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

Ubuntu...

[brilinux]

While I usually use Free/NetBSD, I put Ubuntu on my laptop to compare it to Debian. I updated to the current Breezy Badger, and while some things, like GNOME, XFCE, and KDE are ahead of Debian, some others that I considered important were actually behind it, such as Firefox and Thunderbird. While I applaud Ubuntu for doing what Debian cannot with all of its platforms (which is excellent too; I really haven't much against Debian), I think that if Debian has Firefox 1.0.3, Ubuntu ought to as well. Still, I applaud Debian and Ubuntu for their contributions to OS/FS.

Re:Ubuntu...

[Anonymous Coward]

hoary hedgehog froze in april, security fixes from firefox 1.0.4 have been back ported to 1.0.2. (the only problem is that update.mozilla.org tell you that you need to upgrade, but with a poke in about:config you can fix that.)

Re:Ubuntu...

[cr4p]

security fixes from firefox 1.0.4 have been back ported to 1.0.2. (the only problem is that update.mozilla.org tell you that you need to upgrade, but with a poke in about:config you can fix that.

For those wondering what setting to change for this, it is "general.useragent.vendorSub". Change its value from "1.0.2" to "1.0.4", after you download the firefox update for Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog).

Re:Ubuntu...

[3mp3r0r]

Firefox 1.0.4 is available in backports. To get it add the following to your sources.list:
deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/ubp hoary-backports main universe multive\ rse restricted
deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/ubp hoary-extras main universe multiverse\ restricted

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[Toy G]

if you avoid doing dist-upgrade every other night, sid is actually pretty stable. With the introduction of "experimental" as the bleeding-edge branch, packages landed in sid are pretty much safe for everyday use. Heck, I even run KDE 3.4 from the experimental packages, and only the Kaffeine multimedia player (a 0.6 application, still very young) is crashing every once in a while. I only upgrade applications for security reasons (e.g. Firefox 1.0.4, already in Sid), don't usually do mass-upgrades ,and I'm absolutely fine :)

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

it just depends where you want to be on the bleeding edge stable (debian definition) scale.

debian woody is at one end of the spectrum, and respected for being there. debian sid and experimental cover the other end.

ubuntu grumpy will cover bleeding edge end.

most distros find some sort of comprimise. the release versions of ubuntu are version number frozen, which is often a good thing. it is a stable release. it is resonably up to date, but stable.

there is also the ubuntu backports project that lets you easily drop in new versions of stuff if you so want. i think they have the latest firefox, gimp and gaim etc.

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:Current state of breezy

[drac0n1z]

umm. 32bit emulation should be done by the kernel and not by a chroot, compile yourself a kernel that supports 32bit emulation, the default kernel doesnt support it, yes it's annoying.

Re:Current state of breezy

[Mr.Ned]

There was a message posted to ubuntu-devel this week that users ought to hold off upgrading due to the transition to gcc-4.0. Once that is done (and it seems to have finished today, judging from the number of packages that have been processed) and the autobuilders catch up, it ought to be more regular.

Re:Current state of breezy

[erlenic]

Running 32bit apps in a Debian (or Debian based, like Ubuntu) 64bit distro is a bit odd. The system installs the 64bit libraries, but not the 32bit. And because of the way it installs them, you can't install the 32bit as well. The "solution" is to have a 32bit chroot. I think this happens because the 64bit libs are in /lib, whereas every other 64bit distro uses /lib64 for 64bit, and /lib for 32bit.

Re:Current state of breezy

[snorklewacker]

The kernel already supports 32 bit binaries, and in fact supports it by default. Debian however is not designed to maintain installations of 32 bit binaries within the same tree as 64 bit binaries, at least not in terms of managing the entire system this way. This results in a "cleaner" system, but presents difficulties when one simply wants to cherry-pick a few binaries like firefox and ghc.

Plainly you don't even run a 64 bit system, so what possessed you to lecture me about it?

Re:Current state of breezy

[joto]

umm. 32bit emulation should be done by the kernel and not by a chroot, compile yourself a kernel that supports 32bit emulation, the default kernel doesnt support it, yes it's annoying.

Umm, 32 bit emulation is already done by the CPU. That's how most people use their Athlon 64's today. The linux kernel by default supports both 32 and 64 bit binaries, when compiled for amd64 architecture. That isn't the problem here.

The problem is that you also need a 64-bit userspace. E.g. ld-linux.so and shared libraries in both 64-bit versions and 32-bit versions. There are various approaches for doing this:

Some vendors, like Suse have followed the lead of e.g. Solaris, which simply added /lib64 and /usr/lib64 when going 64-bit.

But this is less than ideal. For Solaris, it made sense, since only applications needing a larger address space would benefit from 64-bit support. Thus the majority of userland could remain 32-bit.

On x86 however, there are pretty big performance benefits in going to 64-bit, because it doubles the number of registers (general purpose register, fpu register, mmx registers, and sse registers). So the default should be 64-bit, and we should add /lib32 and /usr/lib32 instead. As far as I know, no linux distribution does just that...

And the reason for that is that we want to support even more general things. How about a /lib-ppc and /usr/lib-ppc for running powerpc binaries through qemu? Or more realistically; the other way around? (Some powerpc users probably want to run wine).

So the people behind Debian and Ubuntu have thought about this problem, and want to do it right! And that takes a bit of planning, because it's supposed to be the last time we do such a thing, no matter what kind of weird multiarch-processors or user-space emulators the future will bring.

So in the meantime, Debian and Ubuntu users will have to add a separate directory hierarchy with a complete 32-bit user-space, and run their apps in this environment (chrooted). While this is less than ideal, it's also the most foolproof solution (remember to re-mount /home ,/tmp, /proc, /dev, and /sys inside the chrooted environment, and copy /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc/group into it too).

Thus, the present "solution" is an annoyance, but the annoyance can easily be limited by a bit of scripting. And it has the advantage of being completely general. There's e.g. nothing stopping you from adding a Fedora chroot to an Ubuntu distribution.

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[pairo]

Actually, I like hardware detection in Debian, as opposed to the one in Knoppix. Last time I played around with it, Knoppix was using kudzu. No offense to Red Hat, but discover is at least an order of magnitude better.
Also, I did have some specific issues with it not detecting a certain NIC I had (Some onboard NIC, that uses sk98lin as the module.)

Also, Knoppix does have its own packages and I've had a couple of issues when 'upgrading' to Sid.

Personally, I'm using Sid + experimental and the only thing that's missing/too old is X.Org. And KDE 3.4, but I don't use that anyway.

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.

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

but Kudzu Helps Curb Binge Drinking

Yay Breezy Badger...

[Mad_Rain]

Nice timing on this - Over the weekend, I changed my apt sources.list to breezy instead of hoary, did an apt-get dist-upgrade, and things ran relatively smoothly for me. (I had to re-install the nvidia drivers, but no big deal). The whole purpose of this upgrade was to get transcode working on an AMD64 machine, so I could push the processing power of this machine a little more. ;)

My experience with Ubuntu on AMD64 has been excellent on the whole, but with a few caveats of what I wish I could do:

First, when I "apt-get install" Apache2, PHP, and Mysql, and then check out PHP, it says that PHP wasn't compiled with the mysql module. (see the thread here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=28241) Having to recompile that is a PITA.

Second, another favorite tool of mine, FreeNX, is available for 32-bit versions of Ubuntu, but not 64-bit.

But I guess the real killer of all the current 64-bit distrobutions right now is the multimedia support. Ubuntu is doing a lot of things right, and it was easy to install and start using, but it hasn't quite gotten all the way there for me (and probably many other users) yet.

apt-get upgrade

[phoenix.bam!]

Has anyone done apt-get upgrade from hoary to breezy without problems? killing 20 more seconds of my life....

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[punkrockguy318]

Ubuntu Backports backports packages from the unstable branch, and makes sure they're stable. I have the latest versions of firefox, gaim, and other software. Check it out: http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[KingBahamut]

I have to aggree. Knoppix and its derivations tend to be rife with installation problems. I honestly think Mepis is the only Knoppix Clone that comes close to Ubuntu, and many Ubuntu users that I know that dont use Kubuntu, use Mepis instead.

Alternately , Knoppix depends largely on debian's repositories. Id take Ubuntu over that in a heartbeat, Canaonical and Ubuntu support their own packages specifically compiled for Ubuntu itself. While the lag in packages could be annoying to some, it doesnt bother me a whole lot.

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[snorklewacker]

That's pretty nifty ... I might even switch back to Hoary and use the backports instead of switching to Fedora. The lack of mixing 32-bit and 64-bit still has me fairly vexed however, and I think bluecurve is purty, but I have always loved using aptitude for packages ... if only I could make the 'C' key command to list changes actually work, I'd really love aptitude.

Yes, I know fedora has apt, and I could use aptitude, but apt isn't bi-arch compatible... come to think, that's probably why Debian makes me use a chroot in the first place.

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[skadus]

That's one thing that bugs me. I went from Knoppix in April or so (long story; my router was broken and I didn't want to run my Win2K machine on a naked cable connection) to a point where I decided I wanted a HD install.

Everywhere I looked I saw Mepis recommended. Installed Mepis, *loved* it until I found out I couldn't get KDE 3.4 without some tricky repository stuff. Tried that, worked okay, but I realised this would happen again next time KDE updated... so I installed Kubuntu.

Now Kubuntu's version of FF 1.0.4 is incompatible with update.mozilla.org, and a few random apt packages and other programs seem to show a Gnome bias, and Debian packages are spotty at best on Ubuntu. Both seem to have their packages they're behind on.

Is there some distro out there as easy to upgrade as Debian/Ubuntu but actually has updated stuff all around with no shady repository adding?

I love "living on the edge," but...

[dalutong]

does anyone know if there will be LiveCD versions of these pre-pre-releases?

I'd love to poke around with breezy, but I don't want to break my setup.

Thanks!

The worst part will be...

[gardyloo]

... that the "Badger, badger, badger" song is compiled into the kernel this time.

Re:Ubuntu is overrated

[Toy G]

As a matter of fact, XOrg on my laptop is worse than XFree - fact. I use KDE 3.4, whose packages are available from the experimental branch (you just have to add the alioth repository and then apt-get -t experimental kdebase kdemultimedia, etc. Google the KDE wiki, it's all there) and run just fine.