Ubuntu Linux 5.10 Colony 1 Released

linuxbeta writes "The first development release of Ubuntu Linux 5.10, code name "Breezy Badger", is now available for testing. Colony CD 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Breezy development cycle, as images that are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Breezy. Screenshots are available. If you're interested in following changes as we further develop Breezy, have a look at the breezy-changes list. Bug reports should go here." (This comes in, of course, as I'm installing Hoary on my iBook.)

Comments

Current state of breezy

[snorklewacker]

As of this morning, breezy still appears to be totally broken for KDE users. Previously there were some problems with DBUS versions, which may still be in effect, but I haven't seen them crop up recently, because I'm struggling with a new problem: aptitude seems inclined to want to remove all of KDE because of a couple unmet dependencies. Namely some silly stuff, like depending on an exact version of Kate for example, with an upgrade to Kate causing the parent package to break and want to take KDE with it. One needs to pin packages, which then tends to have the opposite effect of locking down everything that depends on it. It's apt's special version of RPM hell. That's life on the edge, and it's easy to fall off and lose a lot of packages if you don't look closely at what you're doing.

Given that I also want side-by-side 32 bit support on my amd64 distro, and that Ubuntu's 32-bit support amounts to running a chroot, I'm looking pretty hard at Fedora. I don't think Ubuntu's a bad distribution at all, in fact its amd64 support is first-rate, but I just don't care as much for the chroot solution. I still recommend Ubuntu for a desktop Linux; one should just be aware that Ubuntu's Unstable (currently breezy) is more like Debian's Experimental at start and only slowly converges to the relative stability of Sid, until release (currently hoary) at which time it becomes stable as Debian Stable. Stick to Hoary unless you like occasional mass-breakage.

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[snorklewacker]

> as Debian derivatives go, Knoppix and its "children" (Kanotix, etc) are much better. Better HW recognition, better multimedia support, better package management (straight from Sid) etc.

Knoppix I think is something of a bait-and-switch. If you install Knoppix as Knoppix, you'll find that none of your core packages are compatible anymore, there are no Knoppix-specific repositories that will support you, and at some point, Sid will go out of sync and you'll be stuck. If you install it as vanilla Debian, you have debian, not Knoppix.

Ubuntu actually supports its own packages, and it also supports AMD64 as a first-tier distribution. These were the factors that led me to Ubuntu. The only real gripe I have is the lag with new packages I've needed or wanted (ghc 6.4, needed; postgresql 8, wanted; firefox 1.03, wanted) that Ubuntu has been slow to supply. I'd call these pretty minor things however, which will probably be addressed when breezy next updates from sid.