column view windows and less like the old Mac OS's habit of opening a new window every time you double click through the directory hierarchy.

It's still my favorite desktop distro, though. But then, I must confess I am a Gnome bigot.

Why MP3s aren't a double-click away from working.

[jbn-o]

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.

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.

Re:A lot needs to change

[erhnamdjim]

Don't blame Ubuntu for this. Go out and shoot a Nautilus developer instead ;-)