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Mad Penguin on Ubuntu 5.10 Preview
atrebuse wrote to mention a preview of the Ubuntu 5.10 Preview release, on Mad Penguin. From the article: " Every community has its heroes. From the beginning of time, we've all needed that special something to grasp onto and worship in one way or another. The Linux community is no different. Sure, there are a handful of people known as leaders or visionaries that people look up to, but what other altars do they worship at? The Altar of the Distro. That's the one I'm referring to. According to the DistroWatch page hit ranking sidebar, Ubuntu Linux has held the title of '"most worshiped distro' for quite some time now. So why is that? Is it because Ubuntu is just that good? Is it because the Ubuntu followers are just sitting there hitting their browsers refresh button on the DistroWatch Ubuntu page? What is it about Mary? "
I've been using ubuntu since warty was officially released and generally loved it. I love the simple desktop and the apt/synaptic system of installing new software. I've rebuilt several times and even though I'm on dialup I've found it pretty quick to get going again simply by backing up and reloading the package cache after a reinstall.
Every release has given me some problems, but the latest (breezy colony 4) was so incredibly bad I had to wipe the systme out and reload. When I was trying the dev releases of hoary this never happened, so I'm a little concerned - especially since, after filing a bug report on the main problem I had (it is exceedingly slow, sometimes taking several MINUTES for nautilus to open and display a folder, then apparently having to "refresh" that view again and again as it is opened, essentially making the entire desktop useless for minutes on end) I was told this behavior is "normal when opening very large folders!" Funny, much as I hate windows I never experienced such a lockout when asking exploorer ot open a folder containing several thousand files...
It seems to be related to dnotify (or inotify, whatever they're using) and it also has the effect of causing memory leaks like nobody's business. The chatter I've seen on the list says things like "we don't know if this will be fixed before release" (!)
The only real difference I can see is the updated compiler support (which also proved to be a nuisance, since the system is built with 3.4 but installing their default "build-essential" package loads the 4.0 compiler!) and the newer version of gnome desktop. Mono is also updated but that's not a big deal since you can get the mono installer in one 50MB package and have pretty much the latest official version anyway. I'm personally not convinced that's such a big deal anyway, since beagle has NEVER, EVER worked properly for me and muine (which I loved) is no match for Quod Libet (which looks very much like Muine but has a tag editor from heaven and is written in Python).
Unless things really, really change with breezy in the next 30 days or so I can't see a single reason to change from hoary. Install the build essentials and the header files and build gnome-panel, nautilus and the panel widgets and you'll have a faster, more robust machine than the breezy I saw.
My understanding is that the primary objection to the photo came from people who wanted to deploy Ubuntu in conservative Muslim countries. I've read of similar disputes on wikipedia, where some cultures would prefer to have non-illustrated articles about certain body parts, and some people say that wikipedia should try to be a useful tool to those cultures by meeting their standards of decency, even if those standards aren't the same as "ours".
I didn't see anything on the Ubuntu image that would be objectionable to a typical American ultraconservative. It's less skin than you'd see at the beach.