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Mark Shuttleworth Proposes Delaying next Ubuntu
Beuno writes "Mark Shuttleworth has proposed on the ubuntu-art mailing list to postpone the 'Dapper Drake' release by 6 weeks. He lays out the reasons pretty clearly: the delay should make the release a more user-friendly distro. He has also called up a community meeting in April 14th on IRC for community input. Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?" Commentary on this also available from the Tectonic site.
He proposes a town hall for March 14, not April.
How long exactly has Longhorn, er, Vista been pushed off? Six weeks pales in comparison.
Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?
Absolutely.
What can be done with Ubuntu that I can't do with Debian?
505 users in favor of the delay, 50 against at last count.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=142536
Dapper is coming along nicely, but there are a number of bugs that might not get the attention they deserve if Dapper is released on schedule.
Their Flight 5 CD is out. It should be quite stable for normal use.
As a Gentoo user, I tried out Ubuntu on an old Toshiba laptop about a month or three ago when the current version came out. I liked what a I saw, but I ran into to huge problems. One, Ubuntu completely screwed up the monitor settings for the laptop, and the sound was completely futzed. I found the solution to fixing the monitor settings on an Ubuntu user forum (involved hand editing X.org's conf file) and the sound, well, I managed to get it to play somewhat but GNOME still never detected it properly.
If Ubuntu wants to be "Linux for human beings" it needs all the polish it can get after that experience.
Keep up the good work guys.
A 6 week delay doesn't sound earth shattering to me... I fail to see the problem here, to be honest. Especially if it's about improving usability, an area critical for Linux adoption, which is one of the main purposes for this particular distro.
To me, this feels basically like delaying an extra security heavy distro 6 weeks to implement verify a new security protocol implementation works correctly.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Considering that they want this to be the first Ubuntu release that's supported for a long time and that can compete with things like SuSE's or RedHat's enterprise distributions, I'd say six weeks are perfectly acceptable.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
OMG, Ubuntu is closing on Debian.
To be honest, Dapper is very stable and polished already. There's mixed reactions over the new Clearlooks scheme they've implemented but overall, it's turning out very well. I can't speak for the localisation issues, but a stable release is much better than a rushed release. If you want to try Dapper, Flight 5 should be just fine.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
>Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?
there are hundreds of distros already, and the only thing they all lack is polish, so yes.
what's the hurry?
Patience is a virtue. Ubuntu has no need to generate revenue, and if it takes six more weeks to make the release more usable for human beings, that can only be a good thing.
If your a VB programmer, thats REALLY easy:
Sub BootLoader()
On Error Resume Next
CodeLookingStuffHere
End SUb
liqbase
If it wasn't for the fact that Ubuntu is synchronized with Gnome releases I wouldn't mind the delay. But now they would have to either rush the next release, be late with it or completly skip Gnome 2.16. I hope they'll find some good solution because many users are preferring Ubuntu to other distros because of fairly nice bleeding-edgeness. With this step they could lose major selling point to causal Linux geeks.
The recent theme changes are not a step in good direction too. It looks abysymal and burns my eyes. Even tough I didn't like brown theme the new one made me miss it.
Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?"
Yes, it's worth it. FTA, this isn't a release aimed at the "average Linux user." It's meant for enterprises, and it's important to get it right. It's something that can be a big point for the adoption of Linux in the desktop workspace, that this is a distro which looks good, has a wide range of language options, and has support. Spending a rather trivial amount of time getting it fully ready is what should be done, rather than try to hit an arbitrary "release date", only to, a few weeks later, do the MS routine of "here's the update package, Service Pack X".
I think that almost everybody would agree that a little more time spent making a product better is a good thing.
:) Any steps, no matter how small, to appeal to the Chinese/Korean/Japanese markets will probably pay off well.
:)
It's not just about polish, though. TFA lays out a number of points where improvements are needed:
1. Testing
2. Certification
3. Localisation
4. (last but not least) Polish
Improvements to Asian localisation should help a ton of people - we're not all English speakers.
Not that it all matters to me, though... I use SUSE.
BaltikaTroika
Its not like this isnt common practice in the first place.. "sorry its not quite done' is a good answer..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem is that, with a broken bootloader, you can't really 'bypass it'. The bootloader, by definition, is the first thing that runs. If it's broken, there's nowhere to put the logic to do anything else. Maybe if the PC had a more usable firmware than the BIOS we're stuck with, you might have some recovery route, but the way the platform is set up, you have no alternatives.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
This is the Ubuntu that will be competing with Windows Vista. It needs to be polished.
There is going to be a reasonably large number of desktop users willing to "try Linux out" just before they "upgrade" to Vista. The distribution they're most likely to try is currently Ubuntu, and if it is good enough, they might switch to Linux rather than Vista.
You toss control back to whatever would otherwise load when it fails.
...
Back to whatever would otherwise load? That would be nothing (Well, not nothing, but it's impossible to determine what that something would be). The BIOS loads the first 512 bytes of the disk (the MBR) into ram at location 07c0:0000, that MBR then loads the 512 bytes at the start of the partition marked "active" in the MBR at address 07c0:0000. Now, keep in mind that there are 512 bytes in the MBR for data, and code, also remember that the MBR just loaded the partition bootloader over itself in RAM, it's not there any more at all. Next, the partition bootloader (grub in this case) has 512 bytes at location 0x7c0:0000 to load the rest of itself into memory, including error conditions. Now, the read fails, and you get code like this:
if(read failed)
print ("read error")
goto fail
fail:
clear interrupts
halt cpu
because there isn't any other option. You can't just jump back to code that was overwritten when you came into ram. There is no option but to crash in this case. It's like if your interrupt handling code page faults. Your OS WILL crash.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I don't know what applies here, but there you go: 1. There might not be licenses for unlimited redistribution; in other words, you can't distribute the software the license covers under the GPL. 2. It might not actually be illegal for the end-user to download the software -- downloading it for your own usage might be all right, redistribution not.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Except, I don't believe, that's on the cards
Considering that Dapper is going to be a major release, oriented towards gaining the business market, not supporting WPA is a big mistake!
I hope I'm wrong
The fact that you're not a software engineer shows.
Want to know what would have otherwise loaded? The Windows Bootloader, which would have been within the exact same 512b sector that Grub now occupies. Boot loaders on PCs are extremely restricted in what they can do -- their code can be no larger than 446b in size, they run in real mode, and basically must rely directly on BIOS for all of their I/O routines.
In effect, this is 1980's technology, and flexability is virtually nil. The primary boot loader can't just pass its duties off to another boot loader, as there aren't really sufficient instructions available to do this, and the two boot loaders cannot occupy the same space on the drive.
If you're looking for something to blame for this situation, it's the fact that the architecture of the PC BIOS hasn't changed significantly in more than 20 years. It's still firmly rooted in the days of 160KB floppy booting, where the idea of a second-stage boot loader for choosing what OS you want to boot would never have occurred (want to boot a different OS on a diskette-only system? Use a different boot disk). BIOS should have died a long time ago.
Boot loaders like GRUB do the best they can with what little resources and possibilities they are given. I'm sorry that the GRUB developers don't have access to your screwy system to test and debug on. Here I've run GRUB on a variety of systems, and the only machine I ever found which had problems with it is one with a built-in nVidia chipset, back in the Fedora Core 2 days, which was easily solved by switching to a different boot loader.
Yaz.
Got released in April, but the CDs didn't come out until everything was polished? Maybe a 6.05 edition?
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
Yeah, thats a common misconception. Ubuntu is not a snapshot of Debian Unstable. Multiverse is a snapshot of packages in Debian Unstable that are not in Universe, Main, or Restricted. Universe contains packages supported by the community, which is encouraged to work closely with Debian. Main and Restricted are both modules that are directly supported by Canonical. These packages are worked on heavily by employees of Canonical and while there is significant collaboration(some would like to see more, but thats a seperate debate) these packages are not just stabalized snapshots. Canonical puts a lot of time into Main and Restricted and you will often see versions of packages(and packages) that are in Ubuntu before they hit Debian. You can see that by the fact that Ubuntu Dapper currently has the prerelease gnome 2.13 while Debian still has 2.12. Please stop spreading this misinformation.
"We Don't Need No Truthless Heros!" - Project 86
Yeah, I sort of agree. That's actually one thing I liked with Debian. Who cares if there is never a new version? The packages would still get updated. I miss that with Ubuntu.
I have to admit that Ubuntu has many nice useability tweaks over Debian though. Ubuntu is almost install and run without thinking about it. Debian still requires a bit of work in certain areas.
I really do wish there was an "unstable" Ubuntu though. Something where any new package can be stuffed, all bleeding edge junk like Debian unstable. I hate waiting months for another Ubuntu release when I want some newer version of something (eg. Breezy is still using Thunderbird/Firfox 1.0 when 1.5 has been out for ages; inline spelling, yum) and I dislike munging up my system by manually installing some newer version of a specific package.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
get it here: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight5 Live CD and .torrents available
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
Actually the Linux kernel does these things pretty well. And modern distros that use udev, hal and dbus can detect hardware configurations on-the-fly. I was half-shocked when I plugged in my digital camera and it was detected and mounted automagically. The problem is X has it's own hardware subsystems for the sake of portability (BSD kernel does not Linux-like subsystems) and are not as good. It would be great if X just would let the Linux kernel do its thing. There is some work being done along these lines and hopefully will improve the situation.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
By the way: does anyone know if dapper will ship a kernel that's been compiled with the version of gcc that's included on the distribution CD's? If badger had one fundamental flaw, it would be a kernel compiled with gcc3.4 and gcc 4.? included on the CD. People who need to compile e.g. their wireless driver because it's not included in the standard kernel, are fucked, because they may not have network access with the distribution files and need to download either gcc 3.4 or kernel sources...
I have never had problems using GRUB to boot various flavors of Linux, as well as dual-booting them with Windows (XP). The difference in my case is that I always searched or asked someone "does this installer set up dual-booting correctly?". When the answer was no, I tried something else.
On the other hand, bugs happen. But saying that it is the fault of GRUB, LILO, or whatever program happened to fail on you is not fair. It creates the impression that certain programs are inferior when the reality is that all programs have problems.
The biggest issue is that not everyone will work on polish and bug fixing. Some will be working on development of new features. A good version control system should allow this state of affairs, but what will happen when someone working on the development branch gets a major new feature developed in the long six week time frame that others are working on the polish?
One faction will say, "Don't commit any new features until the next major release after this one!" while another faction will say "This is too important to wait through endless patch releases and another major release cycle!" The temptation will be to "just risk a few bugs" for this "major new feature" by those who don't really see the value of the polish right now. The offense will be that "any new feature" will require more polish, patches, or in essence de-values the work the polish team has been doing. Great amounts of spite and venom will be launched at each side.
Set a firm, clear policy about what the polish window will be and about the firm exclusion of new functionality that's independent of any particular technology before this starts and make sure everyone knows what that policy is. Not setting a policy is bound to cause chaos. Setting and then breaking a policy is bound to drive off any future desire to work on future "polish" release work.
As many others have pointed out, in 446 bytes, we can't do anything. All the Microsoft boot loader have historically done when it barfs is print something like "NT Loader not Found", and then left you "locked out of your system", just as GRUB did.
BTW, you're not really locked out. You can create a GRUB boot floppy and manually boot into your OS installation. You can also use the Windows CD to set the MBR back to its original state. Or you could use most Linux distros' rescue CDs to fix the problem.
I think that's great. Just a while ago Dapper got a new urine-colored Human theme, and - all due respect to the people who put their efforts into making Ubuntu better - frankly, it's just horrible. If the release is delayed, they have a lot better change to fix the theme.
Another thing i'd really like to see in dapper is the new NetworkManager 0.6 with its WPA and OpenVPN goodness. "Automatic network detection and configuration management" is high-priority target for dapper, and the new features in n-m 0.6 are needed by many users.
See slow firefox problem in Dapper and the un-upgrade-able firefox 1.0.7 still vulnerable to security issues in Breezy. They also need to fix the fact that they cannot update firefox because everything else in the distro depends on it...
I'm a Computer Scientist. I wouldn't know, nor do I care about such semantics.
The problem here is that Software Engineers are not Hardware Engineers. They develop software for the system that is available. No amount of pure software can overcome the shortcomings of the BIOS.
BIOS sucks. If you're looking for me to argue with you that BIOS is a poor engineering solution, you're not going to find one. It's hardly the software developers fault that you (and most other people) keeping buying systems that feature the crappy old PC BIOS. Would you build a search and rescue helicopter out of a motorcycle engine and paper mache? And if you did, would it have the same level of fault-tolerance as an EH-101?
Boot loaders are fragile because the architecture they are based upon wasn't designed to handle them. Want a real solution? Go out and buy a system that doesn't use PC-style BIOS. Get a system that sports Open Firmware, or the Extensible Firmware Interface. And then go and bitch to Microsoft that their consumer-level OS's won't boot on such systems because they still only support the 25 year old BIOS for bootstrapping.
Fault analysis works best when you have complete control over the entire system. Software developers typically don't get a say in how the handward is designed, however, and PC hardware is so riddled with cruft and poor design from 25 years of backwards compatibility, developers working in dark corners like those of boot loaders have to make do with what little they have. If you want something more robust, then buy something more robust and ditch your PC altogether.
Otherwise, don't complain. The software developers in this case do the best with what little resources the system provides them. The fact that the system can't be made more fault tolerant isn't the fault of the developers -- it's the fault that the 25 year old system they must rely upon actively works against such fault tolerant code from being developed in the first place.
Yaz.
Why isn't a clickable install script made available on a trusted site though?
Oh You POS
Why waste all the bandwidth twice? Really? If they release on schedule then release a major patch that soon that everyone will apply. Why waste the bandwidth. I thought /.ers where all about things like saving resources of all kinds?
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
You want ubuntu unstable? Well that is dapper at the moment isn't?
p yGroundhog ?
Though when dapper is released you have to do a dist-upgrade to the next development release.
If you really want bleeding edge ubuntu, then perhaps this version is better: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/Grum
Anyway, if you want just more than security updates, then the backports repositories is enough for me.
My other Sig is very funny.
I'm not even an Ubuntu user, but I think the whole community would benefit if some major distro said "Okay, stop everything, we're going to spend six weeks on making the distro usable by normal people." Thanks and Kudos to Ubuntu if they lead the way on this.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Yes. We're not talking a year, here. A month is inconsequential. The question is silly.
And, with a distro where being "user-friendly" is a primary feature, it's all the more important to make these minor adjustments in release dates for improvements that are fundamental to the underlying concept.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Don't let your anger show. Frustration is understandable, but showing it makes you harder to communicate with. If you want people to help, don't make snide remarks.
Install XP on one disk, install Linux on another. Write GRUB on Linux disk and set the BIOS to boot from that. Now if GRUB boots ok, you can choose between linux and xp. If GRUB errors, then change the BIOS setting and boot from the NTFS disk. Your xp installation will boot without a problem. If your most important installation is xp, the wise thing to do is install Ubuntu in a new disk and not repartition the old one
The stockholders are going to revolt!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
> spits control back to whatever would load in the absence of GRUB having been installed.
/boot/grub/stage2. GRUB needs to do this because it is bigger than 512 bytes, so stage 2 contains all of the GRUB code that doesn't fit in the first 512. GRUB needs to be this larger than 512 bytes because it's a really advanced boot loader, it even understands file systems, which allows it to load configuration files, initrds, kernels, and modules by reading the file system, instead of having hard coded locations of those files location (by disk geometry) rammed into it. (this really helps when you update, replace, or change those files!)
/boot/grub/stage2, a location which is hard coded with the disk geometry location of this file. (stage 1 doesn't understand file systems).
/boot/grub/stage2, the parition table, and the boot sector of your windows partition are completely differnt locations on the drive, it is entirely posible that GRUB stage 1 could have a problem, while the Microsoft MBR could not.
/boot/grub/stage2 is located, but not in the partition table or boot sector of the Windows partition, one could fail where the other succeds.
/boot/grub/stage2) is loadable, but a bug in the implementation means it only works for block_number=(location of partition table) or block_number=(location of boot sector). Who wants to bet that there are BIOS out there that only get tested by the manufacturer on MBRs that only load play with the partition table and boot sectors of partiti
The BIOS knows you want to boot from your hard drive, it does one simple thing to facilitate this, it loads the first 512 bytes from the drive into memory, and it tells the CPU "start executing here". Should the code in those 512 bytes fail, the bios has nothing further it can do, it only knows how to do one thing, grab the 512 bytes and let them execute.
You installed Stage 1 of GRUB in the MBR (first 512 bytes of the drive). When you installed it, you installed it over top of the 512 bytes that were Microsoft's MBR. This is what was there before GRUB was installed, and now it is gone, completely written over, and neither GRUB nor the bios can do anything about it.
I think you would probably like it if the grub installer put a backup copy of the Microsoft MBR somewhere else on the drive, and you would like stage 1 of GRUB to load and execute those if there is any problem. But, if there is an error loading those 512 bytes, absolutely nothing can be done.
There is a perfectly valid explanation for why stage 1 might fail and why the microsoft MBR doesn't.
Stage 1 of GRUB (installed in the mbr) has 1 job, load a file from your Ubuntu partition,
The Microsoft MBR also has a simple job. It looks, at the partition table for partitions marked as bootable, takes the first one, loads the boot sector of that partition into memory, and executes it.
So stage 1 of GRUB and the Microsoft MBR really have a lot in common, as they are both 512 bytes they really do shit all, they just attempt to load more boot code off the drive and let it rip. The crucial difference here is WHERE on the drive they play with. Microsoft MBR reads the partition table and the boot sector of the partition marked bootable. GRUB stage 1 reads the location of
As
What could be different about these different locations on the drive?
If there was an error on the drive where
Or, maybe the hard drive is fine in all locations, but the mechanism used by these two MBRs to access it is not behaving as it should. What is this mechanism? Our frequenly buggy friend, the BIOS. The BIOS implements a interface that the MBR can use to get its job done. Something like
load_sector_from_ide_drive( ide_channel, master_or_slave, block_number )
Assume neither MBR has any bugs in calling this interface, what if there is a problem with the implementation itself? What if the interface promises that a block_number=(location of
IANAE but I think that the vast majority of your printers rely on patented Adobe technology, and as such, each manufacturer is on different versions and licenses.
I am, on the other hand, an expert on a technology called SVG, and I know that there are alot of guys at Canon working with the w3c on something called SVGPrint, which they are looking to use as an Open/Free mechanism to transmit data to all their printers. (In place of postscript?).
There is alot of work going on in these fields, but it will take a little bit longer until some of the newer open technologies hit the market.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
It is.
They just don't publicize it enough. Probably so they don't get sued for that, too.
I'm Shocked, shocked I tell you that a distro based on, and dependent upon, Debian packages would choose to focus on some kind of abstract "usability" or "stability" issue over fast and frequent updates!
Where's the bleeding edge code? Where's the "It compiled this morning let's push it out" mentality that's so common with Debian based Distros??
I'm astounded and saddened. Microsoft has updates coming out weekly. It can't be good for Ubuntu if it loses the "update war" with Microsoft. If you lose the update war, everything else is down hill from there.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I think you're trolling. As an engineer, you should be able to understand "that's just the way it has to be." I'll try to explain further, but for some reason, I don't think you'll get it:
PCs have exactly one master boot record. That master boot record points to exactly one bootloader. When you install GRUB, the single entry in the master boot record is changed to load GRUB instead of the Windows bootloader. There is no "whatever would have loaded." PCs just aren't designed that way. Don't like it? Call IBM and ask them to go back in time and fix it. But until then, that's just the way it is.
As for Ubuntu's install instructions not being correct, I find it highly unlikely. The fact that tens of thousands of people have managed to install it just fine by following those same instructions would seem to indicate that it does work the vast majority of the time. The logical conclusion when a set of instructions work fine for thousands of people but don't work for you, would seem to be that you did something wrong. Believe it or not, even an "engineer" can fuck up sometimes. Did you try the install again paying closer attention to the instructions? Did you make sure your partitions were correct? Did you try using LILO instead? Or did you just get pissed and start trolling?
Oh, and by the way, I like how you state that you're not a software engineer and that you have no idea how PCs boot, and then make suggestions about how GRUB and the boot process should work. Do you have software engineers telling you how helicopters should work? How often are their good ideas thrown out because they don't know how anything works?
Maybe not
I remember keeping track of the Breezy Badger planning wiki before that version was released, and it seemed to me that the team deferred many of their major goals... on the other hand, it looks like most improvements planned for Dapper have been implemented already, as Shuttleworth notes in his message:
s
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+spec
I'll refrain from Debian comparisons, as they're not needed to communicate what stellar work the team has done here. Point is, Ubuntu users and admins ought to support this delay, for the same reason I support Ubuntu... the Ubuntu team simply has its shit together, moreso than that of any other freely available distribution.
Let Shuttleworth strategize to take on Red Hat, SuSE, and Vista--because Ubuntu actually has a fighting chance. That prospect ought to excite Ubuntu partisans (like me) and fence-sitters alike.
Amen to that! I tried installing Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop, and in the end I just gave up getting Chinese input working properly (she's Taiwanese and sends a lot of mail in Chinese to her friends back home.) After a couple of long nights spent fiddling with it, I could get it to sort of work with some apps, but this is one area where Windows beats Linux hands down -- after I gave up and installed Windows on her machine, enabling Chinese input took me all of about 30 seconds to do, and it works flawlessly in every app she uses.
I think Ubuntu is just trying to silence critics that say that they've run off and abandoned Debian. I think that delaying the release date is a move to get back to the distro's roots.
A bootstrap loader sits in the Master Boot Record -- the first 512 bytes on the disc. The BIOS knows how to position the reading heads at any cylinder and sector on the disc's surface and select the signal from any head. It knows precious little else. What it does when first switched on is go to head 0, cylinder 0, sector 0 {which is the only sector you can be absolutely cast-iron certain will definitely always exist, no matter what size drive it is}; read that sector, which is 512 bytes big, into memory; and begin executing it as instructions.
/mbr
Within the space of those 512 bytes, you have to have a program which loads the operating system proper. It can use BIOS calls to find any place on the disc {or just within the first 1024 cylinders, if it's a really ancient BIOS} in order to do this. Once the operating system itself has loaded, it no longer needs to rely on the BIOS's own methods of accessing the disk; it can talk to devices directly.
Windows has a bootstrap loader of its own, which goes in the MBR. Grub also goes in the MBR. Even Lilo, the original bootstrap loader which had nothing wrong with it in the first place before Grub became all trendy, goes in the MBR. When you installed Grub, you overwrote Windows' own bootstrap loader. It is now lost for all time.
The solution is to replace the MBR. Either boot up with a Windows CD and do
C:\> fdisk
to install the MBR from Windows; or boot up with the kernel from a Linux boot CD, using a cheatcode to specify your usual root file system:
boot: linux root=/dev/hda1
{or whatever partition it's on}, and then re-configure Grub. Or preferably just install Lilo instead.
I hope this explains why you can't have a fallback when the bootstrap loader fails. In the Olden Days, with no bootstrap loader you would have been given a simple memory editor which would allow you to display the contents of memory, enter instructions and data in hexadecimal, and begin executing instructions from memory. Things like this would be useful to programmers {you could type in a bootstrap loader by hand if you needed to}, but they stopped being popular about the time more non-programmers started buying computers. More sophisticated display devices began needing more sophisticated BIOSes, and the hex editor {which most users would not know how to use anyway} was squozen out to make room.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If you live in the EU or the UK, and certain other countries, a software MP3 player licence costs nothing; the patents in question are not valid in those countries.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Already happened. Debian took three years to get Sarge declared "stable"!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Some example specs (copied / pasted) :
This is what all linux distros should do, start listening to the users instead of relying on the old "RTFM n00b" cliché.
I'm sure that if Ubuntu keeps doing all of these user-friendliness checks in a couple of years, Ubuntu will match the usability and installation-friendliness of WinXP, yay!
I think the next release of Ubuntu has some really bleeding edge new features and testing is probably not going well. XGL alone is a bit of a gamble(though I cannot wait to have it running soon after a full install) and I think he's looking at some of the QA for some of these features and flinching. I don't blame him but the community will be there for it, so let it delay 6 weeks if they think that's enough time to make some significant resolution to the quality of the distribution, otherwise let it fly and see if it stabilizes with the increased interest.
I guess your meant Windows.
But that's not true either. The windows boot loader is fully capable of loading another OS.
Take a look at
Garry Williams
"It's pretty embarrassing to see tech-oriented sites act like teenage girls fawning over their latest pop singer pin-ups."
Hey, don't dis the fawning teenage girls. It was those type of people that made the Beatles more popular than Jesus to some people. We could only be so lucky to have thousands of screaming teenage girls promoting Linux use at home.
Oh You POS
Yes. It is. Full stop.
Free software ships When It Is Ready. That's why it's better.
All's true that is mistrusted
Well, the Ubuntu "unstable" releases tend to be a lot less stable than Debian unstable. It's because they tweak so much stuff and are preparing for a stable release and expect a consistent environment for the upcoming release. Nothing wrong with that but the pre-releases don't tend to work that great until the beta is released.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Yup, we've noticed. Considering how many MB extra the libraries take up, and the time they add to the base install, this doesn't bother me. Besides, the target market for Ubuntu is the kind of user who doesn't want to have to compile programs, who doesn't want to know how. As long as the likes of you and I can add that functionality on for ourselves...
(this is not a