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Shuttleworth on Ubuntu's Direction and Intent
cj2003 writes "Mark Shuttleworth has released a FAQ about Ubuntu's Direction and Intent. It comments on the discussions of funding, of being a Debian-fork or not, of the strange names, and many other 'hot topics' relating to Ubuntu. In his own words: 'This document exists to give the community some insight into my thinking, and to a certain extent that of the Community Council, Technical Board and other governance structures - on some of the issues and decisions that have been controversial.'"
> all those professional adders
In fact, the original meaning of "computer" was a person who did math calculations for a living.
Come on now, XP Pro has, what, Active Directory/Windows Domain/whatever-else-Microsoft-tried-to-replace-LD AP-with support? A nice GUI for managing NTFS ACLs which you can manipulated in XP Home with cacls? As far as I know, Pro is only really useful if you're managing a large gaggle of Windows boxes. For instance, at home I run all my network services under Linux. I've a few boxes dual-booting with XP Home, and one with XP Pro. Pro sees no benefits whatsoever in this environment; it's no more stable, functional or secure.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GrumpyGroundhog
It's an ubuntu distribution for developers that has the daily builds of everything:
Don't forget the third option: I work for a company that produces software that is licensed to hardware manufacturers who then ship actual devices. Mobile phones, in my case. The software is never sold directly to the primary users of the software.
I suspect there's a hell of lot of this going on, too.
vnc isn't idea. you should try windows remote desktop with the open source rdesktop client. it works better.
gpedit.msc
compmgmt.msc
I'm not positive, but I don't think either of those extremely useful utilities are in XP Home. (Can anyone confirm?)
The most important part of the wiki is towards the end, when Shuttleworth states that the real reason for funding Ubuntu is to solve the "distro collaboration problem" by collaboring with other distros on bugs, translations, technical support, revision control systems. These tools will allow Ubuntu to make its work available easily to Debian, Gentoo, and the rest of the upstream community.
Actually, if you had read the interview, there is compelling evidence that this is already happening. Debian is already incorporating a lot of the advances from Ubuntu.
Pro sees no benefits whatsoever in this environment; it's no more stable, functional or secure.
... forcing them to accept the bundled home edition and then buy XP Pro separately... (and at a rather ridiculous price considering how similiar the products are.)
When XP came out, the logic was that anyone on 98/ME could move to XP Home, while XP Pro was for those who needed 'that weird esoteric enterprise stuff' that was only in windows 2000 professional.
So when all these users got their new laptops and desktops with xp home preinstalled it was a pretty rude awakening that MS had actually removed the webserver and disabled the ability to connect to a domain entirely.
It wasn't simply that Home was a watered down version of XP Pro (people were pretty much expecting that)...in some significant respects it was a waterned down version of 98!!! "Upgrading" from 98 to Home actually removed 2 pretty major features.
A lot of hobbyists, tele-communters, home-based web developers, power users, savvy gamers, and so forth got burnt by Home Edition. It was aggravated by the price difference, and the fact that many system builders didn't offer XP as an option in their more home-consumer targeted products... yet many "home consumers" needed XP Pro, but had no reason to pay 60% more for an 'enterprise workstation model of pc/laptop'
Additionally the watered down security model, the lack of support for encryption (what?! Home users don't need privacy??) and limiting users to the "Microsoft Way" of setting up shared folders etc (hiding all the details where users literally could not meaningfully get to them -- yet all the details were there for misbehaving software to bungle up) was a real disservice to consumers.
Finally the loss of remote desktop, has saved the day for countless thousands as more clued friends family are able to solve their problems. (Sure home comes with remote assistance which is much much much clumsier and more of a pain to setup, especially when all parties are behind NAT boxes. Getting RD up and running is a few checkboxes and an easy nat/firewall tweak...)
Home solidly deserves its reputation for being crippled.
There are a quite a few major transistions all happening at the same time. Debian is adopting the GCC 4.x ABI for C++, going from XFree86 to X.Org, and there are new releases of KDE and GNOME. Because of when Sarge froze, these all started hitting Unstable at the same time. I went through this with Breezy over the summer. There just isn't a smooth way for a development distro to handle this many at once. I'm sure Gentoo's dev branch went through it to but I bet they only got them one at a time. Come to think of it, they went GCC 4.x pretty early. That is the ugliest one and has directly affects KDE and GNOME.
Once these are over, Debian Unstable will be its usual not-really-unstable self.
try http://ubuntuguide.org/. Kinda handy for all the addons that one needs to be happy.
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