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Why Is The Ubuntu Hoary Beta Release A Milestone?

Posted by timothy on from the it-doesn't-weigh-enough-to-be-a-planet dept.

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."

2 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Re:manual mounts are what's wrong with Linux! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "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.

  2. Re:But why is it a milestone? by bVork · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's easy - its FAR more compatible. My case is a good example. I have a laptop with some rather, er, odd hardware, like my Radeon 320M IGP.

    The old Warty Warthog LiveCD didn't even boot - I got a black screen.

    This new LiveCD worked perfectly and even detected my touchpad's on/off button! (Something no other distro I've tried has ever done.)

    It worked so flawlessly, in fact, that I decided to install Ubuntu. I'm using it right now, in fact. Its just so... perfect. The default configuration is so wonderful that I've barely changed anything. (Though I did mess with the theme to make it look more like OSX and less... brown.)

    I've never used a Linux distro as my main OS before. The new Ubuntu LiveCD is the only reason I've started. That's the milestone.